I decided to try out WordPress and was wondering which host to go with (taking cost into consideration). I'm pretty new at this, so any advice is much appreciated.
Fatcow is running a special for $88 a year. Have not had any problems with them. 1&1 sucks. But that is my opinion, and opinions of others. Most hosting is pretty cheap. Just dive in and get your feet wet.
hostgator isn't too bad - I'd stay far away from Xisto and computinghost.com though they are the worst host I've ever had - I had maybe 25% uptime if that....and if you get more than 100 hits per day they suspend your account (even if they guarantee a 25 gig bandwidth, seriously bs in my book...*end vent*
Clever Monkey Domains offers hosting for as low as $3.99 and has a step-by-step installation process for WordPress that's very easy. (Full disclosure: This is my site). Hostgator and Bluehost are both excellent hosts. I have several clients that use hostgator and love it. I've used Bluehost in the past and they have great service, but it's a little more expensive.
To run wordpress you need web hosting company which offer PHP and MySQL database. In these days such features offer almost every web host. So you should concentrate more on the reliability of the web hosting provider - check out web hosts uptime etc. If you are beginner you should consider to look for company which offer wordpress preinstalled. This way you can install it from your web hosting control pannel by a few clicks of mouse.
I use godaddy.com, but it depends on your expected bandwith usage. My current project I plan to use wordpress but I also plan to have an influx of people visiting and I'm leaning towards mediatemple because their dv plan gives you 1TB of bandwith.
You may end up having your site on the slowest server on the planet. My www.idowriting.com (check out the speed, you'll be impressed) used to take 15 minutes to fully load. Took me couple of months to get my site transferred...
2500 MB Web Space 20,000 MB Bandwidth 1000 Mail Boxes 1000 Autoresponders £300 Free Software Free and Fast Support eXtend Control Panel 2.0 Plus Much More £2.49 p/m or £24.95 p/a Thats what i offer!