WebSites by Your Vision

Website Hosting - How to Choose?

Introduction

Selecting a hosting company is much like buying any other type of service or product. The time you spend doing company and product research is essential in making an educated decision based upon your needs, and staying within your budget.
Researching web hosting companies can be complicated and confusing with a multitude of options and offerings like, dedicated vs. virtual server, Linux or Windows, ecommerce, telnet, SSH, CGI, PHP, ASP and others. How do you make the right decision when it all looks the same but the monthly charges range from the price of lunch to a car payment?
In this article I will help answer and hopefully guide you through some of the processes in determining what you need in a host and how to evaluate them.

Determining your needs

The first step to buying hosting services is evaluating your hosting needs of your website. Here is a list of questions that will help.

How much physical storage space will your site require in the after the initial development?

When starting the development of a site the storage is relativity small most of the time less then 5MB. However, as time goes on and history and archival data like PDF documents, guest’s books, client profiles, photo galleries, video clips, sound files, the list is unlimited, disk storage space can become a costly issue if you exceed your limit. So try to think 3 or maybe 5 years after launching your site to determine storage space.
Keep in mind that most sites even with archival data are far less than 20MB in storage. Many hosting companies offer unlimited or extremely high storage space at a cheap price and most are counting on you using less then 20MB. In reality there is no such thing as unlimited storage since hard disks indeed have limits, so be careful of these claims and make sure you read the fine print before signing up for services.