Choosing a domain name is one of the first, and most difficult, steps in getting a great new website created and operating. You will also need to choose UK web hosting from a web hosting service whose offerings match your needs. But before your website can go live, you'll have to choose a domain name.
If you are lucky you will find a company that offers free installations and assistance with pre-installable forums, cms or traffic statistics and some even give you a free domain. The web hosts can provide such cheap prices without compromising in service quality by offering what is called Shared Web Hosting.
So, you have a name, a plan and a place for your site to live. Finally, it is time to start designing! The choice here is to try to build yourself, "self-build", or find a professional to do the job for you. A half way house some use is to find a family member or friend who dabbles in Shared Web Hosting UK design and will do the job for as little as a case of beer. I would strongly advise against this route as the design process can be quite intense and is apt to place some strain on any personal relationship if significant redrafting is needed or the design is not all you had hoped for. If your first designer is not up to the project you can fire them and move on. Letting go of a family friend can present far more issues.
The easiest way to do this is to just go to the top of this page and use the domain name search box supplied. Anyone can register a domain name within the framework of allowed suffixes provided it isn't already taken.
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.
When this is the case, maintenance costs are also going to be an issue. Using a shared server, a lot of different places will share the same server so maintenance costs are going to be shared as well. This can greatly reduce the cost by a lot because every one of the companies that have a space on there will be paying a certain percentage of it based on the amount of disk space that they are using.
Web hosting services are becoming more and more common day by day, and prices are going down. But it is extremely important to select a reliable, low cost web hosting services to get the most for your money.