Reliability of the servers and Uptime: The servers of the web host should be reliable and should have a continuous uptime of a minimum 99.5%. The server reliability translates into the availability of your website on the net. If someone tries to access your site and they get ‘server not found’ message too many times, they will shift their business elsewhere. A good web host will guarantee 99.8% uptime round the clock 7 days a week.

Traffic Transfer or Bandwidth: Traffic transfer or bandwidth refers to the capacity of the web host to accommodate simultaneous access to your website. This is measured by the bytes number (amount) transferred by your site when web surfers access your site on the web. All web hosts will charge for this service and there is no such thing as ‘limitless bandwidth’. It is good if you can find out the details before hand so as to avoid bad surprises with high bills for data transfer. A simple website will be comfortable with about 50 GB to 100GB.

Disk or storage space: As important as the traffic transfer size, is the disk or storage space. Similarly, you should look out for a minimum 200 MB. Many web hosts will and can offer you larger disk / storage spaces, which is absolutely fine. However, keep in mind that even if you are a totally professional site you may not need more than 5000 MB. So, a realistic move is to aim at 200– 1000 MB as disk/storage space.

Technical or service support: Look for history of the web host and find out their approach and time of rectification of different problems that can crop up with the server and sites. All web hosting entities will assure you of round-the-clock service seven-days-a-week. However, very few really function this way. It is very important to have a good service support so as to have an interrupted access to your site. Be careful of free services and false assurances in this field as it can destroy your business with lack of proper support.

Add-ons capacity: You should be able, unless you prefer otherwise, to add, update, and delete things in your website yourself. The most normal of these things would be managing your email, passwords and creating different accounts. There are more advanced features with the control panel of the host, which could allow you to add or delete extra items on your website directly. You should find out the amount of liberty your host can extend to you.

In case you are planning to run a business complete with financial transactions, order forms, you will need additional services like secure server for credit card encrypting and the like.

Other plus points are email auto-responders, mail forward, re-routing, and multiple accesses. This would ensure that your negotiations cover all bases.