There are many novice users who are very new to website hosting and don't know exactly which shared hosting package is best suitable for their websites. In this article, a detailed discussion has been provided for such users to select the best suitable hosting package for their website.
The selection of website hosting depends on upon the following major factors:
Disk space: It is also termed as web space. The term is related to the volume of space on the shared server is being provided to you. Before checking any plan you must know your exact requirements related to disk space. You can calculate the disk space required for your website with the following method.
Total disk space required = K * (Web content (uncompressed) + Web content (compressed))
In the above formula, the web content contains all your files related to the website including databases as well as emails. The factor K is the safety factor which must be more than 1. This factor K is necessary to safeguard the space allocated to you in the worst case. As many temporary files and log file being generated, while your website run. And their sizes grows with time and this factor is utilised to compensate such spaces. The optimal value for K is 1.61, according to golden section rule.
Bandwidth: In most of the hosting packages the bandwidth is limited. The term is related to the amount of internet used by the traffic on your website from the server end. This bandwidth provided is on the monthly basis and its counter refreshes on 1st of every month. You can compute the amount of bandwidth required for your website depending on the following formula:
Total Bandwidth required = K * Page size of your website * Total number of page visits in a month
Here, the average page size is the estimation of web page size, which you can compute by downloading the heaviest page of your website using ctrl+s from your browser. After saving it to your PC, you need to check its full size including all images, js, CSS files etc. You get to know the web traffic from google analytics. If your website is new, you may just take and ideal value that suits you. The factor K must be more than 1. You must choose its value by taking into consideration of worst cases when a huge unexpected traffic may come to your website. Ideally, you may choose its value to be 1.6 which will work as a safety factor for such scenario.
A number of websites: There used to be the facility to host multiple websites in the same hosting plan. If you find the option to host a number of websites. Then you must select the plan which provides minimum 1 number of extra website to host. It means that if you have 2 domains then you must choose a plan in which you can host 3 domain. It has been noticed by many experts that when anyone starts in having websites then that user usually buy new domains within a span of the 3-6 month. In that case, the hosting plan will with more domain hosting provides a better solution.
A number of subdomains: Subdomains are the prefixes with your domain. As an example, if you have a web domain yourdomain.com the subdomain may be test.yourdomain.com.
You must select a hosting package which allows you a maximum number of the subdomain. As these subdomains will also be beneficial if you are developing a website and you don't want it do be displayed on your main domain during development. Then you may build it on any subdomain and then shift it to your main website after development.
Number of Email ids: In the hosting package, there must be provision to create maximum number of email accounts for each domain you add. These help you to organise the function of your website with much comfort as any number of executive you have they we will provided with a separate professional email id.
Number of Databases: You must select a hosting package with provision of creating maximum number of databases. As these will help you while testing of your website on any subdomains etc.
Data center location: Always try to get a hosting package, whose data center is nearest to you. As the distance of data center increases the number of nodes in connection to your server increases and thus the speed of your website goes slow.
These above mentioned are the major factors while selecting a hosting package. But some more factors which are affecting your website hosting selection are number of FTP accounts, site builder or 1 click insaller like softaculous, webuzo etc.
