A search on the web will reveal lots of website hosting plans from numerous companies all seeking your business at differing prices, offering slightly different packages and, of course, differing levels of support. To help you find your way through all the options you should consider the following questions.

What Is The Purpose Of Your Site?
The first question to consider is will your site be used for any purpose that might be considered commercial, now or at any time in the future? If you site/blog will not be commercial you may find that, for example, a Squidoo Lens or a blog on Wordpress.com is all you need. These services are free, easy to setup and avoid the need to pay for a domain name and hosting. These options do limit your flexibility but can be a quick and easy way to start.

Is Price A Major Factor?
If you have decided that the free services are not suitable the next step will be to consider the various website hosting plans that are available. There are a number of cheap deals around (or even free if you don't mind advertising appearing) so you need to consider if price is the over-riding factor. Bear in mind that it is actually easy to become a "reseller" of hosting services which means that anyone can set-up in business as website hosting providers. As a result you benefit from the infrastructure provided by the large supplier but you are dependent on the reseller for support. Obviously a small reseller cannot provide the same level of support (24/7) as a large provider and this may present a particular problem if provider and user are not in the same time zone. Despite this a small supplier may still be able to provide a good service but it is a risk. However, if your site is more of a hobby it may be worthwhile trying out one of the cheap services.

Other important aspects of a hosting service you should think about:
* Do you pay monthly, annually etc.?
* How long are you locked in for?
* Is there a money back guarantee?
* How many domains are you allowed?
* Is a domain included?
* Is Bandwidth Limited?
* How much disk space are you allowed?
* Is speed and uptime guaranteed?
* Linux or Microsoft based hosting?
* Is the industry standard Cpanel provided?
* How good is the support?

Each of the above is worthy of further explanation and if you require more information please visit our website at http://website-hosting-plans.com where more detail is provided.

My view
I recommend that any commercial site, or indeed a non-commercial site providing a service, should be hosted with one of the big name companies. They are stable businesses with a reputation to protect and will be able to provide all the services you may need in the future. In particular they will be able to support you if you have problems and in the end this is more important than price.