Best Web Hosting - Web Hosting Hub
It's great to have a website; it allows you to reach hundreds of thousands of people worldwide. After you have come up with a name that you feel comfortable with and registered it with a good domain name registrar, you will need a web hosting package.
This is a computer/ server that you upload your website files to so that they are always available online. You can host your own website, but this is technical and probably not necessary.
You will need to look for a balance between price, reliability and capability. The latter is usually worth thinking about in handicaps.
What you decide on will be unique to your needs. Chatroulette.com needed a lot of bandwidth (capacity for information sharing) because streaming video requires a lot of data to go back and forth for example. Web hosting for photography sites uses quite a bit, especially with Flash, but not as much as video.
You should get at least 250mb and probably more. Resource-heavy websites with lots of photos and videos to download will use up your bandwidth quickly and are slow for your users. Many web hosting companies handicap the amount of data your site can use and it is worth double-checking these limits.
When you've made your site, you'll want to promote it. A lot of web hosting businesses use online advertising credits for Google's Adwords and Facebook's own ad system as lures. Be lured; these are useful things to have. Sign up to Google's free Analytics service too to see how your site is doing.
Many web hosts offer access to 'scripts' that allow the installation of tools to help build a website. The content management systems Drupal and Joomla are good, and the blogging software Wordpress is quite easy to use.
I spent aeons looking for the right web hosting provider for my needs, and eventually settled on Web Hosting Hub. They've got such a lot of options, most of which I don't use or even need, but the barebones of their basic hosting package is cheap, reliable and provides several attractive benefits.
I used to use iPage, but they're deeply engaged in the American selling practices, which do get a little frustrating. I cancelled when they were set to automatically renew my annual hosting at double what I had originally paid ($35 for 12 months I think). Irritatingly, I asked if they would be able or were planning to discount at all, but was told no; a week after I had purchased my new hosting, they offered an enormous discount.
Web Hosting Hub are smaller, and so far seem to be doing okay. Their Live Help is particularly useful.
I can be reached at ben@benevansphotography.com, or here 
on Twitter.
