Category: webhosting

Dedicated hosting is the most reliable and expensive option in webhosting. In shared web hosting you will be sharing server’s disk space, bandwidth and other system resources with many webmasters. Your 300 GB of hard disk space is just a part of some 5tb or 50tb space available on the servers. The rest of the space is occupied by the websites of others. Your applications shared the memory of the web server along with applications of other webmasters. Of course, the servers have bandwidth limits which your website will be sharing with many other websites. Then why do people buy shared web hosting options? Obvious reason, the costs!!! Dedicated hosting costs about 60$ to 300$ per month with which you can buy a whole years plan of expensive or premium shared hosting.

Then what does this so expensive dedicated hosting include? When they say dedicated hosting then the whole server is reserved for your website. Only your applications use the memory or CPU of the server. Or they are only running on the server. Only you website occupies the hard disk of the server. All the bandwidth of the server is reserved for your website. Obviously this option is very costly. If your website is very large and has lot of multimedia files like videos etc and requires large bandwidth, you have to consider seriously buying these plans. Dedicated hosting is reliable due to redundancy. The response of servers will be fast. You will have wide variety of technologies available to operate or use. Even if one web server is down other web server will point to your website, which is called clustered webhosts. Some of the web hosting companies provides unmetered bandwidth (no measurement of bandwidth usage) and unlimited disk space options. If you are a serious business user then I recommend you to opt for dedicated server option.

There are large number of free web hosting companies, but the number of companies that provide reliable free hosting is low.

Just search for free web hosting and you will get about 22 million search results on Google. The free website hosting is a way to promote own paid hosting. Most of the hosts provide free hosting to attract visitors , impress with their service and convert them to paid hosting. Most of the free hosting packages has severe restrictions on technologies available to use. The disk space and bandwidth are limited. Some provide large space like 5gb but place restriction on multimedia files like video, audio and .exe files. Some free website providers provide database support & some don’t as database applications can cause heavy load on the servers. There are as many as 200 free website hosting providers.

Some of these web hosts offer free website hosting without any banners or pop ups on your website. An some even allow you to put your own ads like Google ads. But most of the free website hosting is unreliable and paid hosting is always recommended due to their reliability.

But in my experience free web hosts are unreliable. In the long run they run out of resources and some even block your account if you are using lots of resources. Some even require you to pay for some basic needs like for FTP account. Some adds banners to your web pages, some add pop ups, some require you to post in their forum to keep your hosting alive. I would suggest spend some money and get paid hosting service. Most of them come for cheap like 3$/month….

What is the most efficient way to save bandwidth?
Outsourcing!!!!

Thing you can outsource

1. video
2. audio
3. documents
4. pictures

Dude that includes all!!
Nope you cannot outsource  web pages (obviously!)

Video
Serving large sized video files like movies or video tutorials can really mess up your bandwidth. If that video tutorial is popular it will consume a lot of bandwidth. Let say you video is of 50MB in size. About 10 visitors download / view this video every day. Then total bandwidth utilization only for that file is 15000MB/month (50x10x30). OMG! thats a lot.15GB of bandwidth for only one single video file. Just imagine how much bandwidhth you have to buy if a single video file takes 15 gb of bandwidth.

There are large websites like YouTube  where you can upload your videos and they provide you with code to embed that video in your blog or website.  YouTube allows only 100MB & limits the length of video to 10 min. Uploading to these popular video hosts also has other benefits like, free traffic. Many of these popular video sites bring large traffice to your website. Most of the visitors who are visiting youtube finds your video then comes to your homepage for more information (given you have lfet a link to your website there.)

If you don’t want to stream vidoe files you have to upload these huge video files to free file hosting websites. There are really some good free file hosting websites. They have been popular these days. There is a seperate post on free file hosts( the topic is too large to discuss here).

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Audio Files
Most of the time you can upload all audio files to free file hosting websites but there are some services that stream audio for you. Supload is also one of these hosts that provide you embed code to put in your website to play these audio files.

Documents
Can documents occupy large space. Yes and no. Depends on size of the document. IF the document is of 1 mb just keep it in your website. If it is more than 10 mb share in free file hosting websites. There are some good & popular document hosts like SCRIBD where you can upload almost all types of documents and embed them in your website. The visitor doesn’t need to have any special software (expcept ADOBE flash player) to view that document. These document hosting sites are popular so you can get some free traffic from these site to your blog or website. Just don’t forget to leave a link to your website in the documents you have uploaded and your profile in that site.
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Picture:-
Yes pictures cost a lot of bandwidth for you. IF you are a template builder or a designer who caters free templates then i highly recommend uploading the pictures you use in templates to either photbucket or imageshack. Don’t upload pictures used in your website to these file hosts. You images are loaded every time a person opens you website so its better to keep in a place where large bandwidth is available (your webhost). But imageshack does allow about 300 megabytes of transfer per hour for each hotlinked file. So you might consider using it.
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Many webmasters check for bandwidth before buying hosting package. They are in a misconception that the more the better. It is not a body building competition to buy more and more bandwidth. If you are planning to setup and information website that contains only text then 10Gb would more than enough for a month. Also bandwidth utilization depends on number of page views you get per month. One of my website has about 240,000 page views per month and it has flash games, pictures etc.. but the bandwidth utilization barely crosses 100GB mark… You can calculate the bandwidth required like this.. assume each page is about 100kb size..

Average Size of Page (in KB) 100
No of Page Views/month 100000
Bandwidth Required /month 9.536743

As you can see a site with 100000 pageviews per month needs 10GB /month… 100000 are for really large websites… and if you are planning to setup 10 such sites 100GB or 200GB/month plan would be ideal. and far more than enough. If you are planning for a personal website even 1GB is redundant… :) . But if you have lots of pictures, videos and other rich media you might have to buy a larger package or you can manage with free file hosting sites like mediafire. But now a days the rich media are consuming a lot of data. Text itself represent a low percentage of your bandwidth consumption.