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.
One feature I like about site5 hosting is the multisite accounts. It is basically a full featured control panel for each domain. Unlike other Shared Web Hosting UK companies which uses domain pointers, a multisite accounts exists on its own with its own subdomains, domain pointer, ftp, mysql etc. This help me to organize my websites better especially if you have a lot of domains. You can set the diskspace and bandwidth from the main pool of your web hosting account.
Most domain name registration services do not include full email. If you want email Shared Web Hosting UK services with your domain name an additional charge is likely. In most cases you will only get email forwarding. Even for straight forward POP3 email, expect only 1 or 2 email accounts as standard.
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.
When this is the case, maintenance costs are also going to be an issue. Using a shared server, a lot of different places will share the same server so maintenance costs are going to be shared as well. This can greatly reduce the cost by a lot because every one of the companies that have a space on there will be paying a certain percentage of it based on the amount of disk space that they are using.
I can't stress this enough, with an established online business your most precious asset is your domain name. Don't risk your business for the sake of saving a few dollars!