Selection of a hosting company should be high on your list of priorities and should not be selected purely on cost or purely determined by your web designer or developer.
As an individual or company you should ensure that both the domain names (eg. www.mysite.co.uk) and the contract with the hosting company are with yourselves and not your web designer. To keep your administration simple it is advantageous to use the one hosting company or provider to register your domain and host your website and email. There is no requirement to do this as if you want you can use separate providers for each. For your own ease of administration using one provider is beneficial; after all if you want the hassle then there is nothing to stop you from putting your own web server on the internet.
Besides the hardware, backup and support of a hosting company you need to consider the needs of your website or application, not only for today but for how it will grow. Although you may just want a simple site for now, you may intend to expand your site to host an on-line shop or a forum and as such you may need secure socket layers and databases to be included as you scale up your applications.
There are a lot of choices that you need to consider:
- How many domain or sub domain names do you want?
- How many email accounts do you need?
- How much traffic do you expect?
- Do you need a database, ssl or specific server sided languages?
- What is the growth expected to be?
... and the list goes on.
Take in to consideration the total cost of your hosting, such as security certificates, setup costs and any add on administration costs.