After you feel comfortable with the level of support a provider offers, consider what features are available. A basic understanding of what you know (and what you don't) will help direct your choice. If creating a site from scratch is intimidating, look for a provider that offers free website building software. This will save you from knowing html. You will also need a domain name to get your site up and some Shared Web Hosting providers even offer these for free. A free domain name should not be the main selling point for which provider you choose. After all, you can purchase a domain name from anyone from $2.99 - $12.99/year.
Although there is much controversy around the whole domain name business one thing is for sure...can you really afford to let someone else capitalize on your company domain name or names. The number of domain names is increasing with most of them linked to geographical locations such as .nl for Holland, .de for Germany and .FR for France.
The selection of platform and database engine is connected. If your web host offers hosting on the Linux platform, the script language is PHP and the database is MySQL. For Windows based hosting, ASP/.NET and MSSQL is often used. Unless you are a programmer with special demands in regard to platform, this selection doesn't matter much to you. More web hosts offer Linux hosting because it is cheaper, hence Affordable Web Hosting.
So, you have a name, a plan and a place for your site to live. Finally, it is time to start designing! The choice here is to try to build yourself, "self-build", or find a professional to do the job for you. A half way house some use is to find a family member or friend who dabbles in web design and will do the job for as little as a case of beer. I would strongly advise against this route as the design process can be quite intense and is apt to place some strain on any personal relationship if significant redrafting is needed or the design is not all you had hoped for. If your first designer is not up to the project you can fire them and move on. Letting go of a family friend can present far more issues.
It is a wise decision to find as many answers to your questions as possible. The better informed you are the easier it will be choosing the right Shared Web Hosting UK host for your website. Creating your own website and finding a hosting service for it is the first steps in many for your new business but it these are a couple of the most important ones.
Bandwidth (or data transfer as it is also known) relates to how many times your website is visited. Each file your page is constructed of all adds to the data transfer. If you have a page that is 2kb, with two pictures each of 199kb and you have a data transfer allowance of 1GB per month then you could have around 2600 visitors each month. That's about 87 visitors per day. The likelihood is you will have more than one page, and will want more than two pictures on some - if not all - pages. If you exceed your bandwidth then your provider will charge you a lot more for the excess, or will disable your website entirely. So the more bandwidth that a web host offers the better.
Try to schedule the transfer at a time where there's least traffic. Start by creating custom error pages on the new host server. Let your website visitors know about the move. By giving them prior warning, you can ease the transition. Configure your existing email accounts on the new sever. Transfer your existing website via FTP to the new server. Test everything to make sure it all works. Set up all the extra features and let your site run for a few days. Once your new web hosting plan has been activated and your website is up and running, cancel your old hosting plan. Make sure you have retrieved all your data from your old account.