The Best Hosting Plans, A Beginner's Guide

The following information contained on this lens concerns knowing the different aspects of getting your own www.yourdomain.com as well as the hosting plan behind it.

There are a lot of people out there who are not web-saavy, and they do not understand the basic fundamentals behind getting their own domain as well as what type of hosting plans they would use. I will mention from time to time on this page about how "the basic plan is enough for the typical user" which is true. If your only going to write articles, post pictures, host your own image gallery, and so forth, then you do only need a basic hosting plan. Usually the basic hosting plan is about $2-10 per month, which is peanuts if you think about it. On a sidenote, if you plan on making money online with ad revenue or affiliates, you may earn enough to pay for your hosting, or perhaps even more than that so you have some extra pocket-money each month too.

Before we even get into it, here is some food for thought. As time moves on more and more domain names are being eaten up, in otherwords domain campers, squatters, and other website saavy people are purchasing domain names. How does that effect you? It will be increasingly more difficult to get the domain name that you want if you keep waiting, and no I'm not trying to push you to getting a domain name, but it's something to think about. If you wait too long the domain that you wanted to use may be gone, or you may have to spend hundreds if not thousands of dollars on the domain that you wanted by purchasing it from a camper.

This is probably the most important thing that your considering, since afterall a domain name is what makes your site. I'm not going to get into SEO (Search Engine Optimization) here much since this is about hosting plans, but I will give you the following information as a food for thought. Having a keyword rich domain name can be very important. For example, if your on Google and your looking for 'free online games' your more likely to see a keyword rich domain name come up on the first page of the results. So with that example a domain name of www.freeonlinegames.com is very keyword rich, I mean your typing in the search engine exactly what that domain name is. That domain is very likely to appear at the top of the search engine results just because of that fact.

Your website name should be something that you really like. It's going to be with you for a long time if your site is successful. With that the whole 'keyword rich domain name' vs 'a great branding name' issue comes into play. You may want a website that deals specifically in graphic arts, and you wanted a simple domain name of www.Joesplace.com which doesn't have any keywords pertaining to graphics, but it's somewhat memorable. I personally like combining the two in a compromise, semi-keyword rich, yet still very brandable. What about a domain name of www.joesgraphics.com, or even www.joesdesigns.com? Those are brandable names yet still have a keyword rich factor to them.

A lot of hosting companies offer a lot of storage, and some even offer unlimited! Don't be fooled by the word "unlimited" since that implies that the storage is infinite in size, which it's not. But, on that note it's more likely going to be more than enough space for you, more than you'll ever need for a standard website.

The storage capacity of your hosting plan is pretty important, especially if your going to be doing a lot of data storage, such as hosting videos, music, graphics, and other forms of multimedia. Since hosting companies are competing with each other, usually they try to out-do each other in terms of how much space they give out in comparison to the cost of the plan. These days even the most basic of plans come with a lot of storage capacity, more than a typical person will use in the entire existence of their site.

Another thing to keep in mind, is that you can usually just contact your hosting company down the road and tell them you need more space if the need ever arises. So, if your going to make a typical website where it only has a couple dozen pictures along with articles, you shouldn't get a terabyte (1,000 gigs) of space if it's not needed. If it is needed down the road, just upgrade your plan.

In website hosting, the term "bandwidth" is often described as the amount of data going to or from a website or server in a specific period of time. Usually this comes across as the monthly data transfer amount that you are allowed, per month.

This is another important aspect of your hosting plan, how much information can be sent to and from your site. For example, let's say that one of your pages is an article and it includes 3 pictures, each person that goes to that page needs to download the text and pictures when viewed in their browser in order to view your page. Each time a person downloads your ebook or application from your site, or watches a streaming video which is hosted on your site, that also uses bandwidth. This also includes people who upload pictures, text, video, music, or anything else to your website. Bandwidth is a two-way road. Even the information your seeing right now on this page has used up some bandwidth (from Squidoo and my Imagehosting).

A lot of hosting plans include something like 500 gigabytes per month, or even state that it's unlimited. Either way, this is a huge amount of bandwith and for most typical users it will be more than enough. Let's put it this way, on one of my sites I have over 1,000 people per day go to it, and I'm still only touching a fraction (1/100 about) of my monthly usage, and that site is only using a basic hosting plan. It's way more than I need, and it's extremely affordable.

If by chance in the future you need more bandwidth, you can always contact your hosting company and get a better plan. It's not like they are going to tell you no.

There are a lot of little things that people should consider when purchasing a hosting plan from a company. First, what are you using this for? Are you going to upload and use a picture gallery, or forum software, or anything else like that? Then you may want to check and see if your hosting plan (server) is compatible with the software that you want to upload to your site.

Basically, in a nut-shell, if your going to be running any form of application on your website, such as a picture gallery or forum, then you may want to check up on the requirements of those applications and compare them to your hosting plans technical information to be sure they are compatible, otherwise you may not be able to run your software on your site. All of the professional hosting companies will give you all the information that you need before you even purchase your hosting plan, so you can shop around a little bit to see if the plan meets the necessary requirements of your applications.

Some of the things to look at when your checking out your hosting plan.

• MySQL version?
• Sub-domains available?
• Add-on domains?
• Shell access?
• PHP support?
• Perl version?
• Python version?
• SSI support?
• and more.

If you are not sure if the hosting plan that a particular company is showing you would allow you to run a specific piece of software, feel free to give them a call or send them an email. Afterall, they are trying to get you to join them, and they will take the time out of their day to respond to your question. In otherwords, call them up and ask them this "Hi, would [insert software name] work on your [insert hosting plan name]?" and you should get your answer from them. If they don't respond to you, don't use them.

A lot of hosting companies include a variety of software applications that are already prepared to be installed on your site. Be sure to check, you may already have everything you need at your fingertips without any extra effort!

These days hosting companies use a wide range of incentives to get you to join, which you can also use to your advantage. They will usually give you a large amount of "extras" that you can install with only a couple clicks of your mouse. These softwares can sometimes go for a couple hundred dollars if you were to buy them yourself, but some hosting companies give you them for free! In otherwords, why spend $200 on a piece of forum software which then you fumble around with for a few days trying to figure out how to install it, when you can just search out a hosting plan that includes a forum software, and it only takes a couple clicks of the button to install it?

The following are some of the types applications that you may get for free or at a reduced cost with your plan. It's worth to check out the fine details of a plan, it could save you hundreds of dollars.

• Blog Software
• Portals/CMS (Content Management System)
• Customer Support
• Discussion Boards
• E-Commerce
• FAQ
• Guestbooks
• Image Galleries
• Mailing Lists
• Polls and Surveys
• Project Management
• Wiki
• and other scripts.

Lunarpages - I have used Lunarpages for several years now, the customer support is great and I have way more bandwidth and space that I will ever use. I highly recommend them, they have been good to me.

I'm pretty much a net-junkie by nature, and with that I hang around a lot of fellow net-junkies in my day to day travels through the internet. The following hosting companies are ones that I've heard good things about. Feel free to check them out, you may find one you like.