Website Hosting Tip #2 -- Basic or Premium Hosting?

What website hosting plan is right for you?
Previously we discussed the fallacies of free website hosting, now we will discuss which hosting plan may be right for your website. For those that read and use our advice and are looking to pay an affordable price for your website hosting service; hopefully this section will provide some useful advice for determining which website hosting package you will need.

Terminology:

1. Disk Space - The total amount of space allowed for your website file uploads.
   
   
2. Bandwidth - Bandwidth refers to the amount of traffic (visitors) that is allowed to occur between your web site and the rest of the internet. The amount of bandwidth a hosting company can provide is determined by their network connections, both internal to their data center and external to the public internet

New Websites

New websites should seek a low cost plan with feasible space - about 250 - 500 Megabites (MB). Businesses offering services or selling products shouldn't seek to spend alot of money for hosting their website. Developing a few pages for information and possibly a blog (which will only require at most 10MB) is all that is normally needed.

A lot of website space is not needed initially because your site is new and developing, thus has low traffic (don't worry, traffic to your website will come!)

High Content Sites

If you plan to have a lot of content on your site such as pictures, videos, software files, etc... it may be a good idea to purchase a website hosting plan with plenty of space.
Nowadays with personalized social networks like ning (www.ning.com), various picture hosting sites (like Photobucket) and video hosting sites (like YouTube) saving space on your website server has become easy. However, if you are seeking to host pictures and videos on your own site, you should seek a hosting plan with approximately 500 MB - 2 GB (depending on how much dynamic content you have.)

Upgrades

Its important to note that many hosting companies enable you to upgrade your account. Even if you start with a low cost / low disk space hosting plan, as your site grows, you can easily upgrade your services to other hosting plans that fit your disk space and bandwidth needs.