Free or paid web hosting?
By: Petr Sejba

Just finished your first website? So it's the time to look for some hosting and make a choice. Your first question probably will be whether to choose free or paid hosting service. Let's have a look at some advantages and disadvantages of these solutions.

Free web hosting:

(+) It's for free. You don't need to pay for domain name.

(-) Your URL will be something like username.freehost.com or freehost.com/username.

As I noticed above, the advantage is that you don't need to pay for domain. But note that if you move your website to another provider in the future you can loose some or all your traffic (there are some solutions how to solve this problem but it is not the point of this article).

(-) Your provider will probably include ads to your pages - usually 1 or 2 banners, sometimes popup windows. If you plan to use banner exchange on your site read carefully their Terms and conditions. Some free hosts doesn't allow it.

(-) Free hosts usually allow lower bandwith then paid hosts and a lot of them don't offer futures like PHP and MySQL.

(-) A lot of free hosts change their Terms and conditions during some time. If your free host offers hosting wihtout ads now, don't be surprised when banner or popup appears on your site in the future.
 
 (-) Sometimes happens that free hosts cancel their free service and
 longer offer paid hosting only. In this case you have only 2 choises -
 pay them or loose your website.

Paid web hosting:

How to Choose a Web Hosting Company
By: Herman Drost

Ok, you have your web site built and are now confused as to all the choices you have in order to find a home for your site.

It is good to make a right choice the first time, because if you have to move to another hosting service, it will cost you time and you will lose some of your valued customers due to the downtime setting up with another host.

You will also have to pay set up and hosting fees for a new account.

Here are some basic things to consider when choosing a Web Hosting Service:

How to Select a Web Site Host
By: Mike Snyder

So, you know how to create HTML files (web pages) and want to start a website. You have a domain name but don't know where to store the files (web host). You find countless web hosting companies offering a wide range of products but you can't make heads or tails of all the features to decide which plan is right for you.

Does this sound like you?

If so, this article was written for you. Hopefully after reading it, you will have a better understanding of all the terms associated with web hosting and find a hosting company that is right for your business.

How does Traffic Affect My Hosting?
By: Ginger Geracitano

The topic of hosting involves many different aspects; reliability, customer support, pricing, add-on features, programming, and allowable installation of PHP and other popular marketing scripts.

Today, I'm going to focus on ONE topic, traffic, and the effects it has on your web site's hosting. The simple one word answer here is 'Bandwith'.

By definition, Bandwith is the measurement of data, and the speed at which it flows through the phone lines, cable or DSL lines to tranfer information to and from a web site via your computer.

In relation to your web site hosting, Bandwith measures this flow of data transfer, otherwise termed 'Traffic'. In plain English, it's the number of hits you receive to your site; pure volume multiplied by the file sizes included on your pages.

So, if you have an all text based web site, you would be able to receive more traffic, at lower bandwith numbers, than you would if you have a 'graphics' intensive page, which would naturally have higher file sizes that are being trasferred from your site to your visitor's browser.

That's great Ginger, but how does this effect my hosting?