webhosting package

Web hosting

You can store a website on your laptop and connect it with the internet. There is one big problem with this choice: accessibility. Your computer has to be 24/7 accessible for hundreds of visitors simultaneously. This can be expensive. Web hosting offers a solution for this and other problems (such as back-up and security), by uploading your website onto a webserver. A webserver is a big computer where one or more websites are stored. These websites can only be reached by the http network (internet). For a monthly fee you can get access to a server. In addition to the amount of space on a server, a web hosting company offers other services, such as:

• ✓ a domain name,
• ✓ subdomain,
• ✓ sending and receiving email,
• ✓ all the necessary applications in order to manage your website,
• ✓ back-up,
• ✓ the security of your data and
• ✓ customer support.

These services are summarized in packages.

There are two important components of a web hosting package that are essential for optimum operation of a website. These are disk space and bandwidth.

Disk space

The disk space is the designated space on a webserver. In this space your files, images, emails, databases, applications, etc. are stored. So, not only what is visible on your website (e.g. images and text), but also what is invisible for the audience (e.g. emails and databases) are stored in this space. So, when searching for a web hosting package, you should not only consider the size of your website; the size of your applications are also relevant. For example, WordPress is an application that takes up 21 MB of disk space.

The majority of web hosting companies use a central processor unit (CPU) to process their data. Some web hosting companies use a solid state drive (SSD-cards). These SSD-cards can process data faster than CPUs. Some companies claim that SSD-cards are 20 times faster than CPUs.

Bandwidth

Bandwidth is the amount of megabytes (MB) or gigabytes (GB) that are used by your visitors in a month. Suppose your website is 1 MB in size and you have 100 visitors in a month. Your bandwidth for that month will be 100 MB. Data transfer may be the term that some web hosting companies use when explaining the processing of data. They really mean bandwidth, even though bandwidth and data transfer are not the same. Bandwidth is the amount of data that can be transferred at one time, while data transfer is the actual amount of data transferred. There is a formula to calculate the data transfer: the number of expected visitors x average page size x expected page views by each visitor x 30 days. Let’s say you expected 100 visitors a day, the average page size is 80KB and you expect each visitor to view 5 pages. If we put this information into the formula above, we will have the following: 100 visitors x 80KB x 5 pages x 30 days = 1,200,000KB or 1,200MB or 1,2GB expected monthly data transfer.

There are web hosting companies that have packages with unlimited disk space and bandwidth. But before choosing one of these packages you should look at two other components of the web hosting package that are essential for the website administrator; MySQL-databases and mailboxes.

MySQL-database

MySQL stands for My Structure Query Language. When someone subscribes to a newsletter or signs up to be informed of special offers, his or her information (email address, name, telephone number, age, etc.) will be stored in a MySQL-database. Depending on the choice of web hosting package, you will have one or more databases available to you. Besides the number of databases needed, the size of these databases is also important. Their size depends on the amount of information that will be collected. On mysql.com you can find more information about this subject. Below is an example, to give you an idea how to calculate the needed storage space:

• − You expect to have 100,000 subscribers to your newsletter;
• − From each subscriber you will ask their first and last name, address and telephone number;
• − The estimate is that about 200 characters will be enough to store the above data;
• − 100,000 x 200 bytes = 20MB of storage space.

Number of mailboxes / email storage

Each web host gives you the opportunity to create several mailboxes. Examples of mailboxes are: info@mywebsite.com, contact@mywebsite.com, sales@mywebsite.com, helpdesk@mywebsite.com, support@mywebsite.com and noreply@mywebsite.com. Think beforehand how many mailboxes and storage spaces you are going to need. The email storage space includes all the folders in your mailbox:

• ✓ inbox;
• ✓ drafts;
• ✓ junk mail;
• ✓ deleted Items;
• ✓ sent Items;
• ✓ and all the additional folders of your own.

An average email consisting of only text is approximately 2KB. A mailbox of 1MB can contain about 500 of these emails. An email with images can be 10KB and sometimes more.
All the components above should be considered when choosing a web hosting package. I have searched and found 5 web hosting companies that specialize in online businesses. All of these web hosting companies have won one or more awards for their services.