Most people choose a web host based on price, technology and / or recommendation of their Web agency. These are all important factors, but most people overlook the destructive impact choosing the wrong host can have on your interactive marketing initiatives.

How to choose a hosting company? One of the key factors in choosing a host is determining which tools and services they support and donâ € ™ t support. What statistics or web analytics packages does your host offer? You donâ € ™ t want to pay a third premium for your web analytics tool, because your host only provides œfree-WAREÂ â € €? statistics. Many hosts have strategic relationships with some of the best Web analytics vendors in an effort to provide their customers with powerful site measurement tools bundled into the cost of their hosting packages.

You are choosing your host because it is also a site that lets you build? If so, can a big advantage for companies without web development resources, but buyers should beware that this will likely impact your Search Marketing initiative. Most WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) site building applications make optimizing your site for search engines is very difficult at best, with most actually hurting your chances of achieving necessary search engine rankings. These tools in many cases actually prevent Search Engine Optimization (SEO) best practices incorporated into your website.

Does your host provide or offer eCommerce packages? If so, is that the software you will use to sell your products online? If not, the host will make sure your e-commerce solution of choice to support.Many e-commerce solutions require specialized installations which your host may or may not support even a dedicated hosting environment.

While website tools and services are important, consistent and reliable email delivery is even more important for many. How good is your host fight spammers? Do they have controls in place to block spammers using their servers as launch pads for their spam campaigns? If they dont get this right, your host may be put through one or more backbone providers or ISPs.

There are countless cases where email generated from IP ranges or even entire hosting companies has gotten blocked, penalizing non-spam companies. To emphasize the importance of this let me explain further. Emails from innocent, non-spam companies can be blocked without knowing where the companyâ € ™ s Web host on a black list due to a lack of protection of the e-mail servers. The main recommendation here is to do your homework by going to sites like http://www.spamhaus.org http://www.dnsstuff.com or to see if your host is currently blacklisted.

Another obvious issue is server uptime. While for a few minutes here and there is unpleasant and causes missed revenue opportunities, the real impact is felt as significant downtime.Significant downtime – be set for days, not hours – can lead to significant revenue loss, tarnish your organizationâ € ™ s brand and cause temporary loss of your search engine rankings. While most hosts offer 99.9% uptime, many have a history of data center, router and / or backbone issues that have affected their clients for extended periods. This is not something they will probably be fairly familiar, but some good search engine research will most hostsâ € ™ past to uncover the plethora of blogs, consumer sites and hosting review directories.

In addition to server uptime, server performance is to consider. As we all know arena webvisitors € ™ t going to wait for pages to download. Many hosts pack their shared servers with too many websites. This not only causes downtime, but can cause poor server performance. Imagine a scenario where youâ € ™ re paying significant money for a good performing Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns. If your pages are prone to load slowly given your hosta € ™ s server performance, you are likely to pay for clicks that donâ € ™ t even your landing page page. This has implications not only for your eMarketing campaigns, but will affect all your web visitors and ultimately affects your Branda € ™ s value in the market.

In short, choosing a hosting company is more complicated than just comparing the traditional features such as disk space, bandwidth and price. This decision can have a significant impact on your eMarketing initiatives. Do your homework and make sure your host supplements your online marketing initiatives versus creating barriers that work against them.