Many hosting providers may try to sway you with talk of the very high bandwidth levels they allow you and the massive amount of disk space but don't base your decision solely on this factor. The truth is over 90% of sites on Shared Web Hosting never get anywhere near there bandwidth levels, with a large number using less than a tenth their limit.
Websites is a kind of platform that will experience growth. Therefore, you need to find a company that allows that growth and not limit you from it. A good provider will have certain solutions for a consumer when the time comes. This is known as upgrades. Websites needs to upgrade their bandwidth, disk space and so on and it is important to get that service. This should be available without huge fees but affordable.
This is why I prefer Affordable Web Hosting plans. They give you more control of your website. If your site doesn't generate traffic right away you will not have to worry about having your web hosting service cancelled with no warning. You will also be given more tools to help grow your website and make your site more user friendly. Reliability is also something you get with paid hosting. They want to keep you as a customer so they will do more to keep you satisfied. Free web hosting can be crappy on purpose in hopes that you will upgrade to the paid service so you might as well get an affordable web hosting plan that fits your needs.
If you are planning to put up more websites, then it will be helpful to have the 'addon domains' feature. This will enable you to host multiple websites on one web hosting account without the need to incur additional costs.
So you have your Shared Web Hosting UK site planned out. You know who you want to visit your site, what you want them to do when they get there, and have a pretty good idea how you want your site to look. Now it is time to give your site a name. For a web site that means "registering a domain name". Domain names can be registered pretty cheaply (from about $8 to $15 depending on the domain type).
There are other TLD's that are Global such as .com and .net and these tend to bee used by people or businesses who require a global presence. Of course this will also make them very sort after and extremely valuable.
My one bit of good advice is do not sign up with any server for a long period of time to start with. It will be cheaper in the long run but at first just sign up for a little while. Try before you buy, make sure that the service provider is able to meet your expectations. If it does, then sign up for a longer period and save money.