Choosing A Hosting Service

What's A Hosting Service?

A hosting service simply stores your website files on their servers. These servers are constantly connected to the Internet, allowing your website to be rapidly accessible to any user at any time.

Know Your Bandwidth

Each time a page is accessed bandwidth is used, for example if your page is 24kb, one person loading up that page will take 24kb of your bandwidth. One thousand people accessing that same page will take up 23.4Mb of your bandwidth. In the beginning this bandwidth issue does not really matter, (today the average bandwidth given through a hosting company is 300Gb). However when your site becomes popular and you exceed your bandwidth allowance, your hosting service may do one of two things...

Prevent any user from accessing your page for the rest of the month (until your bandwidth is reset).
Charge you a set fee for every Mb of bandwidth that is used from then on (note this can become very expensive).

The latter has happened to many individuals with sites that have become very popular almost overnight. So please note that if you are realistically expecting a lot users to be perusing your site, (in the 10,000's range) make sure you get a plan with plenty, maybe even limitless bandwidth.

Who Do I Recommend?

Two names come to mind immediately, BlueHost & DreamHost. I have found them in my research to be excellent hosting providers with high ratings, top-notch service and the latest features including MySQL, PHP5, RubyOnRails... If that doesn't make sense, just know that it will do pretty much everything you would want. Although I am personally with DreamHost, either one of these providers will serve you well!

$50 Off Anyone?

I personally use DreamHost and have found them to be excellent, answering any problem that I have within a couple of hours. I recommend them without hesitation and have setup a coupon code for anyone to use who would like $50 off any hosting package. Honestly this is the biggest discount that I could get and would like to pass it on to anyone considering hosting their site with DreamHost. If you have any futher questions about DreamHost or hosting in general, message me.

The code is "robkellas" enjoy!