Kinds Of Web Hosting
There are different kinds of web hosting setups and dependent upon your website and budget, any of these may be the right type. This is not a discussion of the features a web hosting plan may offer - just a description general types of web hosting

1. Shared Hosting
This is the most common type of web hosting account and can be very low cost. With paid shared (virtual) hosting you pay a monthly fee and get a share on a server. For very low cost plans you may only have a small amount of disk space and a low amount of bandwidth (although this will probably not be a problem for the vast majority of websites). With cheap virtual hosting plans you maybe one site amongst hundreds on the same server - in this case reliability may suffer. For slightly more expensive plans you will probably find better reliability.

2. Dedicated Hosting
With dedicated hosting you have a full server dedicated to your website. This gives you a lot more freedom and you can host potentially hundreds of your own websites. Typically you will have access to the server just like you have access to your PC at home. Dedicated servers are normally reserved for large ecommerce type websites; sites that get a lot of visitors (thousands a day), or for people that want to start their own hosting company and sell shared hosting accounts. A dedicated server is more reliable, but also much more expensive being at least $100 a month vs. $1 - $20 range of a shared hosting plan.

3. Co-located Hosting
This is very similar to dedicated hosting, except that you own the server rather than rent it. Your server is placed in the data center and connected to the Internet through the web hosting provider’s fast Internet connection. You will then pay a fee for maintenance and bandwidth.

So What Web Plan Is Right for you?
You have a lot of choices in the web hosting market and it can be very confusing to find the best deal that meets your needs.

The first step before you start to look for a web hosting company is to determine what your needs are. It can be very tempting to look for plans that offer everything. There are many such deals available, even at a low price, but you will be storing up trouble for yourself.

Step1 - Determining Your Needs

1.       Disk Space
Web pages (html) are normally very small - on average 30 - 60KB. This means you can store a lot of web pages in a small amount of disk space. Images take up more space, but unless you have a big database driven site - it is unlikely that you will need very much disk space. Below is terminology used to describe disk space. If you have a computer at home or the office, then you will be already very familiar with this.

This handy calculator provides a rough guide to how much disk space you might need for your site

You can see above that even a lot of pages don’t really create a big requirement for disk space. If you own a computer at home you will already know that hard drives are very cheap these days. Many web hosting plans will offer large amounts of disk space. This is fine, it doesn't hurt to have the extra space - but unless you have a huge site - you will more than okay with 20MB.

2. Bandwidth
Bandwidth is always stated as a monthly limit in either MB or GB. This is the amount of actual data that can be transferred from the web server that holds your website, to the browser of the person who is looking at your website. If you go over the limit, then either you will have to be an extra fee, or your website will not be available. The amount of bandwidth you use is obviously related to the amount of traffic (visitors) that you receive.

There are web-hosting companies that offer unlimited bandwidth. This sounds like a good deal. The truth is that this is nothing but a lie and you should steer clear of web-hosting companies that offer unlimited bandwidth. Bandwidth is a commodity that costs the web hosting company money - unlimited bandwidth is not only impossible, but would cost an unlimited amount of money. When web hosts offer unlimited bandwidth they are trying to trick you. They know that you will probably not use very much bandwidth. The moment you try to use a lot of bandwidth - then you will find your website shutdown.

For most web sites you will not need much bandwidth. Probably 99% of all websites use less than 2 GB of bandwidth a month. If you intend to have a lot of downloads of software, audio or video, then you may end up using a lot more bandwidth, maybe 50 GB. Adult sites typically use a lot of bandwidth. Sites like mp3.com require an enormous amount of bandwidth, but for the average site - a low level will be enough in almost all cases.

The calculator below will help you determine what amount of bandwidth you might need. This assumes a simple web site with no audio or video downloads. Remember 1GB = 1000 MB (e.g. 0.75 GB = 750 MB)

3. Email Accounts
How many email accounts will you need? All packages include a specific number of email accounts but additional accounts can be purchased if necessary.

4. Support
You need to ask yourself questions like do you want phone support, or will email support be ok? Do you want support 24 hours a day? If you have a small website that is not critical (i.e. you don't pay the rent with website earnings) then you probably don't need phone support or 24/7 support. It costs web-hosting companies to provide this type of support, don't pay more for a plan that offers this if you don't need it.

5. Server Type
If you have a small website, then it is unlikely that you will need to select a particular type of server for your website. Windows 2000 server web hosting tends to be a little bit more expensive than Linux. If you need to run a Microsoft SQL server database, or use Microsoft Active Server pages then you should choose Windows2000. If you have no clue what these things even are - then you don't need Windows2000 - you will almost certainly be fine with any type of server.

6. Other Features like Databases; Server Side Scripting
Web hosting plans can offer a myriad of confusing features. For the small website it is unlikely that you will ever need to know about any of them. If you are a web designer creating complex database driven sites then you will already know what you need. If after creating your site you have never heard of ASP, Cold Fusion, SQL Server, mySQL - then chances are that you don't need to worry about any of these things.