Total cost of website ownership - Web Hosting

• Sep. 8, 2003

Lets assume that you have your url registered for your widget company, now we will look at getting a web hosting company for your new url.

Hosting for a website can start as low as $10 per month. You should be even able to find some at lower prices. The range in hosting can be anywhere from $10 - $200 per month. The price could be higher, but we will cap it off to $200 for now. It will depend on what you are looking for and what your site will require, do you want virtual hosting, or a dedicated server. Having a dedicated will cost you more money per month. For this, you will have to compare the different options per package and determine what is best for you and your monthly budget. You will want to find a reliable hosting company that has little downtime. The more downtime they have, the more traffic and potential customers you will be loosing. For this you will want to do some research on reliable web hosts.

Next, you will need to find out how much bandwidth will be required, how much disk space comes with your hosting package, and is it on a Unix or windows server. If you wanted to expand your site in the future and use ASP pages, you would want to have a windows server, so keep the long term focus in mind. The hosting company that you choose to deal with should offer server logs, error logs and usage stats. Having logs and stats will enable you to review how your website is performing every month and provide valuable information for your website.

Something else that you should look into is getting a unique IP address if possible. Not all web hosting companies will be able to provide a unique IP. Shared IPs are more common these days as not every hosting company can afford to provide unique IPs, but if you can find a hosting company that does offer unique IPs and it is with in your price range, then it would be advisable to proceed with this.

In the next article, we will look at web design costs.

More information on Virtual and Dedicated IPs.

Gerard Manning
Searchengineposition, Inc.
Search engine marketing company