After you feel comfortable with the level of support a provider offers, consider what features are available. A basic understanding of what you know (and what you don't) will help direct your choice. If creating a site from scratch is intimidating, look for a provider that offers free website building software. This will save you from knowing html. You will also need a domain name to get your site up and some Shared Web Hosting U providers even offer these for free. A free domain name should not be the main selling point for which provider you choose. After all, you can purchase a domain name from anyone from $2.99 - $12.99/year.
(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.
This is why I prefer Affordable Web Hosting plans. They give you more control of your website. If your site doesn't generate traffic right away you will not have to worry about having your web hosting service cancelled with no warning. You will also be given more tools to help grow your website and make your site more user friendly. Reliability is also something you get with paid hosting. They want to keep you as a customer so they will do more to keep you satisfied. Free web hosting can be crappy on purpose in hopes that you will upgrade to the paid service so you might as well get an affordable web hosting plan that fits your needs.
Below are a few more but I could go into great detail and do not want to confuse you. If you have the time, look into all of them by using your favourite search engine and decide which is best for you.
The obvious benefit of inexpensive hosting is you will save money every month. You can see a quality Shared Web Hosting UK package for under ten dollars per month with little effort. Cheap hosting is loaded with features to help you to achieve your goals, all at one cheap price.
Windows or Linux: Do you know if your site needs to run on a MS Windows server with FrontPage extensions or does it need PERL, PHP or MySQL? These things you will need to find out if you intent to run a successful small business web site.
Now this is just a brief overview of the basics to get started and i appreciate that there are other steps and tips to also consider that i used when i started building my own website. Hopefully this will help you to take that first step.