Choosing The Right Website Host

Maybe you've came to the point where you are comfortable enough to publish websites on the internet, but maybe you stuck on which website host is the right choice for you and deciding whether or not you want a dedicated server which we will discuss later in the article. If this criteria sounds something like you keep reading because we will go through the basics of web hosting and get into much more into the scoop of web hosting.

Now first off lets discuss what a web host really is if you are a beginner at website production. A web host is a business, but the simplest way of explaining it is calling it a big computer with a 1000 or more clients who all have websites stored on them depending on the web host provider. Webhosts generally have 2 or 3 plans to choose from based on what you want the website for and how much your willing to pay. Their packages generally looking something like: Personal or Home, Premium or Business, and Dedicated or Pro packages. We will talk about all three of those in a moment, but go ahead and look at the features many paid website host offer below.

-Domain Name ex. website.com
-Disk Space (How much space is available to your website or files)
-Bandwidth (Traffic that comes from and to your website)
-Coding languages such as: PHP, MySQL, CGI-Perl, Javascript, ASP or Microsoft web scripts, ColdFusion
-Subdomains ex. www1.website.com

Many businesses these days in the high-end world we live in need excellent consumer to business response, what else better way is there to contact these days than electronically. Of course websites have been around forever but how do businesses decide on there website host provider, maybe for the more fortunate ones who own there own ISPs and provide there own web hosting service this article would not apply to, but many businesses these days are still not that far ahead, so your the webmaster right? What do you know about webhosting and how far along are you in knowledge of their tricks?

Now if you already have a website with unlimited everything, then your probably saying there's no point in this article right? Wrong. Web hosts like many other companies like to persuade users think that everything is unlimited for a low price, well one thing to know about this point then is there's no such thing as unlimited. Web hosts that offer unlimited services generally do have the resources to satisfy the needs of all clients while adding more disk space when time comes, but simply put nothing is unlimited.

Many people look for web hosts that offer free domain for life, this can be found from a lot of providers these days, read the hosts website you are interested in to see if they offer this feature. Also unlimited subdomains can be a pro to helping users decide on their website host.

Disk Space
Most websites will use around 5 to 10GBs depending on what the website is based on. A larger website like a file download site would use hundreds of gigabytes of space to store all its files.

Bandwidth
Bandwidth is the amount of data that can be uploaded and downloaded from a website. Again the unlimited space factor can play a role here as well, but instead of being unlimited we should call it un-metered since a lot of web hosts offer unlimited bandwidth when in reality it is limited but just not monitored. The point where too much data is being passed through in a specific period of time is when a website gets monitored, many web hosts terms of services will tell you such things as what we have discussed.

Script support
Many website owners love the dynamics of our advance world wide network, such as foreign website codes as I would call them. PHP and MySQL are the most commonly used languages, PHP stands for Hypertext Preprocessor, which in lamest terms breaks down data from your script and MySQL database before the website is loaded to the user. PHP is generally easy to learn (I learned when I was 12 in less than a week). While MySQL is not really a language to the average person to learn its features can be integrated into almost any kind of scripture structure such as for ex. ASP.net ColdFusion, and Javascript.

Now that we've covered the basics lets discuss web host managed hosting and dedicated hosting (Reseller).
A web host manged hosting services offers you features such as cPanel which controls your independent website on that server, while dedicated website hosting dedicates a whole server to your website, these servers can be almost called unlimited since they are massive for most users, dedicated servers offer features such as WHM (Web Host Management from cPanel) which can control all websites stored on that server. A dedicated server is recommended for people who are going to become web site host their selves or have a big companies website. For most users who want an independent website a web host managed website is the best bet for the price, since dedicated servers can be expensive because all expenses web hosts pay you must as well.

Many of the things mentioned above are often featured in free hosting as well, don't be afraid to consider a free host as well, if you plan on just running a small website for personal fun and the package offers what you want. A free website host will generally not offer you a free domain however. Many considerations should be considered before picking any website host, please review the Terms of Service of the web hosts you sign up for to see if they are representing their merits proficiently, testimonials are often another good resource of creditability.

Boosting your traffic through ads can be achieved by using things like Google AdWords, or affiliated websites, some of these techniques are offered by web hosts as well, check the features of your plan to see if this is available to you.

A website to compare web hosting services is: http://webhostinggeeks.com/ or http://www.top-10-web-hosting.com/