The issue of picking a hosting company is probably the second most important decision you'll make after the selection of your designer. This article will explore the hosting issue and discuss some of what you need to know in order to make a reasoned decision about hosting your website.
Lets start at the most basic point.
A host, put simply, is a company that leases you space on their servers for your website. There are several kinds of host accounts available to choose from, but the most common host account is what they call a virtual host. The upside of this is that virtual hosting is cheap, you can get a reasonable feature set from a host for a low cost. The downside is, depending on the responsiveness of the hosting company and their resources, you are sharing one computer with many other people, all you need is ONE account on that host to become really popular and suddenly all of the accounts on that server will suffer the effects of that popularity. The hosting company must continually monitor the traffic and they make sure that no one domain gets more than their fair share of the processor.