BUYER'S GUIDE

The number of web hosting service providers is startling - there are thousands of them. The number of plans they offer is several times that. How does one go about choosing the ideal plan for their business?

The key to choosing a great web hosting service is understanding your needs.

Your ideal plan should provide adequate support, include all the features you need and do all that at the lowest possible price.

The key, of course, is to understand what you need. Once the requirements are established, you can weed out many options. While the requirement definition process can be difficult and lengthy for large (especially e-commerce) sites, most small businesses looking for simple web presence can use the following list of criteria as the rough guideline.

CRITERION #1: CHOOSING BETWEEN SHARED AND DEDICATED SOLUTIONS

There are several types of plans (as described on the Levels Of Service page), but essentially, you need to choose between a shared and a dedicated solution. Hint: perhaps, 95% of small businesses should choose shared hosting. The only reason we're mentioning this criterion first is because if you fall into the 5% that need a dedicated solution, you should determine it early on. Read more about choosing between Shared or Dedicated Web Hosting solutions...

CRITERION #2: DETERMINING THE AMOUNT OF DISK SPACE YOU'LL NEED

The next step is to determine how much disk space you will need. This is particularly important for businesses who decided on a shared plan. Make sure your provider offers more than you need and check how much it will cost to "rent" even more disk space.

Fortunately, disk space is cheap and prices are only falling, so it's unlikely that disk space will be a major price-influencing factor.

CRITERION #3: ESTIMATING AMOUNT OF MONTHLY TRANSFERS

Next comes the difficult part - you need to guess how much bandwidth your site will consume. Essentially, you are estimating how much information will be downloaded from your site over a month. If your site consists of static HTML pages, you can use a simple formula:

MONTHLY_BANDWIDTH = MONTHLY_VISITORS * AVG_PAGES_PER_VISITOR * AVG_PAGE_SIZE

Example: The web site of "Ann's Sandwich Shop" down the street receives 1,000 visits from hungry neighborhood customers who typically download 2 pages per visit - the front page and the menu page. The average size of a page on Ann's site is 50KB. Thus, Ann's web site will consume at least

1,000 x 2 x 50KB = 100 MB

100MB in transfers is a very small amount, but Ann wants to be sure she's not going to get charged extra, so she decides to look for a web hosting plan offering at least 500MB in monthly transfers.

If your site is much bigger than Ann's or if you chose a dedicated solution which typically meters bandwidth and not total transfers, your calculations may turn out to be slightly more complicated. Use our Estimating Bandwidth.

CRITERION #4: CHOOSING THE OPERATING SYSTEM

Most people who host static web sites don't care which operating system their site is running on. They shouldn't! However, if you plan to introduce server-side interactivity, you should look into what your system can provide you with. There are several popular choices for operating systems:

Microsoft Windows
Linux (UNIX-based)
FreeBSD and Apple Serve (UNIX-based)
other UNIX-based systems - mostly hi-end offerings (AIX, Solaris, etc)

UNIX-based systems are touted as more robust and reliable, but maintaining a site hosted on UNIX variants may require some technical expertise.

CRITERIA #5-#?: EVALUATING OTHER FACTORS

There are many other factors you should take into account, especially if your site requires interactivity. Read for more information...

FINAL CRITERION: PRICE

Finally, perhaps the most important factor: the price. If you run a small web site without serious interactive functionality, you should be able to find something below $20 per month - perhaps even below $10 per month. Other than this rough estimate, it's really difficult to provide any sort of guidelines on the typical cost structure.