Keep in mind, however, that many hosting companies will offer you a “great deal” on, say 5 GB disk space even though you’ll probably only ever use about 10 MB of it, if that. There are also hosts that offer “unlimited bandwidth,” and you should be skeptical of them, because technically, there isn’t any such thing as unlimited bandwidth.

Cost should definitely be a consideration, and sites like webhostinggeeks.com and others post cost and feature comparisons that can be extremely helpful for those shopping around for web hosting. Other considerations should include whether and how many email accounts are included in the price, whether you get a control panel for routine tasks like changing passwords or adding email accounts, and whether you require a Windows server (which you will if you write or use ASP scripts). Web hosting is very competitive, and you as a customer should take advantage of that to get what you need and what you want for a price that’s reasonable.

With potential SEO companies, stay away from the ones that promise you that your business will rocket to the top of the search engines effortlessly, particularly if they don’t tell you how they plan to get you there. Oh, and when they say “search engines,” make sure they’re talking about the major search engines that people actually use. Think of it this way: if an SEO site is willing to engage in shady practices to artificially boost your search engine rankings, they’ll think nothing of rerouting your domain to a scary malware site if their relationship with you goes bad.

Many of the same principles apply when you choose a PPC company. Make sure their “results” have to do with the major search engines and stay away from cloaking and other deceptive practices. It’s bad enough to throw your money away on a bad PPC consultant, but it’s worse if they do things that get your site banned by search engines.