2006-09-26 by  Jaya Kumar Patchala

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This article is to help people who are planning to start a website. To become a successful website owner, the first thing is to determine the nature of your website and hosting requirements for it.

Why the nature of your website is important?

To know how much disk space and bandwidth you require. Many hosting companies offer just too much of disk space and bandwidth. If your site is a personal site or restricted to a community, you do not require that enormous space or bandwidth. Most of the times it is virtual disk space. Normally, for 90% of the sites 100 MB hosting space is enough, with variable requirements of traffic bandwidth. You will be given an option to add more domains/websites to your account. Unless you are experienced web master, such options only add to confusion.

So, it is important to determine, the amount of disk space and bandwidth required. Required bandwidth depends on your website’s geographical appeal. If your site is of some use for all regions in the world and for all population, you will require more traffic bandwidth. Do not invest more than what it requires to start a website. A website’s success cannot be guaranteed.

Several things influence the success of a website. If you invest too much too early into a website, you might end up losing a lot of money. Failed sites will not have a good resale value and a website’s assets are not tangible. Nobody wants to consider site’s popularity in its heydays. A website is appraised on its current position. Several people plan their websites on a grandiose scale. Most of such sites are caught in unending web development cycles and time delays.

Unless you have a brick and mortar shop that requires a web counterpart at any cost, plan your website in such a way that it gets up and running with minimum investment. If your site is noticed and chances are high of its success, then proceed to add new features and facilities. Always remember that a website remains successful until a competing/similar but superior site comes up. There are highly competent people in web world to ensure that your site will not remain at the top for a long time.

You need to cash on your site before someone else notices the traffic/profits you are getting and comes up with a better site. Start small, make changes fast, cash on it and don’t compete foolishly with new similar sites that come up. New is always more attractive than the old. Remain in the fray for a while and let the old site die its natural death. I am sure; you will get several ideas for new sites all the time.

What are the costs involved in getting a website up and running?

The visible costs are domain registration (varies between $10 to $40 per year), web hosting (varies between $15 to $100 per year), web designing (varies between $50 - $5000) and promotion (varies between $100 - $10000 recurring). Free hosting and free templates doesn’t make a good site. There are several such sites hosted on free servers with sub-domain names, but with a low-commercial or resale value.

To start a website you require a good domain name and reliable hosting. Depending on the objective of your website, you can go for suitable budgeting for web designing and promotion. You need to search for a good web developing company or a freelancer and decide upon the types of promotion. Sometimes you may require a full-time web master for your site.

You can consider web designing and promotion costs as hidden costs. Many people get lured by web hosting companies that offer hosting for a few dollars a month. It is easy to signup with them and gets hosting disk space. However, the real work and expenses will be waiting in the form of web designing, promotion and site maintenance. This is why; you can find millions of domain names that don’t have a website.

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