"If being found via search engines is important to your business, be very careful about where you have your pages hosted. If the hosting service also hosts spammers and pornographers, you could wind up being penalized or excluded."

AltaVista is not the only search engine enforcing this policy against certain Web Hosting services. This is a common practice causing many sites to lose their rank. Choosing the right host for your Web hosting needs is of great importance if you really care about your search engine position.

Here is a short list of things to watch out for;

Shared IP hosting:

Many Web hosting services do not give out unique IP addresses to customers. The name-based system of virtual Web hosting allows multiple domains to be hosted by a single IP. This means several hundred domain names could all be using the same IP address. Are you sharing an IP address with people you don't even know?

If someone else, who is hosted on the same server as your site, gets banned on a search engine, then your Web site will be caught and banned as well. This happens on a regular basis causing serious problems for those who are affected.

Downtime:

If your Web host provider cannot keep servers up and running 24/7, people will not be able to find your site. The search engine spiders won't find it either. They will assume your site is gone and remove it from the search engine index. You will have to resubmit and wait weeks or months for the spider to re-index your site. If your site already is indexed and ranking well, it might lose its position altogether.

No matter what web host provider you use, it is highly recommended that you sign up for a free site monitoring service like EasyMonitor. This guarantees that you're alerted within minutes when your site goes down. This enables you to get to work immediately to solve the problem and dramatically increase the time your site is up and running.

The speed and reliability of your Web host provider will depend on several factors. Look for a web page host with;

1) A T3 connection (or better) close to a primary Internet backbone

2) Safeguards against systems, network or power failure

3)Several connections to the Internet (in case one goes down)

4)Backup power supplies and "Uptime guarantee" with at least 95% uptime

Access to raw web log files is one feature often missing with low quality Web hosting services. Some Web host providers provide logs, but do not include referrer information. Others delete logs frequently, making it impossible to use them effectively. Make sure your Web hosting service gives you access to raw server logs, preferably in "Extended Common Log File Format", a standard that can be understood by most log analyzers.

The server logs will give you some valuable information for your search engine optimization work, including what search engines people are using to find your site, exactly which keywords do they type into the search box, and when the search engine spiders visit your site. This is crucial information. You cannot properly optimize your site without it.

Other features include daily back up of your data, high bandwidth and, of course, the quality of their support services. In addition, you must consider the features offered by the Web page host. Some features to consider are;

1)The space available for your site

2)Monthly transfer limits

3)POP mail server availability

4)Support for CGI, SSI, Perl, databases and FrontPage 2000 extensions

5)Secure server access (SSL)

6)Anonymous FTP and

7)Shopping Cart Software.