You will hear words like 25MB, bandwidth, ftp, email forwarding, php, cgi-bin and fantastico. All of these are things that are offered with different packages that you will find. Before you decide let's look at what you might need and how to know that you are receiving this.

Most website hosting companies will have their packages grouped by the various things they offer, of course the more you get the larger the price will be. The basic package is usually around 25MB of web space. This is how much space the hosting company will allow you to have on their web server. This is with shared hosting. There will be other websites also on this server with you, each with their own packages and amounts of space.

Bandwidth is how much data you are allow to use in a certain amount of time, usually monthly. Bandwidth is used each time you upload web pages, images, or some one visits your website. If you are only allowed a small amount of bandwidth like say 50MB then you may run out of bandwidth if you plan on adding a lot of pages, or you are expecting many visitors.

Ftp is a way of getting into your website through the backdoor. This will enable you to upload your web pages, images and install scripts in a pretty easy fashion. All you need to do is place the folders in the proper place in the correct folder.

Email forwarding can be very useful. You can have any email that is sent to your website forwarded to another email account that you have. This way no matter how many websites you have you have all the emails forwarded to one main account.

Php is a way in which website are coded. This is used for building scripts and even some template designs. Php is very popular for its fast loading time. Some php scripts will also require MySql database. This is another feature that you can add. These databases are very fast loading and do not require any maintenance after they are up.

Cgi-bin is another way to host different scripts. If you wish to use cgi scripts you must be sure that you have a cgi-bin included in your hosting package. These are some what more difficult than php scripts but many people enjoy these types of scripts.

Fantastico is a compilation of several scripts that can be installed directly from your control panel.

You can search online for hosting companies and remember to compare. If you are just wanting a simple website you will probably not need all the extra goodies and normally no more than 25MB of web space and around 500MB of bandwidth should work. You may even wish to try some free hosting until you understand how everything works. But, remember more than likely you will be offered a sub-domain like yoursite.theirdomainname.com. This is not the best way to get web traffic, so I would only use a free hosting company that would allow your own domain name and check out paid hosting as well. Many of these paid hosting companies can give you so much more than a free hosted site and the cost is not always tremendous.