There are several important steps to consider when choosing a web hosting company. It is important to carefully choose a company that is able to offer all the features required by a Webmaster.

Do not be tempted in selecting a company purely on the price. Today hosting is cheap and the competition is strong to attract new customers.

Do some research with independent reviews of hosting companies you are interested in. See what type of reviews they have, paying special attention to their performance. How much time were they off the air off for example? Look for their uptime figures. Do a comparison with several companies.

How easy is it to get support from them? Many web hosting companies now have instant messenger service, which can offer instant answers to simple problems as well as email, phone, and fax, but normally receiving answers from these methods will be slower.

It's no good having a hosting company that when a problem arises takes days to respond. Choosing the right company can make the difference between a successful partnership and serious problems if there are always faults.

Look at the features of the web hosting company, do they offer all the most common functions required?

How easy is it to use the features? Many companies offer cpanel and Fantastico, which makes adding new items to websites very easy. Be sure to investigate the features offered. Check how much disk space and bandwidth is being offered.

Check how many domains can be hosted on one account, some companies allow one domain, others allow 10 domains and some have unlimited domain hosting.

Most people start with a small hosting plan, make sure it is easy to upgrade to a larger plan if required. Some hosting plans have limited options for upgrading.

It is normally advisable to register a domain name with one company and then transfer the domain name to the hosting company. This is very easy and is only a question of directing the domain to the hosting company domain name server. They will tell you how to do this.

The reason to have a domain name registered independently from the hosting company is that it makes it easier to transfer to a new host if required.