You want to Host your Website? Look out!

Blogs are popular and part of the social media. Everyone can create a blog and write there what they want. But not only blogs, also companies need websites, and organizations, institutions, governments, action groups, political parties, newspapers, and any individual wants to have a website. But all of that have something in common: they need a website. That website is stored and maintained on a server and that means that everyone needs to have a hosting account in order to host the website. And here the problems start. You are limited with maximum 17,647 page views per day.

Hosting a website can be done in four ways:

1. Website hosting, pricing from $2 per month and higher

2. VPS hosting, pricing from $20 per month and higher

3. Dedicated hosting, pricing from $80 per month and higher

Website hosting is sharing one computer at the hosting company, which you share with hundreds of other websites. VPS is hosting one computer at the hosting company, which you share with a few other websites, but you have control of your part of the computer. Dedicated hosting is one computer at the hosting company only for you. I want to focus on website hosting. There are some points you need to be aware of.

1. Disk space. Website hosting companies offer gigabytes of disk space for hosting a website, but some of them offer a few megabytes. The last ones are really out of date.

2. Bandwidth. This was in the past a bottle neck. That means that if your webpage is one Gb large, and there are 100 visitors, your bandwidth is 100 Gb. Bandwidth is measured per month and those providers offering 2 Gb bandwidth means that you need to pay fortunes extra because of bandwidth violations.

3. Limited email accounts. Some providers are offering only one or two email accounts for your website. Normally they must be unlimited in my opinion.

4. Unlimited everything. That sounds good, especially when they are offered for a price of $2 per month.

5. Free website hosting. This sounds good too. But is it workable?

Hosting is nice, if you want to have a personal website for personal usage. But choosing a hosting account for a company is a very bad idea. Why?

A large hosting company like iPage is offering hosting accounts for a few dollars per month. Everything there is unlimited, but that's a very big lie. It's indeed unlimited, except the number of queries per hour you're allowed. They don't mention that on their website. You will find out about this restrictions after you've paid for it, invested in building your own unique website and start to attract website traffic to your website. When you reach the 17,647 page views per day, your site crashes. Well, it's not actually crashing, but it's stopped by the provider. Why?

• Each website, which is using a (unlimited) database (most of them do) produces queries to the database.

• An average of 100 queries per page is normal. If you want to have a fancy, content rich website with advertisements and the like, those queries might go up to 200 or even 300 queries per page. If you wan to have a plain site, you might produce 40-80 queries per page.

• The hosting provider has a limitation of 75,000 database queries per hour, which they don't mention unless you ask for it.

• That means that your site can handle never more then 750 page views per hour (when your page produces 100 queries), or 18,000 page views per day. For fancy websites with 300 queries per page this means 250 page views per hour or 6,000 page views per day ... maximum.

• Worse even, if you have more traffic (and you can't control that) then the maximum allowed, your fancy site crashes or stops working for a time (officially a hour, but in practice it goes up again after 10 minutes).

So, if you have a website and you have plans to attract as much as visitors as you can manage, don't ask your professionals, because they don't know about these things too many times, but ask your hosting provider. And then you will discover that they don't give you a clear answer, if they answer this question. And it's not only iPage who is doing this. It's almost all of the hosting companies having these restrictions. For company websites or websites who want to attract website traffic, you must only think about VPN and dedicated website hosting, nothing else. It's almost a scam. WordPress WordPress is an excellent publishing platform and it's free. But if you use a shared hosting account, it might be expensive, because WordPress is database driven. But WordPress offers something for free, which might be interesting for you. They offer anyone a hosting space for free, almost unlimited (they limit the size of the images on the site). But the rest you can do what you want. You don't have bandwidth restrictions, database queries restrictions and restrictions on the number of posts you publish. Just like this site is hosted at WordPress, I can write billions of articles about anything and nobody will stop me or restrict me. It's a perfect platform for bloggers and organizations. Another limitation is the disability to add plugins in your WordPress website with the free hosting account.