Let’s Talk About Web Hosting
When it comes to putting up a new website, the exciting part is the design and the functionality. You finally have your photography gallery up for the world to see or are drawing traffic and awareness to your Non Profit focusing on helping troubled youth. In order for your website to work, you have to have hosting, but what does this mean?
Think of your website as a company selling shoes and your web hosting as a storefront. In order to sell shoes to the local public, you must have a store to host your shoes. Just like a shoe company to a shoe store, once your shiny new website has been designed, you have to have a place to put it in the digital expanse known as the internet. This is what Web Hosting is, but not allhosting is created equal.
There are two things you should keep in mind when choosing your hosting: 1. How much traffic will my site be getting? and 2. How much content will I have? If you have a lot of visitors clicking through your website, you will need more bandwidth and if you have a content-rich site, you will need adequate storage.
Bandwidth determines how fast (responsive) your website is and how many viewers you can accommodate without your websitecrashing. We’ve all been frustrated browsing through or shopping on a website that takes forever for pages to load. This is almost always caused by a shortage of bandwidth, and probably means there are a grip of people just like you getting on the same website and sharing your frustration.
Storage determines how much content you can upload to your website. While pages and pages of text will not take up muchstorage, pictures, music, video and any other interactive content (.php, .css, Jquery etc) will. This means any video you post on your website that exceeds your storage capacity will not appear until sufficient space is created; i.e. you buy more storage or remove other content.
If you’re still unsure what type of web hosting will best suite your website, you should be able to ask your web developer for guidance.