Almost anyone can have their own space on the Internet these days. What You See Is What You Get website editors are becoming very user friendly so making a webpage has never been easier. If you can use a word processor, copy, paste, point and click, you will be able to create your first website. Once you've created your website, you need some place on the World Wide Web to set up your site.

A web hosting company is the place that rents you the disk space you need to store your pages, images and files. The web hosting company also provides the bandwidth you and your visitors use when the website is viewed and files are uploaded or downloaded. Web hosts enable anyone, anywhere, to access your website at any time.

Finding a suitable and affordable web host can be an intimidating project, as there are a large number of hosts to choose from.

Cheap Does NOT Necessarily Equal Affordable.

Prices can range from free to hundreds of dollars per month. Free does have a price which often comes in the form of limited services, limited control, limit on the content you have, (You might not be able to monetize your site.) banner advertisements, limited bandwidth, reliability issues or by the impression they give your visitor.

Let's take a look at some of the options available, so you can make an informed decision, and choose an appropriate web host for your needs.

disk Storage

How much disk space will you need now and as you grow?

Disk space is the amount of storage space needed for your website files. This includes all your content such as HTML files, graphics, scripts, and multimedia. A simple 5 to 10 page website with minimal graphics will usually take up less than 1MB of disk space. A 500 page website written in HTML with each page containing 3 graphics and 2 page lengths of text might consume about 10MB of space.

Use a Content Management System and you might use 70MB of disk space BEFORE you add any content.

As you add more content and include material like downloadable files, pictures, music, and video you will require more space. Be aware that an average 3-minute MP3 file can use up 2 or 3MB of disk space! If you are planning to host multimedia, be prepared to acquire a lot of disk space and bandwidth.

Bandwidth

Bandwidth refers to the amount of data that moves into and out of your web hosting account. This includes requests for web pages, email, FTP requests, FTP uploads, and multimedia and file transfers. Each hosting account is allocated a fixed quota of bandwidth per month. Normally, figures for bandwidth range from 1GB for small personal sites, up to 200GB for large business systems.

How much bandwidth you need depends on the volume of traffic your website receives and the type of content you have on your web pages. A page that has streaming audio or multimedia on it will consume much more bandwidth than a page with just text or even text with images.

One way to estimate how much bandwidth you need is to figure the size of your downloadable content and multiply by the number of visitors you receive each month. Add to that the amount of emails you send and receive and other potential data transfers such as FTP uploads and downloads. This number should be fairly accurate and will give you a margin to play with, because every visitor will not view every page or download every available file. If, for example, you are having 100 visitors a day view a 35MB multimedia file, 3500MB of bandwidth will be used EACH day. This translates into 105000MB or 105GB of bandwidth being consumed in 30 days with 100 people each day watching your video.

Summary

Finding a reliable and affordable web host is important for everyone that's serious about building a web presence.

Prices vary considerably - as low as $2 per month, to $60 or more. Keep in mind, though, expensive rates don't necessarily guarantee you great service. Some of the less expensive hosts provide reliable, stable services that will enable your website to be up and running day in and day out for years to come.

Do not fall into the trap of thinking a higher price means a better service than one that is less expensive. Service from the hosting provider is just as important, if not more important, than the features of the hosting package being offered.