3. Technical Support As most hosting companies offer inclusive technical support, you shouldn't pay extra for this. If you're not offered 24 hours/7 days you should look elsewhere. The test is to contact company and ask questions. If they don't reply within 48 hours, or don't reply at all, consider another hosting company. A good company should reply within 24-48 hours.

4. Reliability. How reliable is a web hosting company? Most claim 99.9% uptime, but due to nature of computers and communications equipment, outages will and do occur occasionally. You can contact a company and ask, but they will tell you they're very reliable. Instead, ask for a couple of sites they currently host, that you can check out for yourself. Not only will you see that site is available, it gives you opportunity to see how well they perform during peak periods too.

5. Price and Guarantee. If previous four steps check out, then you need to consider price and this can vary widely. You need to consider setup fees, monthly fees, plan discounts and optional extras in your calculations. Some companies offer you ridiculously low or no monthly fees, but check fine print before agreeing to anything. Free sites almost always have popups or require space invasive banners. Cheap hosting companies often fail on steps 3 and 4, so check them out first, or you may find your site is often not available to your visitors. Setup costs vary widely too. Basically, this is cost that a company will charge to set up an account for you. This is justified if you are getting a lot of features included (see step 2). You should not need to pay over $50. If you can get a money back guarantee, then you know company is concerned about it's customers. The longer guarantee, better. Seven days is not usually enough to judge if company is suited to you.

So, if you follow steps listed above, you should find perfect hosting company for your needs. **********************************************************

Using Breal as an example, if 1,000 visitors viewed every page on site, total data transfer would be 2 GB (1,000 x 2 MB = 2,000 MB) or a single 10 KB file could be viewed 200,000 times and data transfer would be 2 GB. Most professional level websites will use less than 2 GB bandwidth per month.

Why do some companies charge for bandwidth and data transfer, while others claim you can have unlimited bandwith and data transfer?

Strangely enough, free on Internet often means fee. Look closely at many of unlimited offers and you will discover that there is a limit to bandwidth. You may need to contact company and ask them to define what they mean by 'unlimited'.

For information on Breal's hosting plans, visit http://www.brealweb.com/hosting/hosting.asp