There are a large variety of web hosting services available on the internet. It can be very confusing to decide the best option for you. If you need more features than are provided by free website hosting, then you may consider an upgrade to a free service. Many of the free sites offer more memory space and traffic allotment for a monthly fee. Compare prices between servers before you make a decision.

Once you've done the research and discover that an upgrade simply doesn't meet your needs, you might consider the next step of registering a domain name and getting a bigger web hosting package. There are many sites where you can purchase a domain name. Some sites simply sell you a domain name, but provide no hosting. Other sites provide a domain name for a low fee, and then you can pay per month for hosting. And other sites allow you to buy a domain name and offer free basic hosting, with upgrades available.

If you are using it for a business, you need to decide how much traffic you expect before you can decide what service you will need. It's best to start out small, and then upgrade as needed. Many offer more than one package to choose from.

You can also buy a domain from one site and then transfer hosting to another for the server space. Most of the sites have a transfer fee, so you need to decide if the cheaper domain cost is worth the difference in just registering the domain through the hosting site to begin with. Some of the companies also have affiliate programs, where you can refer people to their hosting service and receive anything from a free domain transfer to cash.

Here are some of the more poplar sites that offer domains and web hosting:

www.godaddy.com - Godaddy.com has very reasonable domain registry and transfer rates. It even has domain names up for auction. They have monthly hosting from around $4.00 a month up to $15.00 a month.

www.register.com - Register.com has a 30-day money back guarantee, and a subscription to Fortune Magazine and 24/7 tech support. It also has bulk domain registration as well as discounts for registering domain names for longer than a year (up to 150 years).

www.networksolutions.com - NetworkSolutions offers many features in addition to domain registration and hosting. It also has things to help enhance your site, like e-commerce, search engine optimization and online marketing for additional monthly fees.

www.doteasy.com - Doteasy offers free basic web hosting with domain registration, with annual renewal of the domain. Additional web space features can be added for monthly fees. Doteasy also has a nice comparison chart for various web hosting services.