1   2   3

Choosing a hosting plan

Many people get confused with different hosting packages from the same provider. Namely, they can not choose appropriate package and ask questions like "how many products, categories, visitors can it handle?"

It's easy to understand that all packages are served on the same hardware base so number of products and categories does not matter actually. But number of visitors do matter.

Generally it is difficult to estimate how many products or visitors a site should have as page sizes and the number of images in a page vary greatly. A user who has 5 products listed on a page will use less bandwidth than a user who has 30 products listed on every page.

Bandwidth is the amount of data transfer that you are allowed to have for a hosting package. Let's say you have a web page that is 48KB in size, now each time a user opens your site and goes to that page he downloads 48 KB of information on to their computer. If a 100 users view that page one time each then there has been a total of 4800 KB of data transferred from the server on which your files are stored for the computer of users.

Size of web Page: 48 KB

Number of users who viewed the web page: 100

Total amount of data transferred: 48KB * 100 = 4800 KB

Bandwidth is the term that is used to denote the amount of data that has been transferred from your web space.

The amount of bandwidth that you require while choosing a host depends on two factors: the size and the popularity of your site.

If your site is not very huge and you do not have any audio/video downloads and it's not very popular i.e. not a lot of people visit your site then you do not really require a lot of bandwidth, on a average a web site uses up only 500 MB of bandwidth per month. Or if your site is small but extremely popular then you might have to go for a web hosting package that offers high bandwidth.

On the other hand if your web site is huge, providing audio/video downloads, as well as being very popular then you would certainly require a huge amount of bandwidth. Let's say you have a video file that is 15 MB in size and in a single day a 100 visitors download the file. This means that 1,5 GB of bandwidth will have been used. If you multiply that by 30 days for the month it comes to 45 GB.

Please view X-Cart system requirements for details.

The Myth of the Perfect Commercial Host

In general, there's a great doubt that there are any "perfect" web hosting companies around. Note that even if you are prepared to pay a huge price for your hosting needs, it does not guarantee that your host is any good. This is an interesting industry where a high price does not necessarily yield quality hosting and support.

On the other hand, one thing you can probably be sure of is that you will not get top-notched support if you only pay (say) $10 a month. At that price, which company can afford to hire enough good help to cater to all its users?

Like everyone, you'll probably wind up settling for a trade-off between price, reliability and features that you're willing to live with.

Revision date: Apr 27, 2006

1   2   3