Understanding hosting episode 1 - understanding your requirements
Hosting comes in so many different flavours that you can spend anywhere from $5 to $50,000 a month (and beyond). So it's worthwhile gaining a decent idea of what you really need out of your hosting; I'll give some guidelines too.
What are your objectives?
If you're going to be creating a personal blog to talk about your daily activities, it's unlikely you'll attract mammoth amounts of traffic, nor will you be storing overly large files. Therefore quite cheap hosting can be used because you shouldn't stretch beyond their limitations. However if you're going to be starting a blog/website where you'll write articles then you need to consider the levels of traffic you might get.
If you're writing within a very specific niche that has very little mainstream interest then you can probably get away with really cheap hosting again. However if you're writing within a topic that does have a strong level of interest (web development, SEO, photography, etc) then you have to consider what would happen if your content was picked up by a big website (Digg, Reddit, Slashdot, other big news sites). Not only do you need to consider the bandwidth costs of the extra traffic, but your website needs to withstand the pressure without bursting into flame.
But I can't predict my success?
You might start with very humble ideas but slowly accelerate into something more meaningful... Remember you can always change hosting company. If you've got really cheap hosting that stops being sufficient you can upgrade/buy a different package and transfer all your content/data over.
What might you be storing?
This is an excellent question to ask yourself. If you're running a blog - that'll have quite low overheads, whereas serving videos are quite expensive in resources. You need plenty of storage and acres of bandwidth (not that these two are expensive, but they can make a big difference at the end of the day). Normal day-to-day blogging with text, images and okay levels of traffic doesn't cost much to host.
What is my hosting, what do I get?
I'm with Dreamhost and I'm very happy with them. I've been with them for over a year and find their service and value to be excellent. This website has been Dugg numerous times and the site had a month of 160,000 uniques last year and it coped fine. It doesn't succumb to the "Digg effect" and that's excellent. My hosting allows me £200gb of storage and 2TB of bandwidth, for this I pay only $120 a year.
What do I use?
At the moment I'm using around 5gb of bandwidth to serve 30,000 uniques a month, although I have used as much as 30gb without issue too. I serve just content with images; you might find overheads slightly higher/lower depending on your design.
I hope this post has helped you to understand what you need to consider when thinking about buying hosting. In episode two I'll be taking these considerations and applying them to real metrics like bandwidth and storage. Have a think about where you see your blog going, where you'd like to take it and what effects that might have on your traffic/exposure. With these things in mind episode 2 will explain how to move forwards with finding hosting.
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