Congratulations! Now that you've decided on and registered a domain name, you need to choose a service to host your web pages. The web host provides you with space for your web pages, tools to create the web pages, and support if you run into problems.

Here are some factors you will want to consider in choosing a web host:

Tools: Do they provide beginner friendly web design tools, or do you need to provide your own web design tools or service. If they do provide tools, are they flexible enough to meet your needs? Do they assume knowledge of HTML?

Support: Are they available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week? Are they available by phone, or only by email?

Commitment: How long is the subscription you are signing up for - can you cancel at any time?

Storage: How much space do you receive for your site?

Email: Does the web hosting include email (POP3) accounts, or are those seperate

Reliability: Do they make any guarantees about "uptime" - the percentage of time per month your site will be available to customers?

Most people will choose standard web hosting, but if you plan to have a lot of traffic or do not want to share a server, you can choose "dedicated web hosting" which gives you your own dedicated server machine that the Web Hosting company manages for you.