When you start your own website, you want to make sure that you have reliable, decent hosting – if your host is down all of the time, your site might as well not even exist in the first place. So, to keep things smooth and simple for a webmaster-to-be, I have composed a list of tips for choosing the best hosting for your site.

Running a website does not have to be expensive. There are reliable hosts that can handle your site for 5 to 7 dollars per month. So long as you don't have a huge website, one of these hosts is really all a person needs to manage their site.

It used to be that you had to pay tons of money on a domain name in addition to hosting, but more and more web hosting companies are offering a free domain name when you sign up, so keep an eye out for these – could save you a handful of money right there!

To get an idea of what companies are offering the best bang-for-the-buck at the moment, consider checking out an independent web hosting review site for recommendations. Do be careful though, as there are some review sites out there that are just scams set up by the owners of a hosting company to try to get them more business!

Look out for activation fees. Some hosts seem to be cheap at first – until you read the fine print to find out that they have a 50 dollar activation fee!

Check out the types of customer support a company offers. Web based instant message type support can be very quick and efficient when you have problems.

Think ahead when you buy hosting. Are you going to build a plain HTML based site? Or is there a chance you could want to add a forum or another dynamic feature to your site in the future? If so, you'll want to make sure the site has PHP and MySQL. CGI might also be a requirement for you.

With these easy tips, you can be on your way to mastering your own website in no time!

Ryan Bauer is a large-scale webmaster who runs a Web Hosting Review website and writes how-to articles for computer users.