Many hosting providers may try to sway you with talk of the very high bandwidth levels they allow you and the massive amount of disk space but don't base your decision solely on this factor. The truth is over 90% of sites on Shared Web Hosting U never get anywhere near there bandwidth levels, with a large number using less than a tenth their limit.
However there are certain factors that are often overlooked or not deemed important to consider when making a hosting decision. This factor has nothing to do with the functionality of your website. Rather, it determines how the search engines treat your website.
But, how far can an Affordable Web Hosting go? For most web hosting providers, it still means good quality service, a great and flexible plan, and a guarantee that they will stand by.
SMTP is Simple Mail Transfer Protocol which is used for outgoing Email Server. Most hosting companies do not offer access to SMTP servers as they can be difficult to maintain and defend and the want to cut corners with their customers.
Web Host Country - Depending on your market, this could be the most important consideration, and often the most overlooked. The physical location of your host servers can have an impact on your business if your target market is in your own country. Google UK, for example offer the option of either a UK only or a world-wide search. If you want to feature in the UK only searches it is far better to have your website hosted by a company who has its actual servers in the UK. Be aware that some Shared Web Hosting UK hosting companies who appear to be UK based companies actually have their servers located in other countries. Always ask!
Windows or Linux: Do you know if your site needs to run on a MS Windows server with FrontPage extensions or does it need PERL, PHP or MySQL? These things you will need to find out if you intent to run a successful small business web site.
The hosting company that I use also allows you to purchase a new domain name with PayPal. This is what I did. The online domain name purchasing website did not accept my debit card. However, I was able to email full payment via PayPal along with the domain name that I wished to purchase. This request was then carried out within minutes by the support team, whom emailed me confirmation of purchase.