I need help determining what my hosting needs are. I have a website (no flash) that is about 2mb on my hard drive. It contains a script for members to signup, and well as a mail script. It will also have phpbb3 installed with about 30 forum members. The database is very small (there is only about 200 posts). Can I get away with shared hosting? How much bandwidth do you think I will need if I have 400 hits a day?
If your site really is that small and you have only 30 forum members, you can definitely get away with shared hosting. To calculate the bandwidth, 400 hits a day means at most 100 visits. Even assuming that you get 500 visits a day who go through the whole site (very unlikely), at 2MB per visit this means 1GB per day, or 30GB a month. A minimal hosting plan should do, though best to go for an option you can easily upgrade in case traffic increases.
I agree with the above posts, sharing hosting plan is fine but it also depends on a hosting company. I have a website that has on average 333 visitors/day (10K/month) on a shared hosting plan.
Hub, I'm sure you'll feel pretty comfortable on a small hosting plan. How many databases do you need?
Depends on your budget, if you need a total security on a total uptime.. you must buy a dedicate server. but you can try to use also a free hosting and when you see that your site have much visits and need more performance, you just moving on a vps or dedicate server.
if you are Uploading and downloading images you will NeeD "Full trust hosting", which is not given by anyother hosting company, the best known company is in my signature, just go to them and there will be no problem
Hmm I somewhat disagree with rafo, many hosts will give you an uptime guarantee on shared hosting, although I agree security can be a subject on a badly set up shared hosting box. (Not a problem from quality hosts) @rnvr Isn't full trust something related to asp which is totally unrelated to this topic and just confusing to the OP?
A $15 a month hosting plan from somewhere like hostgator should serve your needs pretty good. Your going to need a mysql database that you want to be able to export and backup. Sometimes a free hosting providers will charge for a backup of the database. So when it comes time to upgrade the server, you may have to pay in order to move to the new server. That is why I do not recommend a free host.
Shared hosting is fine but why shared when you can have a VPS at the same price or lesser. There are many opensource tools and panels to use too. You can easily request an upgrade of guarranteed resource if your site expands. Also more usage and control such as installing monitoring tools, reporting tools, etc. USD20 per year might be something that you want to consider goto - http://adf.ly/16bAh