The array of options available to you when choosing a Web hosting plan can be a bit intimidating. To help you decide, we've prepared a few questions that will help you decide.
1. Decide which platform is right for you - UNIX or Windows NT.
- UNIX is the standard on which over 90% of the Web sites on the Internet are hosted. UNIX offers rock-solid stability, all of the features most Web site require and complete support for Microsoft FrontPage and e-commerce applications if you require it. Additionally, UNIX hosting is considerably less expensive due to its stability which requires less maintenance.
- Microsoft® Windows NT operating system offers you power, performance, and the ability to run NT-compatible applications such as powerful database applications. This ability does come at a higher cost to you due to the increased maintenance and more stringent hardware requirements.
2. Decide if you require e-commerce capabilities.
- Our e-commerce plans offer you the ability to setup a complete storefront on the Internet allowing you to create an online catalog of your products and securely take orders over the Internet. Denver Web Host offers AgoraCart software, an online ecommerce application on all of our plans (at additional cost) to handle everything from a very basic store up to a store with an unlimited number of products. If you don't need e-commerce, stick with a standard UNIX account.
3. Decide how big your Web site is going to be and how much traffic you expect to receive.
- All of Denver Web Host's plans offer generous amounts of disk storage and data transfer rates. The majority of small business sites would be more than adequately served by one of our Standard Plans. When deciding how much disk space you require, consider that the entire Denver Web Host Web site including all of the HTML files, all of the graphics and all of the scripts take up only around 11MB of disk space! Our Standard Plans offer nearly ten times that amount of disk space! If you intend to provide a large number of files or documents for your customers to download, then you may require the additional storage of a more advanced plan.
- Regarding data transfer, using the example of our Web site that is only 11MB in size, under the Standard Plan which offers 5GB of data transfer 910 different people could view half of the pages on our site before we would exceed the limits! If you intend to allow customers to download a large number of files and documents or files that are large in size, you may need to consider a more advanced plan.
4. Decide how many (if any) e-mail POP accounts your business requires.
- POP e-mail allows you to create e-mail addresses with your domain such as myname@mydomain.com and store the e-mail on our server for retrieval with your own e-mail software. Each plan has a different number of POP accounts from 10 on our Standard Plan up to 50 on our most advanced. It is entirely possible you won't even need POP accounts.
- We also offer an unlimited number of e-mail alias' with all of our plans. Alias' allow you setup a custom e-mail address as well but instead of the mail being stored on our servers, it is simply forwarded to your ISP's e-mail address. Alias' are used more often than POP accounts due to their convenience and simplicity. For more information on the differences between POP accounts and alias', we recommend you review the information in our tech support area on the subject.
Armed with the answers to the questions above, you should be able to make a very accurate determination as to what you need from your Web hosting plan.
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