First Web Hosting Experience	Visited: 1025 5.0/5.0 (2 votes total) Rate: Select 1 - Terrible 2 - Poor 3 - Average 4 - Good 5 - Outstanding
by Igor Romanoff June 10, 2004

Well... you've purchased a domain name... created a pretty design... filled it with content... what now?

HOSTING.

I suppose that you know what a web hosting is, and we don't need to repeat in once again.

Actually if you don't know what it is, and you don't even want to learn about it, you have a great way out:

Just type ‘web hosting' in Google, click ‘I'm filling lucky' and then simply click the big ‘BUY' button on a website that appears :)

But if you really need to find a proper web hosting company that will suit your needs - use our advices below and take the one that will charge you not more than you expect.

Let's assume that you're ready to pay a bit for hosting services, we won't take free hosting into consideration (it's absolutely another story).

So here's the small list of what you need to learn before choosing a web hosting company.

Disc Space

Everything here depends on the size of your website.
In fact the easiest way to calculate the volume of the disc space do you need is to check your website's weight at your computer folder. But note that you'll need some extra space, just in case.
For example, if your web site needs 100 MB of disk space, look for the plan which offers at least 150 MB of web space; this will prevent a large unexpected bill at the end of the month when high priced costs, charged by most web hosts for extra disk space usage, are added on to your bill.

Bandwidth

Try to estimate how much bandwidth (data transfer) your web site may use. And of course make sure that you get more bandwidth than your site uses.

For example, if your website uses 5GB bandwidth per month, then choose a plan, which offers at least 8 GB bandwidth per month. This again will prevent from paying more money for ‘extra bandwidth in the end of the month.

Website Speed

This is a very important factor while considering a hosting service.
This will decide how fast your website loads when some one visits your site. You need to know that your future visitors and customers are very busy, so you need a fast server. Otherwise they won't be sitting and waiting for the load of all your texts and graphics.
Feel free to ask your hosting provider to provide you with a list of their client's websites to check their speed.

Mail Server

Make sure that you get enough email addresses with your own domain name. There is no need to pay an extra fee for use of a mail server as many hosts offer this service now for free, within the hosting plan.

...

Now what? That's all for now my friend. If it's your first hosting experience - this information will be sufficient for you I suppose. Of course there're many many other features that you'll find out later. But as for now - let's won't overload you with them all.