If you are planning to transfere your business online, or even will start your business on the internet from scratch, the first thing you will face is: where you will host your websites? and if you are new to this area (web hosting), you will find yourself a bit confused about many webhosting terminology, so it'll be very important to you to understand these terms before you take your decision.

Here, I will mention to the most important factors you must take in consideration:

1. Bandwidth: (data transfer) is measured in gigabytes. A gigabyte is one billion bytes. Each letter is one byte. Images can take up a big amount of kilobytes (thousands of bytes), and file downloads can be several megabytes (millions of bytes) in size. You must logically think of how much bandwidth your website will need. Unless your website has a lot of downloads, it will be unlikely that you will need many gigabytes of transfer - 10 gigabytes should be very enough. Any more, and you will just be paying extra for something to use.

On that note though, you should be careful and make sure you always have some extra bandwidth - many hosting providers charge $3.00 and more for every extra gigabyte of bandwidth you use. That can add up very quickly

2. # Of hosted domains allowed:

One of the most important factors which must be taken into account when choosing your hosting provider is the number of websites that allow you to host on a single account, some hosting companies allow only for one domain per account, some other companies will allow you to host an unlimited websites per one account, meanning several aebsites at the expense of one.

If you are serious about your business on the Internet then you must be aware of the fact that you will sooner or later will need to launch more websites to expand your business to high levels. Therefore it is important to take this point into consideration where you will remove the burden of purchasing additional webhosting accounts to host the new websites in the future.

3. Control Panel: Before you buy a web hosting plan, ask the hosting company show you a demo for the control panel from which you will administrate your hosting account.

Control panel is the place where you can check your website visitor statistics, add or erase email accounts, host additional domains on your account, install scripts and make other nominal changes for your website. Control panel should be easy to use with friendly interface and you should take some time to understand what it is all about before purchasing your hosting plan.