Web Hosting for Starters #Part 3

This is the third part of the 3 part Web hosting for starters series.

In this post, I’ll be talking about how to go about choosing the perfect web hosting for your website/blog.

There are basically two things we need to decide on:

1. What type of web hosting do I choose?
2. Where do I host?

What type of web hosting do I choose?

I have already talked about the different types of web hosting services currently available in the market. If you have already read that post you must have a fairly good idea about what to go for.
Its a common mistake to get overwhelmed by the overselling plans. We prefer going for 5000GB web space at $8/month than 500GB at $7/month(which is still a oversell). Why not you may ask, We are getting an additional 4500GB for just $1 extra. In reality, You may rarely(read never) use at max a few GBs of hosting. In most cases, more content will equate to more traffic and shared hosting CANNOT sustain that much amount of traffic without making your website incredibly slow, resulting in you loosing your audience.

To decide on what type of web hosting to go for, go by what you need than what is being offered

Firstly know your requirement
What you need - the softwares and other tools required
How much you need - the amount of bandwidth, the hard disk requirement, amount of RAM etc

Below is a list of questions which will help you in deciding the features you need to look out for

To decide on Bandwidth Requirement

1. What is the amount of traffic you are getting?
2. How fast is the website growing?
3. Are the web pages heavy?(lots of images, videos and other bandwidth consuming stuff)

Answering the above questions will give you a better idea about your bandwidth requirement. Use the current traffic and page weight data to calculate the current bandwidth requirement. You may have to consider the traffic growth, to ensure that few months down the line your user don’t see a BANDWIDTH EXCEEDED page.

To decide on Hard disk space requirement

1. How much space is the current data occupying?
2. Can users upload data onto the site? If so, maximum how much can they upload? Will the uploaded files be deleted after a certain time period? Are

You can ask yourself questions like these before deciding on each feature.

After making a list of the necessary features you are looking for, you can decide on the type of hosting to go for. The list below briefs about different type of hosting, to know more check part 2

You can choose Shared Hosting
If you are a starter, this is the plan to choose. It is cheap and has enough features to get you going.
If your website is a blog/CMS which doesn’t require any special software, or if doesn’t have heavy traffic

You can choose VPS
If shared hosting is not giving the desired performance
Your website needs special softwares to be installed

You can choose Dedicated Hosting
When even VPS is not giving desired performance, you are in need of more power.

Above gives a very general opinion, each and every case has its own needs and bottle necks. So when deciding on the type of host I suggest you to just refer this post but not come to a decision solely based on this. Doing the activity I have talked about above will give a much better picture about what you need.

As this post turned out to be long, will be blogging about “How to choose a web host?” in my next post

Related posts

• Web Hosting for Starters #Part 2
• Web Hosting for Starters #Part 1
• How to choose a web host?
• Want $10? Sign Up for the Pepperjam Affiliate Network Now
• Web Hosting for Starters

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