Choosing a Web Hosting Plan

Different Kinds Of Web Hosting

There are different kinds of web hosting setups and dependent upon your website and budget, any of these may be the right type. This is not a discussion of the features a web hosting plan may offer - just a description of general types of web hosting.

1. Shared Hosting
This is the most common (and cheapest) type of web hosting. With paid shared hosting (aka "virtual hosting") you pay a monthly fee and get a portion of the server's space. The cheapest plans may only offer a small amount of disk space and a low amount of bandwidth (although most limits are well beyond what someone browsing this tutorial will probably need). With cheap virtual hosting plans you maybe one site amongst hundreds on the same server - which can effect reliability. More expensive plans might help alleviate this concern, but it shouldn't plague the average user.

2. Dedicated Hosting
With dedicated hosting you have a full server dedicated to your website. This gives you a lot more freedom and you could potentially host hundreds of your own websites. Typically you will have access to the server just like you have access to your PC at home. Dedicated servers are normally reserved for large ecommerce websites, sites that get a lot of visitors (thousands a day), or for people that want to start their own hosting company and sell shared hosting accounts. A dedicated server is more reliable, but also much more expensive being at least $100 a month (vs $1 - $20 range of a shared hosting plan). If you're not sure if you need a dedicated host, then you probably don't...

3. Colocated Hosting
This is very similar to dedicated hosting, except that you own the server rather than rent it. Your server is placed in the datacenter and connected to the Internet through the web hosting providers Internet connection. You will then pay a fee for maintenance and bandwidth.

So What Web Hosting Plan Is The Right One To Buy?

You have a lot of choices in the web hosting market and it can be very confusing to find the best deal that meets your needs.

The 1st step before you start to look for a web hosting company is to determine what you actually need. As tempting as it might be to rush into the plan that offers the best of everything, analyze what you need the service to provide. Odds are that if you're not using your website to swap music or store a lot of pictures, you probably won't come close to using up the storage and bandwidth limits. However, if your site is graphic-intensive and you plan on bringing a lot of people to view your albums, you might need to put down a bit more cash.

Determining Your Needs

1. Storage
Web pages (html) are normally very small - on average 40 - 50KB. This means you can store a lot of web pages in a small amount of storage. Images take up more space, but unless you have a big database driven site it is unlikely that you will need very much disk space.

You can see above that even a web site with a lot of pages doesn't necessarily require a lot of disk space. Many web hosting plans offer large amounts of disk space to lure in customers. While it doesn't hurt to have the extra space, unless your site is massive, you'll probably be fine with about 200 MB.

2. Bandwidth
Bandwidth is always stated as a monthly limit in either MB or GB. This is the amount of actual data that can be transferred from the web server that holds your website, to the browser of the person who is looking at your website. If you go over the limit, then either you will have to be an extra fee, or your website will not be available until the start of the next month. The amount of bandwidth you use is obviously related to the amount of traffic (visitors) that you receive. 99% of websites are not going to need more than 50 GB a month of Bandwidth.

Transfer is usually listed in gigabytes (billions of bytes). After the transfer limit is reached for the month, you will need to pay extra for additional data transfer at higher rates. For example, if an average visitor to your site views 3 HTML pages of 20 KB (thousands of bytes) each and 8 small embedded pictures of 10 KB each, and you get 500 visitors per day, you will require at least (3 * 20 + 8 * 10) * 500 * 30 = 2,100,000 KB = 2.1 GB of transfer per month.

3. Email Accounts
How many email accounts will you need? Normally 10 is enough, but if you think you might want more then determine how many you would like to have.

4. Free Domains
Some companies offer free domains (ie www.YOURNAME.com) as an incentive to choose their hosting plans.

5. Subdomains
This is the amount of subdomains provided free of charge by the hosting company (ie http://SUBDOMAIN.yourname.com). You can usually purchase additional subdomains if you need more than are offered in the package.

6. SSL
SSL is a method of encrypting sensitive information (like credit card numbers). You will need an SSL if you are planning on doing any kind of transactions or transfer of data that will need to be secure. Some hosting companies will offer a free shared SSL certificate to use. If you would like to have your own private SSL certificate, most companies will offer this option at an extra price. Some of the more advanced plans will include a free private SSL Certificate.

7. SSH
This is a process of connecting to the web server that hosts your web site. When you SSH into a computer, it is as though you were sitting at the computer itself. It is a more advanced option than using FTP to maintain your web site (transfer of files, creating directories, setting permissions, etc).

8. Set-Up Fee
This will be discounted to $0 with most web hosting companies if you sign up for a year of web hosting.

9. Support
You need to ask yourself questions like do you want phone support, or will email support be ok? Do you want support 24 hours a day? If you have a small website that is not critical (ie you don't pay your mortgage with website earnings) then you probably don't need phone support or 24/7 support. It costs web hosting companies to provide this type of support, which they will pass on to you in the form of higher monthly fees.

10. Server Type
If you have a small website, then it is unlikely that you will need to select a particular type of server for your website. Windows 2000 server web hosting tends to be a little bit more expensive than Linux. If you need to run a Microsoft SQL server database, or use Microsoft Active Server pages then you should choose Windows 2000. If you have no clue what these things even are then you don't need Windows 2000. Again, e-Comparer.com is run off of a Linux box (Apache server, written in PHP accessing MySQL databases - long live open source!).

11. Other Features like Databases, Server Side Scripting
Web hosting plans can offer a myriad of confusing features. For the small website it is unlikely that you will ever need to know about any of them. If you are a web designer creating complex database driven sites then you will already know what you need. If after creating your site you have never heard of PHP, ASP, ColdFusion, Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL - then chances are that you don't need to worry about any of these things. If you plan to add a message board to your website then you will need a MySQL database. As MySQL is open-source (freeware), it is the most common database used with discussion boards.