subject: The Factors Of Web Hosting That Determine The Charge [print this page] In order to create a web site, you need web designers and web developers. Once the website is designed, you need some sort of medium to place it in the internet so that the visitors can see it from any place in the world. This is achieved by web hosting services. The scope of these services varies greatly. All kinds of websites from small-scale personal sites to large-scale e-commerce based sites can reside in one server.
The companies which provide such services are called web hosts. They provide these websites space in their servers with exchange of monthly or yearly rental according to a certain data plan. The monthly or yearly rental depends on some factors like-
Disk Space
All the web pages, files, emails, databases etc are stored in the hard disks of the companies. The charge depends on the total space required for saving all the data related to the website. You should always estimate your usage and choose appropriate plan for your website.
Bandwidth and Data Transfer
These are other factors which determine the charge. Though many thinks bandwidth and data transfer as same thing, there is huge difference between them. Bandwidth is determined by the amount of data that can be transferred in unit time where data transfer is measured by the actual amount of transferred data. If you have less bandwidth, it will take more time to load your website in the browsers regardless of the connection type of the users. Higher the bandwidth, higher will be the charge. Also, if the amount of data transfer exceeds its limit as per your plan, your website will be unavailable for the visitors.
Email Accounts
Email accounts provide you mailing facility. You will be provided an email account where the visitors can send mail. There are mainly three types of email account. They are- POP3 accounts, forwarding accounts and aliases. All of these are different in features. While the POP3 accounts provide you with a dedicated mailbox, forwarding accounts and aliases employs other companies for filtering your mails for you. The charge of the data plans depend on the number of the mails allowed.
FTP Access
FTP or File Transfer Protocol allows you to upload or download files in your websites. These files include web pages, image, sound, video or other type of files.
Along with these, the charge can differ depending on quality of service, SEO or search engine optimization etc.
