Cost - You want the price to be fair. Make sure that you are not being overcharged for your account. Don't make the mistake of jumping at the first company that you find online. Search the internet and see what comes up when you search the company name. Check current customer reviews of web hosting services. Look for the ways that you can pay and the frequency of payments. Are you going to be charged yearly, quarterly, or monthly. Your choice of payment frequency might offer some savings. If you pay for hosting in advance you might get a discount. Some companies have weird payment policies that require you to load money into an account and then the web host will deduct your fees from the stored balance. Make sure you understand the terms before signing up.
If your company has a lot of traffic, you are going to want to make sure that you have plenty of bandwidth. If you run A2 Hosting out your site will be unavailable. Make sure that the company you choose is able to offer plenty of bandwidth for your site. You should be able to have several GBs of bandwidth without it drastically increasing the cost.
As a beginner, it would be a better idea to start with reseller hosting first. It gives you some initial money; you get an initial customer base going, without having to handle the task of managing servers. If you buy a server, you will need a place to keep them, either in your own home, or if you have an office building, keep it there. You need to take good care of your servers, and you need to constantly keep updating them with security patches.
Besides augmenting your one-time product sales, you will make money on residual income from your web hosting package. People who make use of your disk space and bandwidth will be paying you monthly or annually for as long as their website is up. You will be making sure earnings from one hosted client monthly.
It does not really matter if you are very well-versed and familiar with the technicalities of setting up a website. The important thing is that when you choose a web hosting service provider, they provide you the needed technical and customer service support you expect. This is because it is the service provider's responsibility to ensure that your site is always up and that you do not experience technical glitches. Look for a provider who can be easily be contacted when problems arise so that your website can always be accessible to your market. You can determine if the customer service of a provider is good if you read a lot of positive client or customer testimonials.
A good firewall is a must. Your servers are the core of your business. Any problems in your servers and your customers may start leaving you. Your servers have to be always running high and up. You should try to get hold of a fixed IP address that doesn't change with every use. You should also read more try to get multiple internet connections to get high uptime. You have to choose your control panel, your operating system and your programming language as well. Proper research is needed in this aspect. Lastly, you have to set your prices well, not to high or too low. High prices will make you lose customers; low prices may make people think quality of service is bad. Charge your customers well so that you can get the best out of your web hosting services.