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Let's say you're shopping around for a lot to build your dream house on. Your real estate agent takes you to what she calls "a prime piece of property." Five acres of beautiful wooded land with a small pond, just off a main highway. It's a half-hour drive to the nearest town--far enough to have peace and quiet, but not too far to be inconvenient for weekly grocery shopping. And then the agent floors you with the asking price--"It's only $12,000."
Twelve thousand? you think. For this beautiful piece of land? What a deal! You're about to say "I'll take it" when she adds one more thing...
"However, there aren't any utilities here. You'll have to arrange for all of that yourself."
Not such a great deal now, is it?
This is the kind of trouble you may run into if you choose your website hosting company based on price. It may seem like a good deal, but if the company doesn't provide everything your website needs, you're choosing the wrong company. Here are a few things to consider when choosing a new website hosting company or evaluating your current one.
In case you didn't know... What exactly is a website hosting company or website hosting provider?
A website hosting company owns and maintains one or more servers--specialized computers that store your website's files and make them available to other people through the Internet. It is possible to set up your own server, but buying this service from a company will give you access to various scripting language support and traffic statistics at a much lower price than you could manage on your own. Unless you are expecting to have vast amounts of traffic on your website, or will transmit a large amount of data (such as having video and audio that are downloaded a great deal), it is more time- and cost-efficient to have another company host your website.
How much disk space do you need?
One of the criteria that usually separate one website hosting plan from another is the amount of space you get on the server for your website files. This is similar to space on your computer's hard drive, and is calculated the same way--in gigabytes, megabytes, and kilobytes. You can calculate the amount of space you need by adding up the size of all the website files. Don't forget to include all the graphics and images.
How much bandwidth do you need?
Bandwidth is calculated by the size of each file a visitor to you website sees multiplied by how many times a visitor sees it. For example, if your home page file is 11K (kilobytes) and it has two 7K images on it, that will add up to 25K of material transferred every time someone looks at your home page. So if you have 700 visitors in a month who look at your home page, that will be 17,500K transferred, or about 17M (megabytes). This will be calculated for every page a visitor looks at, as well as any video, audio, or other files they download onto their computer.
Most website hosting companies set a limit on the bandwidth you can use per month, but make sure that is the case when comparing plans. Remember, one gigabyte equals 1024 megabytes, and one megabyte equals 1024 kilobytes.
What email options do you get?
Some things to look for are the number of email addresses you can have, mailbox storage size, POP3/SMTP service (you can send and receive email from your account), if you can have email aliases or forwarding (an address that sends all messages to another address's mailbox), online email access, and spam filtering. Consider your company's current and future needs when evaluating this.
Twelve thousand? you think. For this beautiful piece of land? What a deal! You're about to say "I'll take it" when she adds one more thing...
"However, there aren't any utilities here. You'll have to arrange for all of that yourself."
Not such a great deal now, is it?
This is the kind of trouble you may run into if you choose your website hosting company based on price. It may seem like a good deal, but if the company doesn't provide everything your website needs, you're choosing the wrong company. Here are a few things to consider when choosing a new website hosting company or evaluating your current one.
In case you didn't know... What exactly is a website hosting company or website hosting provider?
A website hosting company owns and maintains one or more servers--specialized computers that store your website's files and make them available to other people through the Internet. It is possible to set up your own server, but buying this service from a company will give you access to various scripting language support and traffic statistics at a much lower price than you could manage on your own. Unless you are expecting to have vast amounts of traffic on your website, or will transmit a large amount of data (such as having video and audio that are downloaded a great deal), it is more time- and cost-efficient to have another company host your website.
How much disk space do you need?
One of the criteria that usually separate one website hosting plan from another is the amount of space you get on the server for your website files. This is similar to space on your computer's hard drive, and is calculated the same way--in gigabytes, megabytes, and kilobytes. You can calculate the amount of space you need by adding up the size of all the website files. Don't forget to include all the graphics and images.
How much bandwidth do you need?
Bandwidth is calculated by the size of each file a visitor to you website sees multiplied by how many times a visitor sees it. For example, if your home page file is 11K (kilobytes) and it has two 7K images on it, that will add up to 25K of material transferred every time someone looks at your home page. So if you have 700 visitors in a month who look at your home page, that will be 17,500K transferred, or about 17M (megabytes). This will be calculated for every page a visitor looks at, as well as any video, audio, or other files they download onto their computer.
Most website hosting companies set a limit on the bandwidth you can use per month, but make sure that is the case when comparing plans. Remember, one gigabyte equals 1024 megabytes, and one megabyte equals 1024 kilobytes.
What email options do you get?
Some things to look for are the number of email addresses you can have, mailbox storage size, POP3/SMTP service (you can send and receive email from your account), if you can have email aliases or forwarding (an address that sends all messages to another address's mailbox), online email access, and spam filtering. Consider your company's current and future needs when evaluating this.
About the Author:
MyHosting.com is one of the internet's premier affordable webhosting companies. They have affordable hosting packages for businesses and individuals, including packages that include Windows hosting! Find the right package and set of features that fit your needs today!
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