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!