I've been checking out various web hosts for an online store, and what I'm not aware of is, how much bandwidth, diskspace, etc,...GB or MB is more than sufficient to run an online store with a sophisticated shopping cart, one that handles numerous orders per day, and provides email notification automatically to my wholesalers, virtually hands off. My concern is this, If I were to spend alot of time away from my pc, and orders accumulate at random, that they will still all be handled until my return, and so I have enough space and so forth to handle more incoming orders until the previous have been each processed, that I can just download those to disk for records and such to free space.

--- below is a great post I wrote a while back for my own website.

Learn how to tell the difference between a good and bad webhosting company.

This guide is for every beginner webmaster such as myself. Your adventure through the internet is going to be filled with dangerous traps and every corner. Please read this guide so that you don't make the same mistakes I made.

As a new webhoster, I'm sure you've already heard about the major companies. The most popular webhosting companies nowadays are GoDaddy.com, 1and1.com, Hostgator, Dreamhost, and more. Then we also have the ISP-based webhosting companies like Earthlink, AOL, and Yahoo.

Is there's really a difference between all these webhosting companies?