You have spent weeks designing the ideal website yourself or spent hundreds or thousands of dollars hiring a designer to showcase your product or business. You have the Flash intros, the cross browser compatibility, the search engine optimization and the key words and meta-tags that will assure you are seen by the multitudes.

All you need to do now is find it a home – a server to host your site.

The options are staggering and the prices run from free to outrageous. The goal is to find a happy medium somewhere south of outrageous and a little north of free.

Free Hosting
Why not just slap it out there on a free site? In a word - image.

Your hard work or dollars creating a professional website should not be tossed away by packaging it in a plain brown paper wrapper. The small expense of having your own domain name and paid hosting service will give your potential clients greater trust in your company or product. It's simply more professional.

There is almost always a price to pay for "free" hosting, and it usually means giving the free hosting service part of your site to advertise their services.

Reliability: Dedicated vs Shared Hosting
Unlike a free hosting service, a paid host won't have your carefully crafted pages inundated with third party banners, pop-up ads and frames. With hosting for basic websites as low as $30.00 per year, there really is no reason to give up part of your site to someone else’s advertising.

Now that you have decided on a paid hosting solution, you are presented with the question of reliability and whether a dedicated or shared hosting plan will meet your site requirements.

Reliability can be determined by researching the data centers used by the hosting service. If your host consists of a guy with 3 computers in his garage and a cable modem, your site may or may not be available 24/7/365. Plus, the odds are he is not too worried about backing up your data.

If your hosting service has multiple servers in secure data centers and redundant servers that take over should their primary location experience a problem, you’re playing with the big boys.

Suppose your site was hosted on a server in New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina hit and the entire operation went under water? If the hosting service also had a data center in Nebraska that was automatically updated every 24 hours from the primary source, web traffic could be routed to the high and dry Nebraska servers and your visitors would never know there was any problem. Of course there is always the possibility that just as the traffic is re-routed to the Nebraska server, a tornado rips the roof off and sends your website hurtling through the cornfields.

This is why keeping a local backup of all your website data is so important. I make a CD copy of all my client files every 30 days and store it in a fireproof safe at another location. Even if the hurricane and tornadoes hit just when my house catches fire and toasts my hard drive, I can be back up and running as soon as I can get to the safe and another computer.

If you want to be assured of having your site available 24/7/365, select a co-located server that does redundant backups.

If you have a large business that deals with sensitive client information and you expect millions of people to visit your site every week, you may need a dedicated server. This means you are leasing a server to run only your website. It's much like the choice of leasing a condo with 200 close neighbors or leasing an estate with fences and gated access.

On the other hand, if you’re a small business that just wants to present your product or service to the public, you may be well served with a shared hosting plan. The main difference between shared and dedicated hosting is that with dedicated hosting, you lease the entire server while with shared hosting; the hard drive on which your site resides is also home to several other websites. The shared hosting hard drive is divided (partitioned) to allow each client a set amount of server space, depending on the level of hosting service they pay for.

If you have several websites you should consider a shared hosting plan. This gives you easy access to all your sites on just one server. Most plans will include all the tools your business will need like FrontPage extensions, MySQL database, multiple email accounts, etc. Shared hosting is quite reasonable and in most cases, you can find firms that will give you all the bells and whistles with plenty of bandwidth for around $5.00 per month.

Dedicated hosting usually runs quite a bit more, from around $20.00 to $200.00 per month depending on the plan you select.

One item that will affect the cost of whatever hosting package you choose is bandwidth allocation, or how much data can be transferred from and to the host.

Packaged Options
Selected options in your package can also affect the price. While many hosting services will charge extra for every option they can, the better ones configure their customers with a full selection of options that can be upgraded in some cases. If you find your hosting company wants to charge a fee for each item as a basic service, you may want to reconsider your hosting service.

Your website says a lot about your business and choosing a safe, reliable and affordable hosting service for your website is an important business decision that shouldn’t be taken lightly. Knowing the basics of web hosting, your site requirements and shopping around will go far in helping you make the best and most informed decision.

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