Domain Hosting

I have been elected to create a website for our church.  The pastor would
like to have our own domain name.  We have been shopping around for domain
hosting services and have found some local providers.  The thing is while I
am fairly confident in my design abilities I have never had a domain name,
and do not know the correct questions to ask.  I do not want to get us into
a situation where we are hosted on a server that has repeated outages, or
where we would have other problems.

Can anyone make suggestions as to:

1) Questions to ask, or things to look at when selecting a host site?

2) Online or printed resources that would help us find a host site or
prepare us for the process?

3) Reasonable (inexpensive not cheap) services that we could host with?  (We
are a small church with very limited resources).

TIA
Charles Nance
http://users.elknet.net/lionscub/

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