Where your Web site will be hosted depends on your site components and business needs. There are plenty of service providers to choose from, each trying to outdo its competitors and promising to offer more for lessmoney. Your job is to wade through all the marketing and find aWeb site host thatmeets your current needs while still having enough wiggle roomto accommodate future expansion.

Take a bird’s eye view look at all potential Web site hosts and evaluate:

Cost: Most Web site hosts charge by the month but will offer substantial discounts for one year or multi-year contracts.

Disk space: Large documents, high-resolution images, audio files, and video files can take up a lot of disk space in a short period of
time. If your Web site is going to be content and multimedia heavy, you need to ensure the Web site host provides adequate storage for your current and future files.

Transfer limits: Web site traffic will vary from month to month, but if you’re expecting a lot of traffic, or you plan to stream multimedia content like audio and

video: You must make sure the host’s transfer ceiling isn’t too low. You’ll most likely incur additional charges for exceeding your allotted monthly transfer limit.

E-mail support: If your business doesn’t have its own dedicated mail server, you’ll need to make sure the Web site host provides an adequate number of e-mail boxes for all your employees as well as adequate storage per mailbox.

Technology support: If your Web site is going to contain user applications (e.g., PHP, Perl, .NET) and/or databases (e.g., MySQL, MS-Access, PostgreSQL), check to see if the Web site host actually supports them.

Backbone security and failsafes: The more fail-safe measures a host has, the more likely your Web site will survive a system crash or failure. Fail-safe measures also help minimize service interruptions associated with blackouts. Typical fail-safe measures include regularly scheduled data backups, uninterruptible power supplies (UPS), backup generators, and a formal disaster recovery plan.

Once you’ve weeded out the hosts that don’t meet your needs, you can use the table below to help you narrow down your choices until you arrive at a suitable Web site host: