Many hosting providers may try to sway you with talk of the very high bandwidth levels they allow you and the massive amount of disk space but don't base your decision solely on this factor. The truth is over 90% of sites on Shared Web Hosting never get anywhere near there bandwidth levels, with a large number using less than a tenth their limit.
Although there is much controversy around the whole domain name business one thing is for sure...can you really afford to let someone else capitalize on your company domain name or names. The number of domain names is increasing with most of them linked to geographical locations such as .nl for Holland, .de for Germany and .FR for France.
This is why I prefer Affordable Web Hosting plans. They give you more control of your website. If your site doesn't generate traffic right away you will not have to worry about having your web hosting service cancelled with no warning. You will also be given more tools to help grow your website and make your site more user friendly. Reliability is also something you get with paid hosting. They want to keep you as a customer so they will do more to keep you satisfied. Free web hosting can be crappy on purpose in hopes that you will upgrade to the paid service so you might as well get an affordable web hosting plan that fits your needs.
MySQL, Perl, Frontpage Extension, all of the features that you get with any decent web hosting account. You'll get them here. Like I said, these feature are pretty much the same everywhere, so don't worry about them.
Get into Shared Web Hosting UK 2.0 (aka Social Networking)! Start a blog (you are reading an example), post a video on YouTube, set up a company page on Facebook, post press releases online, write and post articles about your area of expertise...The possibilities are growing all the time and the more work you put in the better the results you will achieve. Don't forget to link everything back to your site!!
The second thing that you should not overlook is customer support. You are of great likely need to get help from their technical staff here and there. One of the main thing to be noted here is that you should make sure your web hosting provider will going to provide you support by email or by phone or by live-chat 24/7.
Cheap web host providers are the ones that likely go bankrupt in the web hosting business. This will result to the shutting down of web sites - and this means, loss of business for your part. Moreover, transferring to another web host entails a lot of inconvenience for yourself as well as for your clients.