So you have your domain name and you have your new wonderful website. But how are you going to get that up on the brilliant World Wide Web for all your customers to see?
Most companies offer a few different types of Shared Web Hosting UK services. The only difference usually being how much disk space you want or how much transfer allowance you need.
Some web hosting companies provide dedicated servers to their clients. This means that the entire server will be for your use alone. This is expensive, but it is more stable compared to shared servers. If you're on a tight on the coin you want to spend, you can take advantage of the Shared Web Hosting UK-server arrangement. You just need to know how many accounts are sharing the space, since the speed and the download times of your website will be affected by the performance of other websites from the same server.
Up-time is the over all time the hosting company promises that their servers will be up and running. Some claim to have 100% up-time, but I find that to be almost impossible to have so I tend to go with the ones claiming a 99,9% up-time. This tells us that even though they take back-ups, have mirrored servers and all other stuff to keep the servers safe and running, there is always a small possibility that the servers can go down.
Just because you have used Affordable Web Hosting doesn't mean it has to be poor quality hosting. There are lots of very good quality hosts available at very affordable prices. Also be aware of what comes as standard with your hosting and what comes as paid extras. Check that your potential host uses a popular control panel such as Cpanel. Some hosts use free panels and although they work fine, if the time comes when you have to move your website to a new host, control panels like Cpanel make the process a lot easier.
Special characters: Try to avoid the special characters in the name, like hyphens. This is hard for the user to remember and there are chances that the user is redirected to another website.
There are MANY web hosting companies on the web fighting for your business. Make sure to research these companies. Although there are many GREAT companies out there that will make your experience extremely easy, there are also those that are saying what they know you want to hear in order to cheat you out of your money. You need a company that's going to offer you what you need, but will also be reliable at the end of the day.