Let's cut right to the bottom line. If you have never had a website before, 99.9% of you will only need a shared hosting plan.

At the very least, check into these items when choosing a shared hosting plan:

Essential web hosting features will depend heavily on the type of hosting you need. A VPS will have very different specs than a bare metal cloud server. That said, some features do cut across most types of web hosting.

Hosts on our list stand out in these features. For example, Mochahost's determined support team, TMDHosting's security features and DreamHost's strong uptime guarantee.

Sometimes, cheap really is cheap, and you have to pay a little more for quality. Value is that fine point balancing cost, product features and product quality. Providers on our list offer reasonable values, but many require paying for one to four years upfront to realize that balance.

Not every business can afford large chunk payments and must look at the best value for monthly payment plans.

For overall value, Hostwinds, TMDHosting and Namecheap pull together strong combinations of features compared to costs when looking at monthly billing plans.

Even if you have a great tech team, there are times you need customer support. Billing errors occur, issues with the control panel pop up or there's a tech issue with the physical servers. Being able to reach someone quickly at your web host can mean the difference between no downtime and thousands of dollars in lost sales.

For quick customer service response times, look at hosts such as Mochahost and IONOS.

Even if you love your web host's services, there may come a time when you need to move your website. Companies are sold, terms change or you might outgrow the hosting offerings. Portability means your website files are yours and can be migrated to a new host.

For the best portability, look for cPanel plans from hosts such as Mochahost, TMDHosting and Namecheap.

Regardless of your business type, most of us are planning for some amount of company growth. As companies grow and website demands grow, especially e-commerce businesses, you'll need more bandwidth and eventually to move from shared hosting to something like VPS where you can increase or decrease computing power on the fly.

For scalability with stronger hosting types, consider hosts such as IONOS, DreamHost and Hostwinds.