There are mainly two types of web hosting providers, shared and dedicated web hosting and the latter is much more expensive. If you are a new comer to the website and internet field, I suggest to start with a shared web hosting provider.
If you are lucky you will find a company that offers free installations and assistance with pre-installable forums, cms or traffic statistics and some even give you a free domain. The web hosts can provide such cheap prices without compromising in service quality by offering what is called Shared Web Hosting UK.
To add insult to injury they will then drag their heals in moving your server, so you could end up with your Shared Web Hosting UK or blog being offline for a good 48 hours. If you have a good site that is making money and has regular visitors this is a real burden and can put people off from moving.
Is the website you are hosting a private one? Perhaps, it is a family portal that is meant only for your family members, relatives and friends. Or, are they websites that you will promote to the general public to get as much visitors as possible? In that case, your traffic volume will be quite high each month.
Affordable Web Hosting is what everyone wants but you do not want to give up all the things you had with your old host. Some may offer more bandwidth and space to grow your website but how much do you really need. Before you think about moving to a new web hosting you must first find out how much space you are currently using. Some hosting sites can offer you more than you need in order to get you to sign up. Why pay more for something you will never use. How likely will you build a website that is 10,000GB in size. That is huge! Some of the most popular websites out there is not that big so why pay for it. Plus, you want to make sure that the uptime is 99.9% of the time. If not, it can cost you visitors if your pages are not live all the time.
(2). Get A Linux Plan - A Linux plan is more reliable and use up less resources than windows. A word of caution here though, unlike windows that is not case sensitive linux is, so make sure that you use all lower case letters in your file names to avoid any recognition problems.
If you're not comfortable asking a company a whole bunch of questions then just find a friend who has a few websites online and ask them which host they use - like I said a recommendation from a trusted friend is worth its weight in gold when it comes to shared web hosting.