Choosing a hosting package for your Website.

One of the most critical tasks in planning your new Website is choosing the correct hosting package. It is also one of the trickiest. Is it important that your Website load fast on a consistant basis? Do you plan on having many visitors right off the bat? Do you have a lot of large items to download, such as images or video? Do you have programming that requires a lot of server resources? If you answered "yes" to any of these questions then you might want to consider a dedicated server.

What is a dedicated server? As the name implies, a dedicated server is a web server that holds your Website, and your Website alone. Shared servers, which are the most common type of hosting available, hold many different Websites. These Websites are competing for server resources. This can lead to problems, such as:

1. A Website on your server gets a lot of traffic on a given day, and hogs the bandwidth. That can cause your Website to load slowly or become unavailable to your users.

2. YOUR Website gets a lot of traffic on a given day. This can even be traffic from a Web spider or a spammer. The hosting administrator will clamp down on your bandwidth, limiting your resources, which will also cause your Website to load slowly or become unavailable.

3. The web hosting company puts too many websites on your shared server. Everything can load well at first, but as the server fills up and there is more competition for resources, your website, that looked so good during development and at launch, now loads so slowly that you loose visitors.

There are other problems with shared hosting, but these are the main ones. Shared hosting can be as much as 10 times cheaper than dedicated hosting, but if a fast loading Website is critical to your business, the extra cost will definitely be worth the stability and performance you gain.