What type of site are you planning? An E-commerce site? A personal blog? A informational site for your small business? What you're going to do with your site determines how much space you'll need and what resources your site will require. Common resources include a database, scripting language support, site metrics, and installable third-party applications.

If you're planning an E-commerce site with many products and images in your catalog, you'll require more disk space than an informational site. If you plan on accepting payment on your site, you'll also need an SSL Certificate and your own IP address...make sure your host can help you with this.

How busy do you expect your site to be? This affects bandwidth—how much data is served over time—usually measured in Gigabytes. Unless you've already hosted your site somewhere and paid attention to your site's usage statistics, it can be difficult to tell how much bandwidth you will need. Look for a host that has reasonable bandwidth offerings, but will allow overages in case your site grows in popularity.

Medium and large businesses generally look for a colocation facility to house their own servers. This means that they own the servers, but may pay someone else to manage the hardware and connection issues involved in maintaining a server. For everyone else, the alternative is found in shared hosting. Shared hosting means that you lease shared space and resources on a server along with other website owners.

Shared hosting is the most cost-effective method of getting a presence on the Internet. This is an acceptable and affordable alternative to buying your own server and paying thousands of dollars each month for a high-bandwidth connection to the Internet. It's important to know whether or not your hosting provider is also leasing shared space and reselling to you. Resellers can serve a specialized role—perhaps your site designer is reselling hosting to facilitate management of your site.

All too often though, resellers serve no other purpose than to add another layer of expense between you and the actual hosting provider. Those are often the same resellers who have stumbled into the industry without the knowledge and experience to manage servers. If they don't have full access to the servers and don't know how to address problems, your site may go down periodically while your host calls the up-stream host to fix the problem. Make sure you're buying hosting from an actual hosting provider or a value-added reseller.

What is your experience with the Internet? Do you have the knowledge you need to make your online dream a reality? Whatever your knowledge level, your hosting provider should be available as a resource for knowledge and ideas about how to make your site successful. The lowest cost hosting plans don't always provide full support, though.

If you're experienced in the skills required to setup, promote, and manage your site, a bottom-dollar hosting plan will probably be adequate. If you need more guidance, the added expense of a higher-priced hosting plan—and the accompanying added support level—will often be the better buy.

Perhaps the ultimate test of your chosen web hosting provider is the level of confidence you're left with at the end of the day. You shouldn't be worrying that your site is down and no longer selling your widgets. You should have a confidence level in your host that allows you to focus on your business, not the underlying technology.

At Cheap-Web-Hosting-Provider.net, we aim to provide a level of service that puts you at ease, but at an affordable plan. 'Cheap' only refers to our price, not the level of service. As your site grows, we'll work with you to provide growing solutions for your growing business.

Stay tuned for Web Hosting 201, where we'll discuss some of the more technical issues involved in setting up your hosting, what to expect, and what resources are available to you as a new website owner.