Yes indeed, who would have thought it, but your web hosting provider could indirectly be costing you the chance of good placements in the major search engine Google.
Most companies offer a few different types of Shared Web Hosting services. The only difference usually being how much disk space you want or how much transfer allowance you need.
Windows or Linux: Do you know if your site needs to run on a MS Windows server with FrontPage extensions or does it need PERL, PHP or MySQL? These things you will need to find out if you intent to run a successful small business Shared Web Hosting UK site.
Popularity does not guarantee you a good service. Many popular host start of small and offering a good service but once their popularity grows they start to become complacent and their product suffers. It may not always be the case but it happens more than you'd believe. Also becoming popular nowadays can simply be a case of having the largest advertising budget.
Which all brings me back to what is Affordable Web Hosting? I have my pages hosted at GVO and I pay a higher monthly cost than if I used certain other cheaper hosts.
(2). Get A Linux Plan - A Linux plan is more reliable and use up less resources than windows. A word of caution here though, unlike windows that is not case sensitive linux is, so make sure that you use all lower case letters in your file names to avoid any recognition problems.
If you're not comfortable asking a company a whole bunch of questions then just find a friend who has a few websites online and ask them which host they use - like I said a recommendation from a trusted friend is worth its weight in gold when it comes to shared web hosting.