Site hosting principles:

• Look for dependability and trustworthiness
You need a hosting provider (or 'host') to make your website available on the internet. They will host your website on their server(s), making it available to anyone browsing the web. Without a good host your business could be in trouble, so choosing one should be more than a last minute decision. A good hosting company will be your partner throughout the life of your business, ensuring that your site is always live and available to visitors, and dealing with any problems promptly.

• Lot of choices
Search the internet for hosting services and you'll find thousands. So how do you find the right one? Try and get a personal recommendation first. Failing that, you'll need to do some research.

• Wrong choice
The implications of choosing the wrong hosting company can be very serious: " Making the wrong choice could end in thousands of customers either being shown unwanted advertising, being shown a page error due to server downtime, or worse still, never actually finding your site in the first place.  Some hosts will advertise on your site and email and some have recently been known to link farm too. Link Farming is where less scrupulous hosting companies link all their customers' sites back to their own to boost their search engine rankings. This can result in their site, and their customers' sites, being banned from search engines altogether. We suggest going with a known, reputable provider: " after all, your site may well become the main customer-facing part of your business. The power of the web is that it's up and running 24/7  make sure your site is too. "

• Get it in writing
When choosing a host, insist on a Service Level Agreement (SLA). This is where your hosting company sticks its neck out and tells you what percentage of the time you can expect your site to be up and running and how quickly they will react if something goes wrong. We would recommend a formal SLA from the outset. I would also make a point of asking for reference customers who can vouch for the quality of their support when things don't go according to plan. " " Your needs might start simple, but they could soon grow to include a fully scripted application driven by a database back-end that has thousands of hits a day. Furthermore make sure the host has a breadth of offerings  the last thing you want is to outsource your email to one provider, get your broadband from another and need to go elsewhere for dedicated server hosting. "