I won’t point any fingers here or link to any sites because this little secret is everywhere on the web.
How much do you know about hosting a website on the web? The answer to that question for most people is "0".
There is nothing wrong with not knowing about website hosting. Unless you do it for a living.
I have just let this little secret slide without saying anything because I figured it out and thought if I did most everyone else would.
If you have ever shopped for website hosting you probably have seen the offers of unlimited space,databases, and bandwidth, usually under $10 a month. This is a great deal! I would not tell anyone to shy away from these great deals. Just beware of what "unlimited" really means in the hosting world……
First I will tell you most hosting will be a shared server. This means you and up to thousands of other people will have that same "unlimited" space and bandwidth. For those of you that know a little about computers, the web server is just like the server in your computer network at work. It is just online 24/7/365 so anyone clicking your URL can see your website. Even with today’s technology unlimited space for hundreds or thousands of people take one huge hard drive.
Bandwidth is the traffic flow through the lines to the server. Unlimited to thousands? That could tie up the lines for a while!
What these sellers or resellers hope for is you don’t know how to a heavy content management script or get much traffic anyways, with most people, they have no problem. What they don’t tell you is if you offer a free blog network like this one and actually bring in traffic (By the way our Alexa traffic rank is under 300,000 now, pretty soon we will be one of the top 100,000 traffic receiving sites on the web! ) you can use more than your share of memory (nothing to do with traffic or space) which we were doing and it was causing trouble. This is the reason I had to stop adding features like stats for each blog. I even had to shut down a few of the normal WP MU functions to keep us in the limits and working smoothly.
So the most space and bandwidth don’t make the sale. Chances are you will never use it anyway. Ask your potential hosts some questions and see how fast and well they are answered. The fastest to answer your question the way you like, should be your website host. Pay no mind to the sales page…..
If you know you will be using lots of memory space and bandwidth, or can’t afford to have a site outage because of another of your shared hosting members Dedicated servers is the way to go. BUT! This comes with a cost, so website not expected to be earning at least a few hundred dollars a month will run as a loss. Dedicated hosting can offer lots of services and are for the most part worth the cost if you are in business and have monthly website budget. New work from home startups can’t afford dedicated servers and usually don’t need them. If you are just testing the waters…… find the cheapest or easiest for you and give it a try, transferring to another host isn’t as hard as it sounds and usually the new host will help you, but unless you have a Google paage ranked site and you haven’t been getting much traffic to your "test site" Build your business plan, build a new website plan, and start over. You will be glad you did in a couple of months I bet!
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