Web Hosting Options

Whether you're looking to set up a personal site for your family to share pictures and info, or if you are trying to get your online business up and running, getting a web hosting account is something you will need to look into. Once you finally choose to put your business or personal affairs online, you'll find a lot of different options for web hosting and depending on what type of internet presence you plan on building will determine what service you choose.

 

There are some providers that offer free web hosting, which gives you a specific amount of bandwidth each month, which is sufficient for most personal sites. However, a business might not have enough bandwidth or space on their site for people to access it properly with a free service.
Typically, a company will offer free web hosting services and give you about 50 megabytes of bandwidth a month. If your family site is going to have loads of pictures on it, these free web hosting services might not be able to handle the memory load.

 

When you are looking into web hosting, bandwidth is not only important for the site's content, but also any information that is sent from you to your site or from your visitors to the site. On average, a picture can take up about 2 megabytes of space, which leaves the vacant space on your web hosting account insufficient for your needs.

 

Another Important Consideration is Available Scripts

When selecting web hosting, you must also consider what kind of information will be posted on your site because some providers don't offer the use of certain scripts that are available for online use. For example if you want to upload a song to your family website, but your web hosting service does not allow streaming audio...that wouldn't be the best provider to go with.

 

The cost of web hosting can also vary greatly, usually based on the amount of bandwidth available, the amount of email addresses you will have, the amount of space you will need on the web hosting provider's servers and a lot more. The companies reputation as far as being available should be on the top of your list of criteria.

 

A handful of the lesser expensive web hosting providers and free ones have great reputations for being up all the time. A 99% up time is usually the standard, meaning that your website should only show as unavailable or have a server error one percent of the time.