When you are in the market to find web hosting and/or a domain name you can often find a great deal if you are prepared to shop around. A lot of people find a good hosting package or domain retailer and every time they need one, they automatically buy one from there. If this sounds like familiar then you could be throwing money away each and every time you do it. Different companies will have various deals throughout the year, you should treat every purchase as your first in order to get the maximum savings.
With the ever growing amount of competition in this specific industry, companies will be fighting for your custom so they will bring bigger, better offers out in order to make you choose them. Don't be afraid to use this to your advantage.
In the past you used to have your domain name registered with one company and then a hosting package with a different company, this was simply down to the fact that the domain registrars prices were sometimes unreasonable and stand alone hosting companies were much cheaper. It also helped with the fact that it wasn't hard at all to get the domain and hosting linked together so you could begin making your website within minutes of purchase. As time has moved on various domain registrars have begun creating packages enabling you to purchase a domain name and hosting from them at the same time. This not only gave you a bigger saving but it kept everything simple and just having the one renewal fee and everything in the same place. You would hate to be having to check a number of companies just to ensure that everything is working as intended.
If you do your research you can actually find certain companies out there who are willing to give you free hosting if you buy a domain name from them. These are definitely worth checking out as they may actually be cheaper to register the domain in the first place. Be sure to find out the renewal costs before you make any decisions because the low price may just be an introductory offer they have on. Look out for other free features such as email setup, parking/sale pages, forwarding, beginner's guides to making a website and more. Some even offer initial assistance and a free web page to get you started if you are not 100% sure what you are doing.
Another important factor to look out for is the support, if you are making money from your website you will want 24/7 support available in the event your sites goes down for any unknown reason. For every second your website is unavailable it will be costing you money.
Just because the hosting may be free it doesn't stop you checking the features of it, you have to ensure that it will give you sufficient space and bandwidth for you to get the full potential out of your website or there is no point in using it - regardless if it's free.
With all this being said you will definitely see the benefit from buying a hosting/domain name package as you will have everything in the one place, the once renewal fee and they will often give you a discounted price if you plan on buying in bulk.