The beginner's guide to choosing a hosting plan

• Jonathan Crossfield
• 8 July 2009
• Page 1 of 2 : single page

Without web hosting, your website can never reach the outside world. Hosting is the essential link between your website and the internet, but can often become a baffling annoyance.

If you’re like me, being forced to read a list of technical specifications and jargon is a better cure for insomnia than a mallet to the skull. But sometimes, choosing the right hosting package can involve making important business decisions based on information it seems you need a year at night school to understand.

Wouldn’t it be nice to understand what it was you were paying for? Wouldn’t you feel more confident knowing how each figure and impenetrable word benefited your business?

This guide may not answer all your questions, but should provide a window into the world of web hosting.

What is web hosting?

If your computer was a TV, the domain name would be the channel button on your remote, the hosting provider would be the TV station and the host server would be the video bank at the TV station broadcasting the recorded programs you watch. Therefore, the server stores your website and ‘broadcasts’ it to any internet browser that enters the domain name.

But servers can be configured to provide a number of different website types.

To clearly understand how a particular hosting package can benefit you, the goals and needs of the website should be planned in advance.

How do I choose the best hosting company?

When choosing a hosting company, there are certain ingredients that can make the difference between online success and an internet disaster.

Do you want to be able to contact your hosting company at 10pm if your site and email develop problems? Do you know how secure and stable the provider’s hosting setup is? Do you want to deal with someone who speaks English instead of technical jargon?

There are a number of small hosting businesses set up in garages and basements or with limited staff. They may be cheaper, but the smaller the company, the fewer resources they have available to provide adequate customer support or servicing when you need it.

It is not unknown for websites to go down only to discover that the person responsible for fixing the server is on holiday or otherwise unavailable. Every time your website is down, your business loses money, so compromises on hosting prices can cost you in other ways.

The most reliable hosting companies provide dedicated customer support and technical services, capable of dealing with your issues day and night.

If your website goes offline, you don’t want to wait a couple of days before discovering the problem – you want to be sure your provider will identify and correct the issue before you even know about it.

Also, although it is possible to host your website anywhere in the world, choosing a local hosting company can have greater advantages. Dealing with a hosting company in the United States can be frustrating. Long-distance calls are expensive and email support can often be slow and unhelpful outside of US business hours. If your website is suffering costly delays during Australian business hours, you don’t want to wait for New York to wake up before it can be fixed.

A reputable hosting provider should have enough backup safeguards to ensure your website never goes down (well, at least 99.99% of the time). The last thing you want is the server with your website on it floating through a flooded building with no appropriate back-up stored high-and-dry elsewhere. The same goes for the connections to the web. If the local roadworks chop through a Telstra cable, wouldn’t you feel better knowing your server was also linked to the net through at least one or two other connections, providing uninterrupted service? Make sure you know how your provider can guarantee your online store will remain open for business 24/7.

Netregistry houses servers in the largest data centre in the southern hemisphere, Global Switch in Pyrmont, providing reliable, secure local hosting.

What do I need to consider when choosing a hosting package?

There are a number of factors to consider when deciding on the best value hosting solution for your website. It is important to not only understand your current goals, but have an idea for how the website is likely to evolve. In choosing a hosting plan, there are a few key considerations: data storage, data transfer, bandwidth, databases and scripting technology.

Most hosting accounts come equipped with features such as email. Even so, there are some that consider email an added extra for a fee. Check for the features you need beforehand so you have a clear idea of the total cost of the package.

How much data storage is necessary?

Most hosting plans contain more than enough data storage for the majority of websites. But certain files take up more space than others. Lots of image, video or audio files can chew up storage space quickly. It is possible to reduce the size of many large files, so it is worth working with someone with the technical ability to compress the amount of data without compromising quality.

If your website is likely to grow over time, this needs to be accounted for. An extreme example would be a site like YouTube, needing to find storage for thousands of large video files every day. You will probably never be faced with that kind of growth, but even a few large files added regularly over time can soon eat up your storage space.

Alternatively, simple text pages with only a few small images take relatively little storage space. You may be able to add hundreds of these pages before filling the space taken by a handful of audio or video files.

What is bandwidth?

Bandwidth is the ‘pipe’ that connects your website to the internet. It is a measure of the amount of digital information that can be accessed within a given time period. For example, if your main webpage is 300KB in size, then every time a web browser accesses it, 300KB of data travels down the pipe. How fast this data is transferred depends on how many people are accessing data down the pipe at the same time and how large your pipe is.

Larger files, such as audio and video, eat up bandwidth just as they eat up data storage. Putting a lot of large files in your website can clog the flow of data through the pipe and make your website much slower to load in a visitor’s browser.

Even with small files, your bandwidth can still become bottlenecked. If your pipe can cope with a certain amount of data transfer per second, but the number of people trying to access your website exceeds this data limit, it can also cause a traffic jam. With the data not getting through fast enough, website visitors can receive ‘timed out’ error messages instead of your wonderful webpage.