Hosting Helpful Info

Hosting:   The amount you pay to host your website depends on several factors of course, one being how much value the website provides to you or your business.  That will not be easy to put on paper initially so you must consider the additional factors.

Hosting companies compete on several levels, the most common being price per month for a given amount of space and a given amount of transferred data.  Since all do not provide the same amount of space and amount of transferred data, you cannot go on price alone.  The price is important but only after you compare all other factors.

The space consideration depends on the amount of space you need currently and how much you will need in the near future.   Simple enough.  Calculate the size of your website and add 25%.  If you go over the initial allotment, you can always pay extra.  Plans often offer 50 Meg starting out but your website may only be 20 Meg.  That should not be an incentive to increase your website content.  With more content, more data gets transferred.  Why is that important?  Read on.

The "amount of transferred data" is the least thought about part of the formula, and for good reason, it is the least understood.   Even with minimal understanding, it still gets put on the back shelf of the mind.  Part of the problem is even after understanding it, how do you use it in the formula since it involves predicting the future.  Let me explain.

Amount of transferred data is the amount of data that the hosting company will allow you to transfer before starting to charge extra.  Transfer what where when?  When you load files onto your website, you are transferring data from one computer to another.  One computer is on your end and the other is on their end.  That means some of that computer's processing power has to be exerted to receive the files and store them on the area that is to be your website's storage area.  Simple enough.  You know how big your website is and you know how often you will be sending the files to the hosting computer, probably not that often unless you make lots of updates and changes.  Initially, there may be several changes until your website settles in its final design.  Now, any changes made will depend on the type of website you have.  If it displays current events to keep customers informed, then you may be updating files every day.  No matter how much you update your files, you will soon find that you are nowhere near the allowed amount of transfer as outlined in your available amount of transferred data (unless it is extremely low).  So no problem right?

Your amount of transferred data is also affected every time a visitor wishes to view pages from your website.  The hosting computer again gets involved.  One viewing of your entire website could eat up as much of the amount of transferred data as transferring every file there in the first place.  What you need to be concerned about is how many hits will your website get?

If you have a great website and advertise it well or the word gets out, your website could be swamped with visitors and every one of them gets the hosting company's computer involved.  While it is dishing out web pages to be viewed, it is keeping track.  Occasionally you hear about the horror story of a kid's website getting mentioned somewhere in cyberspace and suddenly the entire world comes visiting.  Cheap exposure right?  Right until the bill arrives for $3,000 to pay for the transferred data charges when the allotment was used up but visitors continued.

Make sure you understand the charges applied after the allotment is used up.  Understand any caps, denial of service to visitors, etc.  If your website is set up to take advantage of the additional traffic, then the return in revenue may outweigh the extra hosting charges.  If your intake is 10 times as much as the extra charges, you are in luck.  If your website provides information without generating any revenue, the increased traffic may end up costing you.

Understand that the amount of data for each web page adds up.  Graphics take up more space than regular text.  You want to keep graphics within check, make sure they are no larger than what is necessary, and are in a format that keeps them as small as possible for the quality you want to present.  This is not to scare you but more to make you aware.  Some companies are now offering unlimited amount of transferred data.  Hurray! Right?  Well, yes and no.  Unlimited transfer has been abused and many companies are shying away from offering "unlimited" transfer but instead, offering a very large number as the limit for transfer.  The companies that offer large amounts of transfer can because of how they are connected to the backbone, whether they own their own servers, or are set up to make the offering simply from an accounting standpoint.  Some companies are so entrenched in their current offerings, and also due to the number of clients that would be affected, that they have maintained the status quo, just to have the same cash flow.  Regardless of what transfer a company does offer, large amounts or unlimited transfer does not come without responsibility though.  That means that your files should not be unnecessarily large; in other words, don't waste the resources just because your account has unlimited or a large amount of transfer allocated.

Besides the initial consideration of price, space allotted, and amount of data transferred allotment, there are several other factors to take into account.  You should also be concerned about how well the company's computers can allow Internet users to view your website contents.  Another factor is the availability of the host's computers (e.g., what percentage of time are they up).  Another is the amount of statistics that can be provided to you about the traffic your website is seeing.

Website hosting often relies on "bartering" to lessen the cost of hosting.  In exchange for showing some ads on your website, you can get hosting for free or at very low cost.  The ads are usually at the top of your website, and for the competition.  If the ads are a cooperative effort that also helps your website, then the ads can be great, providing they are not intrusive to your website.  For example, we have a co-operative advertising network that works the same way, except we place the ads at the bottom of the website so that your website is not pushed down.  Your banner will be in the same pool of banners and as a result, you will get instant exposure.

Provided your website is fairly simple (does not use a database or other services such as a secured site), you can get hosting at an affordable rate on shared servers.  Hosting prices generally range from $5 to $35 per month if the website is hosted on a shared server.  Your site is hosted on the same server that hosts several other sites, meaning possibly several hundred other sites will share the same server.  You can get dedicated hosting (servers only for your website).  This is the most expensive route.  It is not uncommon to pay as much as $600 a month.  If you are in the market in the biggest way, it might be the way to go.  If you are just starting out and want to see what type of traffic you get, there are less expensive alternatives.  The less expensive the costs, the more likely that you share the host with several other websites.  There could be 200 to 300 sites all sharing the same server.  If your traffic is low, and the others do not hog up all of the bandwidth, you can see that this is a very economical method of starting to have web presence.

Availability is also important if you expect to have 24 hour traffic.  Some hosting companies offer 95 to 99% guaranteed up-time.  Sounds good right?  What happens if they have troubles?  You don't get compensated for the down time unless the hosting company is down for more than what the agreement said.  Do the math.  If your site is up 95% of the time, that means your hosting company could be down for more than 18 full days over the course of a year.  99% up-time means your hosting company could be down for more than 3 full days over the course of a year.  99.9% means the hosting company could be down for no more than 525.96 minutes out of a year (8.766 hours, or .36525 days).

Based on 365.25 days in a year

In spite of the technology available to ensure that the servers do not go down, servers do occasionally fail.  After all, they are executing software (server software) written by humans.  More often than not, the reason for downtime will be due to server upgrades or human error, not software failure.  Every company doing hosting likes to think that they have the best server hardware, the best server software, the best technical people, and therefore, there shouldn't ever be any problems.  No matter where you work, or no matter what you do, you know that the more people involved, the more chances for a problem to pop up.  In other words, the very best hosting companies have problems.  A server upgrade that is supposed to take 5 minutes turns into 30 minutes.

There are companies that run fault-tolerant systems, and can upgrade without any downtime by upgrading an offline system, bringing it up, then switching your server to the alternate server in real time, upgrade your primary server, switch your server back in real time, and no one will ever notice the difference.  You will have to pay extra to get this additional guarantee of up-time.*  Is it worth it to pay for the extra up time?  It depends on what you are hosting.  Fault tolerance certainly has its place for things such as banking, telecommunications, medical situations, and many others.  Unfortunately, the costs are not so competitive with shared hosting.  Therefore, for most websites, being down no more than an hour or two in a year is livable.

Regardless, of what your needs are, if it is the first time, then it can get pretty complicated.  We can alleviate those complications by helping you choose a host.  We have made arrangements with hosting services and resellers to help get your website hosted and in a reasonable amount of time. We even have same day service.  To see some example plans, click here.

If you need help, feel free to contact us.

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