Many hosting providers may try to sway you with talk of the very high bandwidth levels they allow you and the massive amount of disk space but don't base your decision solely on this factor. The truth is over 90% of sites on Shared Web Hosting never get anywhere near there bandwidth levels, with a large number using less than a tenth their limit.
Some web sites which are being hosted by cheap web site host providers are usually prone to down time. A reflection on the kind of services which cheap web hosting plans are known about. But, then again, this does not apply to all; there are still some cheap web hosting out there that are mindful to their clients' needs and concerns. One should also see in a wider perspective that if your server frequently crashes down, there is a tendency to lose your clients.
The selection of platform and database engine is connected. If your web host offers hosting on the Linux platform, the script language is PHP and the database is MySQL. For Windows based hosting, ASP/.NET and MSSQL is often used. Unless you are a programmer with special demands in regard to platform, this selection doesn't matter much to you. More web hosts offer Linux hosting because it is cheaper, hence Affordable Web Hosting.
Below are a few more but I could go into great detail and do not want to confuse you. If you have the time, look into all of them by using your favourite search engine and decide which is best for you.
Ok, you type web host into Google and it came up with a billion results. How do you really get to know who is the best? Well, you can start with know the amount of web space that will be given to you. Web hosting companies do provide limited web space (Shared Web Hosting UK web hosting) for their clients, but what you should know is how much will be yours. If you have very small pages, you basically don't need a business web host with more than 5MB space. This should ensure their will be enough to run your video clips, podcasts, and other media files without any problem. Most will have this. Don't worry.
Bandwidth (or data transfer as it is also known) relates to how many times your website is visited. Each file your page is constructed of all adds to the data transfer. If you have a page that is 2kb, with two pictures each of 199kb and you have a data transfer allowance of 1GB per month then you could have around 2600 visitors each month. That's about 87 visitors per day. The likelihood is you will have more than one page, and will want more than two pictures on some - if not all - pages. If you exceed your bandwidth then your provider will charge you a lot more for the excess, or will disable your website entirely. So the more bandwidth that a web host offers the better.
My one bit of good advice is do not sign up with any server for a long period of time to start with. It will be cheaper in the long run but at first just sign up for a little while. Try before you buy, make sure that the service provider is able to meet your expectations. If it does, then sign up for a longer period and save money.