Just a brief note - HostMe123 offers free website hosting. As with most free web hosts, they do put advertising on your site BUT with a difference. They promise not to put any flashing adverts up and that all adverts they show are family-friendly. There's even a demo so you can see the sort of ads that will be shown. Why not have a look at see what you think?

Before purchasing web hosting, you'll need to know a few things:

1. What platform do you need?
Hosting comes in two flavours - Windows and Linux. If you want a straightforward html site or want to use a bit of JavaScript, then the hosting platform doesn't matter. If you want to use PHP scripts and / or a MySQL database you'll need Linux-based hosting or if you want to use ASP scripts, you'll need Windows-based hosting. If you are using a web designer and are unsure, ask them!

2. How many websites do you want to host?
Most hosting packages come with the ability just to host one site, but more and more packages are now offering multiple website hosting in one package. If you want to host three or more sites, or want the potential to do this, multiple website hosting is the most economical way to go.

3. Where are you geographically?
It may not be the most important consideration, but if you host your website in the US and want to appear in the UK rankings, you may not appear as high as if you hosted your website in the UK. Google ranks according to domain extension e.g. a .CO.UK site will appear higher in the UK than the US rankings whereas Yahoo! ranks according to where the website is hosted from.

4. Do your scripts need cPanel or databases?
Again, check with your web designer or the script developer if you are unsure.

5. What disk space will you need?
You need a certain amount of disk space on a web host to upload your web pages and images, etc. and a storage area for them. The average personal website uses less than about 5 MB of space, even with large images, so most hosts offer 'disk space overkill'. If you are going to host lots of images though, do a quick calculation to make sure the space will meet your needs now and in the future.

6. What bandwidth will you need?
Bandwidth or data transfer is the quantity of data that is communicated and/or received by a website in a specified time unit. Most hosts offer a monthly amount of bandwidth. Again, add up the size of each of your webpages, all the images, CSS files, scripts etc...(these tend to be shown in KB - divide by 1024 for MB and divide this by 1024 for GB) and multiply it by the estimated number of visitors to find out your estimated bandwidth.

There are hundreds of places to buy website hosting from, so where do you start?

For UK hosting, I recommend 1&1 - it's not the cheapest, but is exceedingly reliable. As with buying a domain name, their checkout process is very straightforward and easy to use. They are not cPanel based - instead use an in-house package but it is very easy to use.

For US-based hosting, GoDaddy are one of my favourites - they are reliable and if you can ignore the upselling when buying your package, are a good price. Even better, if you buy a hosting package, you can add a domain registration for just $1.99 which makes for a very well priced website package.

Finally, if you want to host multiple websites in a cPanel environment (for linux packages), HostGator is well priced and reliable.

If you've bought a domain name and hosting, the next thing to do is to make them 'talk' to each other. This is a process whereby you edit domain name servers.