Every website on the internet has to be hosted, whether it be a growing blog like this one or a huge corporate empire like Microsoft or Google.Hosting can be either free or paid depending on who you are hosted by, with prices ranging from less than $1 to over $100 per month. A small just starting off blog could suffice with free hosting whereas JohnCow.com runs his own dedicated server valuing in at $300 a month.

Paid Hosting comes in three main types:

      1. Shared hosting - Shared hosting is simply someone who owns a dedicated or virtual private server sharing a portion of it with you, this could be to subsidise costs or to create a profitable hosting business. Either way shared hosting has its limitations (Bandwidth, Disk Space, ect.). With shared hosting you have no control over the software, hardware or operating system is ran. You are just faced with a control panel such as cPanel where you can: add domains, databases and other necessary things when creating or running a website. You get what you pay for in the hosting world, a shared hosting package with Hertzweb at $3 a month would get you 2GB disk space and 25GB bandwidth, well enough to host your new blog.

      2.VPS hosting - Virtual Private Servers are basically a portion of a dedicated server with its own Operating System installed and you have control over it. For example you can install any software than runs on the OS, this is not possible on a shared hosting package as you only have access to a control panel. VPS usually comes with increased bandwidth and disk space over shared hosting. A standard VPS hosting package at $40 would include 25GB disk space and 500GB bandwidth

      3.Dedicated server - Dedicated hosting is the pier le resistance of hosting, with excess of 4TB bandwidth available. The reason for this is that if you purchase a dedicated hosting service you are actually leasing a entire server, not shared with anyone. This allows you to have complete control over what hardware, software and operating system are installed on your server. A typical dedicated server at $129.99 a month boasts a 250GB hard drive and 5,000GB Bandwidth (5TB).

Bandwidth and Disk space are not the only specifications that make a hosting plan, but they are the simplest for us beginning bloggers, other things to look at in a future hosting plan are RAM(Dedicated and burstable), and dedicated IP’s.

Basically as your traffic goes up, so does your hosting bill. It is important to remember this when you read articles about people making $x amount of dollars per month without and mention of outgoings. Hosting has got to be paid whether or not your website makes any money or traffic.

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