Which Webhost

I have been through about 15 hosts after 8 years of messing around with websites. All my websites have been disabled at least once – some of them 20 times. I have been through host after host – sometimes several simultaneously, trying to keep my websites up and updated, free from viruses, off spamlists and now I reckon I can give some valuable advice to anyone starting out with websites.
The most important tip is to avoid free hosts and get a top level domain like a .com or .org. you will be able to transfer these domains and host them anywhere. It is ok to start with a cheap shared hosting package from about $4 a month and come with built in one click website installers and security features. These servers are professionally maintained with the latest software and features and often offer unlimited bandwidth and disk space – in practice I have found they are limited to 40 gb a month bandwidth and 30 gb disk space. Next step up is a VPS or virtual private server. These are several accounts hosted on a single server, as opposed to several thousand on a shared server. The disk space is typically 50gb – 100gb and ram might be up to 3gb. You might get several dedicated core chips. I have never found a VPS to be better value than a shared host. A dedicated server is a better jump to make and offer a lot more options. What makes me hungry at the moment is speed. A dedicated server means you can install all your own software – much of it open source and free. On my home server I have ubuntu, which is a popular version of linux, very stable, and having ubuntu on a dedicated server too means that you can test solutions to your problems on one machine before you apply them on another.
What host you choose depends basically on what you want to do. Internet hosting is an international business and things illegal to do on the internet in one country may not be illegal in another. File-sharing sites, file hosting sites, music download sites, exam paper websites all manage to found homes on the internet though they are illegal in many countries and are even banned from being accessed, like pirate bay, though this can easily be circumvented via a proxy.
These websites are hosted offshore. The servers are more expensive but this is often the only option for such websites.
A website like freeecampapers.com has been up continuously for about 6 years without interruption on http://www.shinjiru.com
Freeexampapers hosts copyrighted exam papers and means that students avoid the need to pay up to three pounds a paper to a company like edexcel. The website obviously cannot be hosted in the UK or USA because of copyright issues.