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Web Hosting Company Search
By
Staff
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Don’t pay for
what you don’t need. If you have your Web site
built – and you should by the time you are
picking a host by the way – figure out exactly
how much space you will need. It is not unusual
for people to discover that they are paying for
space they don’t use. A rough rule of thumb is
that 20 pages is about 3Mb. If you are not sure
how big your site is, right click on the root
folder – this tells you how many files you have
as well as total size. If you built your site
using an editor – we would be surprised if you
did not – you can use the editor to give you
this type of information. If you use FrontPage
for example, you can click on the site summary
in the reports view to get this information.
In terms of
discerning what you need versus what you do not,
make sure you are looking at the right type of
hosting service. Prices will range from free to
$5 - $50 per month for a package that is 20 – 50
Mb in size. Free sites work for small,
non-technical business sites. More than likely
you are using virtual hosting (a.k.a. domain or
shared hosting). If you anticipate a lot of
growth, check out deals on dedicated servers.
Again, the competition in the current market
works in your favor and there are some great
deals to be found.
Know what you are
paying for. Ask the Web hosting provider if
they have a limit on how many web sites they put
on one server. Also ask about what kind of
hardware they use and about their available
bandwidth. With the server technology available
today, a powerful server with enough bandwidth
can easily handle 1000 accounts. But you don’t
want to find yourself in a situation where you
either have to move or upgrade from a shared
solution to a more expensive alternative because
your web hosting provider uses dinky hardware
and doesn’t limit the number of web sites per
server. In any case, it is not a bad idea to
also ask candidate providers if they offer
virtual hosting and dedicated server packages,
and how much would it be to upgrade? Ask if
there is any time limit or penalty associated
with changing your plan.
Another set of
questions in the “know what you are paying for”
category is about bandwidth. Getting charged
for extra bandwidth usage is one of the biggest
pitfalls that consumers encounter. Know exactly
how much bandwidth you are buying with your
package. Also know how data transfer is
calculated. Monthly data transfer is the data
that moves between the Internet Web hosting
provider’s server and your customer/visitor’s
browser – at their request as sent from the
browser client to the host’s server. This would
be the sum total of all the files used to
display the information requested from your site
during a one month period - HTML pages,
graphics, forms, downloads. Make sure the
control panel included in the deal has a
bandwidth meter. Email alarms that you can set
so you know when you are getting close to your
limits are even better. If you do go over your
limit, what does the web hosting provider charge
for the next GB?
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