Web Hosting Bandwidth Explained

When shopping for web hosting, a very common concern, and legitimate one, is the amount of bandwidth you will need. This article is intended to help you determine just how much of bandwidth your web site requires.

When shopping for web hosting, a very common concern, and legitimate one, is the amount of bandwidth you will need. This article is intended to help you determine just how much of bandwidth your web site requires.

When you are buying insufficient bandwidth, you might find yourself in two undesired situations: paying, usually high fees, for the extra bandwidth your web site needed or having your web site shut off. Overbuying bandwidth is not a good thing either as it will put you in the position to pay for something you dont use. This article is intended to help you determine just how much of bandwidth your web site requires.

What is bandwidth anyway?

Lets just see what bandwidth is. Bandwidth is the term that is used to denote the amount of data that has been transferred from your web space to the computers of your visitors. To put it simple, bandwidth is the amount of data that flows across a network wire in a given period of time. In web hosting industry this time period usually is one month. This happens simply because web hosting providers are also charged monthly for their huge broadband Internet connection. This is the cost that ultimately is then passed on to the consumer in the form price for their individual web hosting plan.

Bandwidth being such a delicate matter for a successful web presence, could you at least estimate the bandwidth needs of your web site? The answer is yes, you can estimate it, but you can never be sure of your estimate being perfectly correct because of all the variables involved.

How do I calculate my bandwidth?

If your index.html page has a size of lets say 50 KB, every time you get a visitor on your start page (assuming that your visitors will only open you first page and not browse your entire web site), your visitor will download 50 KB of information onto his or hers computer. For 100 visitors, you will get a total of 5.000 KB of data being transferred from the web server hosting your site to your visitors computers.

So a formula for computing your estimated needs of bandwidth would look like this:

Size of your web content * number of visitors that accessed that web page = your consumed bandwidth

The formula looks very simple, yet estimating correctly the bandwidth required by your web site is anything but simple. This is obvious when you look at what makes up this formula.

The size of one web page is one thing, and the total size of your web site is another. You should take into consideration the total size of your web site and this means including files offered for download. Also web sites grow in time or even change completely. When this happens, you must redo the estimates for your web site bandwidth.

When it comes to visitors browsing your web site, it is rather difficult to predict what pages your visitors will access. For example, some visitors would stop at the index page, other will look for the contact details, and some will download your brochure. Knowing the sheer number of visitors your site has over one month can be very helpful in estimating the bandwidth required to support them.

Ultimately, when trying to find out the amount of bandwidth your web site requires you must answer two important questions:

• What is the size of your web site?
• What is the traffic your web site will get?

For a not very large web site that is not very that doesnt offer audio/video downloads and doesnt get very much traffic, you dont need a very large amount of bandwidth. Average web sites use only about 500 MB of monthly bandwidth. But for small web sites that generate a lot of traffic, you should consider a web hosting plan that offers a lot of bandwidth.

For your reference, an average web site (for example a personal or a family web site) will also get average traffic, meaning a range of 50-500 visitors per day.

When assessing the requirements of your web site bandwidth, you must also understand that although you have purchased your web hosting together with the bandwidth as per month, your total monthly bandwidth is usually broken down into daily rates. Exceeding the daily rates might result in having your web site shut down for the day.

How to keep your bandwidth down?

Having a lot of rich web content (images, flash files, audio files) is a good way to make your web site more attractive for your visitors, but also is the shortest way to burn out your bandwidth. This article wont tell you to give up using such files for your web site, instead simply point out that overcrowding your web pages with images could harm not only your bandwidth, but also the usability of your web site. Good web site design is not proportional with the number of images per page.

Offering downloads on your web such as site music files, .PDF files, flash or video files is another thing that will almost sure consume your bandwidth by just a handful of visitors. The simple download of an average .PDF file half of megabyte in size will consume monthly 1 GB of bandwidth, only with 2.000 people downloading it.

Stick to your goals and adjust your web sites content strictly to fulfill them.

Keeping down the amount of bandwidth your web site is consuming might be easy to achieve with good preparation and excellent web design.

To avoid sky-high bandwidth costs, try to apply the following suggestions:

1) Make the file size of your web pages as small as possible. Lots of tools, some of them freeware can help you to do just that by compressing them.

2) Keep the images on your web site to a minimum. For the images included in your web site, use .JPG or .GIF compression tools to reduce the size and still keep the quality at an acceptable level.

3) Try not to offer too many downloadable files. If your have to offer downloadable files, it is best to only include the ones around 1 MB in size.

The right way the to start when planning your web sites bandwidth needs, apart from the traffic your site will get, is to look at the type your content your are going to serve to your visitors. If your web site is packed with multimedia (video, music, flash etc) or if your offer .PDF files for download, you might consider opting for a dedicated server. Even in the event your web site is just starting out an you have limited funding for its hosting, it would be wise to choose a web hosting provider that will offer you a plan with more resources than your estimate need at a reasonable price.

As no matter how good your estimate is, there is a chance that it will fail, dont forget to look at the charges for the bandwidth exceeding your monthly plan.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Calin Indre is editor at HostPinPin ( http://www.hostpinpin.com ), a Cheap Web Hosting Directory Resource.

HostPinPin.com is a resource for webmasters and consumers looking to find a web hosting company. Providing web hosting reviews, compare web hosting plans, web hosting articles, glossary of terms, free hosting guide, free hosting quote, tips and more.

This article may be reprinted or published without the authors consent as long as the About and weblinks are kept intact.

Managed Vs. Unmanaged Dedicated Hosting

“Unmanaged dedicated servers” – this is a pretty uninviting term to many, especially the non-gurus, but in most cases is not as “non-servicing” as it seems.

“Unmanaged dedicated servers” – this is a pretty uninviting term to many, especially the non-gurus, but in most cases is not as “non-servicing” as it seems.

“Unmanaged dedicated servers” – this is a pretty uninviting term to many, especially the non-gurus, but in most cases is not as “non-servicing” as it seems. In fact, I think someone one day soon, ( who knows maybe me ) will coin a new phrase to replace the term “unmanaged” – similar to how “used cars” is now “pre-owned” or how “apartment complexes” are now “rental communities”. The truth is that unless you just picked a lousy provider or have unreasonable expectations, unmanaged hosting offers more service and support than most think.

The Difference

While exact definitions vary among providers, generally speaking managed hosting means your provider takes complete or near complete care of your server. This can include anything from basic system maintenance and patches to applications maintenance, security, monitoring, etc. Someone that needs dedicated hosting and wants to rely on their host for pretty much anything and everything regarding their server needs to strike a relationship with a managed service provider. Full blown managed services involve lots of skilled people hours. Not only that, since every managed customer is unique, it’s hard for a managed provider to be overly systematic. For this – expect to pay a great deal more than today’s budget server provider but if your needs demand it, and you choose a solid provider it should be money well spent.

Unmanaged dedicated hosting obviously refers to dedicated servers with less, little or none of the skilled people support you’d expect to find in managed. You signup, you pay, and in a few minutes to a few hours you get a welcome email with IP address, login, FAQ’s, etc. – Beyond that you are pretty much on your own. Relax – you are not really as own your own as it seems.

First off, most unmanaged providers do in fact offer technical support, and most that we’ve seen is very good. If you choose unmanaged dedicated service you do need to have someone on your team that knows the technical side a good bit, but they don’t necessarily have to be experts. While you may have to wait 12 – 24 hours or you may even have to pay extra for it, nearly all the unmanaged providers I know do have high level techs available to handle serious issues. In addition most providers give some sort of immediate reboot service. Unless you’ve been tinkering with some critical config files or have a hardware failure, a reboot can help with a range of issues. Lastly, unmanaged providers may not support you or whatever you put on your server after you move in, but they do stand by the hardware and software they sell you. If a hard drive crashes they are going to replace it for you (although you had better be doing your backups) and if your system crashes most will fix it for you.

Summary

The bottom line is if you’ve got mission critical needs and don’t have the in-house staff to efficiently keep your servers performing the way they should, then you are going to need managed services. Even still it’s a more cost effective route that hiring your own staff and most likely you will receive a higher, more consistent level of service. If your needs are more basic, and or you or your staff has the time and know-how to perform 75% – 80% of your server’s maintenance then an affordable unmanaged service should do you just fine.

Please refer following web sites for useful resources related to web site hosting:

http://www.vipwh.com

http://www.thehostingguide.com

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Paras Shah

Chief Technology Officer

VIP PowerNet, Inc.

Phone: (713)787-6501

Email: paras@vippowernet.com

http://www.vippowernet.com

Web Hosting Terminology

This article will define what various terms used by web hosting companies mean. It’s not possible (and sometimes insulting to the reader) to cover everything so this will just cover the most commonly used and important terms.

Bandwidth (or Transfer or Data Transfer)

Bandwidth is the amount of traffic that is sent (and recieved) by your website. It is usually measured in gigabytes (GB), where 1 GB = 1024 megabytes (MB), and it is usually allocated on a monthly basis, for example you could have 5GB/month of bandwidth, which means that there is a limit of 5GB of files that can be downloaded from your site within a month. Bandwidth is only a concern if you host a lot of files, for example images or movies, as webpages are usually small file sizes.

Colocation Server (or Colocation Hosting)

This is similar to Dedicated Hosting (see below), except the server is owned by a customer and they pay the colocation hosting company to host the server for them – that involves paying a charge for bandwitch which the hosting company provide, the physical space which the server takes up and the power that the server uses. With this set up the customer is responsible for their hardware.

Control Panel

This is a web page with a usable interface which the customer can connect to when they want to tweak their hosting settings, view the transfer statistics, or utilise other features provided with their hosting.

Dedicated Server (or Dedicated Hosting)

This is a server which is owned by the hosting company which they will rent out to you for a monthly fee along with an allotment of bandwidth which you can use with it. This means that you get a whole server to yourself to use for what you desire, this is needed for scripts which use a lot of server resources (for example large message boards, for one of which I pay for a dedicated server). As a customer, you would have full control over the server and could change the configuration as required, a facility not available when you have to share a server with others. With a dedicated server, the web hosting company is responsible for the hardware as they own it, not the customer.

Disk Space

This is the amount of space on the server that you have to upload your files on, it’s usually measured in MB or GB.

MySQL

This is a type of database (as is PostgreSQL) which allows the customer to store and retrieve information on the server. A lot of scripts require that a database is present to function.

Reseller Hosting

This is similar to Virtual Hosting (see below), but the customer is given the ability to create small hosting accounts of their own, which they can then give or sell to people if they desire. It usually allows the customer more features, bandwidth and diskspace than with normal virtual hosting.

Scripts (eg PHP, Perl, ASP)

These are server side scripting languages which allow the customer to use already written scripts, or write their own, which provide additional features for the website and increased interactivity (for example message boards and content management systems).

MySQL

This is a type of database (as is

PostgreSQL) which allows the customer to store and retrieve information on the server. A lot of scripts require that a database is present to function.

Virtual Hosting (or Shared Hosting)

This is where a webhosting company puts many customers’ webpages on the same server – so the server resources are shared amongst all the customers using it. This means that applications which cause a high server load are not suitable, and if one customer uses one then other customers will suffer.

vdhri.net is a website dedicated to providing free lessons and tutorials in many programming languages.

The Basics of Hosting

At its most basic, getting an Internet project up and running requires two essentials: access to hardware and access to the Internet. Hardware and bandwidth are a major consideration in light of both the potential expense and the issue of quality of service. This is one of those areas where you can pay as much or as little as you like. There is a correlation between what you pay and the quality you get, but there are plenty of good deals to be found in the current market, so shop around.

Lets take one step back and make sure everyone shares some common ground, in terms of terms.

“Servers” are the hardware that holds and distributes information to people via the Internet. A small site may reside on a server with a number of other sites, a large site may require hundreds of separate servers in a variety of physical locations, all connected together and running as one cohesive system.

Servers can handle a wide variety of functions, from housing websites, to running mailing systems. For a quick rundown of server terminology check out the Webopedia server listing.

While some firms are interested in owning and feeding their own equipment, most firms these days choose to outsource all, or at least part, of the task. Outside of firms with special needs, it is hard to make a case for purchasing hardware in the current market. Like a new car, a server depreciates massively the moment it is taken from the dealer. Add to the equation the maintenance of the hardware and the software, and you have a cost center that not only becomes more expensive over time, but less functional relative to the newest technology.

A web hosting company (sometimes called an “Internet Data Center” or “IDC”) will offer a variety of packages, including the rental of hardware. The low monthly costs associated with hosting these days tips the hardware scale firmly toward the decision to rent, rather than buy hardware. Let the web hosts staff worry about changing disk drives, updating the operating system with the newest security patch and keeping the electricity and Internet connection going 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Outsourcing lets you focus on your core competencies, and the fact is that most IT departments weaned on office networks are in no position to support a real time data center-type operation.

When we talk about outsourcing hosting, another term you are likely to hear frequently is collocation. Co-location facilities physically house hardware and equipment in a secure location. The facility generally offers some degree of security against physical intrusion, fire, and power or bandwidth interruption. The quality of the physical facility and staff is generally related directly to the price and a site visit is appropriate where high-reliability installations are required.

If you are in the e-commerce business, or providing support services through your website, down time can be very expensive. Larger hosts will provide redundancy for drives, power supplies and bandwidth. If your site produces revenues, dont scrimp on the host.

Security of your data and your customers data is a sensitive issue. While your host is unlikely to guarantee security of any system, they should have in place adequate assurances that their environment does not contribute to the risk. They should also be willing to guarantee turn-around time on installation of patches and security fixes as they are released by vendors (like Microsoft!).

Selecting the right host for your company requires taking a hard look at your needs. Issues that must be resolved and prioritized include your need for ongoing maintenance and physical support services, network quality and speed, contract terms, and of course the value for money. Lets not forget that the current market, with its slough of bankruptcies, has also taught us that the financial stability of the firm is a factor.

For most clients, the level of the hosts customer service is the key to satisfaction. Poor customer service is commonly cited as a reason for moving from one host to another, so make an effort to assess any firms abilities in this area. Several sites now focus on rating web hosts and these should serve as a good starting point for your investigations. Try Hostsearch.com, with its wizard interface, and Web Host Directory. Make a point to ask around – word of mouth is a strong persuader in the customer service game.

Other issues that will inform your decision include your preferred operating system Windows, Linux or Unix — and your database needs. The additional services area is where a lot of firms distinguish themselves, offering incentives in the form of unlimited email addresses, or free domain name re-directs. Look carefully at the fine print and add up the cost of additional services. You may well find that the more expensive package bundles a lot of items marked as additional expense in the budget packages. But, also never forget that the company will be more than happy to let you upgrade to a bigger package if your needs change in the future.

author: Ric Shreves, www.waterandstone.com

Lets take one step back and make sure everyone shares some common ground, in terms of terms.

“Servers” are the hardware that holds and distributes information to people via the Internet. A small site may reside on a server with a number of other sites, a large site may require hundreds of separate servers in a variety of physical locations, all connected together and running as one cohesive system.

Servers can handle a wide variety of functions, from housing websites, to running mailing systems. For a quick rundown of server terminology check out the Webopedia server listing.

While some firms are interested in owning and feeding their own equipment, most firms these days choose to outsource all, or at least part, of the task. Outside of firms with special needs, it is hard to make a case for purchasing hardware in the current market. Like a new car, a server depreciates massively the moment it is taken from the dealer. Add to the equation the maintenance of the hardware and the software, and you have a cost center that not only becomes more expensive over time, but less functional relative to the newest technology.

A web hosting company (sometimes called an “Internet Data Center” or “IDC”) will offer a variety of packages, including the rental of hardware. The low monthly costs associated with hosting these days tips the hardware scale firmly toward the decision to rent, rather than buy hardware. Let the web hosts staff worry about changing disk drives, updating the operating system with the newest security patch and keeping the electricity and Internet connection going 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Outsourcing lets you focus on your core competencies, and the fact is that most IT departments weaned on office networks are in no position to support a real time data center-type operation.

When we talk about outsourcing hosting, another term you are likely to hear frequently is collocation. Co-location facilities physically house hardware and equipment in a secure location. The facility generally offers some degree of security against physical intrusion, fire, and power or bandwidth interruption. The quality of the physical facility and staff is generally related directly to the price and a site visit is appropriate where high-reliability installations are required.

If you are in the e-commerce business, or providing support services through your website, down time can be very expensive. Larger hosts will provide redundancy for drives, power supplies and bandwidth. If your site produces revenues, dont scrimp on the host.

Security of your data and your customers data is a sensitive issue. While your host is unlikely to guarantee security of any system, they should have in place adequate assurances that their environment does not contribute to the risk. They should also be willing to guarantee turn-around time on installation of patches and security fixes as they are released by vendors (like Microsoft!).

Selecting the right host for your company requires taking a hard look at your needs. Issues that must be resolved and prioritized include your need for ongoing maintenance and physical support services, network quality and speed, contract terms, and of course the value for money. Lets not forget that the current market, with its slough of bankruptcies, has also taught us that the financial stability of the firm is a factor.

For most clients, the level of the hosts customer service is the key to satisfaction. Poor customer service is commonly cited as a reason for moving from one host to another, so make an effort to assess any firms abilities in this area. Several sites now focus on rating web hosts and these should serve as a good starting point for your investigations. Try Hostsearch.com, with its wizard interface, and Web Host Directory. Make a point to ask around – word of mouth is a strong persuader in the customer service game.

Other issues that will inform your decision include your preferred operating system Windows, Linux or Unix — and your database needs. The additional services area is where a lot of firms distinguish themselves, offering incentives in the form of unlimited email addresses, or free domain name re-directs. Look carefully at the fine print and add up the cost of additional services. You may well find that the more expensive package bundles a lot of items marked as additional expense in the budget packages. But, also never forget that the company will be more than happy to let you upgrade to a bigger package if your needs change in the future.

author: Ric Shreves, www.waterandstone.com

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ric Shreves is an Internet consultant and author specializing in web technologies. He is a partner in Water & Stone, a web design agency focused on Mambo, osCommerce, and other open source tools. Read more of his work online at: http://www.waterandstone.com.

Web Hosting Jargon Buster

Web Hosting Jargon Buster In this article, I am going to introduce a few web hosting jargons in a concise way.

Disc Space – The term refers to the amount of physical space devoted to holding the client’s content (which is basically his website files or stored

databases/emails).

Monthly Traffic – If people visit one’s site, data is sent from his server to their computer. That data may also include emails received and

downloaded to one’s PC. At the end of each month, this request data is summed up to show the total data transfer or monthly traffic.

POP3 Email – POP means ‘Post Office Protocol’ which is a client/server protocol for collecting email on a server from individual mail accounts. A

straightforward online control panel lets client to configure the users and passwords.

IMAP – Instant Message Access Protocol (IMAP in short) differs from POP3 as it allows remote clients to access email stored on a remote server

instead of downloading it. A user can always access his mail from his home PC or mobile devices since the mail is centrally stored. Microsoft

Outlook/Outlook Express and Mozilla Mail/Thunderbird are known to have IMAP support.

Email Redirects – Email redirect is better known as email forwarding. Instead of collecting email from the server, one can arrange for mail

addressed to his domain to go to mailboxes hosted elsewhere.

Domain Name – Domain name is a unique name which identifies a website. It workds as a permanent web address and provides a professional

web presence. While moving a site can be really messy in case of a domain owned by others, registering one’s own domain name lets him keep

same address even if his site is moved.

BBS – BBS stands for ‘Bulleting Board System’, a computerized meeting system where users can have discourses, make announcements and

download/upload files. There are copious BBSs around the world, most of which rely on a direct modem to modem connection over a phone line

using a single computer.

MySQL – MySQL is the most popular open source relational database management system (RDBMS) in the world with more than four million

installations powering websites, business applications etc. It is a very effective language for adding, accessing and processing data in a database.

MySQL is specially recognized for its flexibility, reliability and most importantly, speed.

CGI – CGI means Common Gateway Interface, a protocol that allows a webpage to execute a program on a web server. Common CGI programs

include counters, guest books and forums. CGI scripts are programs written in PERL that is stored on the remote web server and run on the web

server in response to a request from a particular user.

PHP – Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP) is a widely used general-purposed server side scripting language. It is very suitable for web development as

user can embed it into HTML pages. Many popular CMS systems are based on MySQL.

Virtual Server – A virtual server is a UNIX based server environment which allows multiple independent servers to work on the same hardware. It is

the significant trait which discerns virtual server from dedicated/shared servers.

About the Author

-Abdul Vasi is a Marketing Expert specialized in Internet Marketing, His Web hosting India Company Hostcats provides you with reliable but affordable web hosting solution for your online business.

Web Hosting Guide for Beginner

First and foremost, for non-IT savvy, it might be a little tough for them to comprehend the meaning of web hosting. I believe if you search it on any search engine, of course there will be answer and explanation for them. But, how far do you really understand? Honestly, when I first get to know this term few years back, I had problem understanding myself. Then, I found one simple explanation that might be easy for people to understand. So, today, if anyone were to ask me what is “web hosting”, i’d explain as follows…

Imagine you are homeless and you want to rent a room or buy a house. In order to get a shelter for yourself, you need a room. So, you imagine yourself as the website and the room as the hosting that you need to place yourself in. That means your website need a web hosting. Then, that’s the time you start finding yourself a web hosting provider. Here, web hosting provider would be the house owner who rents you the room. So, in order for your website to be available and browsed by Internet users, you need to make sure your website is hosted in a web server provided by a web hosting provider.

So, when you finally understand what web hosting is, next will be the time to find out more about the different types of web hosting available. You have shared hosting, dedicated hosting, reseller hosting, VPS hosting, and colocation hosting. You name it, the Internet has it! So many to remember and differentiate..so, let’s get the ball rolling with…

Shared Hosting
Shared hosting means that a web server has its resources shared by many other websites. Or you can put it as, in a house, there are many tenants. Usually small or normal e-commerce businesses will choose this type of hosting. Websites with high traffic might not be able to choose this type of hosting due to insufficient webspace.

Dedicated Hosting
Dedicated hosting refers to hosting in which you rent a server from your web hosting provider and will be placed at your web hosting provider’s datacentre. They will provide software installation and connection to Internet. This will indicates that the website owner has control over the server as they don’t share it with other websites. In short, dedicated hosting is where only 1 user hosted on the server machine and have a full privilege over the server to manage it by themself. The server machine will be still belongs to the web hosting provider.

Colocation Hosting
Well, this hosting has the features which are almost the same as dedicated hosting EXCEPT that you provide your own server and web hosting provider just help you to plug it into their datacentre. You need to install own software and hardwares. Everything is DIY.

Reseller Hosting
Reseller Hosting is a hosting where the account owner has the priviledge to allocate the webspace and bandwidth access and resell them to his clients. This shows that reseller hosts act like a middleman and is usually not responsible for any software or hardware intallation. They only buy webspace and resell to clients.

VPS Hosting
VPS stands for Virtual Private Server. It is almost the same as dedicated server. Hence, it’s sometimes called Virtual Dedicated Server. Generally, it means that the account owner has the feeling as though his owns a dedicated server. In real sense, it’s actually separating a physical server into several independent hosting spaces or VPS-es, each isolated from the other. This will allow you to create and manage multiple sites and domains and take full control of your VPS with root/administrator access which allows you to access the virtual hard disk, RAM and to reboot your private server independently from other VPS-es.

Domain Name
After we are done with the different types of hosting, there is something else which I want to touch on. It is none other than the “domain name”. So, ever wonder what is domain name? Wow, sounds technical? Not really actually. Don’t be scared. Last time, when I saw the words domain name, it freaked me out too. Now, when I got used to it, it’s not that nerve-wracking after all. So, domain name is just the normal web address or url (Uniform Resource Locator) you type in the “address” area when you open a browser. Examples of domain name are “exabytes.com”. You know? Just the normal web address. Well, since it’s a web address, it’s a unique name. Hence, there will be no other same domain name. In fact, domain name is actually corresponding with numeric IP address. So, every domain name will have its numeric IP address. For example, the IP address for exabytes.com is 72.18.131.206

When you see exabytes.com, ever wonder “.com” stands for what? It actually stands for commercial. Whenever you see .com, .org, .net or others which ends after the final dot or period (.) of a url, it is known as top-level domain. It actually tells you what kind of website it is, indirectly. And the commonly used domain name extension nowadays will be .org, .net, .com. However, there are a lot of new domain extension up for grab lately such as .aero, .info, .museum, and .name. Next in the list that I shall explain is, Country Level Domain Name. Examples of country level domain name is exabytes.com.my. It has “.my” as its country code top-level domain (ccTLD). .my here represents the country “Malaysia”. Of course, different country will have different ccTLD. For example, .jp stands for Japan, .au for Australia, .ca for Canada.

There are more to learn in order to excel in web hosting industry. Hopefully this simple guide will help all those novice out there. There are other things you need to know as well. But, it will be in my next article. Cheers!

About the Author

SY Ho is an Online Marketing Executive for http://www.exabytes.com

Do You Know What Your Hosting Sla Is?

Also known as “Terms and Acceptable Usage Policy” your Service Level Agreement, SLA is probably the most important piece of text you will need to read. And read you will have to; the entire text. Once you have familiarized yourself with this SLA you can start to skim read and look out for the most important details you feel are most important to you as you search for other hosting companies.

An SLA basically tells you what services you will be paying for and what rights you do not have and what rights you do have. You are agreeing to pay for your web hosting and for what is in the SLA and nothing else. In this document or text, the web host provider is letting you know in print, what you will have to agree to if you wish their services. But remember, that it also tells you, what rights you have. If the web host provider does not live up to the SLA, you now have a right to use this agreement to your advantage.

Web sites and web pages are very powerful marketing tools to appeal and encourage the client to act or buy the service that company is offering. Web pages can contain images, Flash, colors and even sounds and music. A web page can even be interpreted as one big advertisement to the buyer. This is why the SLA of a company, or in this case, a web host provider is so important. It is straight to the point and to quite a number of people, simply boring. Many times the SLA is written in small text, is very long and to some people confusing or complicated. You may notice some SLA’s are almost hidden or at the bottom of a page in small text or only available on the order form.

Is there a reason why this is so? To have your SLA on the first page would look very odd and highly unusual. There are many reasons why some companies choose to have their SLA located where they are, written the way they are. Some are simply so they do not confuse the buyer. Some are so they do not scare the buyer so he or she thinks that what they are “getting into”, is way out of their league. Unfortunately, some companies “hide” these service agreements because it reveals too much about the company and what you are really purchasing. Remember the colorful and bedazzling web pages? Well these SLA’s are just the opposite. They get straight to the point. It’s like opening the hood of a car and looking at the engine to see exactly how it works.

If you do not find an SLA anywhere on the website and have looked on just about all the web pages, then simply move on to another provider. This must be present on all web host providers selling services, even if they are free. You can always ask for their SLA, but this is not advisable if it comes in the form of an email as there is no way for both parties to revert to a static SLA.

This is also another important matter. The web host provider can always change their SLA if need be, but find out if you are told so and how much time you have to adapt to these changes. It is not good agreeing to their terms and then having them change it later on to something you did not agree to. You may wish to make a copy of their SLA page and save it on to your computer’s hard disk. You may also find it much easier to read their SLA by copying and pasting the text into Notepad and reading it from there. There is actually no need to read the small print on the web page itself, just copy and paste.

Another “tactic” for some web host providers is to provide their SLA on the order form. This is where you are just about to enter your credit card details and pay for your web hosting that they inform you of their SLA. A check mark is needed beside the agreement which usually has a link to the small text. 9 times out of 10, buyers can’t be bothered to read this long complicated text and just get on with getting their web hosting. A mistake done all too often. Roughly 70% of all customers read their SLA after they have purchased a web hosting account.

Let’s discuss what the SLA can contain. You can always “verify” if what the web pages say are true, as well as get the finer details in the SLA. For a while, a few years back, the most heated discussions involved unlimited bandwidth and web space. To cut a long story short, unlimited bandwidth or web space is simply and always will be an outright lie. There is no such thing; again, read the SLA.

30 day money back guarantee.

The phrase sounds simple enough but there are still just a few things to think about. Can you receive a refund on the 30th day? Or do you need to give them 7 days warning that you wish for a refund. Is is truly a “30 day guarantee”? Does it regard all types of payments, check, money order credit card etc. Is it mentioned in the SLA? Remember, you are basically buying the services within the SLA.

Uptime guarantee.

Another very important feature to look closer at. Again, web pages can look wonderful, but the business takes place within the text of the SLA. You may even want to compare how these uptime guarantees are calculated by other web host providers. Do you need proof to in order to tell the web host provider that your site was down more than x many hours a month so the web host provider can give you a refund? Or is it more complicated, where your site needs to be down for x many hours in a row? In other words, down 2 hours on Monday, 3 on Tuesday, and 1 hour on Sunday but not 6 hours in a row, therefore not receiving a refund? Or if their uptime guarantee does not involve third party software crashes, server maintenance, internet congestion etc. What does the uptime guarantee cover? Not, what does the uptime guarantee not cover. It is extremely unlikely for any web host provider to offer a 100% uptime guarantee, without some exceptions.

What files are permitted?

There are more than just .html, .gif and .jpg files on the Internet. Apart from those files, what other files are you allowed to upload? Do they include any multimedia files; mp3 or movie files? Are you allowed to upload software files? and etc.

How is the bandwidth and disk space quota handled?

If you go over your quota, how is it handled. Are you automatically charged the extra fee? And if so, how much? Or, is your account suspended until you pay the extra charges or pay for the next hosting account? Or, are you notified about the “problem” and asked to pay the extra charges or upgrade to the next hosting plan within a certain number of days?

Domain names.

If you have registered a domain name with a registrar you should not encounter any problems. If you are registering a domain name through your web host provider, make sure you retain all rights to the domain name. This is especially true if you are given a free or a very inexpensive domain name with your account. Some web host providers will register the domain name for you, but in their name, which means you do not own it. In some cases, if you wish to move to another web host provider you will have to purchase the domain from them at a much higher cost.

Miscellaneous categories.

A few other categories to study are server resources, background running programs, mass mailing and other technical areas like Cron Jobs, telnet or SSH etc. Some of these topics mentioned in the SLA may sound rather strict or stringent but it is actually very common to read these same restrictions on almost all web host providers. This is, as mentioned earlier, to inform you of your rights and most importantly in this case, to protect the customer from harming or congesting the server for the company’s other clients. You do not want someone slowing down the server which you are using so your web pages load slowly or not at all. So you can actually be more reassured that if this happens, action will be taken, thus an advantage to you and not necessarily a hindrance. (This mainly refers to all virtual hosting accounts.)

If you are uncertain about a certain part of an SLA, you should always ask the web host provider. Never assume something is adequate unless you are sure and have checked. Always think ahead. Will I need this or that in the future? What happens if my website grows much bigger? What if I need to upload x type of files from now on? What if the third party company or software I work with needs this or that enabled? Should I have read the whole SLA? Never assume your web host provider will have or offer what you wish. Find out, and if you are not sure, ask!

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Plausibility is a term that is most often overlooked in regards to web hosting. Our goal is to educate the reader and at the same time, improve our hosting services. For more infromation and articles or to comment, please visit http://www.HostingAndDesigns.com.

Web Hosting Jargon – A Beginner’s Guide

The internet has spawned hundreds of new terms – downloads, uploads, browsers – the list is endless. Web hosting is no different – experienced users talk glibly of bandwidth, scripting languages, POP3 accounts, databases and more. But what does it all mean?

If you are new to web hosting then you will probably find it take a little while to become familiar with all the jargon needed to understand the details of different web hosting packages. To help you get started, we’ve put together our very own Top 10 of essential web hosting jargon.

1. Domain name – your online identity - http://www.yourdomainname.com – essential and almost always included with hosting.

2. Disk space / storage – How much disk space you can use to store your website’s files – it always sounds a lot, but can soon get eaten up with movie clips and audio files.

3. Data transfer – Every time someone views a page on your website, they transfer all the files for that page to their computer – hosting companies pay for this traffic, so they put a limit on data transfer per month. This limit varies a lot between providers.

4. POP3 / IMAP / Webmail – different ways of accessing your mailboxes. Webmail allows you to access your mail through a web browser and POP3 and IMAP are used with e-mail clients like Outlook.

5. FTP – File Transfer Protocol -the method used to transfer your website’s files to your web host’s servers. Simple to use.

6. MySQL databases – many websites rely on databases to store information – MySQL is the most popular database for websites.

7. Spam Assassin – a great tool used by web hosts to filter most spam out of your e-mail before you get it.

8. Custom error pages – give your visitors a polite message when things don’t work, not just a meaningless error page.

9. PHP, Perl, CGI, SSI – scripting tools to allow you to put extra functionality into your web pages.

10. FrontPage extensions – you need this if your website is built with Microsoft FrontPage.

We’ve only taken a brief look at web hosting-related jargon here, but it should be enough to get you started with web hosting. Good luck!

About the Author

Jason has been in theweb hosting business for 10 years, and has helped thousands of people find their online home. Hisweb hosting reviews are essential when choosing an online host.