I've been looking for a new host that provides shared, vps, and dedicated servers. I run a small web design company and we need a vps for ourselves and out projects, and would like our clients that need hosting to be with the same host. Anyway, the main concern is, I see such a huge variation in bandwidth allowances from host to host, and I don't have a very good idea of how much bandwidth I will need in the future. Right now I hardly use up 300mb just for our small group of websites (personal and business), but we have a few large projects in the making, one of which is a dating type site. So, is there a good way to figure how much bandwidth I will need with my new host? I see some hosts that offer 1 or 2TB of bandwidth which seems like enough to be safe for quite a while, and other hosts that offer 300gb or so, which I'm not sure if it ill suffice in the long run. Any input will help. Thanks!
At a start, you should be sufficient with enough bandwidth like 10GB for a small group of websites. I believe that your host will allow you to upgrade the next higher plan when you require. Do not straight away jump into the highest plan just because you feel that you want it. Start small and grow as you need, so you won't see the overhead cost. If you are going to be using 1TB bandwidth, you should be thinking to move to a dedicated server instead of a reseller plan. Just for your info, sites do use system resources such as CPU/Memory. You will not be just limited with storage and bandwidth. For a high traffic dating site, you should be prepared to eat up a lot of resources.
Thanks all, I'm still researching hosts like crazy. I've been going don the list at hostjury.com and wow are there some crapy hosts out there. I'll try to keep this thread up to date with my findings and decisions.
well all leading hosting provider offer you minimu of gigabyte bandwidth. so your problem will not be bandwidth check upload time and uptime of the hosting service
I totally agree with you. also, make sure you check the terms and conditions before you sign up. i've been with a host that doesn't let you cancel your hosting unless you've been with them for a year.
Thanks for all the great suggestions everyone. I'm not sure what you mean by upload time? Is that the transfer rate for the bandwidth? i sometimes see on a host's website it will say 10gb bandwidth at 1.5kbs or mbs. I could be wrong about that though, but I thought I have seen it on some hosting plans. Also, I'v seen in some reviews people saying negative things about a host's latency. what does that pertain to? Thanks again!
Hi, if you are seeing bandwidth in mbps, I believe you are looking at the dedicated server. This is a method of burstable billing. I could not explain this myself better, so I would direct you to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burstable_billing . Most shared hosting and vps plan should be come in GB instead of Mbps. You should leave Kbps out as this is the speed of 56k dial-up era. Latency refers to the response time in mili-second from a visitor to the server. If your targeted audiences are in UK, you will find a faster response time if your website is hosted at a UK server than a US server. Ultimately, local server will have the best speed.
Thanks! That's what I wanted to know about latency. Now, what feature should I look for in a host that would suggest I won't run in to poor latency problems? Or is it more just the location, and not so much a feature?
well your are right in common words how fast your site open to your customer. Let say one visstor came through google search to site but he found your site not opening for long time, then he will obviously close your site because people don't have patient to wait for long time. This happen because few reason either they shared the server with too many clients, so you get very less share of server CPU percentage or the the bandwidth of the server is occupied by other user so it get delay. Nowadays CPU is a main issue for such problem. Many company offer $2 per month hosting plan to compensate their loss. They over sell there server. The Server which they previously had only 50 customer now they alloted the server to 100. So when choosing the server ask them how many accounts they host in a single server.
Another thing I am noticing, some hosts only provide 1 ip address and others give more. I don't even know what multiple ips are used for. What is the importance of the vps ip and the use for more than one?
I believe that is not a problem at all for those web hosts wich provide one IP provide you more. You need to pay fo the extra IPs
IP can be used for Dedicated SSL, SEO purpose, Nameservers, etc. You need VPS IP, as that is where you are going to communicate with. You need IP to SSH to your VPS. You need IP to FTP your files to your VPS.