Hi,
In response to your questions;
1) You can use a webhost in any country you want - however, it's best to host in the country of your target audience, allowing better visibility across search engines for that country (arguably) and allowing faster page loads for your visitors.
2) This depends on yourself, do you feel you could do it yourself? how much does it mean to you - is it the front of a business, and a clients first port of call, or is it a hobby. You can buy templates and modify them, or you can hire a web designer to create you a site and use your own webhosting.
Of course many web designers provide hosting for a time, but they are generally resellers of resellers, and as such, getting support can be problematic.
SEO is a tough one, it's hard to get right, and the people who know it inside out usually charge a lot for this service - it again depends how serious your site is to be - will people be referred to it by yourself/others, or are you relying solely on search engine traffic.
3) I've never heard anything about either, do a few searches for reviews on them - but as with anything online, take them with a pinch of salt - people aren't always who they say they are.
If its a small site, a few pages and a few images, anything from 50 - 100mb storage, and a couple of gb bandwidth; make sure your host allows you to expand as and when you need it, the last thing you want is to have to move webhosts when your site is at its peak!
If it's going to be content rich, and include large media files etc, obviously you'll need more space. If you're getting the site done prior to purchasing hosting, you'll be able to check how big it is, and base your needs on that.
Hope this helps
