Lets start from scratch about web hosting and what it is. Essentially, web hosting or a web host is the foundation of your website. What do I mean by "foundation"? Well, setting aside that fact that you may or may not have had your website designed already, how is everyone going to see it?A web host very simply put is the window through which your visitor are looking to view your website. It allows your linked pages to show when clicked upon. In most cases your web hosting plan is purchases and operated remotley, there are occations where the web design company will also host your website.

Which comes first, hosting or the egg?

Once your idea for the website is conceived you should purchase your domain name as soon as possible. From personal experience I once had an idea for a website and thought about it a little to long. Within 2 hours it was already purchased by someone else, so within a 2 hour time frame from checking the domains availability to the point where I wanted to purchase it, it was gone. So the egg or the domain idea that is hatched should be purchased ASAP, just do it, domains are cheap enough these days!

Following your domain purchase should come the hosting plan purchase. Your designer is going to need a place to test the webaite that is being built for you, some designer will use thier own website for testing but regardless, your hosting needs to be in place before the design is complete.

Where to purchase hosting

Where should you purchase your hosting? Well I would love it if you purchase your domain and hosting from me at SarJen Web Hosting but that may or may not happen, so lets go this route. First, I'm not going to tell you who not to purchase hosting from, this would be wrong although it would prevent a lot of heart ache on your end. But I can tell you that not all hosting companies give you what they say they will give you, most often in the way of support. You can Google what you're looking for in the way if web hosting, check that hosts ratings out, visit forums and ask people who they use and whether they have had issues or not. Information is one of the best tools when purchasing a hosting plan.

What kind of hosting package do I need?

This is a good question because it takes into account the type of hosting package and extras you might need. Again, let's start at the beginning, when you're choosing a web hosting package, you should first think of the language your website will be developed in. If you are using a professional web developer, they use a particular language they are most familiar with such as PHP which uses Linux as its web server software or ASP, ASP.NET, and others that can be hosted on a Windows server software. So check with your developer about this or leave it to your web developer to purchase your hosting.

Next, you'll need to look at your bandwidth requirements for your website. There are essentially two parameters to look at and that is the storage and transfer, so lets define those. Storage, just like a hard drive is the amount of space you are given by the host for your website files and applications, the easiest way to explain transfer or bandwidth is to say that it is the amount of times that your website is downloaded to a visitors computer. Every time your web site is visited it spends some of your bandwidth, if you have 100 GB of transfer or bandwith that gives you plenty of visitor time with a website that may be 70KB in size as opposed to a website or application on a website that may be several MB.

What about all the extras in web hosting packages? You will get some free extras when you purchase hosting from SarJen Web Hosting , there are also extras you can purchase, in most cases I would wait until you know what you're going to do with the site before buying extra tools which you may not know much about.

I hope this has given some insight to web hosting, next we'll be talking about domains.