Paying for Web Hosting means making payment to someone to use the space on their server and to send your web pages to your customers. Nowadays, web hosting has become much cheaper than what it was a few years ago.

Domains and Hosting Together
A number of companies now offer to host your site when you buy a domain from them. However, this is not a good idea as it is quite costly and provide less features.

Where to Start?
The answer to this question depends up on a number of factors such as the number of expected visitors, amount of graphics, size of the database, whether you want an email address with your domain name, and the like. All hosts offer different combinations of these features at different rates.

The basic things that you should look for are:

MB storage
The amount of storage space is an essential factor. For simple sites, even a small MB of storage is enough. But in case you are planning to have something apart from the plain pages such as picture gallery or e books directory, much more storage would be required.

GB bandwidth per month
The amount of data that can be transferred by your website is known as the bandwidth. Small websites have nothing to worry about, but websites with large amount of traffic needs a large bandwidth especially if the visitors are expected to see a lot of pages or download files from it. Bandwidth is the biggest factor which determines the cost of hosting. 

MySQL databases
This is the number of databases you will have for storage of things. However, one is enough for your needs. It is always better to use MySQL and not some other SQL. Make sure that your host offers all scripting languages such as PHP, ASP, JSP, ColdFusion, Perl and others.

Sub domains
This feature allows you to split your website into sections other than www. For instance, shop.domainname.com etc. However, these are not really essential as the same purpose can be served by sub folders as well, for example, www.domainname.com/shop.

FTP accounts
A File Transfer Protocol is used to upload your website to the host. This one will be always available.

POP3 accounts
Post Office Protocol, or POP, is another term for email. The more the number of POP3 accounts, the more email addresses you can have. It is sometime useful as you can have different emails for different purposes such as sales@domainname.com and support@domainname.com.