Hostgator will help you out if one of your plugins causes your blog to crash upon update (and it WILL). Not every shared host will do that as they consider WP to be 3rd party and not their responsibility.

Originally Posted by jwee

I would recommend Wordpress.com.Its free and its the one who developed the wordpress software.

According to the Terms of Service, you can NOT place affiliate ads or AdSense on a Wordpress.com hosted blog. So if you plan to do either of these forget Wordpress.com - you will have to get your own hosting and use a Wordpress.org blogging platform via Fantastico in your Control Panel of your hosting - It is VERY easy to install a blog this way - 3 clicks.