What is a hosting service?

It is the place where all of the text, images, and files, that make up your website, are stored . Choosing the right web hosting service is extremely important. Having an unreliable host can severely damage your image, reputation, and ultimately cost you in revenue. Learn how to avoid unreliable web hosts.

What should you look for in a web hosting service?

The hosting provider you choose will highly depend on the scope of your website. But to highlight some of the essentials, here is a quick checklist you should look into before choosing a web hosting provider.

  • How much disc space will you need?
  • How much bandwidth do you foresee your website consuming?
  • Does is provide SSL secure server capabilities?
  • Does it provide e-mail inboxes?
  • Do they offer shared, VPS, and/or dedicated hosting?

Learn how to to figure out what features you need from your web hosting service.

Web Hosting F.A.Q

What is bandwidth?

Bandwidth, when referring to web hosting, is the transfer of data between your server (where your website is being hosted) and the client (the person viewing your website through a digital medium). This is not to be confused with the actual definition of bandwidth, which is the speed at which data is transferred (also referred to as transfer rate). So when we talk bandwidth we will be referring to the amount of data you can transfer between your server and the client.

Bandwidth is important because it directly affects the speed of your website. If you don’t have enough bandwidth it can compromise the reliability and uptime of the site, thus making you look unprofessional.

It’s a bit tricky to predict the exact amount of bandwidth you need, but here is a simple formula to point you in the right direction.

  • First you estimate out how big each page. You do this by taking the size of all video, images, and files that comprise your web page and add them together.
  • Then you multiply the pages file size by the number of people viewing that page.
  • Now repeat the two steps above for every page and add that together. That will give you a rough estimate of how much bandwidth you need.

Ex: You have a one page website that is 200k in file size. You estimate that you will receive 1,000 hits per month. By multiplying these two values together, you will need to buy a web host with 200,000k (or 200mb). But keep in mind that if you plan to have a multi page website, the bandwidth usage will be a lot higher than this.

Yes. In order to keep your web pages as small as possible make sure you are coding and programming with D.R.Y (do not repeat yourself) practices. The more code your website needs to run, the bigger it is. It is also highly recommended that you create separation between the structure, the visual presentation, and the programming. By doing this you can again prevent yourself from repeating code and reduce file sizes.

Keep your images compressed and in a .jpeg format and your graphics in a .gif format. This will reduce the file sizes dramatically.

Also, instead of hosting the images on your own server you can choose to link to them from an external source, just make sure you have the external sources consent as this would be stealing their bandwidth. This would be considered pirating and is therefore illegal.

Unfortunately there is not much you can do to prevent bandwidth theft. You can add watermarks to your images to make it less inciting to steal and link to your images and video. And you can reverse engineer your links to find out who is using your images and ask them to stop. But other than that, there is not much else you can do.

How much disc space you need is directly correlated to how large your website is. If your website has just a few images and pages you probably don’t need a lot of disc space, but if you are a large website, you probably do.

To figure out how much disc space you need- calculate how large in file size your website is by adding up all of the video, images and files that make up your website.

Keep in mind that if you are thinking of expanding in the future you will need additional disc space. So give yourself enough room to grow.

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