How Much Should You Pay For Quality Website - Blog Hosting?

By Tom Thomas

If you own a company or are considering an online business, you will most likely want to set up a paid web hosting account. Although there are free website hosting companies out there, their reliability is poor and you will have to put up with random ads that may not be related to your business or that may be down-right objectionable.

So, paid website hosting is the way to go for reliability and complete control of your site. These days paid hosting accounts are inexpensive, making them the preferred solution for anyone even remotely serious about their web presence.

But what exactly is a website host?

Briefly, it's a place to put your website so that the rest of the world can visit it. Hosting companies run web servers. Simply put, web servers are computers that are attached to the Internet and can communicate with all other computers online. And that means your customers!

The bad news: To maintain this service costs hosting companies money, so there are charges for you to host your website on their servers. The good news: A typical website owner's costs used to be quite high, but prices have come down considerably in recent years. And, at the same time, the features offered have become much more robust.

How much does web hosting cost?

Anywhere from $3.99 to hundreds per month. But for the typical small business or online entrepreneur, quality feature-filled website hosting can be purchased for $3.99 - $7.99 per month.

Why the range in pricing? As you might imagine $3.99 / month web hosting packages normally include fewer features than their $7.99 / month counterparts.

To give you an idea of the differences, let's consider two of the most critical features of any web hosting package: bandwidth and disk space.

What is Bandwidth?

Bandwidth is also called "data transfer" or "traffic". So if you see any of those terms associated with a gigabyte or gb or GB value then that feature is actually bandwidth.

It sounds like a very technical term, but bandwidth is simply the number of gigabytes of data that your website is allowed to transfer from the web hosting server to your users in one month. A gigabyte is roughly a billion bytes of data.

You'll want enough bandwidth to insure that all your customers can access your website without exceeding your monthly data transfer quota. These days you will see typical monthly bandwidth offered in the range of 300gb all the way up to unlimited!

To give you an idea of the amount of bandwidth you may need...

For the average business website with a few thousand visitors per month and less than 100 average-sized web pages, 300gb is probably many gigabytes beyond what's needed. But you may have spurts of traffic, so the extra included gigabytes of bandwidth can be useful to have.

(For a detailed explanation of Bandwidth requirements, please read: Web Hosting Features: What is Bandwidth and Why Should I Care?)

What is Disk Space?

Web space or disk space is the total number of megabytes or gigabytes a web hosting company gives you to hold the HTML and images that will be displayed on your website when your web pages are viewed.

However, your web space also includes website log files, FrontPage extensions, PHP files, CGI programs, externally linked CSS and Javascript files, and usually email accounts as well as space for your databases. (For a detailed explanation of these terms, please read: Web Hosting Features: What is Web Space and How Much is Enough?)

How much space do you need?

As in our example above, if your website consists of 100 pages with just a few medium-sized graphics per page, then you probably only need 20 megabytes (that's megabytes, not gigabytes) of disk space. However, there are other website features like forms automation, photo hosting, data gathering, or blogging that can substantially increase your need for disk space.

Not to worry... because disk space is cheap for your hosting company, they can offer a lot of space for a low monthly rate. For example, even the least expensive paid hosting company offers 10gb of disk space, which is almost overkill for the typical small business website.

Of course, if you're running a membership website or allowing your users to upload data or pictures, then you might need almost unlimited amounts of disk space. Fortunately, there are inexpensive web hosting packages that offer just that. In fact, many of the $7.99 / month hosting packages offer unlimited disk space (as well as unlimited bandwidth).

The best thing to do is to read reviews of hosting companies that you are considering and only pay for features that you'll use. In the event you become wildly successful (and I hope you do), be sure your hosting company can grow with you. They should be able to offer additional features, like increased bandwidth and disk space, as you need them.

Looking for inexpensive and reliable web hosting for your website or blog? You'll be surprised at the low prices you'll pay for quality website hosting today. For the latest reviews of the Best Web Hosting plans available, visit http://www.BestMoneyMakersGuide.com/hosting Reprint Permissions: Feel free to reprint or reuse this article, but please follow these simple rules: use the article in its entirety, without changes, and include the author's resource information with a link to the author's website, as shown here.

How to Save Bandwidth For Your Web Hosting

By Phil Anderson

It's confusing between bandwidth and data transfer, especially when web hosting companies are using the terms without much explanation. For clarification, bandwidth refers to the measurement of maximum data that can be transferred in a given time; while data transfer is the amount of data can be transferred. Fundamentally, we can understand data transfer as the consumption of bandwidth.

Hosting bandwidth affect a website performance directly. Website with lower bandwidth loads slower; vice versa website loads faster with huge bandwidth. Regardless of users Internet connection speed, your website will load slowly when the data transfer capacity is running low. Some web users will need to wait for their turn to access your website whenever the bandwidth is temporarily fully used.

How you can save bandwidth?

As bandwidth is an important asset for every website, web owners or designers should always build their website with minimum bandwidth requirement. Fancy flash presentation, huge audio and video files streaming, and high resolution images are all huge bandwidth eater. You should avoid using any of them if your web host is running out of bandwidth.

Keeping your web design clean and simple reduce bandwidth usage. Nested tables and excessive empty tags are always wasting the server resources thus should be avoided. Try design your website with CSS and JavaScript kept externally instead of burying them in every single page of your website.

Also, out of control robots can also suck down your bandwidth like a black hole. Avoid unknown bots crawling your website via a filter list on robots.txt also helps a lot in reducing bandwidth usage.

A final words for those who are getting started - getting an affordable but yet reliable web host is always the most important thing when starting of a new website. I would recommend Hostgator for those who are looking for a shared hosting as they are offering quite some good bargain at the moment. My advice to you is to take advantage on this and save some quick bucks for your hosting costs. But hey, that's my personal findings based on my own preference - in case you are doubtful, why not read further on Hostgator review? Article by Phil Anderson.

Unlimited Bandwidth Hosting - Should You Go For It?

By Maryse Buultjens

The two main items you look for when purchasing hosting is web space and bandwidth. Web space is the amount of space on your hosting server to host your website. Bandwidth is the amount of bytes available to transfer web pages from your site to visitors when they come to your site on a monthly basis. Text and images on a website consume capacity or bandwidth on the web. Both web space and bandwidth cost money.

The data that is carried around the web is by network lines and these have a finite capacity. The amount of data that can be transferred at any given point in time is limited. Similarly, the physical size of the hard drive of a web server is what determines the amount of space of the hard drive. This space is also fairly limited.

How much web space and bandwidth do you really require? 50 Mb or less of space would be adequate for a 200 page website which would include text and images. 1 Gb to 5 Gb's would be adequate bandwidth space for the same features of a website.

Sometimes when you go to the address bar and type in the address of the website and hit the "Enter" button you may get an error message saying that the site is not available and that the server has reached its maximum bandwidth allowance. This occurs when you have more visitors than the bandwidth can cope with. This very often happens with unlimited bandwidth hosting.

A lot of hosting providers today offer unlimited bandwidth hosting. What they are trying to imply is that an unlimited amount of traffic can come to your website with no implications at all. Let me tell you unlimited bandwidth hosting does not exist. It sounds very enticing though, doesn't it? This is just a marketing gimmick to get you to buy. When such companies advertise unlimited bandwidth hosting they are hoping that the website will not exceed its bandwidth as most websites generally use a very small amount. But on a particular day your website may exceed that bandwidth as the number of visitors increase. That is the day you will not want your website to go down, as loss of visitors to your site means loss of business to you.

So then do you go with companies that advertise unlimited bandwidth hosting? The answer is yes, but please keep in mind there is nothing called unlimited bandwidth hosting - just CHECK the company's Terms of Service as to what they really mean by it.

Choose from a wide range of hosting accounts at very reasonable prices. Visit http://www.cheapbusinesshostingblog.com/

Linux Or Windows System

By Justin Knights

In the industry of web hosting, there are two kinds of system to choose from. In the market today, all web hosting companies will either provide a Windows plan or a Linux plan. Foe those who favor the Windows plan, they will have to accept the fact that they will need to pay slightly more because of the license issue related to Microsoft. Like many other choices that we have to make, which one should we choose?

Most of the computers in the world today are in the Windows operating system. In fact 95% of all computers are using Windows worldwide. Therefore, this gives Windows web hosting system a big advantage because they dominate the computer users in the world and because of this, most people will go for a Windows based web hosting.

However, according to a study by securityspace.com, Linux based operating system seems to have an edge on Windows system. Their study found that Windows system is behind by 20%. This means that a Linux operating system will perform better than a Windows operating system.

Even though Linux seems to have the upper hand on things, using a Windows operating system would be advisable if you are using .NET technology which includes ASP.NET. This is something that only Windows system can support and Linux system has no way o supporting this technology. By using the Windows platform, you will also be able to access your database, for instance, the MySQL class database. Added bonus when you use a Windows system is the ability to use Microsoft programs along with your operating system.

For Linux system, you can run it in Apache, MySQL and PHP. You can have a good infrastructure of tools to build your website very professionally. We say this because the PHP works more efficiently with a Linux server compared to a Windows server. Another added feature for Linux is the price of it. It cost 20% less than a Windows server. Therefore, you just have to decide according to your preferences because Linux could also serve you very well and efficiently.

Wish to read more website hosting reviews? Check out WebHostingSecretRevealed.com - a place where the webmaster (Jerry) examine various hosting services by hosting websites on the web hosts first hand. Personally, I recommend his writings on Bluehost review - read on, it's among the very few reviews that share honest opinions on Bluehost hosting. Article written by Justin Knights, freelance writer.

Dedicated Hosting For an Online Shopping Website

By Justin Knights

For any online business to achieve success, there are many small parts in many different aspect that need to be tune to be in harmony. Especially for a website that is related t e-commerce. A website that is related to online transaction needs all the reliability it can get. Therefore, most of the e-commerce websites around are hosted by a dedicated web hosting system. The cost may be high but business owners are willing to pay rather than taking the risk.

A dedicated server is a server that hosts only one website. There are no other websites in the server. Therefore, all the resources are used by one single website in that dedicated server. A dedicated server will give you the best security compared to other forms of web hosting. So, there will be no risk of being affected by other websites like it happens in a shared web hosting situation. There will be no spam, bugs or virus which comes from another website.

Having the whole server, there will be more storage space, bandwidth and resource that can be used by that one particular website. This means better response and increase in speed and uptime giving visitors or clients a better experience in transactions or other activities that take place in your website.

With a dedicated server, you will also have more control over your website. You can choose the type of control panel you desire and also choose the functionality that suits your operation.

However, not everything is perfect with the dedicated server. It does have some minor disadvantages. Firstly, the price is much higher and you will need more time and requirement to monitor your website. If you were to hire technical personnel, it will add up your cost in your website expenditure. However, if you are well educated with the technical issues of web hosting, you could still do it yourself. Therefore, hiring another person will require a labor cost which you will need to bear.

So, should you go for dedicated server? If you are serious about your business and have the money to invest in a website, go for a dedicated hosting because it will definitely provide you the kind of service or resources you need. If you are planning on a small or medium scale business, maybe a shared hosting would do just fine for you. If your business expands, you could switch to a dedicated hosting at a later time.

Need more readings on web hosting review? Check out WebHostingSecretRevealed.com - a place where the webmaster (Jerry) examine various hosting services by hosting websites on the web hosts first hand. Personally, I recommend his writings on Hostgator review - read on, it's among the very few reviews that share honest opinions on Hostgator. Article written by Justin Knights, freelance writer.

The 4 Things You Should Expect From Your Web Hosting Package

By Daren Albom

Often time cost will be the first priority in choosing web hosting for most of the people. Although cheap web hosting saves operating cost but unfortunately always those are web hosting which associated with low quality. Poor support and reliability is sometimes a great issue with cheap hosting. Therefore by compromising the cost with quality is always something not worthwhile.

Ideally the web hosting that we are carving for is a hosting with high standards and low price. High standard here means a better uptime, a better customer support, a better reliability and etc. Since we already knew what we are indeed carving for, we should draw a clear line on that and no compromises should happen beyond the line.

Perhaps we should state clearly on the line we have just drawn.

Firstly we should by all mean to eliminate web hosting with bad performance. We want a web hosting with good up time because down time not only hurts your web site functionality but also affect your e mail. You will not be able to access your website as well as your email. There are so many web hosting companies outside that fight to serve you. You should always look for a hosting with better uptime like 99.9% uptime.

Secondly will be the customer support. A 24/7 customer support is a minimum requirement for your web hosting providers as internet is something that is borderless, timeless and dimensionless. Anytime there will be something happening in the internet and you need somebody to attend to your queries anytime anywhere.

Thirdly it is the back up of server. Regular back up is proven to be the best way to prevent any disaster from hard drive failure or any other accidents. A good service provider should always have a redundant server to back up all the data, be it a load sharing or N+1 redundancy. Only with regular back up your website and data are secured with the hosting company. (Of cause you should always do your own back up too)

Fourthly will be the added services. Added services can be free website promoting credits, free web site scripts, free web site transfer, free site builder software and etc. These added values will be helpful to build a decent website with least effort. This can be evaluated from the full hosting features of webhosting. Check what kind of software and program that they have.

At last only the pricing of web hosting should come in. Pricing no doubt is an important factor but without the above mentioned criterion, you should never look at such provider because it will be classified as poor quality hosting. Remember you are building a website which will serve hundred or thousands of visitors. Web hosting as the foundation of the website should be the best quality of all elements in your site.

Daren is a writer and webmaster. His Hostgator web hosting website provides a better insight on the web hosting leader. For a good quality of web hosting, Daren recommends Hostgator web hosting.

Do You Own a Drupal Powered Website?

By Ben A Holmes

I recently ran into a hosting website called HotDrupal.com - on the recommendation of someone I trust, I decided to move my website from a shared hosting package to a new HotDrupal account.

As my website was on a new hosting package sponsored by a long-standing company - and had very few websites per server - I really didn't expect to see any tremendous improvements in efficiency or speed.

Boy was I surprised! My website, after being moved - just about tripled it's speed in producing a webpage. I was downright shocked at the difference in speed, it was very noticeable!

It seems that HotDrupal has optimized their servers quite well for Drupal - one of the little tricks they employ is putting the MySQL database on the same server as your website. At most other hosting companies, your Drupal site will have to network to another server for MySQL database queries - and every microsecond counts when you need to run a large number of database queries for each webpage.

My site, for example - executed 268 MySQL database queries in 123.54 milliseconds, and rendered the entire home page in just 292.34 milliseconds. If you're on shared hosting - run the Devel module, and compare your results to mine - you might just decide that HotDrupal.com is worth taking a look at!

Another trick that HotDrupal utilizes is duplicate servers - the only programs running on the server hosting your website are those that are absolutely essential to serving webpages. All other programs, such as your Cpanel or email programs, are on a separate server. This isn't something you'll find at any shared hosting company - and you aren't likely to find faster speed until you can afford to move to a dedicated host.

Until that time - head over and take a look at HotDrupal - you'll be glad you did!

============================================================ Ben A Holmes runs http://www.BurningKnife.com - a community website with tons of free information, and where people help others with website creation, Search Engine Optimization, and driving traffic. ============================================================