My three blogs are hosted on Typepad. I really like Typepad for the ease of use of their service and the fact that you get templates you can use and also easily do a custom header and graphics for your blog. I don't mind paying a monthly fee, and in fact, since I monetized this blog last Aril, (Google ads, sponsorships, and affiliate program through Amazon) my blog has paid for itself and more.
However, there are times when you need more webhosting than Typepad can handle. For example, I am frequently jealous of some of the goodies you can add to Wordpress coded blogs for example the page curl feature. Typepad does not have this.
You also want to go for real webhosting if you need to do web commerce (shopping cart), mysql, php, have a forum, etc.
If you are looking for imformation on web hosting a good site I have been working with is webhostinggeeks.com. In particular their webhosting blog has a lot of interesting articles on what to factor in when you are choosing a web hosting company.
One interesting article from the blog recently talked about how Host Gator, a web hosting company, is using buying carbon offsets to offset its carbon emissions.
