Picking a plan

 Once you've narrowed your choice of hosting providers down to a few acceptable candidates you'll need to begin to compare plans and prices between them.  If you don't work with websites for a living, though, how are you supposed to know how much bandwidth you will use, if you should get a virtual private server, or even what those terms mean?  Here is a rundown of the basic components of a hosting plan that should make that choice easier.

Types of Plans

1. Shared Hosting - Shared hosting plans are the bread and butter of the web hosting industry.  The vast majority of people starting a new site will want to begin with this type of plan.  In a shared hosting environment anywhere from several hundred to thousands of websites are hosted in the same environment.  The advantage to hosting in this type of environment is that by sharing a common hosting environment hosts can minimize their cost per site and can therefore offer their customers a much lower price per site.  The disadvantage of this type of environment is that your neighbor’s problems can easily become your problem.  Hosts have little control over the code that is put onto their servers.  If someone puts code that maxes out the server’s resources then your site will go down as well as theirs.  If you have a site that is getting less than 10,000 hits per day and that is not bringing in a huge amount of revenue, then this type of hosting is the type of hosting for you.
   
   
2. Reseller Hosting – Reseller hosting plans are basically just volume shared hosting plans.  They give the reseller a certain set of resources and allow them to set up new sites until that set of resources is used up.  This type of plan is best for people such as website developers who need to put up hundreds of sites and want easy manageability and a good rate.
   
   
3. Virtual Private Servers – Virtual Private Servers are the next step up from a shared hosting plan.  Virtual Private Servers take care of the bad neighbor problem that share hosting plans have by dedicating certain portions of the hardware to each account.  If a site uses up all of its resources, it will quit working, but the other sites on the server will continue to run just as they always did.  Virtual Private Servers also usually have fewer sites per hosting environment and, because of this, will often allot each customer more resources per account.  This type of plan is best for people for whom uptime is very important and people whose sites require a fair amount of resources.
   
   
4. Dedicated Servers – Dedicated servers give you full access to the hardware of a server.  When you pick a dedicated server plan you will have all the resources of a single server to yourself.  Many dedicated server plans also give you full control of the operating system environment that is running on top of the servers.  This means that you can configure the server however you want to.  Dedicated servers are best for people who have specialized configuration requirements, those who need the full resources of a piece of hardware due to performance and uptime requirements, and those who have the knowledge required to configure and manage the software that the servers runs. 
   
   
5. Managed Servers/Manage Services – Managed Servers and Managed Services are by far the most expensive of all hosting packages.  When you purchased a managed server plan, you are purchasing the exclusive use of a single server and the management of the software running on top of that server.  These plans usually include monitoring, backup, very low downtimes,  and expert support anytime you have an issue.  Managed Services provide the same set of benefits but they do this for all of the equipment/software used to make a service run.  These plans are best for individuals with very high uptime requirements, complex systems, and a desire to not have to invest in the technical skills needed to run a web server or server environment on their own.  Many individuals see substantial savings by moving dedicated services to managed services since they can eliminate the need to invest in resources such as 24x7 technical support, storage technologies, networking technologies, and monitoring.
   
   

1. Bandwidth – Bandwidth is usually promoted as x number of megabytes or gigabytes per month or as x number of MB per second.  One thousand megabytes is equal to one gigabyte.  One gigabyte of data per month is equal to about 100,000 hits for a normal website.  3000 GB per month is equal to about one MBps.  A normal website that is not transferring large files and that doesn’t get many hits will stay under this range.  If you have people downloading files or PDFs you will want 100 or more GB/month.  If you have a large site semi-popular site with some a fair amount of files, you will want 3000 GB/month or more.
   
2. Disk – Many people choose the type of hosting plan they pick based on the amount of disk space that they are offered.  The fact is that most web hosts offer far more disk space than they really have and unless you have a site that you know will use more space than the disk space offered by a plan tends to be pretty meaningless.
   
3. SLA/Uptime – This is a very important number.  Although many hosting companies don’t offer you much recourse if they fall below their advertised uptimes, the uptime they print can give you some insight into how well their operation runs.  Pretty much all hosts will offer 99.xxx (where they x’s are replaced by one or more 9s) percent uptime.  The more 9s that come after the decimal, the less often your site will be down.
   
   
   • 99.9% uptime means that your site can be down for up to 9 hours per  year.
     
   
   
   • 99.99% uptime means that your site can be down for about 1 hour over the course of a year.
     
   
   
   • 99.999% uptime means that your site can be down for about 5 minutes over the course of a year.