If you are an absolute beginner this is where you should start. if you already have your own domain name and web hosting you can fast forward to part 3.
Shared Web Hosting UK is the kind most people start off with. These review websites would often like to have you believe that there is actually a "top 10" list of web hosts. The truth is there are probably only around five quality shared hosting companies around!
The next part is to get your Shared Web Hosting UK onto the internet. This is a little more complex than the designing and developing stage of your site. You have to get your hands on a piece of FTP software. There are many free FTP "clients" online that you can download, such as FileZilla. This is what allows you to connect to your web hosting provider's computer (server) and upload your files, just like if you were to copy files from your hard disk to another place (usb drive, cd etc).
Up-time is the over all time the hosting company promises that their servers will be up and running. Some claim to have 100% up-time, but I find that to be almost impossible to have so I tend to go with the ones claiming a 99,9% up-time. This tells us that even though they take back-ups, have mirrored servers and all other stuff to keep the servers safe and running, there is always a small possibility that the servers can go down.
There are plenty of affordable hosting providers that will make you pay for setup fees. So make sure you don't get blinded by a very cheap offer. Chances are, they will also let you incur hidden charges like setup fees. A few years back, it was hard to get an affordable plan with unlimited bandwidth and space. But today, there are plenty of Affordable Web Hosting plans that can offer you unlimited space and bandwidth. Ask your potential hosting providers and learn more about these features.
(2). Get A Linux Plan - A Linux plan is more reliable and use up less resources than windows. A word of caution here though, unlike windows that is not case sensitive linux is, so make sure that you use all lower case letters in your file names to avoid any recognition problems.
Webmasters are always asking about web hosts on webmaster forums. Find a few recent threads, and note who gets the most votes. Search engines, on the other hand, have been spammed by some hosts. If you do a search on 'the best web hosts' or 'top 10 web hosts' you'll get puff pages. Recent opinions from professional webmasters are the best.