How to Choose a Web Hosting Service!

Written by Tracy Perrin


1. Support. Is there really anybody there? Send them a question by email and see how long they take to respond. You want to know if they'll be there when you need them. Some offer 24-hour support and a few will respond quickly. Speedy customer service is rare and indicates a superior service. I think that this isrepparttar single most important consideration. Also, check outrepparttar 134431 quality of their online documentation.

2. Server performance. You want a server that is reliable and fast. There is a free tool available that allows you to evaluate this before making a decision! NetMechanic.com will measurerepparttar 134432 speed of access for all facets of access (network speed, DNS lookup, connect time, download time, and absence of timeouts). The "download time" statistic isrepparttar 134433 most important single item to compare. Collect your list of candidate hosting services and run side-by-side tests of allrepparttar 134434 candidates. Sample during peak and non-peak times for optimal comparison.

3. Are they familiar withrepparttar 134435 application you plan to use? If you're planning to use a particular application that requires special setup parameters (such as Online Merchant, a popular online store), make sure your potential host is familiar with repparttar 134436 application. Otherwise you may find yourself spending a great deal of time trying to figure out how to configure it - perhaps never succeeding!

4. Traffic allowance. Compare your traffic allowances. Some services give you a small limit onrepparttar 134437 amount of material that can be downloaded from your site each month and charge you large amounts when that limit is exceeded. Some offer huge traffic allowances (several thousand MB/month, where 1,000 MB = 1 GB) forrepparttar 134438 same price as others that limit you to a few hundred MB/month. Sure you probably need less than a hundred MB/month now, but why put yourself in a position where you have to move when your traffic takes off? Plan ahead and allow for growth.

How To Reduce Web Hosting Bandwidth

Written by Herman Drost


How To Reduce Web Hosting Bandwidth Copyright 2002 by Herman Drost

You just received a higher than normal monthly bill on your credit card for web hosting. Your hosting company explains that you exceeded your monthly minimum for “bandwidth usage” and suggests reducingrepparttar size of your web site files.

What is bandwidth usage? What does bandwidth mean? How much bandwidth do you need? How can you reduce bandwidth usage?

Let’s discuss each of these topics in more depth.

What is “bandwidth usage?” This refers torepparttar 134430 total amount of information that has been served to your web site visitors each month. Every file on your Web Site has a specific size (e.g. 22K). Every time a visitor downloads that file, your bandwidth usage goes up by that amount.

The largerrepparttar 134431 file,repparttar 134432 higherrepparttar 134433 bandwidth usage when it is downloaded. The more traffic to your site,repparttar 134434 more bandwidth you will use.

What does “bandwidth” mean? Bandwidth refers torepparttar 134435 amount of data that can be transmitted in a fixed amount of time. The “data transfer rate” isrepparttar 134436 speed with which data can be transmitted from one device to another. Data rates are often measured in megabits (million bits) or megabytes (million bytes) per second. These are usually abbreviated as Mbps and Mbps, respectively.

Bits and Bytes 8 bits = 1 byte. 1,024 bytes = 1 kilobyte (Kb). 1,024 kilobytes (Kb) = 1 megabyte (mb or meg) 1,024 megabytes = 1 gigabyte (gb or gig)

How much bandwidth do I need? To determine how much bandwidth you need, estimaterepparttar 134437 file size of each web page, and then multiply it byrepparttar 134438 number of pages on your web site.

Multiply this figure byrepparttar 134439 number ofrepparttar 134440 number of page views you expect per month from your site.

For example, if your web page consists of two 15Kb images and 3Kb of html, you would have 33Kb of data for that page. Now multiply this byrepparttar 134441 number of page views you expect to have per month (e.g. 100,000 per month). This would mean 3.3Gb of data needs to be transferred per month for that page.

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