If you are not a business, or are a very small business who just needs a straightforward website that won't have a lot of users or heavy downloads such as audio and video, then you will most likely want to go with shared hosting.

Shared hosting means you will have your website files sitting on a computer along with many other customers.

Obviously, bandwidth and storage amounts are limited. If you are going to be having thousands of visitors, or are going to be hosting audio, video, or lots of large images, then this may be problematic.

But if you are planning to only have a small or medium sized site with small or medium amounts of visitors, shared hosting will probably work fine for you.

And if you aren't sure, you can always upgrade later to the next level, virtual private hosting.

So how do you do this?

1. Sign up for a domain and hosting. First, you'll need to sign up for a domain name and hosting account. You can do both at the same hosting company to make the process smoother, if you desire. Choose the shared plan of the company, generally the cheapest one.

2. Build your website. Next, decide how you are going to build your site. You can code it in raw HTML, or use a free HTML editor such as Kompozer. You could also purchase Dreamweaver or Frontpage. A good place to get free templates is OpenWebDesign.org, and a good place for paid ones is TemplateMonster. Another good option is to use a content management system such as Wordpress (for blogs), Joomla (for large websites), or Drupal (also for large websites). These are free and may be able to be installed with one click, depending on what your host offers. If you go the HTML route, check out the free HTML tutorials at W3Schools. If you decide to use a CMS, your website will already be contained on your server, so you won't have to upload anything. If you go this route, check out the free tutorials for Wordpress, Joomla, or Drupal.

3. Upload your files. If using an HTML website designed on your local computer, you will have to FTP the site to your hosting account. Ask your host what your FTP address is, and then download Filezilla to transfer the HTML files. Make sure you download the client version of Filezilla, not the server! After it's installed, you will have to enter the FTP information you got from your hosting company. It's then a simple matter of opening the public_html folder on your host and dumping your HTML files into it.