How do I choose a hosting provider and select an account?

There are many factors involved when selecting the right hosting company and plan for your website. Each hosting company (or provider) offers different account packages and server technologies. Certain hosting facilities are better suited for certain websites. This is not to say that almost any site and be designed and built to run on any server, just that certain combinations work better than others.

Hosting Details

There are a few options that should be evaluated when choosing a hosting provider and plan.

Storage

The storage component of your hosting plan will determine how ?big? your site can be. Larger site, with more pages and photographs will require larger storage accounts. The typical storage required for a small to medium size site, having10-30 efficiently designed pages with some photographs should require no more than 100MB of storage.

The other factor to consider when deciding on storage amounts is your email usage and requirements. If you require that your email be kept on the server you will need more space. See Email Accounts below.

Monthly Transfer

The monthly transfer refers to how much data your users can download from your site each month. The more materials you make available on your website, the more transfer you?ll need. Monthly transfer rates normally range from 1-2GB/month for smaller accounts to 8-10GB/month for larger sites.

FTP Accounts

FTP is how most web developers and administrators will connect to the website to upload new or modified code. Most sites will only require 1 or 2 FTP accounts.

Email Accounts

The hosting package will allow for a defined number of email boxes. If additional mailboxes are required additional costs may accrue. There are normally two ways to use email at most hosting facilities, POP and IMAP. In most situations, POP is the most efficient and cost effective.

Learn more about the different types of services at:
http://www.imap.org/papers/imap.vs.pop.brief.html

Databases

Databases are files or separate servers which store the content on some types of websites. One database will most likely be required for each application your site requires (Content Management, E-Commerce, Bulletin Boards, etc).

Mailing Lists

Mailing lists are used for sending emails to a list of addresses from one central address, and the ability to control that list. Mailing lists require maintenance and mailings require design and development.

Dedicated IP Address

A dedicated IP address is helpful in site development and required, in some cases, by ecommerce applications. If you are moving your site from one server to another and developing a new site at the same time a dedicated IP address is of great necessity.

Server Technology

There are many different server setups available for public hosting in today's market. Each technology setup prefers a certain type of code to be written. For example, a UNIX server will most likely be running Apache as a web server, MySQL as a database server and PHP as the preferred middleware language.

Cost

Hosting packages vary in cost based on their offering company and plan details. Small hosting accounts can range in cost from as low as $10 per month through $100 per month depending on vendor and plan details. Larger hosting accounts can cost upwards of $500 per month.