Before you start, you should know that choosing the right place to host your site is a time-consuming, difficult, and crucial task. You can do it quick and dirty, and just pick the first reasonably cheap service you come across. I did this, for the original incarnation of the Nirman site.
I was new to website design, barely being past the I-can-code-some-HTML phase. An instructor I had for a community college website design class suggested Vipsnet as a hosting company. I went along with it...they were $60 a year, which seemed affordable, and they included domain registration.
This was the first mistake I made. They registered the domain, and I didn't think about it again...I found out much later that they'd registered it in their own names, so I had a lot of trouble breaking my domain free of their clutches when I wanted to switch hosts.
The second mistake was in choosing a hosting company without researching them adequately. I took my instructor's word for it, and soon entered a world of frequent outtages (some lasting several days), no technical support, and a truly terrible user experience. On one memorable occasion, their technical support people informed me that they had dumped my entire database as part of a routine "checking into my account" to answer a domain-name related issue.
To avoid this mistake, visit Web Hosting Talk Forums and spend some time researching hosting companies and reading user reviews.
The next company I used has been amazing. I switched to HostPC about a year and a half ago, on the recommendation of an Anandtech forums poster named Rossman...and have had an absolutely stellar experience since then.
The moral of the story: Research your hosting company carefully, and choose permanence and support over price. There may also be options for nonprofits to find free hosting (there are a very limited number of organizations that offer free hosting to good causes) ...but these options tend to vary widely in terms of what they offer and how much access you have to the server. HostPC, for example, doesn't hesitate to reconfigure or edit their server settings (within reason) when I ask them to for something special (I recently needed the php IMAP function enabled, for example, which necessitated a php recompile on their end) for free (and they're fast). Other companies would refuse, or charge you...especially one which is offering you hosting for free.
Don't get me wrong...there are some great organizations and individuals offering free hosting for nonprofits. Just choose carefully, and find the best fit for your organization and your goals.
