There are mainly two types of web hosting providers, shared and dedicated web hosting and the latter is much more expensive. If you are a new comer to the website and internet field, I suggest to start with a shared web hosting provider.
In Shared Web Hosting, several websites use the same server. The security is not in the hands of the website, but in the hands of the service provides. This can make the Shared Web Hosting service unsuitable to sensitive businesses. You have to make a decision on how reliable you web service provider is. Also, as there are 10 to 30 websites using the same server, the speed is slow, and if you're planning on selling, this could hinder your sales. This kind of web hosting service is only suited to small businesses with moderate traffic levels.
Windows or Linux: Do you know if your site needs to run on a MS Windows server with FrontPage extensions or does it need PERL, PHP or MySQL? These things you will need to find out if you intent to run a successful small business Shared Web Hosting UK site.
Popularity does not guarantee you a good service. Many popular host start of small and offering a good service but once their popularity grows they start to become complacent and their product suffers. It may not always be the case but it happens more than you'd believe. Also becoming popular nowadays can simply be a case of having the largest advertising budget.
This is why I prefer Affordable Web Hosting plans. They give you more control of your website. If your site doesn't generate traffic right away you will not have to worry about having your web hosting service cancelled with no warning. You will also be given more tools to help grow your website and make your site more user friendly. Reliability is also something you get with paid hosting. They want to keep you as a customer so they will do more to keep you satisfied. Free web hosting can be crappy on purpose in hopes that you will upgrade to the paid service so you might as well get an affordable web hosting plan that fits your needs.
When this is the case, maintenance costs are also going to be an issue. Using a shared server, a lot of different places will share the same server so maintenance costs are going to be shared as well. This can greatly reduce the cost by a lot because every one of the companies that have a space on there will be paying a certain percentage of it based on the amount of disk space that they are using.
Well i hope this article gave you a better understanding on what to look for in a web hosting company. I recommend checking out affordable web hosting to review all the top rated web hosting companies out on the market. Plus check out some of the other affordable web hosting 101 lessons for more helpful info.