I'm putting together my author page. I've decided to spring for a hosted website as opposed to one of the free ones and I want to make sure I get my money's worth. Suggestions?
I've been with Total Choice (totalchoicehosting.com) for years and can recommend them unreservedly. Good pricing and excellent support.
I use Server Canyon and have been extremely happy with it. I've never had any problems. In all fairness, I will disclose that I'm biased. It's my son's business. https://servercanyon.com For technical and pre-sales questions, contact: judah@servercanyon.com
I've been with asmallorange.com for about 10 years now, and have nothing but positive to say. Their plans are priced well (i.e. $35 / year for 500 MB storage / 5 GB bandwidth as an entry-level plan), and their customer service has generally exceeded my expectations. Unless you're planning on making a really flashy page or expecting tens of thousands of unique visitors per month, you won't really need much. I'd just be wary of web hosts that offer unlimited, unmetered or excessively large storage/bandwidth at low prices -- those services are neither free nor unlimited, and if someone else on your server is hogging loads of storage or bandwidth, the speed at which your website loads is likely to suffer. (Conversely, additional subdomains, databases, email and FTP accounts are free, yet many web hosts charge extra for those.)
I too would highly recommend ASmallOrange. If it's just an author page you can get away with a minimum hosting plan, and ASmallOrange offers one for only $5/month. It's been a while since I've used them, but I used them for 4-5 years before I had to scale up to a larger server, and they offered cPanel with most features and excellent customer support.