This is in reference to my previous post Choosing a Platform for your Blog where you can learn which are the best platform for beginners. So if you decided to take more control of your blog and want to have your Domain associated with it, though you can associate a domain with Free blogging services like WordPress.com and Bloggers.com However you are still restricted in many ways, for example why i moved to Self-hosted blog is because i could not install the theme i liked and there are certain other limitations as well.
So Choosing a Web host again depends on your ambitions, If you just want to have a amature blog then you just want to keep for posting some personal stuff or topics that interest you, then your would best bet would be to get started with any of the Shared-hosting service providers again there are plenty of them and to save you time i would recommend two most popular Webhosts to you.. eerh! before i do, you must not to forget to read the guide at WordPress.org (for self-hosted wordpress blogs) and learn some skills before you order your domain and hosting account. It’s very important !
So These Two hosts are Blue Host and DreamHost, most of the Top bloggers i came across started by hosting their blogs on one of these two Web Hosts. There normally charge around US $6/month which is an ideal deal for beginners, that said if you think if you want to blog for money or want to have more ‘reliable’ i put that word because there are certain incidents reported by users that shared-hosting accounts at some point screwed them up — let me make it clear, Share-hosting is not for people who are looking to get into professional blogging, at some point you would have to move to another host and choose a different hosting account that is more expensive, so In my case I have chosen (after long research) Mediatemple, their Hosting package starts at US $20/Month and it’s an ideal deal for starting Professional blogs later as your Blog grows and you see increasing traffic then you can upgrade to any of their VPS packages. However their Gridserver Package alone can handle good volume of traffic and even the Digg effect.