I'm looking for a good website host.

What do you recommend in Canada?

The site I'm going to host is going to be pretty heavy on graphics, but I don't expect any major traffic for at least a year until its fully operational. So I'm looking for something that starts out cheap and is flexible.

Reputation is most important. I don't want anything shady like GoDaddy.

Is a domain name always included?

Are you thinking some sort of Dedicated hosting? or Shared Hosting?

No dedicated hosting yet. Shared. Cheaper most of the time, right?

Yes. Well I can only recommend Anhosting.com and Dreamhost.

Both are really great. Anhosting will probably have a black friday or cyber monday deal. I got mine last year from the black friday deal, I got 1TB of space and 10TB of bandwidth.

And they have really great tech support

But I have also heard that dreamhost is very good as well.

Why would you seek hosting located in Canada? It doesn't matter so much where it's located, as your visitors will be from all over the world. I'm quite happy with my USA hosting myself (at discountasp.net). domain name wise, I like to use namecheap.

Go with Dreamhost. You get more bang for your buck. I've got a collection of tons of promotion codes if you decide to go with them.

I looked at the Dreamhost website. I don't like the unlimited disk space and unlimited bandwidth 'forever'.

For less than $6/mo there must be a catch. Looks like they're overselling.

Thats why I go with anhosting.com Great people. Made in USA And the best thing is, the tech support knows there stuff! They don't mess around.

well anhosting also oversells. pretty much every shared hosting company oversells.
for a bandwidth intensive site i would not suggest shared, maybe start off at a low end VPS if at all possible.
what exactly were you looking to pay per month? 5,10,15,20??

I want to start off low, $5/month sounds great. This is until I get everything assembled, then upgrade my plan as is necessary. This is why I need something flexible.

hahaha and whos the one who told me to get anhosting.... or showed me it... Huh? Huh? huh?

ya i know, you love it so far don't you??
they are pretty good for shared hosting but every shared host oversells.
for some of the sites i have i need a fast cpu and lots of ram, i have some pretty large mysql databases.. now i have a dedi with a harpertown and 6gb of ram

I've been with them for a little less than a year. The only catch is that they don't allow personal backups on their space.

Awesome. Now what about domain registration? Does the host do it or do I have to go through a registrar like GoDaddy?

Yeah, I just godaddy.. I like them. I also heard namecheap is good. But its just preference.

i would go with godaddy either way b/c say you want to change your hosting down the road, all you would have to change is the nameservers for the domain name.
if you get a free domain name for whatever host you go with, then you might as well get the free domain name hosted through them.

Forgive me for being a n00b. This is going to be my first website.

This is what I understand so far:

1. Get a shared hosting provider. Anhosting or Dreamhost. Depends on total final costs.
2. Register the doman. GoDaddy if they do .ca domains, otherwise I will go with a Canadian registrar.
3. The host and the registrar are independent. This means I can change my hosting company when I need something beefier and still keep my domain name.

More Questions:

I am designing the site in DreamWeaver and Fireworks.
I want the site to 'adjust' itself to the screen. Like Anadtech. In the upper right corner there are options for page width, and text size. Is this standard HTML?

Does it matter if I get a Windows or Linux host?

Well you will pay more for Windows based hosting.. So if you get Dreamhost or Anhosting, it more than likely will be Linux hosting.

I think you can set your page width to be 100 percent that way it will adjust it self.

But i'm not the best web designer in the world. lol

get a linux server. unless you plan on coding in ASP i don't see any point to getting a windows server.
to get the full screen you would want to use CSS.
you can start out with a dreamweaver template if you want to..
honestly just google about this, there is plenty on it.

Windows Hosting = ASP and ASP.NET pages. A lot of the large websites are starting to migrate over to ASP.NET sites because of improved performance, but the downside is the higher cost (due to licensing)

Linux Hosting = PHP, Perl, etc. These are typically what you find with large scale, cheap hosting.

I've still got my account with Dreamhost and I would highly recommend their service. Their support is quite good and the performance is generally acceptable for a personal site.

There's a LOT more to it than just performance. The development tools is also one of the big points. I make ASP.NET apps, so I stick to discountasp.net myself.

But yes, it's more expensive than extremely oversold PHP hosting. But that same oversold & dirt cheap LAMP hosting is enough to run a me-too personal blog with like 10 page views a month or whatever (that's what a LOT of people are doing with it)

Do like I did - buy only a domain name and host it here - www.000webhost.com . COMPLETELY free, no ads, etc. Nothing like it, man, it is really "better than paid hosting" as they claim. You could also take a look at my site and check the speeds of it if you're not sure - e-berlin (www.e-berlin.org)

P.S. And after that I can help you with some technical matters if you like

Yeah free hosting is fine besides the fact that when you have a lot of images and higher bandwitdh stuff it wont work as well, I tried it when I first got my domain and it was soo slow it wasn't even funny.