Hey, How do I find a place to host my webpage?

You bought your domain name now you also have to find a server to host the webpage. It's like you bought a car and now you need a parking garage for it.

As an author you are now considered a commercial webpage. You are selling your books through your webpage, so you can no longer use free places like geocities to host your page. You can use them but you must now use their pay hosting. Every hosting place has strict policies about commercial sites. So if you had a webpage on a free server and now you are a published author selling your work through you webpage, double check your hosting places requirements.
Server costs vary considerably.

For instance, if you have a mortgage company page and you need the server to have a database and special bells and whistles for your page you will have to pay alot more than if you have a regular webpage from which you are selling your books.

The hosting of an authors website should cost between $10.00 - $40.00 a month. If you have ALOT of traffic you may be paying more for extra bandwidth. If you have alot of bells and whistle on your page you could end up paying more depending what software you site needs. But an average 5-10 author website, with info about your, your books, reviews, news, contest etc. - should be within the price range I talked about above.

Here are some things to consider when looking for a hosting place:

Be wary of any one time fee for a lifetime of server space. This sounds great but I know of over a dozen of these places that went under. The people who paid $300.00 and were counting on having a server for life were left in the lurch.

Most servers will ask for a one time set up fee, but be wary if it's more than the fees for one month.

Check around and find out how long the server you are looking at has been in business. Honestly anyone can put up a server (I have alot of friends who run them out of their houses) and if they decide they aren't making any money they can just close up shop and your webpage is suddenly down. So look for servers that have been around for five or six years (this would mean they survived the big Internet shake up of the last few years).
Go daddy has hosting servers. So does Yahoo. Many webdesigners have their own hosting.

Questions you should ask if you are hosting with a webdesigner - Are webpage updates included in the monthly hosting price? If not how much do you charge hourly?

Make sure you know the terms of your hosting plan. Some places require you to pay monthly, while others want a two year contract.