When choosing a web host to host your web site, you need to realize that there are different options available at different price levels and it all boils down to your actual needs.

Here are some of the questions you should ask yourself when choosing your hosting:

• Do you intend to host one domain or multiple domains?
  Some hosting plans are limited to one domain only while others let you host 5, 10 or even unlimited domains.
• What country is your site’s target audience?
  E.g. if you target the UK you will have better chances ranking in local search results if you host your site on a UK based server - be sure to check with the hosting provider where their servers are located.
• What technologies do you intend to use on your site?
  If you intend to build a database driven site make sure the host offers an option to create a database. If your site will be built using ASP you need to go with a Windows server. If you need to use secure transactions make sure your host provides a security certificate, and so on.
• How large is your site going to be?
  How much space does your host give you with your hosting account?
• How much traffic will your site get?
  This might not be an issue for most personal or small business sites, but you never know. Ever heard of the “Digg effect”? - If your site gets digged, will your bandwidth be enough to handle all that traffic you get? Or will you end up paying enormous extra fees for the bandwidth use over your plan’s quota?
• How many email accounts are you allowed to have?
  This is especially important for businesses as you wil probably want to have email accounts for all your personnel.
• Shared, reseller or dedicated server?
  For most small sites and newbie webmasters, a shared hosting account is perfectly enough. However, if you intend to host multiple sites and have more control over your hosting, you might want to opt for a reseller account. Dedicated servers and virtual private servers are good for more experienced webmasters who are familiar with administrating Unix servers and need to host multiple sites with heavy traffic.

Other things to pay attention to are, evidently, a host’s uptime, the control panel interface (CPanel or Plesk? or some custom solution? - what are you most confortable with?), options for file management, what kind of statistics you will get and of course pricing. It might also be a good idea to see if the host has a moneyback guarantee in case you buy it and then find out some features you needed are missing.

Make sure to compare several hosting options with similar features before buying and best of luck with you new hosting!