Cheap web hosting service

Deciding what you need from your website

Choosing a web hosting service may not be as simple as it may seem. To get what you want and pay the minimum amount for the service, there are certain important considerations that you will need to keep in mind while choosing a web hosting service.

While choosing a web hosting service, you will first of all need to establish your exact requirements. Remember that it is not just getting a good web hosting service at any cost, but one that gives you value for your money. Here are some points that you will need to consider before you can specify your exact requirements.

Web Hosting Space

The size of your site in terms of the space occupied on the web hosting server’s hard disk is determined by the design of your website and the amount of space that you will require for all the pages and programs that you will be storing. Remember that you are paying for the web hosting space according to your usage. Estimate the size of your site and ensure that you ask your web hosting provider for what you actually need – not more or less.

Bandwidth

Bandwidth is actually the amount of data that can be transferred at any point in time, but is loosely used to refer to the total amount of traffic that will flow from and to your site. You will be paying more for the web hosting service if you ask for, or consume, higher bandwidth. Your bandwidth requirement will be more if you have stuff like a lot of animation. It will also depend on how many people visit your site and what they see. It is just not possible to exactly calculate the traffic to your site because it depends on a number of factors including the density of traffic and number of visits, the number of pages that a visitor would on an average load while visiting your site and the nature of the pages most commonly loaded. These are all variables over which you have little control. However, you will have to make intelligent guesses about these. If you already have some data or have experience with similar sites your task will be easier. Otherwise you may have to start with a wild guess and refine your estimate as you go along. In this case check with your web hosting service provider whether you have the necessary flexibility to change as you go along.

Server Uptime

How critical is uptime to your site? It depends a lot on why you are considering web hosting. Is your web hosting purely for personal or non-commercial purposes, or is it for commercial purposes? What happens if your site is down for a few hours? If you’re hosting a commercial site that makes money by redirecting traffic to other sites, you may lose money due to lost traffic for the time the site is down but may not suffer any other damage. On the other hand if your main business depends on the site, as in the case of an online store, you may lose more business as well as credibility if the site is down too often. If you are offering a critical service that needs to be available on a 24x7 basis, your loss is obviously much more if your site is down. You should assess the criticality of your site and choose the service accordingly. Having guaranteed uptime for 99.99% of the time may sound attractive, but if you don’t need it, you are paying for it unnecessarily.

Web Hosting Extras

Deciding on the frills may be more difficult because you are likely to be attracted by all those web features that are handed out to you, but if you don’t really need them why pay for them? A good example is of multiple email accounts. See whether you really need many free email accounts and whether you are likely to use all of them. Many web hosting providers may offer a lot of facilities free of cost or at a nominal cost. Even if the web hosting is offering all these facilities free, make an assessment of what you actually need. This will help you to consider the web hosting service in proper perspective even if you decide to take the additional features. Hostinfo.co.uk provides a range of hosting plans.