Comparing hosting companies can really be an apples and oranges thing. There is a whole spectrum of services they may offer, and the uptime/service offered can also vary. You need to start by figuring out exactly what your needs are. Do you need five 9s dependability, or will the occasional weekend outage not be an issue? How much storage space do you need, and how much data transfer are you looking at per month? Will you need any server side include files? CGI? ASP?
For the design of the site itself, do you have the skills required? There's more to it than just dragging and dropping things in Frontpage. If you want your page to show up at all in the search engines, there is a fair bit of optimization that needs to take place. And when it comes to the actual look of the site, sometimes no website is better than a poorly designed site. Your website will be the first impression some people have of your company, so you want it to be as professional as possible.
Some companies will do the entire package for you...design, hosting, registration, etc.
This company,
https://www.spincaster.com/default.htm, was started by one of the techs I used to work with. I think they do great work, and the owner is a great guy that I have a world of respect for. They did some work for our department, and my wife has done some design work for them. Their servers are hosted from a data centre that is managed 24/7 with all sorts of redundancy. I've recommended them to a few people, and I've never had any complaints at all.
