There are many hosting companies out there who claimed to have this feature and that feature. Some would even give you unlimited bandwidth and disk space. One thing you must know is that the most important element/feature with choosing a good hosting service is the uptime guarantee. This figure gives you an idea of how much downtime will be. So make sure the number is at least 99.99% if not 100%. However, the truth is that no one hosting company can give you truly 100% uptime, because there are maintenance, hardware failures… etc
These are the things you should look for when you are looking for a hosting service for you first website. They should have Cpanel, 99.99% uptime, and good support. Depending on your business, your website is one of the most important asset you have. It does the selling for you on the Internet. So you need to make sure it has a good and secure home, and that is the hosting. You want to install some server tracking code so that you know how good your hosting is. One thing you should never do is sign for a long contract with the hosting company. Read some reviews on forums and blogs and then sign up one month, and then pay monthly for at least 3 months before paying for a whole year or two.
If you are using a website company for building your website you will most like get 12 months of free hosting. In which case you probably won’t have to worry about it too much. The main advantage of that is that you know their company website is on the same server which means they will be there as quickly as possible when problem occurs.