Your website will be the front of your business. You have designed it, tested it and are now ready to release it. All that remains is for you to find that perfect place you can host it on.

With hosting providers flooding the market you are actually spoilt for choices. There are all-encompassing packages that are created to fit all the needs a site or its administrator could ever ask for. You could easily select any one of them and settle for what you might think is the right choice.

Alternatively, you could do the right thing and plan for your hosting needs and then go out into the market and buy the exact hosting plan that not only meets your current needs but also addresses your future demands perfectly.

So, how do you do the right thing? How do you map out or plan your hosting needs? Let’s have a look:

General Reliability

Seek to have your site hosted with the provider that offers 100% guaranteed up time – or as close as possible to it. There are various sites on the internet that keep track of the major web hosting providers so the information is readily available. But don’t just rely on that, also look into reviews made by individuals and businesses alike and what they have to say about what it is like to have a site hosted on a particular hosting provider’s server.

Disk Space

This is probably the easiest feature to figure out. All the files and folders that make up your website will determine the disk space you will use. Now, for the most part, and unless you are a company that requires pages and pages of information to display, you really won’t need more than a few gigabytes’ worth of space.

That means, for the average business website, disk space isn’t too much of an issue. So, you can simply go with the largest disk space you have been offered – because you really won’t be using all of it.

Bandwidth

Again, just like with disk space, here too you will need to do some guesswork. It is difficult to estimate the bandwidth usage of a website that is just being launched. It could flop with just 2 visitors arriving on it during its initial month or it could be swamped with hundreds of thousands of visitors and you might have to actually upgrade your hosting package before the month is even out.

But as a rough estimate, let us assume that you have 2 pages on your site and that the average size of these pages (pictures and other media included) is 80 KB. Let us also assume that you get 40 visitors a day (remember it’s a spanking new site) and they visit both your pages. This means the daily bandwidth allotment for your site should be:

80 KB X 2 pages X 40 visitors = 6,400 KB

Hosting providers usually calculate bandwidth usage on a monthly basis and in GBs, so your monthly bandwidth need will be:

6,400 KB X 30 days = 192,000 KB -> 0.192 GB

0.192 GB is a fraction of a GB; therefore you can safely assume that a 1 GB per month (the same amount offered by most basic hosting packages) allocation will be more than enough for the first few months of your site’s life.

Control Level

Although the average website won’t need more than the normal access permissions to a server, there are those that need to have a little tinkering on the backend side done before they run as they are supposed to.

Make sure you will have all the access and control permissions your website requires before you sign up with the hosting provider.

E-commerce Or Not?

If your website is an e-commerce site – as most business sites tend to be – you will need to make sure your hosting provider has secure servers. This becomes even more vital a step when you need to use payment gateways like PayPal which do not allow their software to work on servers that do not meet their strict security specifications.

Support and Assistance

It won’t matter how many IT guys your business has on its payroll – there are certain issues that only a tech guy at your hosting provider’s end can solve. Therefore, it makes it critical that you have a reliable support team looking out for you. Otherwise, you will find yourself in deep trouble when your site crashes and there is no one to answer the provider’s given support phone.

Price

Although looking for the best price on the market is a point that doesn’t need too much explanation, it should be mentioned that you shouldn’t make the mistake of trying to save on paying for hosting at the risk of strangling your website out of resources, features or technical advancements (upgrades, plugins, patches, full-version software etc.). Don’t save a penny and lose a buck – because your site will crash if it doesn’t get all it needs.

Small Print

Always make sure you go through the small print. Make sure you know what is and isn’t allowed on the site. Make sure you know everything you are getting and under what conditions. Also, make sure you know what could get your contract terminated; then abide by those rules.

Once you have figured these points out, you are ready to choose your web hosting.