Webhosting Explained

Are you looking to start your own website for your clan or guild? or even just to have a personal website? The first task is finding a webhost to host your website. This can be a daunting task but I’m going to tell you what you should be looking for to make your buying experience less stressful. Also, as a quick note, I am not being paid by either company I am comparing in this article.

It’s the year 2014, gone are the days of paying for bandwidth (the amount of memory your website sends over the internet). Earlier in the 90s and even 2000s, webhosts would have you pay for the amount of bandwidth you wanted. This would obviously restrict you to a certain amount of data and then they’d either charge you overage or just take down your website for the rest of the pay cycle. Think about buying a cell phone and going over your minutes, it’s what used to happen with websites. So obviously, any company that does not provide “Unlimited Bandwidth” is pretty much not worth even looking into.

Just like bandwidth, storage space is also mostly unlimited now. With technology the way it is, it is very cheap for companies to add more storage space to their servers so again, any company not offering “Unlimited Storage” is not worth looking into.

I’m going to put a comparison between 2 companies and then explain the differences:

comparison

Dreamhost vs Godaddy

You can see by the comparison, it’s a really tight race. Obviously both companies have more than just those package options but these were the closest to being the same.

Confused as to what “Shared Hosting” means? Shared Hosting just means that your website is hosting on the same server that other sites are hosted on, it’s the way for companies to keep the prices so low. It also means that all the server resources are shared (think about running multiple games on the same PC at the same time, after a certain number of games open, all of them are going to run a little slower). Both Dreamhost and GoDaddy utilize “Shared Hosting”.

What is a MySQL Database? MySQL is the language in which the database is written in. The database is what most websites use to store data (this blog uses a MySQL Database to store all of the blog posts and other information). With Dreamhost you get a nice unlimited Database. GoDaddy limits the number of databases you can have and how big those databases can be. Given, most databases are relatively small, but if your website does grow above that number, GoDaddy would hit you with another charge.

So conclusions are that the main things you need to be looking for are Bandwidth, Storage, and if your host can provide databases and provide them unlimited or not.

Personally, I’ve been using Dreamhost since 2008 to host all sorts of sites, including this blog. I have never had any problem with my webhosting at all. Their customer service is pretty quick and personalized. Unfortunately I haven’t really ever used GoDaddy to make a comparison but honestly, I’ve never felt the need to go shopping for a new webhost in all the years I’ve been with Dreamhost and that says something.

To order a site from Dreamhost, check out the order page on this site! We also have a 15% off new webhosting promo code! Exclusively for readers of this blog!

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