If you have a Shared Web Hosting account, you may not realize it, but you also share the cost of server maintenance with other clients. This is a big reason why a shared account is reasonably priced. Also, your provider is expected to be responsible for security updates, installation of server software and any other server responsibilities.
How to keep the hosting industry's growth is a substantial debate. Realizing the importance of this issue I can put in my thoughts into the discussion. Here are my suggestions and advice to new web hosting companies and especially for those who need to choose their new web hosting provider.
The selection of platform and database engine is connected. If your web host offers hosting on the Linux platform, the script language is PHP and the database is MySQL. For Windows based hosting, ASP/.NET and MSSQL is often used. Unless you are a programmer with special demands in regard to platform, this selection doesn't matter much to you. More web hosts offer Linux hosting because it is cheaper, hence Affordable Web Hosting.
Beware of companies that can quote you a price almost without hearing any details of your project. Don't be afraid to ask lots of questions! Your web site represents a significant investment and you should get clear explanations of what is involved and how the project is priced. On the other hand you should also be ultra clear and specific about the process flow of your business. Remember, your designer might know little to nothing about your industry and without sufficient specifics from you, there can end up being unexpected costs when the designer has to rework the design and coding.
Get into Shared Web Hosting UK 2.0 (aka Social Networking)! Start a blog (you are reading an example), post a video on YouTube, set up a company page on Facebook, post press releases online, write and post articles about your area of expertise...The possibilities are growing all the time and the more work you put in the better the results you will achieve. Don't forget to link everything back to your site!!
Bandwidth (or data transfer as it is also known) relates to how many times your website is visited. Each file your page is constructed of all adds to the data transfer. If you have a page that is 2kb, with two pictures each of 199kb and you have a data transfer allowance of 1GB per month then you could have around 2600 visitors each month. That's about 87 visitors per day. The likelihood is you will have more than one page, and will want more than two pictures on some - if not all - pages. If you exceed your bandwidth then your provider will charge you a lot more for the excess, or will disable your website entirely. So the more bandwidth that a web host offers the better.
Cheap web host providers are the ones that likely go bankrupt in the web hosting business. This will result to the shutting down of web sites - and this means, loss of business for your part. Moreover, transferring to another web host entails a lot of inconvenience for yourself as well as for your clients.