The amount of choice available for selecting a hosting provider these days is staggering. you are presented with almost as many options for hosting plans than you get types of coffee at a Starbucks.

How do you know which are the good, the bad and the ugly?

For one, let's just straight out exclude any type of FREE hosting. If you are serious about running an Internet Business, an ECommerce site or a Business Brochure website, then you should definitely NOT use a free hosting provider.

1) Free hosting is normally actually paid for by advertising. This means that you will be forced to have some form of advertising on your site.

2) Free hosting is not so reliable and you share your hosting space with thousands, if not millions of other websites. This is also true, to an extent, of shared hosting, but at least with shared hosting you have some type of service contract with your hosting provider.

3) You are just not projecting a professional image if you make use of free hosting. Hosting has become so affordable these days that there is no excuse any more for not having your own domain and your own hosting provider.

The next step up from free hosting is shared hosting. This is by far the most common hosting model today. With shared hosting you also share space on a hosting server. This is where it becomes tricky to distinguish the melons from the real thing. The problem is that the next step up from shared hosting is Virtual Private servers, or even dedicated servers. These are very expensive especially for the average website owner. Shared hosting is much more affordable for website owners that are venturing into the Internet world for the first time.

If you have a relatively large company with a relatively large website and you do not have your own internal server infrastructure, you would definitely steer away from shared hosting and rather go into partnership with a hosting service provider where you can use dedicated servers or Private Virtual Servers. But we are talking here more of the requirements of the average Joe Schmoe - the little guy, like you or me, who wants to start his own little Internet empire.

So, shared hosting is what it will be.

The advantages with shared hosting is that is cheap. Hosting is becoming cheaper and cheaper - in the United States at least. The problem is that there are a lot of unscrupulous operators out there, who overload their servers. If you land up with one of them, you will definitely find that YOUR website performance degrades due to the fact that some idiot sharing the same box is sending out 10000 emails to his newly bought list of scraped emails.

Take the following steps:

1. There are a lot of web hosting review sites. Visit these sites and see what customers are saying of the web hosting provider. But please note, do not take everything you see at face value. No hosting provider is perfect, and all hosting providers WILL get some bad reviews. The trick is to determine how well the problem was handled and how well the hosting provider recovered or did something about the problem. It is also worthwhile to visit hosting review sites where some type of rating is assigned to a host.

2. To narrow down your search considerably I am going to give you advice based on my own prejudices - search for CPanel Hosting on a Linux server. Don't mess around with other control panels or operating systems. Not everyone will agree with me and there are a lot of other control panels that are equally good, but you cannot go wrong with this combination and it narrows the field somewhat.

3. If you are on a potential hosting provider's website, take a look at the following details:

- Do they provide a physical address and phone number? Sure, everything can be done by email, but I was once in the situation where my support ticket for an emergency went unanswered and I decided to phone the company - only to find out that they didn't publish their phone number.

- If they have so-called 'Live site support' available, how often is the support actually available? I've seen lots of sites claiming to have 'live support' but the life support seemed to be very dead every time that I visited the site.

- Send a pre-sales question through their support ticket system and make sure that you are happy with the way that the support desk is set up. You might spend some time here in future and you must be able to initiate and sustain support tickets easily.

You also want to see how quickly the hosting provider responds to your question. Don't get too excited however if they come back almost immediately. Pre-sales are normally much quicker off the mark than technical support! But it does give an indication.

See how long the company has been in operation (some review sites provide this) - the longer the better!

- See if they allow adult hosting. If they do, be aware that adult hosting consumes a lot of resources and traffic. Your site might be negatively impacted by this if you land up on the same server.

4. THEN you take a look at features.

The following features are essential:

- Enough hard disk space. This is almost the least of your worries since ridiculous amounts of hard disk space are on offer these days. You can easily get 500 MB of hard disk space for about $2 per month and even more commonly, over 1GB or 2GB per month for about $7. You will probably not need this much space unless you are going to run a forum or membership site, or plan to host videos or podcasts. For a 'normal' site anything between 5MB and 100MB will be enough. - Enough bandwidth - this is also normally more than enough these days.

My advice is, however, NOT to go for the $2 per month options. You are going to get what you pay for....

Other features that are important are:

- Web statistics. I have found a very nice hosting company only to find that they did not offer online statistics. According to them it degraded the performance of their servers. This may very well be, but you cannot operate a website without statistics! Most hosting providers DO offer statistics, but it will never hurt to just make 100 sure.

- If you elected to go for CPanel hosting as I am recommended, you will find that most other features that are essential are available by default - quick installation of software such as shopping carts and blogs; subdomains; FTP accounts; email account setup management; backups and more. Everything that you would ever need, in fact.

Christine Anderssen is the owner of Tailormade4you and specializes in Web Hosting and Web Site Design services for businesses. Read the original article on: choose a web hosting company.