The good ones definitely are worth your time. Good web hosting companies offer these services free of charge, and in return, ask people to advertise on their websites. The revenue from the ads is directly taken by the web hosting companies. Now, in doing so, they also remain profitable.
Features: The basic plan called Tiny offers 75MB space and 1GB bandwidth per month with a yearly payment. The next one called Small is also suitable for starters, which offers 400MB disk space and 10GB bandwidth per month. One good feature of A Small Orange is that they have a policy of "no artificial limits", which according to them is placing no restriction on services that do not cost them, like adding domains, Emails etc. They claim, other A2 Hosting service providers place restrictions on these services to charge extra when you need them. As a result, they offer unlimited databases, sub-domains, add-on domains, FTP accounts and email forwaders etc. A Small Orange places restrictions on services that cost them, like disk space, bandwidth, memory size etc.
99.9% up time guarantee is another feature that should be in the hosting company you are going to choose. Up time in the term of hosting services means that the amount of time your website will be up and running. There are tons of services out there which promise 100% up time guarantee, but believe me that only one or two out there really fulfill their promise.
To answer this question you should take into account if blogging is serious business for you or you just want to share a few posts with your friends. There are some weblog services like blogspot where you can create your weblog very quickly. You do not need to setup anything -- just fill in simple registration form and you can start to write your blog. The advantage of these services is that they can be very easily managed. However, if something goes wrong you can not do anything. Since you use a sub-domain which belongs to the blogging service you can not even more your weblog to shared website hosting company because you are not owner of the domain name.
You will also not see the same type of customer support that you would normally see. You need solid customer support in order to take care of everything that is going on with your business site. If something arises, you need to know that you can come to the customer support team and get everything taken care of quickly. Communication is key when it comes to the get more info right web hosting. They need their contact information readily available, and there needs to be more than one way to contact them.
It is good to note that not all popular small business web hosting services suite your needs. You can look out for less popular but competent services. They are more cost effective as they don't ask for very high fees.