If you are already familiar with the concept of bandwidth, memory allocation and network speeds, please skip onto the next page: Shared hosting/ Virtual servers and Dedicated servers >>
Bandwidth: This can be, rather misleadingly, two related but different concepts. The bandwidth of a connection or network is the speed capacity that data can go to and from a computer- this is covered further down the page under "Speed".
The second meaning of this term is the amount of data going in and out of the server and is normally measured in MB/GB (megabytes/gigabytes) per day/month. Suppose that you have 100MBytes of data on your sever and you transfer it all just once
in a day, you will have used a bandwidth of 100MB/day (this is ignoring data that goes into the machine!). The reason that this value can be important is that many hosting companies will have a maximum monthly bandwidth allowance and any amount
over this figure will be charged for- like using up all of your free minutes on your cell phone.
For a standard website which has some pages and a few images this is not normally an issue (unless it has an enormous amount of visitors) but if you have a lot of very high resolution images, video clips of file downloading/ sharing the bandwidth
ceiling can be reached quite quickly. It is worth calculating the expected bandwidth if you suspect that this may be a problem since you will be charged at a far greater rate if you exceed the allowance. A site I had around 10 years ago cost me
$20/month hosting cost and $350 in unexpected over bandwidth fees in the first month!
Memory: The memory allocation you get will normally depend on what you pay for; most hosting companies will provide various packages with varying memory allocation. This is essentially the amount of hard disk space that is allotted to you-
you cannot exceed this space. It is easy to find out how much you need if you have your web site on your computer, you simply look at how much space all of your web files take up and allow a bit more for email, statistics and other features of your
hosting that may use memory. If you hit the memory limit, most hosting providers will allow you to just upgrade you package to the next level.
Speed: The speed that your web pages will be presented to the visitor depends on a number of factors. First of all it will depend on the server hardware (how good the computer is that is acting as the server). In addition, a hosting package
will typically be one of hundreds if not thousands of others on the same machine- the more there are on a single machine the slower the machine will be serving your site's pages during busy periods.
Next is the data speed; which again is made up of many factors. The network speed and topology that the machine is connected in at the hosting companies building, the "pipe" that the hosting company has (which is the data speed in and out of their
building and onto the internet) and the connection speed of the person accessing the site (broadband speed/ dial up modem etc.). It is important to not have your site load too slow since people will give up on a page within a few seconds if it
is loading slowly.
To ensure that the machine is running quickly enough for the amount of accounts on it you have to rely on the hosting company, some are good and some are bad (in that some companies offer very cheap hosting but overload their
servers). For high traffic sites you can move to virtual or dedicated server solutions which we will discuss later on but for most sites it is sufficient to use a good hosting company which does not overload their servers and provides a good data
pipe.
Want a recommendation? A company that we use that have a good range of packages, competitively priced and we are very happy with the service is "1 and 1". You could do a lot worse than giving them a try!
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