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If you are a software developer or a freelance consultant or an affiliate marketer, it has become compulsory for everybody to own a professional website in order to promote your products and services properly to the millions of online users.

Generally a web hosting package consists of the web space, e-mail accounts, database, scripting, shopping carts etc.

If you search through Google for a web hosting service, you will find too many companies providing this service with attractive packages and facilities. It becomes difficult to choose any one as each company claims as their web hosting package as the best and economical.

In this article, we shall discuss key points which will help you choosing the correct web hosting service.

1. Stay away from free web hosting

Few companies like google, yahoo and netfirms offer free web pages on their server. This is a good service for beginners and hobbyist to establish their website (webpage) without spending a single penny. This service has a big disadvantage. The company shows advertise on the hosted pages and keeps limited bandwidth. This may distract and limit visitors to your website. Don’t go for this kind of service if you are serious about your business and service.

2. Choose the right web space

Generally web hosting space ranges from 5MB to more than 5GB. You should carefully choose the package for your website as you may find lucrative paying for more space. For example, if you want to have a personal website then you should consider package with space between 5MB to 50 MB.

3. Don’t ignore the platform

Platform decides your programming language and database support. it is always important to choose the correct platform depending on the language and database you know. You can either choose Windows or Linux. If you are skilled in ASP and SQL Server, you should go for windows platform. Linux platform will support PHP and MYSQL better than windows from the performance point of view.

4. Additional software, support and control panel

Every web hosting package has additional software and features like e-mail accounts, database support (SQL, Access) and programming support (PHP, ASP). With this a user friendly control panel, support for Blog, forums and CMS (content management system) will be a plus point.

You should carefully choose the package considering these features and support. I hope above points will be helpful in selecting the correct web hosting package.