Get Unlimited Bandwidth Hosting

It seems everyone and their brother is a web host today. There are as many different hosting options as there are web hosting plans out there, which can be confusing. There are, however, a few important things you should look for when choosing a website hosting plan.

First of all, you have to look at what kind of website you will be hosting. What does that website need? If it’s a site that runs a lot of scripts like PHP, ASP or Perl / CGI, then you’ll want a beefy server. The good thing is that computing power is cheap nowadays, so most servers out there can handle these kinds of sites pretty easily. In my experience, servers that run on Linux, Unix, FreeBSD or the like are a lot more reliable than Windows servers and just keep running. They hardly ever have to be rebooted. If your website is database driven, then a beefy server is also important.

Next, you’ll want to look at what your website provides. If it just serves up a few pages that are mostly text and a few images, then just about any hosting plan out there will be adequate. If your site is hosting / serving up video files, audio files or lots of images (big images), then you’ll definitely want to focus on how much space you get and how much bandwidth you get.

Server space is just disk space. If you’re site takes up 200 MB of space, then that’s how much you need (plus maybe 15% for things like log files and misc files) – unless you plan on growing your site. If you do plan on having your site significantly grow, then you’re going want to get a high amount of space (like 1-2 GB or more) or find a host with unlimited disk space.

Bandwidth is your traffic. If you have a 10 MB audio file and 10 people download it completely, then you’ve just used 100 MB of your bandwidth. It’s kind of like a water meter on a pipe. Bandwidth will depend on how much traffic your site gets and what size of files people will download. Some hosts charge for bandwidth and some hosts give you unlimited bandwidth.

Bandwidth is one reason people may post their video on a site like YouTube instead of hosting the video file themselves on their own server. When you embed a YouTube video on your web page, you’re using YouTube’s space and bandwidth. No space or bandwidth comes from your hosting account.

What may happen if you go over your allotted bandwidth depends on your host. Some hosts may cap you off and not allow any more traffic to your site, which makes it look like it’s down or not functioning. Other hosts may allow the traffic to come through but the meter starts running and you may end up with a large hosting bill at the end of the month.

So if you’re worried about going over your allowed bandwidth, you definitely want to find a host that offers unlimited bandwidth hosting. There are a number of them out there since competition is very high for website hosting.

One last thing to think about is price. My basic rule in life is that you get what you pay for. With website hosting, you have to factor in the high amount of competition in the industry, so here’s how I see it:

• Do not buy a website hosting plan that is less than $7 per month.
• Plans from $7 to $15 month are good deals, provided that the host is reputable.
• Plans from $15 on up are also good but should be adding in some extra, premium services that you need.

I am actually the owner of a company in the last category. We offer premium web hosting accounts. We’re small but we know all the customers on our servers and are sticklers for having all the software up to date on those servers. So all the customers on those servers must keep up with the latest patches and updates to the software that they’re running on their sites and we help them do that. This website isn’t about that though.

So think about what your website is going to do, what information / content it’s serving up and what your requirements are. The hosts that offer unlimited space and unlimited bandwidth for the $8 per month price are really good deals and will work just fine for most websites. If you’re expecting very high traffic, then you’re probably not looking for these kinds of web hosts but you’re looking at dedicated arrays of servers with load balancing, which is another whole ball of wax… and to be honest, I’ve never even seen a ball of wax… and maybe don’t want to.