You can choose a cheap affordable web hosting provider provided that you are not setting up a website that requires heavy usage of resources like CPU time, storage space or network bandwidth. Do look at the Terms Of Service with the Hosting provider. The Terms Of Service is usually located at the bottom of the web page.
This means your Shared Web Hosting company will keep up the maintenance and updates, and provide technical support for its users. This is a huge benefit for those who do not have the time, knowledge or resources (like many small businesses I know) to do this. In this sense it makes huge sense to go with Shared Web Hosting UK. The average cost of a reliable shared web hosting package is less than $7.00 per month. You will be paying at least ten times that amount for a dedicated server.
Some web hosting companies provide dedicated servers to their clients. This means that the entire server will be for your use alone. This is expensive, but it is more stable compared to shared servers. If you're on a tight on the coin you want to spend, you can take advantage of the Shared Web Hosting UK-server arrangement. You just need to know how many accounts are sharing the space, since the speed and the download times of your website will be affected by the performance of other websites from the same server.
Is the website you are hosting a private one? Perhaps, it is a family portal that is meant only for your family members, relatives and friends. Or, are they websites that you will promote to the general public to get as much visitors as possible? In that case, your traffic volume will be quite high each month.
This is why I prefer Affordable Web Hosting plans. They give you more control of your website. If your site doesn't generate traffic right away you will not have to worry about having your web hosting service cancelled with no warning. You will also be given more tools to help grow your website and make your site more user friendly. Reliability is also something you get with paid hosting. They want to keep you as a customer so they will do more to keep you satisfied. Free web hosting can be crappy on purpose in hopes that you will upgrade to the paid service so you might as well get an affordable web hosting plan that fits your needs.
When this is the case, maintenance costs are also going to be an issue. Using a shared server, a lot of different places will share the same server so maintenance costs are going to be shared as well. This can greatly reduce the cost by a lot because every one of the companies that have a space on there will be paying a certain percentage of it based on the amount of disk space that they are using.
As I mentioned in the opening section of this piece, this has only been a basic outline of a few of the key items with regard to the topic of how to choose the best web hosting. There are just a tiny number of other absolutely crucial factors that you will have to be aware of.