Well your enot actually going to be doing that much with the host interface... maybe adding a subdomain or adding users if youre using that for authentication or something... but other than that everything should be done through ftp or ssh/sftp so the admin interface is fairly irrelevant.

I've had good luck with the following web hosts:

www.bravenet.com/

www.lunarpages.com/

www.qualserv.net/

The playing field is getting pretty level in the hosting world, so I don't really see any major advantage of one over the other. The two items of note that I'd recommend looking into are:

~ If you are looking into having PHP/MySQL in your website, make sure the host offers, and you select, having your site hosted on a Linux server and not a Windows server. GoDaddy's hosting offers both as well.

~ Lunarpages seems to have the lowest prices at first glance, and we're using it for an Advanced Dreamweaver/PHP/MySQL class and it seems to be pretty solid.

And offhand, I think that while hosting your site on your own computer sounds good at first, I'd just as soon let a hosting company deal with all of the spam and bandwidth issues you might run into. That's just me though, the last thing I want to do is spend time debugging Apache issues when I could be learning a new Flash technique.

Regardless, good luck and let us know what you end up doing.

SMSapphire

I'm not sure if I've found any host that's particularly more user friendly than another. Competition drives the cost of goods and services to their marginal cost. Right now that cost is around $4.95/month for Linux hosting with PHP/MySQL.

I'm not sure if you'll find something for $50/year that won't compromise the quality of service or hosting.

Here's how I found my hosting.

1. I got recommendations. From different social networks, from friends, from webhostingtalk.com
2. I came up with a list of twenty hosting companies that sounded promising from comments and praise.
3. I Googled complaints on each one of those companies. Any company that had even a single of complaint of continued billing after you tried to cancel, I crossed off the list. I crossed of the list companies that had large complaints of downtime.
4. After that I ended up with a list of 4. I asked around for domains of people hosted with those companies. Typed in the domains at www.myipneighbors.com/ to see how many domains there were per server.
5. After that I compared prices and features and that's how I ended up with the two domains I'm using now. Both are England by coincidence.

I can't really seem to differentiate between hosting companies. There's no brand and one seems exactly like the other. The interfaces all look the same to me after I login. The only thing that would differentiate a good hosting company would be how good their customer service is. Since I've never had any issues with the companies I'm with, I've never had to call or email their customer service.

Since you've never designed a site here is my two cents.

Design with Photoshop. Build with a text editor (I use Dreamweaver on PC and I've used BBEdit on Mac)

Don't just open up a WYSIWIG Editor and start dragging images and typing in text. The reason for this is simple. Editors (even WYSIWIG Editors) are building tools, not design tools. It's like making a lamp. Pen and paper is your design tool and the lathe and chisel are the build tools.

You don't have to draw the design of the lamp first. You can just turn on the lathe and start carving, but at this point you're just building and the design you end up with may not be the design that works for what you wanted. Same goes with web sites.