Your First Steps in Web Hosting

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So you have decided to venture out into the online world, and setup your own online business. There are a couple things that you have to wrap your head around, in order to successfully launch your website online.The first thing is web hosting. Web hosts are businesses whose sole purpose is to supply you with storage and bandwidth to make your website accessible online. They do this by renting space on their servers, you may have your own server and there by technically be your own host, but even today large companies host remotely so that they do not have to deal with the headaches and hassles that come with setting up your own web server.

One of the most important things to remember when it comes to hosting, is that you cannot judge the quality of service by this alone. Larger corporations are able to offer you cheaper services, then fly by nighters offering the same for more. Needless to say, do not go for the cheapest host either, they are often over crowed, slow and offer very little value for money! Web hosting is all about finding the correct balance between the most important factors I've listed below, if one fails, your entire site will fail.

Listed below are some of the most important things when considering a new web host

Storage
The amount of disk space that your hosts gives you determines how many files, images, videos etc you can upload. When you first start out online, chances are your host is going to provide you with more then enough storage then you need. The more established hosts provide these at very affordable prices. Storage space ranges from 5 Gigabytes to 15 Gigabytes, even unlimited accounts are available. First of all what is a gigabyte? To give the basics, so you can fully comprehend storage I've listed below the different units of storage.

• B stands for bytes
• b stands for bits

A bit is the smallest unit for measuring data.

• 8 bits make up 1 Byte (1B)
• 1024 Kilobytes (KB) = 1 Megabyte (MB)
• 1024 Megabytes (MB) = 1 Gigabyte (GB)

With the well established hosting companies offering so much storage space, you might be asking yourself how on earth will you ever use so much data. Remember the storage requirements of a few years ago were vastly different to what they are today. With the internet being one of the fast growing and changing mediums in the world, you can never have to much disk space as you can never be sure of what your storage requirements are going to be like in the near future.

Uptime
It is only possible to make money off your site while people can literally view it. When it's down, no one can view it, Google and all the other search engines cannot index it, and this can very negatively hamper your rankings. So, this being one of the most important factors with hosting, please make sure that your host provides an up-time guarantee of 99.9%, if they do not, stay well away from them.

Bandwidth
Bandwidth is the amount of data that is sent from your web server, to your visitors. This is data that travels across the internet, the link between your web server and your visitors. For example, if the landing page for you site used 100 Kilobytes, and you had 10 visitors, you would use 1 Megabyte of bandwidth. As you can imagine, with sites offering more dynamic and rich content, this amount can rise exponentially! Also note, people often forget this, and data sent from your visitors browser, i.e. uploading a photo or comment is added to the amount of bandwidth you use.

Support
Setting up a website can be extremely frustrating for first time users, no matter how easy people say it is, there can be one infinitesimally small amount of information that you are unaware of that can prevent you from going forward. There are so many variables when it comes to hosting, they it is easy to get stuck.

This is why it is extremely important that your host provides you with excellent support. Not mediocre of good. When you run into problems there is nothing more irritating not being able to get hold of a support agent to help you resolve the issue. While searching for a web host, make a mental note of their live chat, and email support. How helpful were they, how quickly did they respond? Where they able to help you with the problem first time, or were you reffered to someone else?

Environments
This is basically the scripting (the programming language used to create dynamic sites), and the databases that your web host supports. These can range from ASP, PHP to Ruby on Rails and Django, don't worry if you don't know what those mean yet. PHP is the most popular scripting language on the internet today, and almost every server supports it. When it comes to adding dynamic content to your site, you will know which route to take, and your site currently being static will be easy enough to move if your current host doesn't support the environment you want.

When choosing your host, make sure that you have the end in mind, and your judgment is clouded by tricks and gimmicks which a lot of unscrupulous hosts try to sell there services on. With the amount of competition increasing daily on the internet, you can rest assured that the hosts at the top will always be improving their offerings and services to keep their customers happy.