When looking in to web hosting it is easy to be misled.

Often there is a difference between what you need and what the hosting company is trying to sell and up sell.

The amount of bandwidth that you require while choosing a host depends on two factors:

• The combined size of your site pages.
• How many visitors you attract to your site.

_{*A kilo is 1000 bytes - a byte is 8 bits or one alphanumeric character}

There are many things to look for in a web hosting service.

Some of those are:

• Speed -
  • How fast you can upload and download files from your server. Determines how fast your pages will load, depending on the images on your page.
• Server Software -
  • What software is included in your hosting package?
• Security -
  • Security provided to protect your web site.
• Customer Service -
  • Are your questions being answered? Are you treated civil and with respect?
• Reliability -
  • What is the "uptime" of the server? Will your pages be available when your users want to visit?
• FTP Access -
  • Does your host provide file transfer capabilities?
• Programming language support -
  • Will you be using programming languages other then HTML and its varieties?
• Bandwidth usage -
  • Do you know how much your site needs?
• Data Transfer -
  • Will you have videos, large images,or plain text for your content?
• Disk space -
  • How much space on the server does your site need?

The myth of "Unlimited" hosting

Many web hosts use the word "unlimited" to say that you get "unlimited disk space" or "unlimited bandwidth" ("unlimited data transfer"), the word "unlimited" usually gets redefined to some other meaning, at the web host's discretion.

The exact meaning varies from host to host but it invariably means the opposite of the "unlimited" found in the English dictionary.

How to determine how much bandwidth your site will need.

The amount of data your site will transfer is referred to as bandwidth usage. For instance, if your web page is 40 kilo-bytes (KB)*, each time a user views your site they download 40 kilo-bytes of information to their computer. If a 100 users view your page, a total of 4000 KB of data will be transferred from the host server to the computers of users.

Size of web Page: 40 KB
Number of users who viewed the web page: 100
Total amount of data transferred: 40KB * 100 = 4000 KB per hundred

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