Wight Portal For The Isle of Wight Community

If you have ever looked into purchasing a hosting package but you were put off by the jargon, then what follows is for you.

Trying to find the ideal hosting package is a nightmare. Sites dedicated to selling these services assume you know what it is you want. Unfortunately my site Wighthosting.com is no different.

So here I am going to try and explain what makes a good hosting package.

You can also find further details on my new site http://wighthosting.info

Shared hosting is the cheapest and most popular type of package. This means that the server that holds your web site also holds several others. The resources of the server I.E the storage capacity and processing power is divided up for each site hosted on it.

The first thing you need to know is, how big your web site is going to be. If it's a 1or 2 page family site, you won't need as much storage space as an online shop that perhaps has pages and pages of things for sale.

Hand in hand with this goes what is known as bandwidth also known as data transfer or traffic, this is a measurement of the amount of processing power the server will need to show your site to the world. The more bandwidth you have the more people can visit your site.

So if your web site is a total of 1 megabyte and you receive 1000 visitors to your site in a month, your bandwidth for that month would be 1000 megabytes or 1 gigabyte.

Most hosting is offered with Apache or Linux as the operating system. It is, I suppose ironic that Microsoft and it's commercial operating systems rule the offline world, where as online Open Source free software is king. Support for all the popular programming languages is a must, these include PHP, Perl and Python.

A lot of sites are built around data bases. The most popular is called MySQL it's a small fast system and so doesn't hog system resources.

So having read thus far are you any the wiser? The table below shows the 3 hosting plans that I offer through Wighthosting.com.

Domain is the name given to a site. For example your_site.com. Each account can host more than one domain, but remember each domain is sharing the same data transfer limit.

The accounts come with multiple email accounts. These can be set up to deliver emails to your desktop email client. If you're in business every department could have a separate account. Each comes with the option to add an autoresponder and forwarders. You can set one up as a 'Catchall' account, this will receive all mail that ends with your domain name no matter what comes before the @ part of the address.

Along with what is in the table above each account comes with the option to have installed a pre made script. There are 30 or so to choose from, included are ad managemet, blogs, content management, customer support, discussion boards, e-commerce, image galleries and web hosting tools.

All you do is choose the script you want and click install. Your site will be up and running in minutes.

There is also a site builder program, where basically, using a tool similar to a word processor you manipulate the text and pictures of your site. There's no need to know anything about coding as the program takes care of that.

All the plans are easily upgraded, say you suddenly need more storage or bandwidth, you simply order it through the back office in the control panel.

This site is presently hosted on the 'Business Plan'.

I hope this brief look at hosting has helped demistify some of the jargon. For a more indepth look go to Wighthosting.com, or you could just sign up below and get started.