Whatever your activity on the web is, your hosting company represents your first strategical partner that will be relevant to determine your success, or not. In fact, being able to distinguish a quality hosting company from an amateur one is the first step when choosing a hosting service.

Nowadays hosting prices are so low that everyone can offer custom service just purchasing from somewhere a reseller account and selling space. For this reason, the real primary difference characterizing a quality hosting is the customer care offered. Not having a real technical support would cause you troubles and possibly freeze your activity, if you don't know how to solve the issue or if you are facing a server-side problem.

A good help desk, and possibly a live chat system are two evaluable tools making the difference when in need of a prompt help. In fact, when you need to solve a problem you need a swift response, if you want to optimize your time and focus your attention to content creation, rather than troubleshooting.

Moreover, your hosting company should offer you tools to improve your pages, and enhanced scripts to add dynamic content, such as open source forum board scripts, e-commerce scripts and so on. For instance, many hosting service providers are giving today a script called Fantastico script, that is a sort of script library, an effective help to webmasters to enrich their content pages.

Another thing you should be aware about, is whether your hosting company gives you access to advanced features, such as the ability to set cron jobs, change files permissions and editing your htaccess (for example to do a mod_rewrite). If you don't have particular needs, a Linux server with Apache is better than a Windows server with ISS: usually it is cheaper and gives you access to more features.

The ability to execute CGI-BIN scripts, a flexible mySql database and compatibility with PHP, ASP, Perl and similar are further requirements you must pretend from a modern hosting company. These services must be included in the basic service offer, while there are hosting companies offering them for an additional extra price.

Anyway, the real primary need is a 99.99% guaranteed uptime and an high value of bandwidth, because your server must be always online and available to everyone. Usually hosting services offered at extremely low prices are usually overselling their server resources, thus resulting in wide down-times, exposing your site to the risk of being delisted from search engines, because of the continuate failure of web crawlers to index your site.

As a last note, always check what is the payment method, if the payment is recurring and you need to sign a subscription, and make sure that pricing will be the same when renewing your hosting, because many companies charge more later, and have binding contracts.