There are many things to consider when you are looking for a new web hosting company. Price is probably the least important thing to consider, as you want to focus on things that together will give you the best chances for online success.

• Ability to edit .htacess file. If your webhost servers run Apache, then is it important that you’ll have access to your own .htaccess file. There are many reasons why having access to this file is crucial, including keeping bad bots out of your site by blocking certain IP addresses, the ability to 301 re-direct the non-www version of your site to the www-version or vice-versa and to permanently re-direct old web pages to new webpages. Good examples on how to edit your htaccess file can be found here and here.

• Ability to pick your own shopping cart. It does not make any sense to choose a webhost that forces you to use a particular shopping cart. You may already have a shopping cart, so choose a webhosting company that will allow you to run a wide variety of shopping cart applications (e.g. php, html, or perl based).

• Pick a hosting company that offers both shared hosting and dedicated hosting. Shared hosting will be cheaper, but if shared hosting doesn’t work out, you can always move to dedicated hosting without too many problems.

• Avoid hosting companies that offer only limited band width. It is not in your best interest to pick a webhost that limits your monthly traffic to let’s say 1GB and where you have to pay extra if you go over. Many hosting companies already offer unlimited traffic on most of their plans.