Shared Web Hosting service - Just as the heading states, you will be sharing the server with many other websites, could be a few hundred, and could be thousands. The good news is with this the services that are offered aren't limited very much.
Although there is much controversy around the whole domain name business one thing is for sure...can you really afford to let someone else capitalize on your company domain name or names. The number of domain names is increasing with most of them linked to geographical locations such as .nl for Holland, .de for Germany and .FR for France.
There are plenty of affordable hosting providers that will make you pay for setup fees. So make sure you don't get blinded by a very cheap offer. Chances are, they will also let you incur hidden charges like setup fees. A few years back, it was hard to get an affordable plan with unlimited bandwidth and space. But today, there are plenty of Affordable Web Hosting plans that can offer you unlimited space and bandwidth. Ask your potential hosting providers and learn more about these features.
It does not matter how much money you save from an affordable website hosting it will never save how much money you will lose if your website collide due to less performing servers. It is consistently best when hosting company offers 99.95% up time guarantee. less performing servers can make a big problem to load your website very slowly. If your website load slowly then you will never get large number of visitors. In that case you will loose possible customer of your business just because you trying to save few money on hosting plan. It is not suitable for your business.
Web Host Country - Depending on your market, this could be the most important consideration, and often the most overlooked. The physical location of your host servers can have an impact on your business if your target market is in your own country. Google UK, for example offer the option of either a UK only or a world-wide search. If you want to feature in the UK only searches it is far better to have your website hosted by a company who has its actual servers in the UK. Be aware that some Shared Web Hosting UK hosting companies who appear to be UK based companies actually have their servers located in other countries. Always ask!
Bandwidth (or data transfer as it is also known) relates to how many times your website is visited. Each file your page is constructed of all adds to the data transfer. If you have a page that is 2kb, with two pictures each of 199kb and you have a data transfer allowance of 1GB per month then you could have around 2600 visitors each month. That's about 87 visitors per day. The likelihood is you will have more than one page, and will want more than two pictures on some - if not all - pages. If you exceed your bandwidth then your provider will charge you a lot more for the excess, or will disable your website entirely. So the more bandwidth that a web host offers the better.
Now this is just a brief overview of the basics to get started and i appreciate that there are other steps and tips to also consider that i used when i started building my own website. Hopefully this will help you to take that first step.