One the first questions I get asked by prospective web clients is what kind of web hosting they need for their small business, I guess it’s a fair question but as a web developer I’ve been in the business long enough to tell you honestly that you don’t need a very big hosting package.

Generally speaking website hosting comes in three sizes, and for most people I build websites for the minimal expense is the best. Let’s take a quick look at what type of hosting you should plan for when you’re designing a website.

Small Business Website Hosting

For the vast majority of small businesses, web hosting should not be a very complicated decision. Hosting companies abound on the Internet. What you should be looking for is a hosting company which offers you at least 25MB of storage space and at least 1 GB of monthly transfer. 

Just so that we’re clear, an MB is a Megabyte and storage space is how much data you can store on your web server at any given time. My website is 350MB in size but has over 6,000 pages which is about … 250 times the size of a normal website.

A GB on the other hand is a GigaByte. Both are measurements of data, where a GB is 1024 MB’s and an MB is 1024 kb’s (Kilo Bytes). So far this month I’ve served up enough web pages to account for 5,167 MB’s (around 5GB’s) of data but to be fair, I’ve also served 80,000 pages. In comparison my Getaway Graphics website has only served up 1,200 pages at a cost of 5MB hard drive space and 300MB worth of bandwidth.

Which leads me to the cost of hosting for a small business, there are a lot of option out there and the costs are all over the map. A lot of people assume that by paying more for web hosting they’re getting better web hosting but that’s not true. I pay ~$7 a month and serve up 25 or more the volume of business a normal website would expect to handle, while a close friend of mine pays $25 a month with no noticeable benefits. In the end, if your website has less than 100,000 visitors per month a standard web host should be able to handle your volume.

Cloud Hosting for Medium Sized Websites

When you get into website that host membership website software or popular forums, heavily visited blogs, new services and highly successful regional sized companies you’ll want to look at something called Cloud Hosting. Basically cloud hosting is the same as shared hosting (what most providers do) but cloud hosting companies limit the number of companies sharing a single computer to just a few and ensure the computer has enough memory and equipment to handle mid level traffic.

Cloud hosting isn’t cheap. It’s a major jump in price to about $100 per month but the difference is out of this world. In real world terms, if your WordPress blog is running over 100,000 unique page views per week you’ll want to seriously consider moving to a cloud hosting solution. On the other hand, starting out at that level is just an expense for most people and one that can be avoided.

Remember, it’s fairly easy to move from a smaller package to another package if you need to upgrade later on.

Dedicated Hosting for Large Websites

Let’s be clear, when I talk about a large website I’m not talking about how many files you upload or how wide your website’s graphics are … I’m talking about how many people access data on your website more to the point, by the time you get to need a large website provider such as RackSpace or dedicated hosting with somebody like Godaddy, you should be measuring your web traffic volumes as visitors per minute … not days.

Virtual web hosting generally starts somewhere between $250 and $500 per month but can run into the $10,000 range or higher for high volume websites. If this is your first introduction to web hosting, don’t panic … by the time you’re incurring that type of expense you most likely have a dedicated team of web professionals working for you full time.