How much does it cost?
Most services charge a setup fee and also a monthly charge. More often than not, you may have to pay one year in advance, so make sure you have looked into all the alternatives.

What is the Host Company's uptime record?
This is important, as all the marketing in the world will come to naught if the site is constantly down. You can lose your listing within Google or other search engines if your server is down when the search engine comes a-calling...this can mean you are not able to be found for 4 weeks or more!

How much disk space?
Your website will be limited to a certain amount of disk space, although you can always buy more. Some small sites have only a couple of megabytes of disk space, larger sites will have hundreds of megabytes available.

How much are hit and data transfer charges?
Some companies charge you for the number of hits-which is the number of times someone transfers one of your pages to their browser. Others charge according to the amount of data transferred out of your website. Either way, the busier your site, the more you'll be charged.
There are companies that have no limit, and others that provide a certain minimum amount of data transfer for free, which quite often is plenty.

How much are upgrades?
As your website grows, so will your hosting needs. Ask about add ons for a later date-more disk space, create more email accounts, transfer more data etc..

Is there a charge for e-mail accounts?
You'll generally get an email account with your website hosting. With a single email account you can retrieve email that has been sent to different addresses, even though they are the one account ie anywhere@jobloes.com, info@jobloes.com etc.
If you want more than this one account you may have to pay extra for them

How many forwarding accounts?
It is also handy to have the service of mail forwarding. So for example all mail to info@jobloes.com
would get forwarded to jobloe@hotmail.com.

Do you mailing lists?
You can use a mailing list to either host a discussion group based on the email system or to distribute a newsletter.
Many companies have mailing list software available for their clients to use, so ask if there is an additional cost and how many members are allowed to be on the list.

Do you have a secure server? (SSL)
If you plan to take orders online or transfer sensitive information, you'll need a secure server.
A credit card information entered onto a form will need to be encrypted before it is sent from the user's web browser to the server. There may be an additional cost for this service.

Do I get access reports?
Access reports show you information about visitors to your site. You need this information as it shows you where your visitors are coming from, what browsers they use, which pages they view etc.

Are there any added bonuses?

Be sure to look into whether the Hosting Company offers any website templates, shopping carts, merchant faciliteis etc. these are all sure to save you money and time in the long run.