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Basic Hosting Terminology
Nearly all hosting companies offer 24/7 support, promise 99.9% uptime and allow you to install certain scripts at the touch of a button (eg wordpress, phpbb) however the main things you need to look at and understand when you see a hosting package advertised is the following :
- Disk Space – The disk space is the amount of hard drive space you have to upload your files to and is either stated in megabytes or gigbytes. For most blogs, images and movies will be the files that eat away at the space you’ve got.
- Bandwidth – If the home page of you blog takes up 10kb and the images on the design take up 90 kb then everytime someone loads your page 100kb of bandwidth will be used every time someone views that page. Note, search engines can eat at your bandwidth too (for example with my poker forums in April 2007- googlebot took up 6.5gb of bandwidth, Ask took up 5gb and Yahoo took up 4.5gb)
- Number of Domains – The number of domains or websites/blogs you are allowed to run in the hosting package.
- Number of MySQL Databases – Some hosting packages restrict the number of databases you are allowed to create for your sites.
There are lots of different factors you need to consider when choosing a host but the main ones are Price, Disk Space and bandwidth.
Types of Hosting Packages
There is essentially 3 types of hosting packages available to the blogger.
- Shared Hosting – Shared hosting is the type of package most bloggers moving to a host for the first time will need. The costs are pretty cheap with the basic starter package starting at around $5-$10 per month. What you get in your package depends on the package you choose. The cheapest entry package usually only allows you to host one blog (eg. one domain name) through the hosting but some companies let you host more. Sometimes they also restrict the number of email addresses and mysql databases you have. Again, it depends on the package you choose. For example, the hatchling pacakge at hostgator gives you 50 gb disk space, 200gb bandwidth, 1 domain and unlimited mysql databases for $6.95 per month.Shared hosting is a Virtual Private Server (VPS) and it sometimes labelled as such. A VPS means that you have a certain amount of webspace and allocation of bandwidth. To you it may seem that your website is hosted on its own but in reality your website is hosted on the same server as dozens if not hundreds of other websites. If for some reason the server was to go down all VPS’s on that server would also go down which would result in hundreds of websites going down as well. Don’t let this scare you though – in general VPS’s are very well run. For new bloggers i recommend BlueHostas you get a huge amount of disk space and bandwidth for only $6.95 per month.
- Reseller Hosting – With reseller hosting you usually (but not always) get more disk space and bandwidth with the added option of being able to resell the hosting space you have to other website owners and bloggers. This obviously means that you can host your own websites as well in these other accounts. Just remember though that you will need to restrict usage in accounts because you are charged and are responsible for all accounts on your reseller package (eg. if you let a friend host a site with you and you didnt restrict the bandwidth they used they could use your whole months bandwidth in a few days!). It may surprise you to learn that Reseller Hosting packages are actually VPS’s as well. Your hosting package will be hosted with other resellers on the server. Granted there will be less people hosting on the server but the number of websites could actually be more. This kind of package should interest those who need a little more bandwidth or for people who would like to host some sites for friends etc
- Dedicated Hosting – There will come a time when your blogs and websites take up too much ram and too much bandwidth and diskspace that you will have no other choice but to upgrade to your own dedicated server. A server is essentially a computer which is turned on 24 hours a day, 365 days a year to host websites and blogs. If you have a dedicated server you have one of these computers for yourself which means that you have complete control over everything. There is a huge amount of benefits in this including changing scripts when you want, rebooting the server when you need and more control over accounts and backups. You can pay for managed services or do it yourself though most people pay the extra for professionals to look after everything (including myself – i can still do everything they can but i leave the complicated stuff to the hosting company incase i mess things up). Dedicated server costs range from $100 to thousands of dollars. God only knows how much Amazon spends on hosting!!
