When choosing a business web host there are a few more factors to consider than when just buying a family or personal web space, if your site is to do anything other than purely market your business or if you are setting up an E-Business your hosting plan will need to have some specific features.

Statistics, tell you who is visiting your site, when they are doing it and which pages they are looking at, it will also tell you which page they land on first, all of which help you to market you site more efficiently most even record which browser visitors to your site are using which can be invaluable information for targeting software for example.

Email, is a basic requirement of every web hosting package, but a business site will need more accounts and the ability to manage mailing lists, for communicating with your subscribers an incredibly valuable marketing tool. Another Email utility is that of an autoresponder, which sends out acknowledgments to Email inquires and also, cleverly saves the contact information automatically to your contact database.

SSL, or Secure Socket Layer security is a must have for anyone intending to take payments over the internet, it is a way of encrypting transfers that makes paying on line safer and more attractive for your customers.

SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation is the process of getting your website indexed and then ranked by the top search engines, such as Google, Yahoo! and MSN, for the uninitiated this can be a very daunting and time consuming process and many good web hosts provide a Free rudimentary SEO service, in any event nearly all will submit your site to all of the top search engines for indexing. An additional incentive being offered although not really SEO , is the inclusion of Free Google Adwords or similar coupons which help to get you started with one of the many pay per click ad campaign providers.

As you are no doubt aware it can take months of careful marketing for your website to start to rank in the search engines, this is all time when your site it not making you any money, so you may be loath to shell out for a top of the range business plan for this period. Fear not help is at hand in the form of upgradeable packages or packages that enable you to bolt on extras, these plans enable your site to grow as required, and allow you to had more space, ecommerce options and addition domains as necessary.