What do you need to know about Hosting and Bandwidth?
Bandwidth - Is the amount of traffic your site receives.

Bandwidth can be the most expensive part of providing web space. Many web hosting packages come with a fixed amount of disk space. With that disk space also comes an allotment of amount of bandwidth - some web hosting.

What is "bandwidth" and how much do I really need?

Bandwidth usally isn't a problem for new websites. If you have a new website online it may be hard to have enough traffic and visitors in the begining to even use up the smallest amount of bandwidth offered by the most basic web hosting solutions. However if your site contains a lot of graphics, photographs, or pictures, pdf's and sound media even a small amount of traffic will start to consume your monthly bandwidth allocation.

Bandwidth is the amount of files that are transferred from your website on your hosts servers to the browser of your visitors. Here is an example. This webpage is approximately 24K (Kilobytes). There are 1,000 kilobytes in a megabyte or "mb". So 40 people can visit this page before 1mb of "bandwidth" is used. Now lets say your host allows 2gb of bandwidth per month, how many users would that be?

Well 2gb = 2,000mb! We already know that we have 40 visitors per megabyte so we can simply multiply 2,000 x 40 = 80,000! that is just for one page! If the average user visits 5 of your pages on and the pages are all about 24k (kilobytes) that would be enough bandwidth for 16,000 visitors or thats about 530 visitors per day.

If your pages contain photographs, media streaming, and video clips it would be easy to increase your need for "bandwidth". It's important to choose the hosting company that offers your the most "bandwidth" per dollar spent based on your budget and traffic needs.

How much web space (disk storage) will I need?

If you are not hosting a site with photographs or video clips you may not use as much web space as you think you might need.Bandwidth is very important it determines how many visitors your site can handle, while web space determines how much stuff you can transfer to the hosts servers. If nobody visits your site this simply doesn't matter.

How many Emails will I need?

We would recommend 5 for the small site. Here are some email address ideas: admin, webmaster, info, submission, service, yourname, promotionm, and newsletter.

Most business hosting plans will offer at least 5 email addresses, email forwarding and or basic auto-responders. If you plan on running huge email campaigns be very careful. Spam campaigns (whether you think it's spam or not) can cause you grief quickly!

What do I need?

You may want to use shopping carts or real time data driven websites, cgi scripts or have just basic needs are pretty simple. Most any hosting company offers sufficient features for all those needs.

Note to FrontPage Users: FrontPage 2003 no longer uses the FrontPage extensions although it does support them. The new features support Microsoft's New SharePoint Services™ t which you can learn more about at Microsoft's website.

Here's a basic breakdown of what you may need:

FrontPage Extensions - If you use FP98, FP2000 choose a host that supports these features.

SSL - Secure Socket Layer support - You will need this if you plan on running a shopping cart.

FTP - this is File Transfer Protocol - All Host support this it is simply how you transfer your files to the server. If you don't have built in file transfer with your web authoring software you'll can use a 3rd party FTP client like CuteFTP.

CGI, Perl, PHP, JSP, ASP - If you are a programmer, then you already know what these do. If not perhaps you'll be hiring a programmer, or purchasing pre-written scripts? Then your host may need to support these script languages.

MySQL - this is a query language protocol that is used to create dynamic real time on-the-fly WebPages from hosted databases.

Statistics - It is important to know where your traffic is coming from, which pages are being visited, how long users stay on each page? If you are a business this information will become extremely valuable. We wouldn't choose a host based on their stats package alone, but good stats built in are a bonus. There are many 3rd party stats companies that really "pull" the info out for you marketing guru's.

Thanks for taking the time to browse our website, we hope it's been helpful in sorting out the basics, and trust you will find it useful in selecting a host for your website development project. Find a Hosting packages that will meet your website needs.

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