Managed Hosting Company

friends recommend me a good web hosting company that is affordable?
Dear friends I am going to start a website, and I want to know what all that a good web hosting company must offer.I am ready to pay about 6$ per month or even more if it is worthy. I am new to such a project like starting a website.What all infrastructure should i need on my side for doing this.I want to add forums,chatrooms etc in my website.What other knowledge should i have such as computer programming languages etc.Can i manage my website from my own pc.What should be my investment and I am ready to spend a lot of time in this.plz help me dear ones.I am from india. Thankyou dear friends,all ur information are so useful for this novice. thankyou friends I am not able to choose the best answer as all seems to be informative but anyways i feel knitting guy is more informative than other.Again my hearty thanks for all the answerers.

1) You can try http://www.fiestadomains.com They are affordable. They have a Website Tonight feature that provide 1000+ web templates that you can use to create professional looking web site. You don't need to know any HTML and any programming experience in order to use this tool. Their hosting fees ranged from $2.49 a month to $14.99 a month. I am not sure about chatroom; but photo gallery, forums and blogs come with all web hosting service. 2) To tell what you programming languages you need, I need to know what you are trying to accomplish first. If you need your web site to interact with a database, you will need to know some kind of server side programming technology (like ColdFusion, ASP .Net, PHP, ...etc.) and SQL (a database query language). 3) What we, web developers, do is that we would have a test server on our own computers. We would make changes and test on our own computers. When we are ready, we will then transfer the files over to the production server. The Website Tonight feature that I mentioned in item I is only for the web templates; this feature does not include database or anything like that. So, if you want to manage your web site (with a database), you will need to set up a test server somewhere. If you have additional questions, please feel free to contact me.

Another question. If I set up a website do I have to have my computer on 24/7?
I want to set up this website for fun. So I want something I can manage. If you hire a host company ddoes my computer have to be on 24/7?

No, the web hosting server is on 24 hours. Not your PC. Annette

cPanel automatic backups?
I have an account with my hosting company who offer me cPanel access to manage what is going on. But I have a major concern about my mail, and backups. I am someone who relies on email for life, and the thought of waking up one morning to find all my mail gone is terrifying! Is there a way that I can set cPanel to automatically backup my mail, or my home directory?

Depending on what version your host is using there is a backup option. Daily or Weekly backup that you can download from your cpanel site. Also your provider should be using backups as well. On the back end there is an automatic backup system built-in.

websites ip address?
what will people see when they check an ip address of a certain "website"? is it the computer location where the website was created or being managed? or the ip address of the web hosting company? thanks.

Yes Ip address depicts the web hosting company. It is the location where the site contents are been hosted in. There can be many ip address for the same computer & hosting. its hard to memories of ip addresses, so what ever we type in address bar is converted on to Ip address, by a Domain Name Server (DNS). DNS is like a receptionist when someone query's on about meeting a person she can guide you through. eg:- www.google.lk after pressing go... Ur sending the request to DNS server given by Internet provider.. and it shows the ip addresses of the particular content ur looking for... if u could go to command prompt and type nslookup and type any kind of web address , you can resolve their ip addresses. Hope it helps ;) This is what i learned while doing MCSE. ask if theres any quries.