James Boyle
Elemental Services
Given the wide range of hosting plans available, choosing a plan that is appropriate for your site can seem impossible. This article examines the issues to consider when choosing a hosting plan.
Firstly let’s take a look at what a hosting company offers. A hosting company at it’s simplest level offers you a place to put your website so that it is accessible by anyone on the Internet. Hosting computers are typically connected to the internet via a high-speed connection and are housed in secure data-centres with all the things you would like to see to ensure that your website is available all the time. Features such as secure access control, 24 hour monitoring, redundant power supplies and regular data backups are common place and ensure that the machines are up and running whenever someone on the web decides they want to visit your site.
Unless your website is particularly large or busy, in which case you will need a dedicated computer, your site will be sharing a computer with other websites, although your visitors won’t know the difference. This type of hosting is known as ‘virtual hosting’ and is the most common and most affordable. Unless you have any reason to have a dedicated machine this is your best bet. The hosting company will worry about making sure that the websites don’t interfere with each other and their computers don’t get overloaded – that’s what you pay them for.
Hosting plans have a seemingly unending array of features and options but most of the decisions can be broken down into 4 categories:
Because there are a number of sites using the same hosting computer your hosting plan will have a limit to the amount of space you can use. The size of your site dictates the amount of disk space that you will use, and the size can fairly easily be calculated by adding up the total size of all parts of your site including:
For example, if your site consists of 15 pages,
which are 10KB each, and 50 images, which are 20KB each, then
the total size of your site is:
15 * 10 + 50 * 20
= 1150 KB
= 1.2MB (roughly)
Be generous with the space you choose, allowing for future expansion of the site and for those files that you may have forgotten to include in your calculation.
Most plans come with a limit on the amount of data that can be transferred to and from your site for free in a month, any additional data transfer over this limit incurs a fee. The four contributors to your data transfer are:
By far the biggest contributor to the data transferred is the number of people viewing your site. Every page that a visitor looks at has to be downloaded to their computer, and this gets added to your running total of data transfer in a month. So the busier and more popular your site, the more data will be transferred.
For example, if you expect 40 visitors a day to
your site, and on average they will look at 4 pages (total
size of each page = 50KB including images) then we can calculate
the expected monthly download amount as follows:
40visits * 30 days * 4pages * 50KB
= 240,000 KB
= 240MB per month
Once again, be generous to allow for site growth and for those months when your site is particularly busy. Most hosting plans will charge extra for any month that you exceed your limit and will allow you to upgrade your plan should this extra transfer become the norm.
Alongside hosting your website your hosting company will be looking after any email addresses at that domain. For each email address that you want – you can have either a mailbox or a mail alias. The difference between the two is as follows.
f an email address has a mailbox associated with it then emails sent to that address are stored on the hosting computer until you connect and download them using your email program. Mailboxes are often called ‘POP3’ or just ‘POP’ mailboxes as POP3 is the protocol used when your email program talks to the hosting computer. For example, if you set up a mailbox for clint@example.com then the computer where example.com is hosted will store any emails sent to this address. You email program will talk to example.com to download these emails.
Mail aliases on the other hand are a way of forwarding emails sent to one address on to another address. For example, you may want an email sent to james@example.com forwarded to your Bigpond email address (james@bigpond.com). In this case your hosting company would set up a mail alias so that when emails arrive for james@example.com, they are sent on to james@bigpond.com. The hosting computer never stores the emails, but rather forwards them on based on your instructions. In this case your email program would download the messages from the mailbox that the emails end up in.
Typically hosting companies offer a fixed number of mailboxes (because the emails stored there take up space on their computer) and an unlimited number of mail aliases. If you want to use mailboxes for email addresses at your site then you will need to ensure that the hosting plan offers enough of them for now, and any further growth you may expect in the near future.
All the remaining options and features in a hosting plan can broadly be grouped under ‘technology choices’. Sometimes these options come as part of your hosting package while other times you will need to pay an extra fee to have them enabled. These technology choices cover different database packages, programs, and services that your website may use. For example if your website uses a database then the hosting computer will need to have some kind of database package installed. If you are offering streaming video the hosting computer will need to have a streaming video server installed.
The operating system that your hosting company runs will be the biggest influence on the technology options available. The two operating systems most commonly used today are Windows and Unix (Linux). While the type of operating system your hosting computer uses doesn’t particularly matter, the options that are available with the particular operating system may determine which one you select.
Technology options are almost endless but in general you only need those components that your site will use. Most sites use very few if any of these extra technologies, so you only want to pay for those that you are going to utilise. The best way to ensure this is to ask your web developer what services and features they need from your host, and have them select a plan based on this. Having features available that you are not going to use is not really a problem, except if it means that you end up paying more.
The options offered by hosting plans seems endless and it is often very difficult to compare apples with apples. However using the above four criteria you can choose a plan that fulfils your needs now and allows for future expansion.
