One of the things that is most crucial, at least that I have found is picking a good host for your website. You want a host you can stay with for a good long time that provides a high level of support for you and your website. This is extremely important if you have a popular website, because if you have a bad host and get slammed by traffic from Digg, a viral video, etc what are you going to have to show for it? There is some help in picking a good web host. eHardware Guide has a guide for hosting websites that does a great job at helping you pick the great web host. All the hosts they feature have cPanel control panel, the ultimate control panel for hosting, I would not use anything but cPanel because I love it so much. Also, all the hosts they feature have the ubiquitous MySQL support.
You can search eHardware Guide for thousands of cities in the United States. They feature a ton of cities in each state and they all have great web hosts that provide service in them. So remember, if you need to find a web host that can support you and your website for a very long time, I would check out eHardware Guide for more information. Good luck in your hosting plans and don’t forget to email me your success stories about web hosting!