When you are starting out on the Internet and just putting together your first website or blog it is very important that you choose the right webhost.
Most companies offer a few different types of Shared Web Hosting UK services. The only difference usually being how much disk space you want or how much transfer allowance you need.
Databases are used by websites that run things like forums, message boards and shopping carts. Any site where you can register an account will have some form of database. Generally one database is used per website function. Not all Shared Web Hosting UK hosts offer databases as standard and often charge extra for the facility. More is always better when it comes to selecting your provider.
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.
Ask for reviews about particular provider in the leading hosting/webmaster forums. This way you will be able to find out more about host's reputation among its peers. You will see what are the pros and cons of the service. Note there is no "perfect provider" but there are a lot of awful ones.
Finally, when you choose a host - always think that it is the best friend of your site. When you make a friend in real life you always consider lot of things before choosing and also overlook minor mistakes to keep a long term relation. A web host is a real friend for you as it provides your business keep running online 24 hours a day and 365 days a year.