How do I purchase hosting for my website?

I read an excellent article on how to purchase hosting for your website http://www.netmagazine.com/opinions/how-buy-hosting and wanted to expand a little on it for anyone new to the biz.

If your site is already built then you need to find out how much space you need.  For example a small five page brochure site could probably fit into a smaller 10 meg hosting plan.  If you have an ecommerce store, or your site built in a content management system you will probably want more storage space, and a database.  Packages usually start around 10 megs and go as far up as a designated remote server.  So the sky is the limit.

Different hosts support different types of programming.  So if you have a form, credit card processing, really any interactive features you probably have programming beyond standard html.  So you need to find out if you are using php, .net, or what type of programming and make sure you purchase hosting that supports it.

Those are the two big things, beyond that check out the article for assistance in purchasing hosting for your site.  I might add my favorite resource is Winhost they offer affordable, robust hosting supporting a wide range of needs.

Ok, now that we got the nitty gritty hosting out of the way what about your site?  For anyone not ready to dive into a site from scratch check out some great templates or a great starting point might be a free template you could customize.