After deciding on the purpose of your site, researched keywords and marketing strategy, the next step is to find a suitable web host to host your site. Just as tenants rent an apartment, room or a house, you will need a space on the internet where your files would be stored. It is very important to choose your web host wisely as ideally you would not want to move from one web host to the other.

A lot of hosting packages are available on the web, and it can be a very daunting task deciding on which one to choose. As most first time web enthusiasts may not have an idea of what to look for, I hope to give you a head start to finding the host that is suitable for you and based on my experience and knowledge recommend hosts that I have either tried and tested or host that have good reports.

Some hosting sites like Moon fruit provide custom templates for you to design your site. Most of its features are drag and drop and anyone that can use the mouse can put a website together in no time. In fact, I hosted my first site with moon fruit, and at that time I was happy with what I was getting. But as time went on I realised that there were several limitations. You only have control over the the content of the site, which has its own limitation too. You have limited access to the meta tags, and you have to means of optimising your site for search engine ranking. I would recommend Moon Fruit for non-web programmers delving into web design for fun without any commercial motive. This type of hosting is definitely not suitable for a commercial site of anyone serious about making money on the web.

For starters with a commercial motive, you would need a host that grants you full control of the site as well as databases, scripts, file management, emails, Ftp, etc. Most of these hosting sites come packaged with a lot of other programs which come handy. Some of the things you need to look out for are:

• Bandwidth - also referred to as transfer.
  It controls the number of pages requested by each visitor. The higher the bandwidth, the more visitors you can have on your site. If your site would be displaying a lot of graphics, the bandwidth should be your major concern.
• Web Space
  In general, the size of the space being offered by most hosting sites are never fully use up. So don't be carried away with adverts offering extremely large web space, you may not need all of it.
• Customer Service
  On the onset, this may not be obvious to you, but you ideally should sign up with a host with good customer service. One that replies to your queries promptly. I would suggest that before you sign up, you request some information from the host and see how long it takes them to respond. It would be a fair indication of how they would respond to you when you have difficulties.

• Host Monster
  I currently use Host Monster to host my site and they are very professional, efficient in dealing with queries and relatively cheap. They have a pleasing and easy to use control panel where you can administer you web site. Unlimited amount of sub domains and email addresses possible. Free shopping cart and site builder also available.

• Affordable Multimedia
  They offer a free web hosting plan which is suitable for small companies and personal larges not having a great deal of pictures. A full featured hosting plan that contains no ads, banners, pop-up windows or advertisements of any kind.

• Blue Host
  From the business owner to the individual who desires full functionality on a small budget, Blue host provides the complete web hosting solution.

I will keep updating this list so check back from time to time as we embark on this journey to our wealthy place, the place of more than enough and an early retirement.

About the Author

Professional web designer more detaitls at http://www.rhemastudio.com/webdesign.php