In today’s Internet, security is the top most important aspect of selecting a hosting plan. The Internet is a wild place. Hacking is on the rise and we hear horror stories of how credit card numbers and identities were stolen. If a server is not secure enough, badware viruses are installed in website coding and downloaded on any visitors’ computers.

Of course, most Internet users have a good virus protection on their computers (or at least I hope they do), but still, nobody wants their site to compromise the security of their visitors.

Fortunately, Google uses automatic algorithms and user feedback to compile lists of sites that may be dangerous (read: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=45432).

This will protect visitors to enter a site with a badware or malware. However, if it happens to your own site, it is bad news for your business. Google will warn anyone who wants to visit the infected site. It can take days to bring it back to a normal listing (after the badware or malware is removed from the website).

In addition to security, it is important you discuss with your website design firm the type of server configuration that you will need before purchasing any hosting plan. For example, depending whether the site will be built using PHP or asp.NET or any other languages, the hosting plan will need to be bought accordingly.

There are various server options: dedicated (you own the entire server), virtual (you own a partition of a server) and shared severs (you share a server with others). The dedicated server gives you the most flexibility and options but the cost is much different from a shared servers.