If you are going to put your business online you need these two basic things,

• Domain registration
• Hosting space without these two you cannot put your company online. You all know there are two operating systems dominating this world are Windows and Linux. After domain registration, you need to carefully analyze which operating system would suit you.

Checklist before Hosting

Before deciding about the hosting provider, you need to first analyze your requirements, whether to go for Windows or Linux Hosting. Before signing up for windows hosting server you need to make sure that server has basic SSL security, uptime and the speed. Windows hosting will be more costly in comparison to Linux server. Make sure your provider has some other sample sites to show you before you subscribe for a hosting package, and also you should understand if you have PHP developer he/she cannot write a program in Windows Server because it won’t support PHP language. However, nowadays Windows hosting packages supports not only Asp, asp.net, but also it supports Php. Linux Hosting is much cheaper compared to windows hosting, but it only supports Php. There is an added advantage why most of the people go for Linux server because MYSQL database is an open source database and it is free, whereas in Windows Server you need to pay for MS-SQL database.Decision Making on buying Hosting Space

Before you decide to buy hosting space you need to first analyze your requirements whether you are going to put a small website with 40 to 50 static pages or put up a medium site of 400 to 500 or want to launch a portal with thousands of pages in it. These following questions will be very useful in the process of deciding of which server to buy.
1. First of all, you need to know about your requirements, how many pages you want to build your website?
2. Will you use a programming language like Asp, asp.net , php or any other languages like ror,cgi etc.
3. Is this a small website, medium website or a portal?
4. Is there a need for database? Decide whether the website will be a static one or a dynamic one with lot of features.

After asking these basic questions now decide whether you are going to buy hosting space in a shared server or dedicated server and you need to consider the features like whether it supports multimedia flash and you should know whether it can play flash streaming video and audio.

If you consider these above things you will buy a hosting space that suit your needs.