I'm just curious if anyone has any suggestions on whom I should do the whole webhosting/domain registration with. I know absolutely NOTHING about what I would need to look for, or if I'd be getting screwed over money wise, etc.

What I'm looking to use it for is solely personal websites, email, blogging... The general things personal websites are based on. I want to be able to have other people use said webspace, with passwords and all that jazz.

I'm looking for the most cost effective, but with good customer service should the need arise.

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Okay, Lindsay, are you forgetting that I was a professional twice over - an analyst and a therapist. The world's first analrapist.

I don't know if I'm getting ripped off or anything, but I used GoDaddy for my domain and hosting of the 9/11 debunking site I'm building. It worked great in every detail except for sitemap building, but it finally came through on that part. Since you're not wanting to hit search engines (I guess), you don't need a sitemap.

Wordpress will satisfy your blogging requirements if you're hosting your own site. If not, Blogger is free, and you can set up multiple accounts and even mess around with the templete some. I'd do Blogger before spending any cash on hosting. Or you can set up a free blog at Wordpress.com, get used to the interface, and then install Wordpress at your chosen domain/host.

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You can take the heart out of the hooker but you can't take the hooker out of the heart. -- Frankenhooker

I go through Bluehost.com for all my web hosting. Price wise, it's comparable to most of the other places, it's not the cheapest I've heard of but it's quite reasonable for what you get. I pay about $95 a year for my site, because I only pay by the year, however if you pay for several years in advance you get a discount. They also offer a large number of plug ins and extras for free (including forums, blog software, Javascripts and even shopping carts), and they register your domain name for you for free as well. Plus, and I can't stress this enough, their customer service is top-rate - I've only had one better experience with customer service, and that was through a company that sells exclusively to publishing businesses - Bluehost deals with the public on a regular basis, and in my opinion, none do it better. I've been with them for about 3 years now, and my site has only gone down maybe twice, both times for less than an hour.  I recommend them to all my web design clients as well.

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"He was cursed with a horrorshow of a face, like Guiseppe Archbold doing a study of mollusk tumors."

I use Serversea for my hosting. It's fairly fast and I've never had a day of downtime since starting it up a year ago. Customer support sucks on occasion, but it's usually pretty good. It even includes a pretty nice setup panel for your site.

Depending on how many people you expect to have on your site, different plans can be better or worse there. I am currently on the Silver plan which allows for 1000MB of storage and 100GB of transfer monthly. It comes to 28.68/year. Not too bad.

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Do you want ants? Because that's how you get ants.

www.110mb.com

They're free (without ads, pop-ups or any of the usual rubbish) and restrict all the bandwidth hogging stuff that normally chews up free hosts, meaning their server is quicker on their free service than the one I'm using at www.netfirms.com and paying $10/month for. They provide 5gig free hosting, with a 300gig/month bandwidth limit. You won't get all the "bells and whistles", but chances are you won't know how to use a lot of the stuff you get elsewhere anyway.

I get my domains at www.namecheap.com, it's a couple dollars more a year than some places but they've proven very reliable, not to mention they accept payment via paypal (and without a surcharge).

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Dinosaurs had eggs bro, the chicken came way later.

Oh, I don't know what 110mb have in the way of shared ftp or the like so it might not be what you're after if you want other people to have access to edit parts of the site without the master password.

Alternately, other people can get their own site there easily enough.

And namecheap domains are $8.88/year, you can get them as cheap as $5/year from some sites, and hosting starts at around $3/month depending on the amount of hosting and bandwidth you'll need (both of the main sites I'm running come to about 300Mb and use around 1gig/month bandwidth, I'm paying for 350gig and 2000gig/month bandwidth).

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Dinosaurs had eggs bro, the chicken came way later.