Choosing The Wrong Web Hosting Plan Can Cost You Customers, Even
By Ian Clarence, Mon Dec 26th
Do you regularly buy goods online? Does this experience soundfamiliar.. you go to an e-commerce website, only to find, toyour annoyance, an excruciatingly slow response. You wait over 5minutes for the next page to load. In the end you give up, andnever make that purchase. Presumably many other people also giveup, causing the loss of many other purchases.
Now imagine that you own that website, and run that onlinebusiness. You set everything up properly, but you find that manypeople face the situation described above. You lose customers,and eventually you lose your business, and all this principallybecause you chose the wrong web plan.
You see, when you set up any online business, I cannot over-stress the importance of choosing the right company andplan.
In choosing a web plan, you must decide whether to gofor shared or dedicated hosting. With a shared plan,your website co-exists with other websites on a computer, knownas a server. With a dedicated plan, your site, and yoursite alone resides upon just one server. You can get a goodshared plan for under $10 per month, whereas dedicatedhosting plans can cost from $50 to over $100 a month.
For shared hosting, one server handles the traffic (visitors)coming to all the websites it accommodates. So if your siteshares a server with other high-traffic sites, then it could runslow because the server works extra hard. Maybe the site willrun slow at peak times during the day, when you would expectmost customers to come and buy, causing the nightmare scenarioabove. However, companies usually use many servers, withonly a limited number of sites on each, thus spreading the load.I therefore advise you to read reviews on companies tosee whether people complain about sites slowing down due tooverloading. I will say more on reviews later.
For dedicated hosting, your traffic does not compete withtraffic to any other web sites. However, this costs much more,so I do not recommend dedicated unless absolutelynecessary.
When choosing a plan, you must consider bandwidth. I'llgive you a simple explanation of bandwidth. If your planallows you 10GB of monthly bandwidth, it allows you 10GB(10,000MB) of data transfer from your site each month. If eachvisitor to your site accesses pages containing 300kB (0.3MB) ofdata on average, then your plan allows you 10,000 / 0.3 = 30,000visitors a month, or 1000 visitors a day. Ask yourself, do Ineed more than that?
Imagine the scene: your site averages 2000 visitors a day. Twoweeks into the month, with your monthly bandwidth quota used up,your site "goes offline" until the beginning of next month,
