Your new website needs to be stored on a web server, so of course you need a hosting account. There are many web hosting providers, of widely varying qualities, and although there is no easy way to choose the most appropriate one for you, the key is in understanding your own needs.

For example:

• How important is it that your site is always online?
  
  It sounds like a ridiculous question, doesn't it? Everyone we ask replies "very important, crucial". But, the sad fact is that there is no guaranteed way to keep a site online 100% of the time. Not even Amazon, Yahoo! etc can manage it. An electrical fire in a datacenter, a failed server hard drive... these kinds of things occur, even if you opt to pay for a dedicated, rather than shared, server.
  
  For shared hosting, you really need a good uptime guarantee. Read the small print of this agreement carefully; what recourse have you if the hosting company fails to live up to its commitment? And never accept anything less than a 99.9% uptime guarantee. That percentage permits only about 90 seconds of downtime on the average day. We can live with that, but the other common guarantee percentages are a joke. 99.5% allows 3 hours 45 minutes of monthly downtime, and a 99% guarantee allows over 7 hours of monthly downtime - that's nearly four days a year! Simply crazy.
  
  
• How many daily pageviews do you expect?
  
  If you can estimate this number, that's a great help. You can then multiply this number by the average size, in kilobytes (kB) of your pages (including all graphics), and multiply by 31 (days in the month). Divide this by 1024 to convert it into megabytes, and then divide again by 1024 to convert it into gigabytes (GB). This is a reasonable approximation of the monthly bandwidth, or data transfer amount, that you will require.
  
  For example, suppose you are expecting up to 4000 daily pageviews, and your average page contains 30kB of HTML and 40kB of images. You will need at least this much monthly bandwidth: 4000 x (30+40) x 31 / 1024 / 1024 = 8.2 GB.
  
  If you cannot estimate a likely upper limit for your daily pageviews then you probably need a hosting account that permits you to start paying for relatively low bandwidth, and then upgrade when you require. It's important that you incur excess bandwidth charges as infrequently as possible, as these are usually punitive. We often hear horror stories about site owners having to pull the plug on their sites after they are linked to from a major news website, as the sudden influx of relatively untargeted traffic, which is not resulting in significant sales, costs so much in excess bandwidth that keeping the site online that day is uneconomic. It's much better to overestimate your bandwidth requirements, even by a factor of three or four, so that such a huge spike for a day or two can be accommodated without losing any sales. So our 8.2 GB example above should actually look for an account permitting at least 25-30 GB of bandwidth.