Web hosting is becoming more essential than ever for the world. The unemployed are turning to internet businesses to keep their families fed, small and large businesses are getting websites, and the internet is the best way to keep in touch with friends and family. These three points make it imperative that there are web hosting options out there for everyone’s budget. If you want to know what exactly a VPS hosting is and what the terms “metered” and “unmetered” stand for, just read the whole of this article. In continuation, we will pay special attention to cheap VPS services so as to enable you to decide whether this is a good option for you.

VPS stands for virtual private server - a dedicated server with a slight difference. A dedicated server is a computer with an operating system to act as the server. This way the computer can communicate with the internet to download pages in a browser. The VPS dedicated server is one physical computer that has virtual servers with their own operating system. The servers exist only in the virtual world and have no physical components, only software programs that imitate hard drives, memory, and web building applications. With such structure the costs are maximally reduced, which makes a VPS much cheaper than a dedicated server.

There are two types of VPS hosting: unmetered and metered.Usually the former is provided ecomomically by a VPS host. Unmetered is defined as an unmeasured amount of disk space and bandwidth, whereas metered offers you an exact measurement. It is possible that anyone searching for unmetered hosting will come upon the phrase unlimited. These two words in hosting mean the same thing: that the company is not putting a quantitative measurement on the amount of disk space or bandwidth you receive.

Confusion often arises between unmetered and metered hosting because one believes having an unlimited amount is better. Unfortunately, the cheap unmetered hosting may be not as perfect as it seems. Everything has a limit and hosting companies are among those with limits. Actually, they can provide you only with a very specific amount of bandwidth and space. The lower price of the unmetered package is supposed to attract customers; still, buying them you risk running out of space.

Metered VPS hosting at least gives you the awareness of how much disk space and bandwidth you can use before your server gets full. A good web owner will calculate the exact amount of data storage they require for their site and the changes they may need to make in the future. Bandwidth is a different property. It basically means data transfer, therefore you need it in an amount that will be proportional to the traffic on your site. In this instance unmetered can be better. A monthly limit of 2 gigabytes on bandwidth is rather low. You may run out of data transfer, which stops your site from working. With unlimited bandwidth you will be able to use whataver amount of it you need without any problems. Quite fortunately you can buy packages that contain a metered disk space along with unlimited bandwidth.

Selecting a hosting plan is a critical step when you want to start up a website.  Prior posts from me were about domain name choice and website creation.  Now let’s talk a little about hosting:  Choosing a hosting plan is a primary step in launching your fledgling web presence.

The next step after creating your website is to make it live on the internet, or publish it.  To have your website seen on the internet you will need to choose a hosting plan.  A hosting plan is different from a domain name.  You own your domain name but you rent a hosting plan.  With a hosting plan you will be paying a service provider to publish your website on the internet for all to see.  The key considerations for choosing a good hosting plan will be discussed here.

SERVICE  The most important consideration is the level of service provided.  Bells and whistles and fancy features will do you no good if you can’t get customer service in a timely fashion.  Once your website is live on the internet you will want it to be up all the time.  Strategically the best thing you can do for your website upfront is to choose a hosting company that is reliable in terms of customer service as well as “uptime”.

UPTIME  When shopping for a hosting company, find out if they have an uptime guarantee. The better hosting providers will offer up to 99% uptime.  Even at 99% average uptime it can mean that your website will be off the internet for over 7 hours per month. If at all possible, choose a host guaranteeing up to 99.9% uptime.

SIZE  What size, or how many pages will the website have?  One of the determining factors for the price of most hosting plans is the amount of space required to store the website on their server’s hard drive.  If your website will be media rich with videos or music or photo files, or a large e-commerce site with a lot of catalogue pages, you will have to take space into consideration as a criteria for choosing the right hosting plan.

LINUX OR WINDOWS  Which operating system should your hosting plan use?  This question has no relevance to the brand of operating system you are using on your computer.  What programming language was used in the Web site design?  For example, if you designed a website using ASP or ASP.NET, you’ll need to find a Windows hosting plan. If you have a Web site that uses CGI or PHP, you’ll need to get a Linux hosting plan.  For the novice user who is building a simple html website the above may not be a consideration at first, but may become important later on as you become more experienced and add more features to your website.

TRAFFIC  How much traffic or how many visitors do you expect monthly?  Hosting plans are usually sold at different level plans according to the bandwith that will be required.  Bandwidth = Traffic.  Obviously more bandwidth is better because it allows more visitors to visit your site, but at the beginning this will be hard for you to gauge.  Usually the best way to proceed here is to start with a basic low bandwidth plan, and upgrade later as the traffic begins to flow to the website.

SHARED OR DEDICATED HOSTING  Whether or not to choose shared hosting over dedicated hosting comes down to the following:  First a brief description of shared hosting, which is sharing space on a server with dozens or perhaps hundreds of other websites.  The main factor here is that you will have no control over the operating system, database structure, etc., and will have to work within the structure setup by the hosting provider.  Dedicated or virtual dedicated hosting is different in the sense that you will have full control over the environment that your website resides in, and you will have the only access to that space.  Dedicated server hosting gives you full control over setup of the operating system and auxilliary programs such as database management or shopping cart or database management software.  Generally customer support will be low to non-existent, since this type of hosting is geared to the advanced user who will be using his own custom setup.  The best advice I can give to the newbie is to use shared hosting at first, until you gain more experience and abilities and are ready to take the plunge into something as advanced as dedicated hosting.

At StartMyWebsiteToday.com I offer 99.9% guaranteed uptime and offer customer service 24/7.  The hosting plans that are offered include a variety: shared hosting, virtual dedicated hosting, and dedicated hosting plans with either Linux or Windows operating systems for every need and budget ranging from the small personal website to large online multimedia sites to those interested in ecommerce website building. To review the options we offer, click HERE: Hosting plans.

The first step in building a website is the registration of a domain name.  Whether you are a butcher, baker, or candlestick maker, or if you want to start up a website to feature your family dog Spot, the entire undertaking begins with the choice of your domain name.

Next you might ask- “What makes a good choice of domain name?”.  Well, what type of website are you planning on publishing?  For example, if you are someone who wants to build a website devoted to your newborn infant, then your choice of a domain name really doesn’t matter.  What’s the difference?  Because in a case like that you probably don’t really care about gaining a lot of traffic to your website, friends and family are your target audience, to keep them up to date.  In a case like this, it does not matter whatsoever if you find a domain name like “bobswebplace.net” or not, since most likely you will only be giving out the name of the site to a few friends and family and maybe some coworkers.   

So you can name a website anything as long as it is only meant for a select few.  It’s only if traffic is a factor and you want to attract customers, and as many as possible, that the domain name you choose to register really matters.  So……

What if you want as much traffic to your website as possible?  What if you are looking for business on the internet?

It can bring huge dividends to have a domain name that reflects your company name and website.  If your website is about car parts for example, do you really expect the average web surfer to remember how to get to your website if it is named “bobsthingsforsale.com” or some other unrelated name?  So be sure and choose carefully when deciding on a domain name.  Best case scenario is to get the name of your business as a dot com or dot net, etc.  In lieu of that, at least try to get the category of business that you are in incorporated in your domain name.  For example, a jewelry website should have a domain name like jewelry.com or jensjewelry.com, something that immediately associates the domain name with the theme of the site.  It’s all about branding, and making a lasting impression on the target audience or customers.

The WhoIs database contains all domain names registered, and when you are searching it will show whether or not your desired name is already registered.  For a quick search of your desired domain name, I have conveniently placed a domain name search engine on StartMyWebsiteToday.com for this very purpose.  After searching for the domain name, the results given will instantly show whether or not the domain name is available, and if so, give you the option to immediately register it.  If it’s not available, several alternative domain names will be proposed, to help you fine tune your search, or possibly giving you an acceptable alternative domain name to register instead.