If you consider yourself a small business, to me this usually means you understand you need need to spend your cash on good web hosting but too many of the prices are just too high. How can you spot a good deal from a bad deal. What you are looking for is affordable web site hosting that is still a high quality.

How do you decide between Windows, Linux, Shared, Dedicated, Managed, Co-location to name the more common keywords. How you identify the really poor quality services.

As you know from this website I have a strong focus on search engine services and optimisation. So before you sign up to the first cheap package let me explain the impact for search engines.

For example - If you run a UK business and you target market is the UK audience - You need to make sure you have a .uk domain name or your web hosting space must be on a UK server.

You may not know this but most of the 'cheap' web hosts have their servers located in the US. Buying hosting space on a US server in this situation will really mess up your search engine visibility.

Just to repeat. You need a website domain name or your web hosting space located in the country you are targetting.

So how do you check this? Search Google for terms such as 'IP to location' and you will find some great tools to help you.

The next important factor to consider is a dedicated IP. Each computer connected to the Internet or any network has an IP address. Search engines use this IP address to help identify what country the web server is in. With shared hosting many many websites can be sharing the same IP address. If a bad website is sharing the same IP address as you, you may get penalised and a dedicated IP address gives you protection from this as well as appearing more professional.

Dedicated IP's are only available from some web hosts but not all and in my mind a good indicator of a good web host.

Next, backups! We all forget them but a good web host will not be sqeezed for space and will understand the need for regular backups. If you find a web host that performs daily full backups, ideally stored offsite this is really great news.

Finally, you need redundant hardware. This means there is failover on hardware, such as RAID hard drives, secondary DNS servers and multiple lines out the the Internet backbone.

Get a webserver in your target country - Get a dedicated IP address - Insist on daily backups and redundant hardware.

If you find your web host can offer you all this at an affordable price you will be very fortunate.