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To participate in electronic commerce, your first steps would invariably include designing a website. Designing a website for your business initiative is a challenging task. However, you can't stay complacent even after designing your website. You still need to scout for a suitable web hosting service to publish or host your website. Selection of a good web hosting plan that fits your bill without compromising on any functional specifications is a critical driver in the success of your electronic commerce venture.

In order to choose a good web hosting plan, a business must follow the proven best practices, just as with any other business decision. Let's discuss what some of these best practices are. First, the hosting service must be reliable. A business should choose a plan from a company that is known for maximum uptime. This is because downtown leads to lost business, and obviously no business would want that.

Next, you need to ensure that the web hosting service provider provides round-the-clock customer support. This is necessary to ensure that any technical glitches get resolved at the earliest. The customer service should not be billed separately. Rather it should come free or be accounted for in the initial sign-up amount.

Multimedia elements (cartoons, music, flash, etc) require higher bandwidth that only a good web hosting plan can accommodate. The required bandwidth also needs adequate disk space for storing these multimedia events. Balancing your bandwidth and storage capacity is important. It requires planning and careful consideration of the nature of the data you want to post.

A remote control panel should be utilized to manage your web hosting plan. It is a great way to administer your domain mailbox, install scripts, etc. A good web hosting plan includes free training in the use of control panels, because providing control panels is just not enough alone.

Price is the most important factor when selecting a web hosting plan. Heavy competition in this market has produced a flood of cheap hosting plans. Unfortunately, you'll probably get what you pay for. Cheap web hosting is usually synonymous with poor service. You should not compromise price for performance. Choosing a good web hosting plan will pay for itself many times over.