pmcgratty wrote:

For my own education, when you say quality hosting and environment that support ecommerce, what does that mean? I taught myself how to build a joomla website, but I am still a novice when it comes to hosting and the hosting environment. I don't know enough to know the difference / what questions to ask?

Thanks.

Always avoid hosts who proclaim "Unlimited Bandwidth! Unlimited Storage!"... The "unlimited" does not exist and will cause problems later down the road if 1 user on your shared server absorbs too much bandwidth you could find your site shut down for a day or two or longer.

Always inspect what OS your host is operating on; as a general rule LINUX is always better then WINDOWS when operating a webserver. PHP, Apache, etc.. releases are always released quicker and more stable on LINUX as well as LINUX being significantly more secure.

I'm not too advanced in servers and hosting either, but the basics should always be looked at. Especially the trying to sell you "unlimited" approach.

If you wish to use GoDaddy or 1and1 or any other hosting provider it's simply your choice; if it came down to one of the two it wouldn't be 1and1 due to the extensive amount of issues (especially not allowing anytime access to error logs).

Whatever you decide, best of luck.