If you have a Shared Web Hosting account, you may not realize it, but you also share the cost of server maintenance with other clients. This is a big reason why a shared account is reasonably priced. Also, your provider is expected to be responsible for security updates, installation of server software and any other server responsibilities.
There are limits as to what can be put on the webpage though. Every website will be different just like every web hosting company. There is going to be a lot of disk space for some companies that specialize is web hosting but not all of them are going to have an unlimited amount of space.
Which all brings me back to what is Affordable Web Hosting? I have my pages hosted at GVO and I pay a higher monthly cost than if I used certain other cheaper hosts.
MySQL, Perl, Frontpage Extension, all of the features that you get with any decent web hosting account. You'll get them here. Like I said, these feature are pretty much the same everywhere, so don't worry about them.
When you are looking for PHP Hosting, some basic features you need to remember. Like as cPanel this feature easily allows you to install shopping carts, blogs, forums, MySQL database. Ensure that you're hosting provider gives you 24/7 support. Disk space is another thing that you might to remember but it is mostly depending on how much data your Website will manage. Also take look at how much disk space may offer your PHP Shared Web Hosting UK hosting provider. You should make sure that you get sufficient space to suit the type of Website you are developing. But obliviously this kind of things is depends on your needs.
Windows or Linux: Do you know if your site needs to run on a MS Windows server with FrontPage extensions or does it need PERL, PHP or MySQL? These things you will need to find out if you intent to run a successful small business web site.
Cheap web host providers are the ones that likely go bankrupt in the web hosting business. This will result to the shutting down of web sites - and this means, loss of business for your part. Moreover, transferring to another web host entails a lot of inconvenience for yourself as well as for your clients.