Website Hosting Requirements

Chances are that you have read several pages of this beginners guide to web hosting and you don’t know what you really need for your website yet.

Don’t worry. It’s completely normal, especially if you are new to the web hosting world.

If you have just learned a lot of new concepts and you are approaching the development of a website for the first time you are not supposed to be able to choose a host on your own, however after reading the web hosting plans features and our web hosting glossary you will be able to to understand most of what you will ever need to know.

Nobody knows how much traffic a website will get in two, three or five years, and buying all the necessary resources upfront would be an extremely expensive investment, without knowing if it will be worth the cost.

Obviously the type of website is very important when you analyze the resources it needs today or might need tomorrow. A basic company website without fancy features, used to get your company image on the web, to make your company known and to collect inquiries could easily start and end its life on the most basic shared web hosting plan. Oh and in case you were wondering, it would use few MB of space and traffic per month, a small fraction of what most basic hosting plans offer.

If your website is going to be resource intensive such as an online discussion forum where many users could be online at the same time, a blog about a hot topic that gets huge traffic spikes, a high traffic photo gallery that uses a lot of space and burns a lot of bandwidth then you could be worried about the resources you need.

You need to stop and think.

Your website could have an enormous success and become one of the most visited websites in its niche, and I really hope it does, but there’s no thing like instant success. Most of those approaching the development of a website for the first time believe that, after the website is completed, traffic will start to flow in and their only worry will be how to deal with bandwidth limits, space limits and server resource usage.

No, it won’t happen. It won’t happen. It simply won’t. Do I need to repeat it another time?

Websites like Flickr, Facebook or MySpace have not become so popular in 2 weeks. Websites like these ones now operate using their own dedicated infrastructures, but they started small. Every website starts small and the number of those small websites that become popular is smaller than you think; a lot smaller.

When you are starting a website you should pick one of the shared hosting plans out there, there are many excellent web hosting providers that you can use to publish your website. Storage space and bandwidth included in most plans ( hundreds or thousands of GB ) are way more than you will ever need so you really don’t have to worry about those limits.

Only in case your website uses a script that requires particular settings, components or modules installed than you should check for these requirements before buying: you can easily start a chat session ( you find the chat button on most hosting websites ) and ask one of their representatives if the feature you need is available or, in case it isn’t, if it can be installed for you.

Web developers and website owners have a big luck: the technical features required to run a website ( in terms of configurations, installed modules and components ) are the same when your website is small or when it grows, so you can easily start on a small and cheap shared hosting plan and, if your website grows, you can upgrade to a dedicated server or a more complex infrastructure when needed. Not having to make a big upfront investment is the reason why thousands of websites are launched everyday, which is the reason why only a small percentage of websites manage to bring a high amount of traffic.

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