To get started with your own website or blog, whether you are using your own dedicated and registered domain name or a 3rd party domain, you need to select the best hosting package to suit your requirements.

First decision to make is what type of package do you want, there are 3 main options and a few options that fall into a little bit of a grey area. But for this article we will stick to the main options:

• Free Hosting

• Shared Web Hosting

• Dedicated Web Hosting

Free Web Hosting

Not always a bad choice, if you are blogging for fun or putting websites together as a hobby or for a charitable cause where keeping costs very low are important then perhaps this is a choice that may work for you. The down sides of free web hosting are that, you will probably have to live with the host's adverts on your site, you will be sharing with loads of other people and fighting for limited resources, you could experience lots of down time and the technical support is liable to be non-existent, the hosts domain name will also form part of your domain name. But hey if none of this matters to you then this could be the choice for you.

Shared Web Hosting

This is the cheaper of two options to use your own dedicated domain name and to have your own email address to your domain name e.g. 'myname@urdomain.com'.

Shared web hosting means exactly that however, you will not have your own dedicated server you will be sharing a server with other domains, hence the reason this option is referred to as being slightly cheaper. All in all though this is a good choice for many people, it is very affordable with options for different hosting packages ranging from single domain to reseller hosting. Pick the right host and you will have trouble free, well supported hosting at your disposal.

Dedicated Web Hosting

This is the option that you will be paying the most for, but to be honest unless you are a multimedia site, with a heavy data driven requirement or perhaps you are big into e-commerce then you will not need this facility. As the name suggests this option means you have your own dedicated server and do not share a server with other domains, but you will pay for this privilege.