If you are an absolute beginner this is where you should start. if you already have your own domain name and web hosting you can fast forward to part 3.

Customer service has to be looked into, seriously many providers think that because they offer cheap Shared Web Hosting UK that they don't need to support their users to a high standard. BS, you paid them for a service so they should damn well provide it. The truth is many webmasters encounter difficultie and at these times they need the support of their hosting provider. Ignore the importance of customer support and you will regret it.

These hosting plans will usually provide only one root directory for all of the domains and sites you plan to build. You will also be allowed one "primary domain". All other domains will have to be "parked" or added on to the primary domain. Without getting too technical, let's just say that some Shared Web Hosting UK scripts don't "play" well with others. And many just don't like being installed in sub-directories!

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.

Affordable Web Hosting company should provide a unlimited domains and unlimited sub domains hosting. Well, if you are not going to host more than one website than it is fine to select hosting with limited domains hosting but it should at least provide unlimited sub domains hosting. Most of the hosting companies provide unlimited domains hosting.

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.

Affordable web hosting service could mean different things. i.e good quality service, flexibility and great plan, assurance of having your site running at any time of the day, and so on. So for these reasons, it is very important that you compare the available affordable hosting plan to know which one is actually good for you. What you want determine whether a web hosting service is affordable or not.