Hosting for Everyone!!

Whether its your first web site and contains only a few pages about your local football team or an up and coming business needing masses of web space and expecting gigabytes of traffic, here you will find a web hosting package right for you.

How to decide.

When choosing your hosting package you should be thinking about things such as the amount of traffic you are expecting, the services you require such as statistical software, linux or windows hosting, quick technical response times, and of course your budget this is all explained here to help you get the right package for the job.

My Traffic.

Some hosting companies restrict your monthly bandwidth and then bill you for every gigabyte that you exceed your limit, choosing a hosting package with a small bandwidth limit could be very costly if your traffic is higher than what you predicted. It is very hard to predict what your amount of traffic is going to be and therefore i would suggest having a good look round for a package that offers a reasonable amount of bandwidth. Bandwidth is used to measure data transfer, each time you visit a web site you are downloading there html file images etc, so if its say 10kb in size then 1 hit was 10kb of bandwidth used. There are 1024 kb's in a megabyte and 1024mbs in a gigabyte, hosting company's will offer you different amounts of bandwidth allowances usually per month, some will offer you unlimited bandwidth which, if you are a big business expanding all the time and hoping for more routine traffic then you should be looking for one of these packages, also be careful if you are planning to have a chat forum on your site, these can create a lot of traffic because of the different topics mentioned on the forum you are more likely to be listed in a search, check out the link reviews section of this site to see who i use and would recommend to you.

Statistics.

When you start shopping around for you web hosting packages you will see that some companies offer free web stats and some charge a fee, but make sure you compare the package's probably. Streamline.net charge's £15 a year for use of there matrix stats but you will find that there standard package is cheaper and offers a lot more than other companies.

Linux or Windows.

When setting up your hosting account you may get the choice between linux or windows server, if your new to all this you would probably be thinking that you have windows on your computer so that's the one you want, but your wrong unless your planning to use asp and .net then Linux will be fine for what you need.

Technical Support.

Everyone has had trouble in the past with some sort of technical difficulty, and the last thing you want is your web site to be down for days on end, with no technical support from your hosting company waiting days for a response is frustrating, so make sure that it mentions quick reliable technical support. If there is a forum then this a good place to look for comments from users which might help you make your decision on deciding which package to choose. I use Streamline.net for some of my site's and they guarantee a response within 24 hours which i think is very reasonable.

How Big is your Budget?

Before you even start thinking about creating your first web site the first thing you will have done, or should have been is to get a rough idea of how much it was going to cost from start to finish. If you are planning to use your site to make profit then you initial budget maybe greater then someone just building a fun site for themselves. There is really only one way to find the best deal for you and that's shop around, but see here for my suggestions on good value web hosting.