Determining Your Web Hosting Needs

When you first need to get your website up and running, you’ll need a web host to do it. And when it’s time to find a web host, you’re going to need to know a few things about what you’re going to need. Bandwidth, domains, and storage capacity are all terms that you’ll need to become familiar with so that you get what you need for your website to display quickly and function properly. But what do all of these terms mean?

Bandwidth can be a very complicated thing to understand but it’s basically the download time of your website. Every time a user visits your website it uses bandwidth to display it to them.  The more non-text content you have on your site, such as videos or pictures, the longer it will naturally take to display to the visitor. When trying to determine how much bandwidth you will need though, you need to take into consideration how much traffic you will have as well. The more traffic that’s visiting your website, the more bandwidth it will use; and if you don’t have enough, your site can crash completely.

The storage capacity often goes hand in hand with bandwidth because the two essentially work together. Just as a large amount of content on your page can cause bandwidth supply to run low and the site to crash, so can all that content that’s crammed into a computer that doesn’t have enough storage space. When you sign up with a web host, they will always tell you how much storage capacity you have or rather, how big your website can be. If you don’t have enough storage capacity, certain applications on your site won’t work. But storage capacity is one of the elements that can really bump up the price of your web hosting package; and you don’t want to have pay a whole lot for something you’re not going to use, either.

The next thing you’ll need to know, even before you start your search for a web host, is how many domain names you’ll be able to use on your account. Some web hosting companies will only let you have one domain name per account, and this could be disastrous for even small companies. If businesses want to have a separate site to boost their main site (these are called “dummy sites”) or the business owner wants each of their five chains to have their own website, they’ll need to have more than one domain name. Many web hosting companies, especially those that cater to businesses, will allow you to have as many domain names as you need.

Bandwidth, domains, and disk space – these are all terms that can seem completely foreign when you first step into the world of web hosting. But knowing what they are, and understanding what they do, will go a very long way in making sure that the web hosting package you get is the exact web hosting package that you and your business actually needs.