One of the worst parts about starting a website is picking your web host. You could spend weeks searching through all of the different options available to you, and you'd probably still be no closer to knowing which is the "best" one. Besides, you don't have time to waste on all of that nonsense, you just want to get a website built!

Let's get that done right now. Put on your web design pants, grab your notepad, and we'll get started.

You'll need to outline exactly what kind of site you're building. Do you need bandwidth, storage space, or dynamic content hosting? These are important to know, because they'll help filter down web hosting services.

If you're planning on making a really large site that will have a big customer base, you'll need bandwidth. Fun thing about web hosting companies is that, if you run out of bandwidth for the month they don't actually stop letting you host the site. Instead, they sell extra bandwidth to you at a premium (read: ridiculous) rate. Not fun.

Are you planning on hosting a huge amount of pictures? If the site you're building is for a family album, pictures of you at the beach, or anything involving a ton of images, you're going to need storage space. For you people who love having a million videos but haven't discovered how awesome YouTube is, you're also going to need a huge amount of storage space to put all of your videos. If you're a fan of the slim-fast variety of websites with a mostly text-based interface, however, you can skimp a bit on storage space.

Finally, do you need dynamic content? If you're planning on making a blog or sales site or pretty much anything other than a cute little site in Dreamweaver, you're going to need dynamic content hosting. This means PHP and MySQL support, pretty much all of the time. Make sure that your host supports this, and you'll be good to go.