Webhosting can make or break an online company. With prices ranging from ten to a hundred dollars per month and bewildering arrays of esoteric features, it can be difficult to choose a decent host, let alone the perfect one. Here's a few guidelines on choosing one that'll be right for you.
.

Q: What's a good price?
A: It depends on what you need. You can get a basic account for around $5us a month. Major considerations will be storage space, bandwidth, and what features a particular plan has. For $5-10us a month, you can get around 200 Gigabytes of storage space, 2,000 GB of bandwidth, and a few basic features. For most people, these sorts of plans will be good to start out with, then upgrade to different plans as needed. Don't get pressured into a two or three year agreement, but expect to buy 3, 6 or even 12 months worth of hosting in advance.

Q: What sort of features will I need?
A: This is massively dependent on your individual situation. If you're just starting out with internet business, you'll probably want to go with a company that does a lot of the work for you. I.e. search engine submission, site creation, esales wizard, blog creation, etc. If you've got any web design experience at all, you'll at least need ftp access, which makes it easier to upload files to your web site. If you're a linux nut like me, you'll also want to find a company that supports ssh access, which will allow you to directly manipulate your site from the command line. The hosting company I use, 1and1.com , has most of these features, although ssh access is available only in the $10us business account.

Q: So I'll need to get multiple accounts to host multiple websites, right?
A: Most of the time, no. Do a little research on prospective companies; A lot of times they'll allow you to host multiple, or even unlimited, domains on a single account. Just make sure to watch your storage space and bandwidth.

Q: How do I get a domain name?
A: The easiest way is to have your hosting company do it for you; most companies nowadays will. Otherwise, you can purchase it from a separate company. Since there's no difference in quality in using one company over another for domain name registration, you'll be looking for a price in the $5-10us range. Anything more than that is just silly, and anything under that is worrying, since companies have to pay roughly $4us to register it to you.

Q: What about reliability?
A: This is perhaps one of the most difficult things to judge about a web hosting company, but can clearly be very important. If your website is down for three hours one day, you've just lost a ton of customers. Google is your friend when researching reliability. netcraft.com also has some good resources for comparing reliability.

Q: This all sounds like too much work. Are there any places that will do this for me?
A: Yes! If you're really not comfortable with doing all the work yourself, there are numerous companies that will do the whole thing for you: Design, create, host, and maintain. My friend Jeff (No relation) own a company that does this called frogstar.ca .

Hope this helps!

-Jeff