If you are an absolute beginner this is where you should start. if you already have your own domain name and web hosting you can fast forward to part 3.
In this article I'm going to be talking about the pro's and con's of both Shared Web Hosting and dedicated web hosting packages. By the end of the article you should have some idea what your online business needs now and what it will need when it expands.
So, you have a name, a plan and a place for your site to live. Finally, it is time to start designing! The choice here is to try to build yourself, "self-build", or find a professional to do the job for you. A half way house some use is to find a family member or friend who dabbles in Shared Web Hosting UK design and will do the job for as little as a case of beer. I would strongly advise against this route as the design process can be quite intense and is apt to place some strain on any personal relationship if significant redrafting is needed or the design is not all you had hoped for. If your first designer is not up to the project you can fire them and move on. Letting go of a family friend can present far more issues.
Up-time is the over all time the hosting company promises that their servers will be up and running. Some claim to have 100% up-time, but I find that to be almost impossible to have so I tend to go with the ones claiming a 99,9% up-time. This tells us that even though they take back-ups, have mirrored servers and all other stuff to keep the servers safe and running, there is always a small possibility that the servers can go down.
Affordable Web Hosting is what everyone wants but you do not want to give up all the things you had with your old host. Some may offer more bandwidth and space to grow your website but how much do you really need. Before you think about moving to a new web hosting you must first find out how much space you are currently using. Some hosting sites can offer you more than you need in order to get you to sign up. Why pay more for something you will never use. How likely will you build a website that is 10,000GB in size. That is huge! Some of the most popular websites out there is not that big so why pay for it. Plus, you want to make sure that the uptime is 99.9% of the time. If not, it can cost you visitors if your pages are not live all the time.
When this is the case, maintenance costs are also going to be an issue. Using a shared server, a lot of different places will share the same server so maintenance costs are going to be shared as well. This can greatly reduce the cost by a lot because every one of the companies that have a space on there will be paying a certain percentage of it based on the amount of disk space that they are using.
If you're not comfortable asking a company a whole bunch of questions then just find a friend who has a few websites online and ask them which host they use - like I said a recommendation from a trusted friend is worth its weight in gold when it comes to shared web hosting.