Whenever you are starting a blog or a website it is very important to choose the right web hosting provider. The big mistake which many people do is to start on a free platform and it will really hard to scale up and it will be very tedious to port the site to a new host. It is always wise to start well from the scratch. The requirements for each website will differ and to start with it is good enough if you get a shared hosting plan where in many sites will be put on the same server. If your traffic increases then it is better to move on to a dedicated hosting plan which will be able to manage things in a better way.
You can check out the top ten ratings at Web Hosting geeks and it will be very helpful in choosing the right provider. Some thing which you have to look while choosing a web host are reliability, up time, bandwidth restrictions, storage space. You should also choose between a windows hosting service or a unix based hosting service. this article on unix hosting will give you a better insight. One other important things is customer support and you should ensure that the provider is good at that.