The two most important factors to consider when choosing a provider are the support and the facilities.

Great customer and technical support can make or break your site hosting experience. Beyond support hours, check into availability-how long will you have to wait on the phone to get through to a person? Expertise counts, too. Will the person answering the phone actually be able to help you resolve your issue, or will you be queued up elsewhere?

When it comes to facilities, focus on how well provisioned the service is to outlast disaster. This includes power outages, cut telecom cables, floods, and fire. Like a Timex watch, you still want your site to keep on ticking no matter the calamity.

You'll also want to look into the Internet connections. Find out how many and how large a connection they have to the Internet. Also, look into how closely connected the service is to the Internet. The farther, or the more "hops", the hosting service is from the Internet, the greater the risk you run of suffering from slow-ages due to factors outside your control. No matter the company, you'll want to make sure the service has redundant connection coverage so traffic can be channeled should something like this arise.

Looking for shared site hosting? If so, take a careful look at the applications they will support or offer. If you've got developers creating custom programs for you, you'll also want to see how open the service is to supporting them.

For e-mail addresses with your domain name, check what that includes. Most often, you are given POP (Post Office Protocol) e-mail addresses. This means you can receive e-mails that are addressed to yourname@yourdomainname.com. However, if you were to send an e-mail, the address would include your service provider's domain name. You need SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) e-mail support to get yourname@yourdomainname.com to appear in the "from" line.

If you're looking for co-located hosting, your primary focus should be on the support and facilities. If you will be co-locating servers, where is the data center? What are the hours of access? What security measures are in place to ensure no outsiders fiddle around with your equipment? What opportunities are there to easily expand your setup?

Since you will be turning over the setup and maintenance of your equipment and software with dedicated hosting, it's critical to dig in. Ideally, the provider should already have customers using the same applications you use. Understanding the troubleshooting process can also help.