ok guys pls dont bombard me with IT speak im quite the technophobe here...
basically im looking for hosting services w domain name registration that are affordable for a school society type website. seeing the entire viewership will be from the same area, should i get a hosting service that is local or will any country do.
In theory, if the data centre is located in the same area it'll be slightly faster, though in practice physical location doesn't matter as much as customer service etc. AFF is hosted on a server physically located in Germany, but most of our users are in the US or the UK and me and Amy are in the UK.
For a small site I would buy a domain name from somewhere like godaddy (
http://www.godaddy.com) and point it at the free web space 99% of ISPs give out. If your ISP does give you free web space then contact them and ask if a domain can be pointed at it.
The other option is to try 1&1 (this is the company we use for hosting all our sites) at
http://www.1and1.com. They seem to have quite reasonable service.
One thing to watch out for with domain registration is to carefully check that you can easily transfer away if you have problems and with hosting try to find out what their average uptime is and how secure they are. Our previous hosting provider shoved all their customers on one webserver and had some serious security issues I won't discuss in public (suffice to say I would not want to trust them with a business site where credit card details etc may be exchanged).
Hope this helps