Choosing a Web Host
When choosing a web hosting plan two of the most important considerations you have are the amount of band width and data transfer required, over the years the cost of memory and the physical size of that memory has fallen. The knock on effect of this on you is that the cost of web hosting has fallen dramatically over the last few years and consequently you can get a lot of disk space for a few pounds a month.
So, how do you decide just how much disk space you need?
Well one of the main factors will be the size of your site, and how you expect it to grow over the course of your contract with your web host. This web site for instance takes up approximately 80Mb of disk space, and is growing at a rate of about 5Mb per month, as newer content is added to the main site and to our blog, which is hosted on the same server and contributes to our disk space usage, as will any of your subdomains. 80Mb sounds quite small, and you would be right in thinking that since most basic web hosting plans offer at least 1Gb of storage, and some offer an awful lot more. But you must also factor in your Email accounts, the number of which will eat up you disk space allowance, and you also need to consider whether you will be uploading media files to your server be they audio, video, documents or programs you wish to make available for download to your customers.
The bottom line is do you have enough to grow?
For instance do you envisage adding a pod cast to your site, a great marketing strategy, but one which will see your disk space usage rocket. When deciding on storage for your web hosting plan take a look at where you want your business to be in 2 years time and choose a deal which can cope with the expansion you require to get to that point and beyond. Conversely chose a hosting provider which will allow you to upgrade and add on additional disk space, bandwidth etc so that you only pay for these feature as it becomes necessary, the key is to think ahead and not get caught out with not enough space to upload your latest product range.
Bandwidth/Data Transfer Allowance
In the most simple of terms an analogy using water flowing through pipes gives the easiest explanation of bandwidth, the wider the pipes (i.e. higher bandwidth) the more water can be moved per second (or data).
So Bandwidth is the amount of data passage per second and is generally measured in Gbps (Gigabits per second).
It is easy to confuse bandwidth, i.e the speed of your connection with data transfer allowance, which is the amount of data that can be transferred too and from your server or web site per month and is measured in Gb. Most web hosts actually incorrectly use the term bandwidth in place of data transfer allowance, and it is important when choosing a web host, or a web hosting plan that you have a rough idea of the amount data transfer you will require.
Put simply each time somebody looks at a page from your site they download that page from your server, using up some of your data transfer allowance, if your average page size is 100kb and each of your 100 visitors a day looks at say 4 pages then per day you are using 40Mb which equates to a data transfer of 1.2Gb per month. Unfortunately customers visiting your site are not the only ones to use up your data transfer, sending and receiving email, uploading new pages to your server, and believe it or not GoogleBot, MSN Bot and the Yahoo! Robot to name but a few of the countless spiders out there, all use up a portion of your data transfer depending on how many of your pages they spider
So, the more bandwidth/data transfer the better?
Yes, decide how many visitors you ideally would like/can cope with and then choose a package with twice the bandwidth you think you need, this serves two purposes, firstly and most importantly it allows you room to grow. Secondly having more bandwidth than you need means you are ready for any surges in popularity you may enjoy, and will avoid having to pay any excess data transfer charges (usually around $2/1 per Gb).
To chose a web host visit web hosting discounts
So, how do you decide just how much disk space you need?
Well one of the main factors will be the size of your site, and how you expect it to grow over the course of your contract with your web host. This web site for instance takes up approximately 80Mb of disk space, and is growing at a rate of about 5Mb per month, as newer content is added to the main site and to our blog, which is hosted on the same server and contributes to our disk space usage, as will any of your subdomains. 80Mb sounds quite small, and you would be right in thinking that since most basic web hosting plans offer at least 1Gb of storage, and some offer an awful lot more. But you must also factor in your Email accounts, the number of which will eat up you disk space allowance, and you also need to consider whether you will be uploading media files to your server be they audio, video, documents or programs you wish to make available for download to your customers.
The bottom line is do you have enough to grow?
For instance do you envisage adding a pod cast to your site, a great marketing strategy, but one which will see your disk space usage rocket. When deciding on storage for your web hosting plan take a look at where you want your business to be in 2 years time and choose a deal which can cope with the expansion you require to get to that point and beyond. Conversely chose a hosting provider which will allow you to upgrade and add on additional disk space, bandwidth etc so that you only pay for these feature as it becomes necessary, the key is to think ahead and not get caught out with not enough space to upload your latest product range.
Bandwidth/Data Transfer Allowance
In the most simple of terms an analogy using water flowing through pipes gives the easiest explanation of bandwidth, the wider the pipes (i.e. higher bandwidth) the more water can be moved per second (or data).
So Bandwidth is the amount of data passage per second and is generally measured in Gbps (Gigabits per second).
It is easy to confuse bandwidth, i.e the speed of your connection with data transfer allowance, which is the amount of data that can be transferred too and from your server or web site per month and is measured in Gb. Most web hosts actually incorrectly use the term bandwidth in place of data transfer allowance, and it is important when choosing a web host, or a web hosting plan that you have a rough idea of the amount data transfer you will require.
Put simply each time somebody looks at a page from your site they download that page from your server, using up some of your data transfer allowance, if your average page size is 100kb and each of your 100 visitors a day looks at say 4 pages then per day you are using 40Mb which equates to a data transfer of 1.2Gb per month. Unfortunately customers visiting your site are not the only ones to use up your data transfer, sending and receiving email, uploading new pages to your server, and believe it or not GoogleBot, MSN Bot and the Yahoo! Robot to name but a few of the countless spiders out there, all use up a portion of your data transfer depending on how many of your pages they spider
So, the more bandwidth/data transfer the better?
Yes, decide how many visitors you ideally would like/can cope with and then choose a package with twice the bandwidth you think you need, this serves two purposes, firstly and most importantly it allows you room to grow. Secondly having more bandwidth than you need means you are ready for any surges in popularity you may enjoy, and will avoid having to pay any excess data transfer charges (usually around $2/1 per Gb).
To chose a web host visit web hosting discounts