Web hosting costs are a matter of interest to anyone planning to create a website. These costs are determined by several factors, including the type and size of the website, as well specific policies of the web host regarding additional features or application support. Costs can range from free – for small sites with practically no features, often used for personal websites of one kind or another – to fairly expensive hosting that is suitable for complex e-commerce or forum sites.
The most basic element of web hosting cost is the host’s fee for disk space. Web hosts either maintain server computers that are permanently connected to the Internet to host websites, or they are resellers who purchase space on another company’s servers, then rent that space to the final customer. In either case, they also have costs associated with the space being used and will decide their fee partly on the basis of their own costs. Disk space currently costs $1 per megabyte or slightly less.
Bandwidth is another crucial part of web hosting costs – generally at around $3 per gigabyte at a maximum. Bandwidth is the amount of information that a website transmits to visitors during a given month. It should be noted that a “safety cushion” of extra bandwidth is usually considered prudent, because “overage” bandwidth (bandwidth usage in excess of the allowed amount) is sometimes billed at a higher rate by the web host.
Some web hosts charge additional fees for enabling a hosted site with the ability to use a specific application – for example, MySQL or Perl. Selecting a site which has built-in support for all desired applications is one way to keep web hosting costs as low as possible, but may not always be practical. In this case, the fees for extra application support should be determined before the hosting contract is agreed to.
One potential hidden web hosting cost is “block buying,” in which additional bandwidth or disk space must be purchased in “blocks” of a certain size, regardless of whether the full amount of extra space is actually used. A web host without block buying is usually preferable, since there will be no unexpected fees for unused server resources.
Disk space, bandwidth, and support for additional applications are three of the most important elements in determining web hosting cost, and are those which should be examined most closely.
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