1. Just starting out, hosting your own website is a very difficult thing to do. Although you SHOULD host your own website, it just isn't practical unless you have a lot of money to spare. Hosting it yourself give you the greatest control over every aspect of it. All big companies host their own websites. Way too expensive for small companies.

2. The first question leads into this question. Yes, you will need to find a hosting company. There are a zillion hosting companies out there. Most are flakey. I told you I wasn't going to pull any punches here. What do I mean by flakey? There are tons of hosting companies that simply buy off-the-shelf PCs and setup a hosting company. They put as many companies (like yours) as they can fit on one computer. If something goes wrong, you have no control or say over how to handle the situation. If a hard disk fails, which they will quite often, since these disks were not made for the stress of a server, your site will be off the air, so to speak for up to several days, until the hosting company can buy another disk and install it and restore everyones's data if your lucky. Speaking of everyone's data, most hosting companies just back up their server software and leave your data completely unbacked up. You must content with a process of backing up your own data.

3. Shared hosting is the least expensive, but the most restrictive. You are at the mercy of all the other companies that the hosting company decides to put on that server along with you. You all share the same disk and the same network connection. That means that the other companies sharing that server with you can eat up the cpu cycles, the disk access or the bandwidth of the network connection, leaving your site seem extremely slow to your users. Also a misconfigured script placed on the server from another company can play serious havoc with your site.

4. CoLo or Colocation facilities are hosting companies that will host YOUR webserver. They will supply the backup power, backups and reboots if needed. It is your server. This is actually a very good way to go, once you get going. Someone is onsite monitoring your server for problems 24 hours per day. It is usually a secure installation and they supply the racks, air conditioning, and fire prevention systems for you. The bad part is that this service ususally starts at around $300 per month, plus the cost of your server. Yes, you CAN find it for less, but remember that you get what you pay for (if your lucky).

There is an alternative to these. The 'free' website. It's a great way to 'start' your web presence. It's FREE! It will let you build a basic website and test it live on the internet. These are usually handled a little better than 'shared' hositng sites, even though they are still shared hosting. These are usually part of a bigger ISP and they have all the infrastructure setup to handle their main servers, so yours gets handled the same way. The downside is that you will have to put with ads popping up and annoying your users. Hey, swallow your pride. There's no place for egos at a time like this. The other downside is that you cannot ususlly host an ecommernce site on a free website. Again, there's no such thing as a free lunch.

5. In a normal shared hosting environment, YOU are responsible for backing up your data and site. Most places now days will include your site in their backup and may even include your data at really good hosting sites. The bad part is that these backups are usually performed once per week. What happens if the disk goes bad 6 days after they did their last backup? You lose. Unless you create a procedure so that YOU back up your data and download it to a remote computer for safe keeping.

6. Finding a reliable hosting company is VERY time consuming. So many of them don't last long enough to build up a reputation. The ones that DO have a good reputation are usually so far behind in offering the disk space and bandwidth that you need to run a successful business that it makes them fall off your list very quickly. So, now you're stuck with mostly new hosting companies that CAN supply you with the disk space and bandwidth you need for a business website. The best way to 'try' and find a good one is by spending a lot of time on different forums, reading hundreds of posts from different people, and sending out emails to the support staff, if you can, in order to see how they respond. After spending all that time narrowing it down to 3, you will find this last test may turn into a disaster. So many times I have send emails to hosting company support staff and have either not recieved a reply or the reply was 3 days later. Can you imagine having a problem on your site and having tech support respond 3 days later, or not at all? It will take you longer than a week of solid work to narrow it down to one hosting company. And, you still won't feel comfortable with your choice.

7. This step is kinda fun. You will have to go to a site where you can check different names for your website. You will find that most, if not all of the first 100 names that you serch for are already taken. You see, back in 2000 and 2001, a lot of companies were formed just to buy up domain names and hold until someday someone like yourself would offer them a lot of money for that particular domain name. Anyway, you will want to seriously consider trying to obtain only a dot com extension, even though you can find the domain name you want in a .biz or .xyz or .yah. Don't do it. If someone is searching for your website and someone already has the same domain name with a .com extension (that is why you chose a .biz extension), the search engine will take them to the other site first. Very hard for people to find you that way. You'll need to register the name to you or your company and pay the yearly registration fee. This can be anywhere from free to $15 per year depending on who you register it with.

8. Before you look for a hosting company, you will need to know how much disk space and bandwidth you will need. There' s enought sites out there that can help you with that, that I'm not going to cover it here.

9. Ditto.

10. There is no choice here. Hosting on a linux platform will give you more features, be more flexible and is much more reliable than a windows platform. There is on caveat here. The hostiing company must be proficient with Linux servers or they won't be any better than a windows server. So, if your hosting company has been pushing windows platforms for hosting, and has recently added Linux servers, you might want to pass on them as it does take some time to come up to speed on a different platform.