It is hard to say what the most important aspect is of an online prescence. However, it is safe to say that without the facilities of a web hosting provider you will have no one to push your website out to the World Wide Web. Web hosting providers serve their customers by providing space on their servers for all manner of files. These include : static pages, databases, streaming video, email, images, audio files, etc.

The two main types of hosting providers are paid hosting providers and free hosting providers. Typically, the free hosting providers make their revenue by splashing advertisiments all across your pages. You don't pay for the space, but your image may be compromised by these advertisments or the low amount of resources given to you. If you are looking for a stable platform and a professional image it is usually best to go with a paid service.

Within the realm of paid hosting providers you can go several avenues as well. The most common is shared hosting. Shared hosting is where several different sites are allocated across one server. As long as the hosting company is diligent about caring for their servers, this is usually not a problem. You may want to ask the hosting company how many accounts they have on the server, what is the percentage of resources allocated to websites, or something similar. You don't want to get on a server that is having 90 percent of its resources taken up by websites.

If you plan on hosting many sites, you may consider going with a dedicated server or colocation. A dedicated server is where you lease a server from a company in their datacenter. Usually you are responsible for setting up your sites, security, and other administrative tasks on the server. However, for more money, you can look for managed services where they will take care of most of the administrative functions like security, patching, maintenance, etc.

Colocation is where you place your own server in a company's data center. You are merely paying for their connection to the Internet and physical storage space. Usually you will preconfigure your server and place it in the cabinet yourself.