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How Much Disk Space Do You Really Need?

Everybody is making a big deal about disk space these days, and rightfully so. If you don’t have enough, you will not be able to store your text, photos and other files you plan to host on your site. Realizing its importance, many hosts try to persuade you to purchase the plan with large amounts of space, which often costs a little more every month. All that extra storage could surely come in handy, but do you really need it? It is good to know approximately how much disk space you require before entering a hosting arrangement, but first you must know how to come up with that ballpark figure. The best way to do this is to calculate the size of the files for your website.

Understanding File Size

Before you perform any calculations, it is important to understand how file size is measured. The smallest measurement in computing terms is a bit and 8 collective bits forms a single byte. A single byte of data gives you just about enough to put a character such as the letter “C” on your screen. When putting 1024 bytes together, you form another unit of data known as a kilobyte. 1024 kilobytes form to create a megabyte, which is what the majority of your graphics and web pages are measured in. So before purchasing a hosting plan, you can gather up all the files you plan to upload to the server, jot down their file sizes, add them up and this will give you an approximate number of how much disk space you need.

Calculating the File Size of Your Site

To come up with the total file size of your website, simply right-click on the root folder where you site is stored. Not only will this provide you with the total size, but also the number of files and folders your site contains. If you are using a tool such as FrontPage, you can go to the reports view and click on the site summary to get a reading of the total file size of your site. This information will let you know how much disk space you are using against how much has been allocated by your web hosting provider. Unless you have a huge website, you should find that you are in good shape and nowhere near exceeding the limit. Once you have determined the total file size, you may find that you are only using 5 MB when you are actually paying for 300 GB per month. Such a huge difference could play a significant role in your monthly bill so if you are paying too much, it may be time to consider switching hosts.

Get a Comfortable Allotment

As your website grows, you may have a need to add extra files, images, databases or scripts. However, even with additional features, 1 GB of storage is usually more than enough to start out with. This will provide you with an ample supply of disk space to start your site, and comfortably grow it as well. If you have signed on for a flexible and scalable hosting solution, you should be able to easily upgrade as your storage requirements increase.

Domain Hosting

Up until a few years ago, anyone in the United States who wished to register a domain name had to do so through a company called Network Solutions. Network Solutions still maintains the central database of domain names to prevent companies from assigning duplicate web addresses, but the government did not want Network Solutions to have a monopoly on the domain name business. Today, consequently, there are many companies through which an individual or business can register their domain names.

The process of choosing a domain name is incredibly simple. There are many "lookup" sites that will let you know instantaneously whether or not a domain name you want to use has been taken. Once you've found a domain name that is available, registration costs only a few dollars. The "trick" to choosing a domain name is not registering it; it's choosing a name that will be easy to remember.

The easiest names to remember are names that reflect either a company brand or a company service. In cases where an individual is trying to select a domain name for his or her own site, a short phrase or even a person's name is easy to remember. Unfortunately, many businesses and individuals find themselves locked into cumbersome domain names because of the domain name format required by their web host. There are two solutions: choose a new web hosting provider or choose a domain hosting provider that will redirect visitors from a gateway site to the real one.

Benefits of a Domain Hosting Site
With a good domain name hosting provider, companies and individuals can register their domain names and set them up so that when visitors type in the name of a website, the domain hosting company instantly connects the user to the "real" site. All of the data associated with the website is stored with the web host--not the domain host. Companies and individuals that already have web hosting plans they like might want to avoid switching plans, but they might also want to remove their ISP's name from their web addresses. By choosing a domain hosting company in addition to the traditional website hosting outfit, site owners can have their cake and eat it too.

Top 10 Google SEO Website Hosting Guidelines

Google Speaks!



Although Google has been dominant in Internet search for at least the past 5 years, plus spidering and ranking websites for over a decade, the company has never really taken an official stance on search engine optimization (SEO) tactics for your website..


For the first time in the history of Google, the company has released an official 22 page long pdf document entitled, 'Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide'. You can download the complete document at: www.google.com/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf.

According to the Official Google Webmaster Blog post on the subject, the document was created in response to frequent questions asked at conferences regarding simple ways to improve a website's performance at Google. Therefore, the company responded (according to the post), ''We thought it'd be useful to create a compact guide that lists some best practices that teams within Google and external webmasters alike can follow that could improve their sites' crawlability and indexing.'' The post goes on to say that Google is planning to update this document at regular intervals to keep it current.

So what is contained in the guide, and what SEO advice does Google give exactly? According to the 'Starter Guide' the content was originally written for internal Google purposes. Here's the into to the guide, ''This document first began as an effort to help teams within Google, but we thought it'd be just as useful to webmasters that are new to the topic of search engine optimization and wish to improve their sites' interaction with both users and search engines. Although this guide won't tell you any secrets that'll automatically rank your site first for queries in Google (sorry!), following the best practices outlined below will make it easier for search engines to both crawl and index your content.'' The guide uses a fictitious baseball card trading site to demonstrate best practices in a real world way.

The main categories with Google's general advice outlined are:

1 - Title Tags - Choose a title that accurately reflects the nature of the page. Make sure that each page on your site has a unique title tag to distinguish it from others. Keep your titles as brief as you can - too long and Google will cut them off.

2 - Use the Meta-Description Tag - Description tags are important as Google may choose to use them as snippets (summaries) for your pages. Additionally, these descriptions are often the descriptive text seen in the search engine results. So create a description that acts as a good overall summary for the page - again, without being too long.

3 - Use Keywords in Your URLs - Okay, that's not exactly what the Google guide says. It does, however, point out that long, ugly, complicated, number-laden URLs are intimidating to users. Also be sure to pay attention to your directory structure so that it is consistent and logical. That will also affect the creation of your URLs.

4 - Pay Attention to Site Navigation - Google suggests creating a ''naturally flowing hierarchy'' for your site. Begin with the root and main sections and build out from there. Other suggestions are to use text links for navigation and to use a ''breadcrumb'' methodology to help users understand where they are in the site structure. Also recommended is a site map and a useful 404 page for errors.

5 - Deliver Quality Content and Services with Your Site - I thought that this would go without saying, but it is also a bit subjective. So to be clear - Google thinks this is very important as evidenced by the first line of copy in this section, ''Creating compelling and useful content will likely influence your website more than any of the other factors discussed here. Users know good content when they see it and will likely want to direct other users to it.'' One interesting note from the guide is to stay ''organized around the topic''. That is, to keep a focus on your subject matter. Also pointed out is the advantage of having unique content (such as a blog or other exclusive articles or news items).

6 - Write Better Anchor Text - Anchor text is the text that one reads in a browser which links out via an 'href' html tag. For instance in this line - website hosting, the anchor text is 'website hosting'. The guide points out that many webmasters simply use 'click here' or other generic text for links. The anchor text should be short and descriptive. One other tip from the guide - make sure that links look like links. You know, blue text and underlined. Also use anchor text for internal linking - that is the linking you do within your own website.

7 - Use Heading Tags Correctly - According to the guide, ''Heading tags (not to be confused with the head HTML tag or HTTP headers) are used to present structure on the page to users. There are six sizes of heading tags, beginning with h1, the most important, and ending with h6, the least important.'' The advice on these tags is to create, in essence, an outline - where the most important items are the h1, the next most important h2 and so on. Other advice is to use headings sparingly across the page.

8 - Optimize Images - The main points here are to use good descriptive filenames supported by descriptive alt text (in case the image can't be seen - the user still knows what was supposed to be seen). Supply alt tags if you are using images as links (same reason as above). Create an image directory and store your images in it. This makes a clean and elegant file structure for all your images. Use a commonly supported image file format (JPEG, GIF, PNG or BMP).

9 - Use robots.txt - The robots.txt command tells search engines which sections or your website to look through - and which to ignore. It can get just a bit technical, so if you need further information on this subject you should read Google's information on Using a robots.txt file to control access to your site.

10 - Use rel = ''nofollow'' - This command within a link tells Google that you aren't sure about the site you are linking out to - and therefore don't want to pass link authority to that website, even though your site is linking out to them. The guide gives the example of 'comment spam'. The guide asserts (once again) that ''linking to sites that Google considers spammy can affect the reputation of your own site''. Bottom line is to link out with caution and care - and only to sites of known quality.

There are some other items about promoting your website and using Google's free webmaster tools at the end of the guide as well. Also mentioned are Google Analytics and more webmaster-related links within Google. Overall, the advice contained here is very solid - although not really anything new or unexpected. What is so great about Google's new Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide is that it takes away the very first bit of mystery about what Google actually endorses in search engine optimization. That is great news for anyone interested in working on their website rankings - but wanting to do things in a way that Google will find 'white hat'.

Email Hosting

Individuals, start-up operations, small to medium-sized businesses, and even some Fortune 500 companies leave running and managing email servers to the professionals. By relying on professional email hosting service providers, companies and individuals benefit from specialized services that would be far too costly for them to provide for themselves. Think of the email hosting service provider as a utility. A large business (even an individual) could generate its own electric power, but it is far more cost effective to purchase power from the local power company. The same is true of email hosting. Unlike most utilities, however, when it comes to choosing a hosting service there are hundreds, if not thousands, of choices available to you.

For most individuals, ISPs are their primary providers of email services. Most ISPs provide eight to 12 email accounts and store all email messages on massive servers that are accessed by thousands of clients each day. Most also provide email related services that make managing email accounts easy.

Email Hosting Solutions for Businesses
Businesses, on the other hand, often need more personalized services than ISPs can provide. Professional email hosting companies not only provide businesses with the same basic services offered by ISPs, they also offer business-specific utilities that are critical for optimizing business communication through email. Administrative tools for provisioning users, back-up solutions for storing valuable email data, and specialized features (like a business-wide footer attached to all emails), are also standard services for businesses. Most importantly, these services allow a company to set their email addresses to include the company name (JohnDoe@JohnDoeCompany.com).

Just as businesses must choose between shared and dedicated servers when selecting a web hosting provider, they must also choose between shared and dedicated servers when selecting an email hosting provider. With shared hosting, a company's emails are stored on a large email server along with the email data of many other companies. With dedicated email hosting, an entire server in set aside for one company's private use. Dedicated server email hosting offers businesses added security and control over the

Web Hosting Directory

Welcome to hostcompanies.com, you have just found probably the most advanced web hosting directory in the world. We wanted to take the web site hosting directory a step further and have spent over a year preparing a very advanced business base. Our intention is to connect the three main areas of internet business ( web hosting companies, web design companies, small and large online business based companies ) together. If you are setting up business on the web or already have a current business running you have come to the right place. We offer advice and guidance for everything from finding the correct web site hosting company to obtaining a government grant. The web hosting directory and the web design directory are both worldwide.

Looking for a web hosting company? - Some of the benefits from using this directory are as follows,

Currency Converter - All web hosting packages are priced in USA dollars but using the currency converter its possible to convert this price into any known world currency.

Translation Tool - This tool allows any page on this website to be translated into several main languages, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese and Spanish.

Hosting Forums - Can be used to interact with other members of the web design and web hosting industry, ask questions and get advice, find freelance programmers, discus various advertising methods. We use a hacked version of vBulliten board allowing search results in our directory to be interfaced with the forum. This means that companies searched for in our directory can be automatically searched for in the forum. This can be used to find out any comments or discussions about the company from other web hosting users. Webmaster Forums are now live - web hosting forums.

Hosting Rating System - Often it is unfair or misleading to judge a company from comments made in a hosting forum. The reason for this has become apparent on many different hosting directories and website's, as other companies or individuals have purposely set up to destroy or harm the reputation of other web hosting companies.
They do this to try to convert clients over to their companies and this can make it very hard to judge comments left on forum systems.
To combat this we have made a unique rating system. Our rating system uses several security systems to check and confirm the source of the rating and comment being made by a various individual or company and to check if they really have had a service performed by the company they are rating.
This goes much further than just recording the ip address. No rating system is perfect or completely secure but we hope our system will block 90% of malicious and unjust web hosting ratings.

Hosting Compare Tools - This can be used to compare different hosting packages from up to 4 companies in a nice simple table.

Hosting Chart Tool - This tool draws a chart comparing up to 4 website hosting companies together, the chart can be set to draw on certain website hosting preferences, for example - bandwidth and services. The chart uses a point system for certain services provided in hosting packages and this enables it to draw.

Multiple E-mail Tool - Can be used to e-mail up to 4 different web host companies produced in search results simultaneously. Useful when needed to ask or inquire about certain services required. We only allow up to 4 hosting companies to be mailed at the same time to protect the companies listed in our database from spam.

Bookmark Tool - Store your favorite web hosting and design companies in a bookmark page for future referencing.

History Tool -All the hosting companies found in search results can be studied in full by using the more info option on search results. This will show all the services the company offers, including company address and currency used. It also shows all other hosting packages and web design services the company offers. When you study a company in this way it automatically is stored in your history box.
These hosting companies can then be viewed at a later date to help users decide which host is best to use.

Server Ping Tool - Test the speed of the server of web hosts as they appear in search results. This can help give some indication of the quality of the hosting they might offer.

Welcome

This site was designed and created for people like yourselves looking for web hosting and other related information. We provide helpful tips and knowledge for a wide range of users, from those just starting out with the internet and those who already know the in's and out's about web hosting.

Website Hosting

There are currently thousands of website hosting companies flooding the marketplace. With Web Hosting Resources help, however, you'll know exactly what to look for when comparing one company's plan with another's. Before choosing any web hosting package you must first determine four things: how much server space you need, how much traffic you expect, your potential need for e-commerce solutions, and the level of security you need.

Disk Space
For small start-up businesses, 100MB of disk storage should be enough for a basic site. If graphics and/or multimedia files are an important part of your site, however, you may need 1000MB or more. Basic web hosting plans offering 100MB of storage can be found for as little as $3.99/month. For just a few dollars more, storage capacity can be increased tenfold or more.

Website Traffic
In order to make sure that all of your customers are able to access your site, you need to have sufficient bandwidth available. Whether you need the ability for your site visitors to download 5GB of content per month or 50GB, there is always a website hosting plan available to meet your needs. Look for a company that provides up-to-the minute reports on your monthly traffic so that as your business grows you can make sure you the plan you originally selected is still the right plan for your business.

E-Commerce and Security
While some businesses today gain from the Internet through subscription services or advertising revenues, more and more are using website storefronts as a replacement for (or a companion to) traditional brick-and-mortar stores. For businesses looking to sell goods over the Internet, shopping cart technology is essential. To protect customer transactions, SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) connections should be used. SSL connections may not be available with basic packages, so be sure to read the details about any plan you are considering before signing up.

Unique Website Hosting Plans
For added security and reliability, many website hosting companies also offer flexible, dedicated server plans that can be specifically tailored to meet your business's unique needs. With a dedicated server, you rent and maintain complete control over the server on which your site is stored. Your dedicated server should have a redundant power source, an HVAC system, and internet connectivity provided via 10/100 Ethernet.

A shared web hosting service or virtual hosting service or derive host refers to a web hosting service where many websites reside on one web server connected to the Internet. Each site "sits" on its own partition, or section/place on the server to keep it separate from other sites. This is generally the most economical option for hosting as many people share the overall cost of server maintenance.

Description

The hosting service must include system administration since it is shared by many users; this is a benefit for users who do not want to deal with it, but a hindrance to power users who want more control. In general shared hosting will be inappropriate for users who require extensive software development outside what the hosting provider supports. Almost all applications intended to be on a standard web server work fine with a shared web hosting service. But on the other hand, shared hosting is cheaper than other types of hosting such as dedicated server hosting. Shared hosting usually has usage limits and most hosting providers have extensive reliability features in place. ^[1]

Shared hosting typically uses a web-based control panel system, such as cPanel, Ensim, DirectAdmin,Plesk, InterWorx, H-Sphere or one of many other control panel products. Most of the large hosting companies use their own custom developed control panel. Control panels and web interfaces can cause controversy however, since web hosting companies sometimes sell the right to use their control panel system to others. Attempting to recreate the functionality of a specific control panel is common, which leads to many lawsuits over patent infringement.^[2]

In shared hosting, the provider is generally responsible for managing servers, installing server software, security updates, technical support, and other aspects of the service. Most servers are based on the Linux operating system and LAMP (software bundle), which is driven by the low cost of open source software. But some providers offer Microsoft Windows-based or FreeBSD-based solutions. For example, the Plesk andEnsim control panels are both available for two operating systems, Linux and Windows. Versions for either OS have very similar interfaces and functionality, with the exception of OS-specific differences (for example: ASP.NET, SQL Server and Access support under Windows; MySQLunder Linux).

There are thousands of shared hosting providers in the United States alone. They range from mom-and-pop shops and small design firms to multi-million-dollar providers with hundreds of thousands of customers. A large portion of the shared web hosting market is driven through pay per click (PPC) advertising or Affiliate programs.

Shared web hosting can also be done privately by sharing the cost of running a server in a colocation centre; this is called cooperative hosting.

Implementation

Shared web hosting can be accomplished in two ways: name-based and IP-based, although some control panels allow a mix of name-based and IP-based on the one server.

Name-based

In name-based virtual hosting, also called shared IP hosting, the virtual hosts serve multiple hostnames on a single machine with a singleIP address.

When a web browser requests a resource from a web server using HTTP/1.1 it includes the requested hostname as part of the request. The server uses this information to determine which web site to show the user.

IP-based

In IP-based virtual hosting, also called dedicated IP hosting, each virtual host has a different IP address. The web server is configured with multiple physical network interfaces, or virtual network interfaces on the same physical interface. The web server software uses the IP address the client connects to in order to determine which web site to show the user. The primary reason for a site to use a dedicated IP is to be able to use its own SSL certificate rather than a shared certificate.

Disadvantages

Name-based virtual hosts have some disadvantages:

• They do not properly support secure websites (HTTPS). All name-based virtual hosts using the same IP address must share the samedigital certificate. This is because the SSL/TLS handshake takes place before the hostname is sent to the server. Thus the server doesn't know which encryption key to use when the connection is made. An extension to the TLS protocol, part of RFC 3546 - Transport Layer Security (TLS) Extensions, specifies a way for the client to provide the requested host name as part of the handshake, but it is not yet widely implemented. Some of the shared hosting providers require their customers to get Unique IP in order to properly set up HTTPS.
• If the Domain Name System is malfunctioning, it is harder to use a name-based virtually-hosted website. Ordinarily, in this case, the user could fall back to using the IP address to contact the system, as in http://192.0.2.0/ (invalid IP for example only). However, the web browser doesn't know what hostname to send to the server, but a name-based virtual host requires it. In this case, the default web host is sent back to the browser for that IP address. Therefore most hosters offer an alternative access method likehttp://192.0.2.0/~virtualhostname to provide access in such cases.
• They will not work with browsers that do not send the hostname as part of requests. This is true for older HTTP/1.0 browsers that have notretrofitted the host field feature from the HTTP/1.1 protocol. (The "Host" header that distinguishes between various DNS names sharing a single IP address was optional in HTTP/1.0; it is mandatory in HTTP/1.1, issued in 1999 as RFC 2616.) Since nearly every webbrowser that is currently used supports the HTTP/1.1 protocol and thus also virtual hosting, this is not a real issue.
• Improperly configured file permissions with shared file systems might give other (compromised) users or processes system-wide access to these files, such as credential files for database access or modification of existing files.