WEB HOSTING BASICS - CONTROLLING COSTS

How much should I expect to pay?

Web hosting service plans differ greatly in price. For simple shared plans you may be able to find something below $10 per month. Dedicated and colocation plans start at about $200 and reach into thousands of dollars per month, depending on your requirements.

To estimate where your web site would fit in read the article on Levels Of Service.

What Are The Possible Hidden Charges?

The most obvious one is the "extra traffic" charge. It may seem unfair that you may be charged for your site's popularity, but that's how this business works. Most plans come with either a maximum monthly transfer (e.g. 2GB per month) or a specific bandwidth limitation (e.g. fixed bandwidth of 250Kbps). It should be noted that these allowances are normally fairly generous and few business sites ever exceed them (sites hosting multimedia content is another story). Nevertheless, it helps to understand exactly how much you download from and upload to your site.

Some providers charge for making changes to your DNS settings.

Finally, in a colocated or dedicated hosting setting, you may be charged hefty hourly fees for dedicated support by engineers. Make sure you understand what is and what isn't included in your monthly service charge.

Extra Services

Hosting providers may offer related services such as monthly backups, web design services, domain registration, and even conference rooms in their data centers (typically offered by large urban co-location hosting providers).