I’m getting a little sick of the meagre 10 megs space/500mb monthly bandwidth my ISP provides me, looking at getting some hosting and setting up a website (if for nothing else but to have somewhere to dump files)
…but I’m a bit of a newbie with all that side of the internet, wondering if someone has some good tips for cheap hosting that is easy to set up with a domain name…perhaps some info on how this is done as well (as far as i know you need to get a domain name then link it to a host somehow, but not sure on the specifics)
I have a feeling some of this stuff will be fairly obvious once I buy the domain but I dont want just dive in and get ripped off for lack of research.
Preferably something with a simple FTP uploading interface. I dont need complex stuff or billions of different email accounts, just going to have a basic html site with a bunch of files to link to…maybe a single email address off it.
Also, where is the best place to purchase the domain from? I can get the one i’m after from yahoo for 10 dollars a year, and this seems fairly reasonable…
I wont post the actual domain I’m thinking of out of paranoia someone else might want to beat me to it 
http://www.all-inkl.com/index.php?partner=14405
I like them, because they are fast and very stable. You can have a lot of webspace, 50 GByte Traffic, MySQL, PHP and a really fast support.
They even offer packages for non-germans. Just contact them through mail, they’ll be glad to help you out 
http://www.byethost.com/ < — good free space with several different space/bandwidth options
the only problem is they don’t allow files larger than 2 megs (even though you get like 150 megs total)… but the solution to that is hosting files here:
www.myfilehut.com
which allows direct linking
rocksors 
Heres a basic overview of how to setup a domain name and website.
Domain Name:
After deciding on your domain you need to find a place to register it. Personally I have been using http://www.GoDaddy.com/ for a number of years now without any problems. Most any domain registrar will do, hosting is where you want to be more particular.
Hosting:
Finding a web host is quite a task. First you want to find a reputable company with good service and then a hosting plan that fits your needs and budget. There are many different hosting types but the common types are shared, virtual server and dedicated server. For personal needs shared hosting usually has everything you need. A good place start for research is http://www.webhostingtalk.com/ but be ready to do some digging as there is a lot of info there.
After registering your domain and signing up for a hosting plan you’ll need to set DNS numbers with your domain registrar company. When you signup for web hosting and the account allows you to use a domain name, the hosting company will provide you with DNS numbers (usually 2). These numbers point the domain name to your hosting company. They need to be added to your domain name configuration usually by logging into your account at your domain name company. DNS numbers will take a day or two to go into effect and then your domain name will resolve to your hosting company’s ip address. Once your domain resolves you’re ready to build your website using your new domain name and hosting.
Cheers,
Sonicade 
Another interesting site for registering webspace might me http://1and1.com/ and if you want to have very, very cheap webspace, you can ask your ISP for at least 50 MByte and register a short domain name at http://www.com.tk
So, you might get http://alexstrain.com.tk for nothing.
All these ad-powered redirects are major turn-offs, at least for me. I’d much rather skip those no matter how cryptic the actual url provided by one’s school of ISP was. Has the possibility of renoise.com offering redirects to registered users been investigated or discussed before? Added value not available to warez kids!
I have my stuff hosted at canaca.com (starting at 20GB storage and 500GB datatransfer.)
If it is for hosting your stuff and updating once a while, it is sufficient enough.
I’ve seen devastating user-reviews upon this one (about the high rate of downtimes etc.), but i didn’t experienced any mayor problems here.
I also noticed that most of those devastating reviews were American reviews…
Not to discredit your post dopefish but I have heard of some negative experiences with 1and1.com’s technical support. You can probably find some info about them at http://www.webhostingtalk.com/.
I found one that gave me 10 gigs space, 100 gigs bandwidth for about 4 bucks US a month, and they gave me the domain name too
its only a very basic website, but as the message on the front page says, I’ll update that when I’m finished more important things…
check out http://dreamhost.com.
most amazing webhosting i have ever seen in my life.
for 7.95 a month you get 20 gigabytes of space a terabyte (1000gigs) of bandwidth, a free domain (with the ability to host as many as you want), unlimited emails, mysql, everything. not only that, every single week they add like 200mb of space, and 8 gigs of bandwidth. WEEKLY, for as long as you host with them. it’s such an awesome deal.
if you do want to sign up, you can use the promo code “AWSM” for 20 dollars off of L1 hosting, if you signup for 1 year!
This is a nice resource while doing your research. We used to be with Feature Price, but that blew into a million bits and we only just got out without legal worries.
We’re currently with www.hostdime.com - not too bad, but not amazing either. They should have RSS for server downtime, but they don’t. About 99% uptime, but that 1% off can be annoying. I don’t think you can escape it in this industry.
I think I did alright…they have a quite specific “guarentee” for 99.9% uptime…
I tested their online support thing and the response was always instant, so it seems to be a true 24/7 support base as well…