When you are choosing a web host for your web page, the first thing you need to consider is the design of your site. Is your spot on the web going to be a personal page where you put up pictures to share with your family? Or is it going to be the web presence of your business, which you want to be as professional as possible?

Or perhaps it will be the e-meeting place for a quilting club? These are all possibilities, and each will inform which host you should go with. If, for instance, you want a simple website to communicate personal thoughts, perhaps a service such as GeoCities or livjournal would suffice. But these two options lack the professional police that you would want if you were putting your company's information on the web, even if that company is small. Remember that professionalism is as much an attitude as it is a market share. Web hosting such as GeoCities can be characterized as free, and plastered over with mandatory advertisements that pay money to the web hosts.

Business websites tend to be more demanding than personal websites. So if you are going to set up a business site, consider what you need. If you are going to sell merchandise, you will have to set up a secure socket layer (SSL) to transmit sensitive information, such as credit numbers and addresses. You will likely need to find a host that supports database management, which will allow the use of such protocols as ASP.NET, Java, and PHP. A web hosts that doesn't provide these things is insufficient for a business site.

You should also think about how much space you will need on the web, because every host offers a different amount. If you are going to upload a lot of media, you will likely need more space, for instance, than you would if you are just going to have a text-based web journal. As a rule of thumb, you will need at minimum 50MB of space for twenty web pages. As bells and whistles, and flash videos, are added on, that number increases. Plan accordingly.

And finally, here is a rubric to consider. Websites material can be broken down into three general categories, basic, database driven, and multimedia. All websites contain basic features, HTML coding and other structural tidbits, whether the site was uploaded ten years ago or is featured on YouTube.

Database driven material is material that is managed by PHP, Java, and similar protocols. This is a bit more demanding in terms of hard drive space than basic. Multimedia material is all that glitters and blinks on the web, and it is the most space demanding of all three. If your site needs a lot of multimedia items, then make sure that you find a host that can store them.