A useful guideline about choosing web hosting package for a site. Ok, the new website that took you months of work is ready to publish on the web: content, graphics, and optimization are finally complete!

Now... What hosting plan do you choose? One big mistake is to choose a web hosting package based on price Alone. You must consider several elements.

First you need to consider the typology of your website: is this a personal website? Is it a company website? Is it a portal? Is it an online ecommerce shop?

According to your answer, it is necessary to choose an affordable web hosting solution that can satisfy your requirements. For example, for a personal website or a blog, it would be better to choose a low cost, affordable web hosting solution. Now, if your website is a portal, or a large database driven site, where reliability and speed are really important, it would be advisable to choose a professional, higher price, but still affordable web hosting solution.

Generally we need to quantify how many visitors (potentially) will visit our website. Usually a personal or small company website will have no more than 100-150 unique visitors/day. On the basis of these reasons, it is possible to discard many hosting packages.

Analyze is the speed/quality of internet bandwidth and if the host provides needed technical features of web servers. On average, good hosting should have an internet speed connection from 10mbit\s and up. This is really important: let's suppose that a hosting provider hosts 200 websites and that every website has 2 visitors each at the exact same time. Every visitor is downloading a page at 20kb\s; we will have a peak of bandwidth usage of about 8000kb\s, even if for few seconds. (Rarely is a web page is more than 50kb). If the host's speed connection was 10mbit\s, we would experience a speed bottleneck.

Another element to consider is the server's power: a server with 2 processors is better than a server with a single processor. Besides this, a server should have sufficient ram. For security and reliability reasons it is really important that the server contains a raid system, preferably raid 1 or raid 5 with SCSI hard discs.

The server's Operating system is another important element to consider. Operating systems that are considered "Unix like" (ex. Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD...) offers better stability and speediness but do not support scripting languages such as asp or Microsoft's access database.

For who use many scripts, it is important that the server runs Zend Optimizer to improve the speediness of PHP scripts.

Very important, for security reasons, is that host's servers sit behind a true robust firewall. It is always a good idea to read the security policy of hosting companies and verify that the company uses good security policies and best practice update procedures.

The last, but not least, element to consider when choosing an affordable web hosting solution, is technical support and reliability. If your website has an issue and technical support takes longer than 24 hours to resolve, this is not an acceptable host. For this reason, it is important to check that the affordable web hosting solution you are choosing offers 24/7 support and what the response time is.

A good and affordable web hosting solution should have an uptime close to 100%.

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