Web Hosting needs.

Too Many Options …

There are a lot of choices in the web hosting market and choosing a web hosting provider can be very confusing because there are many technical details involved, a lot of hype and every web host advertise its offer as being the best offer on the market.

This article contains information to help you choose the best hosting offer for your money. You can of course go and choose the most expensive package that is offered by a web host and normally you can't go wrong with that, but if you only have, let's say, a small presentational website that choice will be a waste of your money.

The first thing you need to do before you start looking for a web host is analyze your site(s). Well, you don't have to write ten pages report or be a web developer; just a "surface analysis" is enough. You should consider the following:

Website's Technical Details.
A website can be developed using different programming languages and web technologies. Here you should talk to the programmers that will or have developed your website and ask them about the technologies they will or have used. The most common used web technologies to develop a website are HTML, CGI-BIN, Perl, Python, PHP, ASP, and JSP. Some sites require Microsoft FrontPage Extensions or SSI (Server Side Include). You will need this information because, if for example, your site is developed with PHP version 4.4.2 and the web host's latest PHP installed is 4.0.2 then you will have to either ask your host to upgrade the PHP server on that computer or look for another host, because the site might not work as expected and it will not be the programmers' fault. The same thing goes with the database server. If your site uses a database to store and retrieve content or other information, you should know the type and version of the database used. Here, MySQL is the most popular database server used on web servers.

Conclusion: You don't need to remember or understand all these technologies, just ask the programmers and write them down so when you inquire your web host about a package, you know what to ask.

The Size of the Website(s).
We have discussed this aspect in the Hosting Explained article. In the past, due to hard drives technology at that time, disk space was a problem. But, hard drives' technology evolved and we can find now, bigger and bigger hard drives. The size of a web page remained the same because the text and the images didn't expand their size; on the contrary, we now have smaller images formats optimized for web display. Because of the files' small size of you might also consider the possibility to host on the same account multiple web sites, if the hosting package allows it.

So, for 95% of the websites, whatever the size of the hosting package is, it's more than enough. There are though a few exceptions, like:

• E-commerce websites that have large catalogs products with ample products' descriptions and products' images;
• Music stores where artists can upload songs and users can download them in MP3 formats. When it comes to size, the average file size for a song is 3-4 MB;
• Sites that need to store and archive news or members information (and they have thousands of members).

Estimated Bandwidth.
Bandwidth limit is one of the most important factors in choosing a hosting package. Your site will get successful sooner or later and that means an increased number of visitors and page hits. That implies that more and more data will be transferred and more and more bandwidth will be used. And bandwidth is very important because if the limit is reached the site either becomes unavailable or you get charged extra for the extra bandwidth used. And it's not cheap! If for example, you get 400 GB of data transfer included in the package that you paid for let's say $7.99, for any additional 1 GB over that limit you might be charged $3-4.

Also, if you move or copy files often from and to your hosting account, this means additional traffic. The bandwidth is also related to website's size, so if you have big e-commerce websites or sites that store lots of images and files available for download or upload, you should expect an increased bandwidth usage. It's hard to make an estimate, but let's say that in the beginning, a bandwidth of 200-250 GB per month is enough for most of the web sites.

The Price Factor

And because money makes the world go round, it all comes down to the price. Depending on your budget you can choose from three types of hosting: free, shared or dedicated/collocated.

Free or cheap hosting.
Yes, there are companies that offer disk space for free or for very small prices (e.g. $0.99/month). They usually create a sub domain of their own domain (e.g. www.yourdomain.freehosting.org) but some web hosts even let you use your own domain name. In exchange for the free space, they will put advertisements on the top or the on other areas of your web pages. Besides advertisements, they don't usually offer a control panel for your hosting account, database server access, PHP scripting or other scripts installed. But, if you have a small, simple site and you don't care too much about reliability or performance, free web hosting might be right for you. Why pay for a limousine when you only need a small car to get from point A to point B?

Shared hosting.
It's the most common type of hosting package and it's the best choice for most of the future webmasters. You rent some space and bandwidth on a server and for a low price you get a lot of features and technical support. The offer is rich, starting from very low cost plans (around $5-6 per month). More expensive plans ($15-25) usually offer more space and more bandwidth.

Dedicated/Collocated hosting.
If your website is a critical business then it's worth spending some money on a dedicated server. The biggest advantage offered by dedicated servers is that you will not have reliability problems that might occur with shared hosting if your site stays on a "crowded" server. Also, you can configure and install the dedicated server to your liking. Of course, all this comes with a price: dedicated servers usually start at around $100 per month. With Collocated hosting you'll actually buy the hardware on which the website is hosted, not just rent it.

So, before searching for a hosting package, analyze your hosting needs by taking the following into consideration:

• Know the technologies used in building your site;
• Based on what your site will offer, estimate your bandwidth and website size;
• Set a budget that you wish to spend on hosting.