Website Hosting Basics – an Overview

Webhosting for your business is one of those things that few people really understand well unless you happen to be a web developer. It’s a mystery sort of like Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – but not quite that bad.

A host for your business website is a server. It could look just like your computer at home. In fact, if you wanted, it could even BE your computer at home if you had a fast and very stable connection. You could use a website server program and set up your notebook or desktop computer to be a web host.

In reality – it’s best left to professional companies that specialize in business hosting because to do it right takes some know-how.

Your website is in all likelihood hosted on a server rack in an air conditioned building that has a few million sites hosted on those servers too. A webhosting company has very fast bandwidth and big pipes. Meaning, they can serve your site to as many places as are requesting it all at once – very fast, very efficiently.

You can create web pages any number of ways, but at some point they go from your computer to the webhost. The way they travel across the internet is via FTP – file transfer protocol. This protocol is ideal for transferring files or programs without data loss. It’s fast and can pick up where it was cut off in the case of connection problems. There are many FTP programs available – most of them are $30-40 for a license. Or, you could use the FireFox browser and use the FireFTP plugin for free. Up to you.

Hosting your business site usually starts with these variables that define the cost of your hosting plan:

• Server Space - how much space you have on the server for your files including photos, videos, mp3′s, html, text, etc. Usually you’ll have a 500MB or some Gigabytes available. Not many business websites use all their available space on the server.
  
• Bandwidth Per Month - this is basically how much information the server dishes out to visitors of your site over the month. If your visitors are all looking at gigabytes of data each month you might go over your bandwidth. If you only offer text articles you’re not likely to go beyond what they give you for bandwidth. Bandwidth per month might be 100 GigaBytes or 1 TeraByte is becoming common now. Again, chances are you won’t ever max out your bandwidth. Years ago it was common. Now? Not much chance!
  

That’s it – this is all at the consumer level that you usually ever choose between. There are a host of add-ons that you can pick up for some extra cash per month but if you’re going with simple webhosting like at Godaddy.com you’ll basically choose plans that vary on these two criteria.

Hosting costs for new small businesses should be under $100 per year in most cases. Godaddy offers it for about $80 per year and you’ll likely have more bandwidth and server space than you could ever use.

If you need to know more about business website hosting we’ll be offering ebusiness training here as we release it through our email newsletter. Some courses will be free, some at a deep discount. You can ensure you get notified so you can take advantage of it by joining our email newsletter now.