There are a few mistakes to avoid while choosing your host. I'd like to share these with you below, and explain why it's important to avoid these mistakes at all costs - especially if you wish to start an online business.

3 Mistakes to Avoid

1. Free Web Space - Remember seeing all those ads that mention "free web space"? Please avoid participating in these services. In most cases, reason it's free is because company will place advertisements for other websites all over your web page. This defeats entire purpose of having "your own" web business.

Why should you have to give your potential customers away? Shouldn't you be able to keep visitors that you have paid to receive through your own ad campaigns?

With "free web space" sites, you'll give away more business than it would cost you to get your own domain and hosting service. It's not worth it.

2. Limited hosting - Avoid hosting packages that will not allow you to add order forms, statistics, or multiple email accounts to your website. These are necessary tools for any webmaster who desires to open an online business.

It's best to choose a hosting service that offers many options such as:

To begin, every website is hosted on only 3 platforms:

Unix Windows NT Macintosh

Very few sites are hosted on a MAC server, so majority of webhosts use Unix or NT. For these reasons we will focus on only those 2 platforms.

Unix and NT both offer various options and have different abilities. Your choice of which platform to use depends on what applications you want your site to run and amount of control you want to have over your site.

Unix

Unix is oldest and one of most widely used operating systems. It is basis of internet and most webservers originally ran on a version of Unix. Unix is know as a multitasking operating system which means that it can run many applications at same time without them affecting each other. This is very important when you consider that hundreds of websites, running thousands of CGI scripts, all receiving thousands of hits could be running on one webserver.

Why Use It?:

It's reliable Ability to host many websites on same machine. Almost all CGI scripts run better on Unix. Programming flexibility. Much more administrative control.

With Unix, webmasters can really tweak their websites (assuming they know what they are doing) to run at optimal levels. Developers can run CGI scripts and create applications specific to their needs.

Down Sides:

Is case sensitive. It is not an easy operating system to learn. Must use telnet or Ftp to make changes.

Windows NT

NT is a relative newcomer to webhosting game but it is fast gaining a large share of business. NT was built to integrate seamlessly with Microsoft's web authoring tool, Frontpage. As such, it is often perfect solution for newcomers who do not want to learn HTML or CGI programming or deal with day to day hassles of administering a webserver.

Up Sides: