When you get a website, you need to have it "hosted".

What that means is that you need to have your webpage files someplace where they can be accessed 24-hours a day. That's where hosting companies come in. They are set up with systems that are connected to the internet so that when someone goes looking for www.yourname.com, they will in fact get your website.

There are lots of hosting companies available. Sometimes you can even get a free hosting package - at least for a personal website - as part of your internet package.

Hosting packages can come as monthly billing or yearly billing packages. Sometimes you can get a better deal by getting the yearly package.

For the artist or small business clients that I work for, you don't need big fancy hosting packages. So I would suggest starting with the smallest package you can get that will give you the basics - enough file space to take care of the website files and enough broadband space to take care of the traffic coming to visit your website. And since most of us aren't going to be getting thousands of hits a day, we don't need big packages for that.

Besides, you can start small, and if you need to, you can always upgrade to a larger package.

I use a company called Hypermart to do the hosting for myself and my clients. Right now they even have a package that would probably be enough for most of my clients that is under $5.00US per month - quite a reasonable price. They offer a good variety of services to go along with that, so I'd invite you to check them out at www.hypermart.net.

A service that I have offered some of my clients in the past - the ones where I was doing all the updates and maintenance - was to piggyback their websites on one of mine. That allowed me to give them an even better deal on hosting. The only thing was that the address which showed up in the window once you had gone to their site, would show as http://bestlifesuccess.com/theirname/ instead of http://www.theirname.com.

And by the way, if you should ever use more than one website, you can certainly cut down on hosting costs by asking your webperson to piggyback the additional sites off of the first one. Unless for some reason you don't want people coming to the additional sites to be aware of the first one. But at least it's worth knowing that you can do that.