If youre just starting out on the web, the process of picking a web hosting company to run your site can be daunting and scary at first. With all the technical jargon and features that hosts offer, how do you separate what you need from what you dont need? In this article were going to take you step by step on how to pick a quality web host for your first site. Youll learn how to separate needed features from fluff, and what to look for in a host with your eye on the future.

What are your needs?

The first step in choosing website hosting is to identify your needs. Take a look at your site and ask yourself, What do I want to do with this site? Is your site just a family page to post pictures so your family can keep up with you, is it a personal blog, is it a fan site of some sort, or is it just a site that is dedicated to something youre interested in? You have to identify what the target of your site is before you can identify the immediate and potential needs your site will have.

Now you should have an idea of what kind of site you want, and you can start looking at various hosts. Youll want to look at disk space, and bandwidth at first. Disk space is how much space your files are allowed to use up, and bandwidth is the amount of data you can transfer to visitors. To get a better idea of bandwidth, whenever someone visits your page, the page they visit is transferred to their browser. If your page is 200kb in size, you use 200kb of bandwidth every time a visitor comes to that page. For a graphic intensive site, youll need more bandwidth then if you just have a lot of text.

So should you choose based on disk space or bandwidth? The answer is both. If you just want to have a site that you share family photos with friends, you wont need a lot of either. While pictures will take up space and use bandwidth when your family visits the page, you can estimate with a pretty fair degree of accuracy how many times people will visit the pages, so you can calculate how much bandwidth you will need. If, on the other hand, you plan on promoting your site and hoping strangers will visit it, you may want to get a bit more bandwidth since its hard to say exactly how many visitors will come.

What about if my site grows faster than I expect

If youre lucky, your site my skyrocket in popularity quickly. If that happens, it can cause some problems with your provider in the form of extra charges or service stoppage. To prevent unforeseen costs and service stoppage, before you pick a hosting plan you should check a few things. First, what happens if you go over your allotted bandwidth usage for the month? Do they start charging you extra for the bandwidth you go over, or do they just take your website down so users cannot access it? You should also check to see about their policy on plan upgrades. If you find yourself needing more space, more bandwidth, or more features, can you upgrade a plan without extra costs? If you are on a less expensive plan, be sure your host allows you to upgrade to a higher plan by paying the difference between the two plans instead of having to purchase a more expensive plan outright.

As you get more experienced with your website you will have a better idea of what you need from a hosting plan. You can start to try out other providers that either arent as big or that target a specific hosting need (Unix hosting for example). Be prepared to pay more for the extra features though, as better plans come with a price tag. Be sure to also look out for deals that look too good to be true - they probably are.