Web surfers can only look at other people's sites so long before they decide they've got to have one of their own. If you've decided it's time to establish a serious, permanent presence on the Web (something more than a page on AOL or Prodigy), you'll have to start comparison shopping among Web hosting services.

How do you find a provider? A search in Yahoo or Lycos for "Web hosting" or "Internet hosting" returns many sites. Our goal was to find a company that seemed professional enough to have been around for a few years but still not cost multiple thousands of dollars a month. The sites we examined in detail are shown in the accompanying Netscape-enhanced table.

Some providers have fairly informative home pages. HomeCom and Digex have fairly good Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) pages that will answer a lot of a client's questions. Ironically, Digex's FAQ lists everything but prices; for that, send email. Some sites list no phone number or address -- and that somehow doesn't inspire confidence.

The first question to ask is how they will support you. Many providers say that they are "available" around the clock, but that means different things to different people. To me, it means I can call at 2 a.m. and get a live human on the phone. None of the services we contacted had such a service, though many claimed round-the-clock availability. Some offer automated phone systems that take a message and page an operator, others ask you to send email (assuming your problem isn't with basic mail connectivity), and others just aren't around during off-hours.

Second, what is the sharing arrangement? Most providers will put several Web sites on a single server. Digex and DeltaNet were the only ones we found that offered your own server. Digex's prices vary for a Sun 360 or a Sparc 20. For most sites, the 360 is more than adequate to handle the load. Predicting what kind of load you'll experience isn't easy. Consider how many users visit your site each day and how graphics-rich your pages are. A good rule of thumb is that the Sun 360 should be adequate for a site visited by several hundred users per day, while the Sparc 20 should service several tens of thousands of users per day.

You'll also want to consider the telecommunications line. A T1 connection (1.5 Mbps) may seem like enough bandwidth, but if that T1 is shared by a thousand people all downloading images and video, it can quickly fill up. Getting specific information on this will be difficult, but you should ask how many clients share the line.

Third, read the fine print on your contract concerning your right to cancel and extra or hidden charges. Some providers, such as Digex, charge $50 a month extra for each service after http. For example if you want your Web site to be an ftp server, a gopher server, and mail server, you'll pay an extra $150 each month. Others include these services in their pricing plan. Also ask how much disk storage you're allowed and whether the provider will charge you on the amount of data transferred to and from your server. Will you pay extra for your own domain name, which allows people to find your site at www.yourcompany.com?

Ask each provider to fax or email you a standard contract so you can examine what you are getting carefully. After all this, you should be able to calculate the overall costs: both for the initial setup and recurring monthly charges. HomeCom takes the guesswork out of the process with a quote form you fill out over your browser and which returns a price.

Finally, you'll need an HTML designer, unless you want to learn this on the job. Many providers offer their own or will recommend freelancers. Before hiring anyone, check their work on the Web and call a few of their references to determine their level of professionalism. With a designer (as with the Web host), doing your homework before you sign may save you money and headaches in the future.

Did we leave you hanging?