When selecting affordable business web hosting there are a vast number of factors you can consider but I think the main decision boils down to just 5 main points.

When you’ve worked these out just compare any other factors that are of real importance to you - but these points below will pretty much make your decision for you…

1) Bandwidth - The more the merrier with unlimited bandwidth being the perfect solution - but don’t pay over the odds for it at the beginning.

2) Web Space - 30-50MB should be enough for a decent sized small business site (50 pages or so) but more web space gives you “room to grow”. If you’re going to host video, lots of pictures or audio go for more rather than less (500MB+).

3) Uptime - Look for 99%+ uptime or you’ll be wasting more visitors and sales than you need to and you won’t be getting the full benefit your website can have on your business.

4) Script Compatibility - If you want to use any scripts on your website check the compatibility to ensure they will work with your web hosting account.

Simply compare what the scripts need with what your web host provides to see whether the scripts you have chosen should work.

As a real-life example one script I use requires:

PHP 4.0+ and MySQL

Then you check your affordable business web hosting company to ensure it offer PHP version 4.0 or newer and a MySQL database and you know you’re safe.

5) Reputation - This is the hardest of all to get an idea of because in order to do this you need to listen to others, weigh up ideas, decide how much you trust that person, read tesimonials and more.

There’s no real shortcut though I will reiterate my own recommendations to you - x and x and I stand by those choices having been recommending them to others for the last 3 years or so.

And in all that time I have yet to have anyone contact me and tell me they had a bad experience with either. Which is a great sign in itself.

Once you’ve got these 5 points nailed down then consider any other “secondary” affordable business web hosting factors that are of interest to you personally.