Every business decision is a balance between cost and benefit. For the neophyte webmaster, it's easy to forget this principle and blindly follow the well-intentioned advice of industry veterans. Normally, this is a good thing to do. But no advice should be followed blindly, especially when it comes to your business. For all their experience and expertise, none of those gimlet-eyed webmasters have the perspective to say exactly what is right for your particular set of circumstances.

Before you cast aside cheap web hosting as a viable option for your site, consider this: Very few eCommerce sites see much traffic at all in their initial start-up period. Much of the work you'll be doing over the coming months and years will be largely experimental - testing traffic and consumer response from a number of different advertising sources, honing and tweaking your site, and generally figuring out how to build your business.