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Web Hosting - Factors to Consider When Choosing Your Hosting Price Plan |
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Written by Hugh Williams
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Tuesday, 18 November 2008 |
 Following on from Web Hosting Services Explained, this article aims to make sense of the diverse range of hosting options and price plans available. Deciphering the difference between two similarly priced packages can be both daunting and difficult.
We hope that this article will give you some food for thought in regards to choosing your package, and that sharing our experience gained through serving our clients hosting needs will help you avoid some serious headaches.
The essential basics are disk space and bandwidth allowance (or data
transfer), these two factors are the foundations on which hosting
packages are built, and as such can affect pricing considerably. Disk
space refers to the amount of space your website requires on the
server, the greater the requirement, the greater the bill! This is
something to consider if your business is multimedia based, and/or your
website is highly visual with large amounts of media such as pictures
and video, which are space demanding. Bandwidth, also known as data
transfer, relates to the amount of traffic your website attracts and
therefore the amount of times your content is viewed. Again, if you
rely on multimedia, this allowance or limit is a fundamental aspect to
consider when comparing hosting packages.
Hosting companies often offer "Extra" services within their packages,
and based on your requirements, some of these will be very useful,
whilst others will merely serve to increase the cost of the hosting
package. The trick here is to have a good, clear picture of your
requirements, both currently and for the future, such as whether you
require MySQL databases, email accounts, etc. In this case, the best
piece of advice we can give is that if you dont need a feature, find
out if there is a way to remove it from your account (and hopefully the
bill!).
Having got your head around these essentials and their impact on your
monthly bill price, you will be pleased to know that there are other
factors which can also have a large impact on both your package price
and its performance, but these are harder to evaluate. The most
important of these is the service and support provided by the hosting
company, and in this case you often get what you pay for, but there are
always surprises out there, both pleasant and otherwise! We suggest
contacting any companies you are considering to get an idea of their
response time and general helpfulness, after all, you could have the
best value hosting package in the world, but if you cannot get your
hosting company to support you, it is pretty much for nothing!
The second of these financially intangible factors is that of hardware
configurations, whilst they are integral to the performance of your
website, they are hard to translate into your monthly hosting costs. In
this case, the best advice we can give is to ask the companies
themselves, you do not have to get overly technical, but some
specifications may help you make a decision! Finally, you must be aware
of the practice of Overselling, which is where the hosting company
assumes that its clients will not use all of their allocated space or
accounts, and as such sells these services to a greater number of
clients that they would be unable to support if everyone attempted to
use their advertised fair share! This could have a detrimental effect
on your performance or price, depending on usage.
The moral behind this article is that in web hosting, everything is not
always as it seems, and that you do not always get what you pay for,
and the best way of ensuring that you get yourself a good deal and are
not selling yourself short, is to do the research and compare, compare,
compare!
If this all seems a little too much to take in, then by all means get in touch and we will happily discuss the services that are available to you.
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"We were very fortunate to come across Jack Bremer and his brother Alex who own the website design agency 3B Web Design.
The design [of our new site] is much better. The flexibility and ease of managing it on a day to day basis is improved enormously." Communications Committee, www.lancingclub.org
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