Paid web hosting is the way you want to go if you are going to want search engines to recognize you as legitimate, and/or you are wanting to make some money with your site. There are a ton of paid web hosts out there, and my husband and I exhausted ourselves researching them before making a decision to go with HostExcellence for this site and another one we run. Ultimately, it came down to the fact that we were getting tired and we liked HostExcellence's plans for mulitple domains and the fact that they had a site builder with tons of customizable templates (many of them do, but some of the good ones on the review lists don't). We also liked the amount of storage and bandwidth we were given, among other things. I haven't had a complaint yet, and we've been customers since October 2005. They have excellent 24/7 live chat support that helps me all the time with just about any issue you can imagine. Whenever a service has been down (which has only been a few times), it's either back up before I have a chance to ask about it or it's resolved before I get off live chat with them. They have a ton of tools at your service, and a site builder program with templates that I've found pretty easy to use. We have more e-mails available than we'll ever use, and more bandwidth and storage space than we've come close to dipping into. They have ftp storage and a really easy thing called web shell that makes it pretty simple to do ftp stuff.
