I think I may have found a new server company, I’m just going to have to do some more reading into their services – as well as their location. Right now the company I’m with is running out of both Kentucky and California. I’m not even remotely content with either data center to be honest, but that’s besides the point. The one I’ve come across tonight is Burton Hosting, they offer both Business Web Hosting and Personal Web Hosting as well. I personally spent more time looking over their Dedicated Hosting but that’s based on the fact that I need that more than Personal services. I’m content with where I am for my personal projects. However, with this company I’m given more resources to work with in a much more reasonable price range so I may be able to go back to housing everything in one place. The main site will always be self-hosted from the house, but that’s based on the fact that I need to be able to keep in touch with people when the servers are down.
For those interested in Personal Web Hosting, I have to say that they’re fairly reasonable. For $6.95 a month you’re given 10GB of Disk Space and 100GB of bandwidth. Based on past experience, and news heard through the grape-vine about other websites on the Internet, even sites with a high amount of content aren’t using 10GB of web space, so really having anything more than that could be borderline absurd. You’re limited in regards to email accounts and MySQL databases, but anyone with a personal site using more than 100 email addresses is kind of odd in itself, isn’t it?
If you do happen to need something a bit larger than $21.95 a month on their Business Web Hosting will get you about 25 GB of disk space and Unmetered Bandwidth. I’m not overly fond of the “Unmetered” aspect but at the same time, it’s close to impossible to use more than 150GB of bandwidth unless you’re an extremely popular website to begin with.
So you don’t need me here telling you about web hosting if you already know what you’re getting into. If you’re really unsure about what kind of resources you need, it’s really a simple thing to figure out. Sit down and figure out exactly what you’re going to use your site for. Factor in whether or not you’re going to have large files of any kind and then go from there. Everyone wants to think that they’re going to use more than 20GB of bandwidth per month but if you’re going to have just a blog and are lucky to get 2-3 comments on any given entry with MAYBE 100 visiters a day, you don’t need to waste the money on a higher ranking plan. There’s the easy rule of K.I.S.S., just work with it.