What is web hosting?

Centre Neptune can provide web hosting for all clients. Because we are a personal web design consultancy, any website we build for you – or help you to build – can be hosted right here with us, as part of our complete service.

Web hosting companies provide the equipment and support required to:

• Store your website data.
• Make your data accessible via the World Wide Web, from anywhere in the world.

Buying hosting for your website usually means renting space on a web server, usually located in a large data centre somewhere in the world. The vast majority of websites run on shared hosting, because host servers generally have a large capacity, and can easily handle hundreds of websites each.

Very large or very demanding websites usually run on their own dedicated servers, some companies choose purchase and run their own virtual private servers, and the truly massive sites (Amazon, Google) can require many thousands of servers working in tandem. Wow!

Every hosting company offers a range of hosting packages, which will allow your website a certain amount of storage space and bandwidth usage. The more of each your website needs, the higher the price. It can be hard to know what to choose.

For our clients, it is very simple. Using Centre Neptune means a single point of contact for ALL your online needs.

How much space do I need?

Digital web storage space is commonly measured in gigabytes (GB).

The amount of space you need will depend on the type of website you build, the way you choose to build it, and how fast it will grow over time. From our experience, here are some useful starting points which should be ample at first:

Consider your content.

Rich media such as videos and lots of large images require a lot more storage space than simple text.

Today, even small e-commerce sites require multiple large images on every page. Customers have come to expect many different views of each product in your catalogue.

There are ways to reduce the load, but before you sign-up to any hosting plan it is worth considering the kind of content your website will be featuring, and how it might grow.

Be aware of your build.

Websites built using a content management system (CMS) such as WordPress, Drupal or Joomla might require a bit more storage space than bespoke hand-coded sites.

This is not usually a problem, however because these systems make it super-easy for beginners to add themes, plugins and media, such websites can rapidly (and unintentionally) expand.

It is good practice to keep your content tidy. Remove all inactive plugins, delete all unattached media, and get rid of any old themes – except the default theme – that you no longer use. You will have less to back-up, less to update, and more storage space to use for other things.

Not sure how much space you need? Talk to us.

How much bandwidth will I use?

Bandwidth is the maximum amount of data transferred over a period of time.

For websites this is usually per-month, and is also measured in gigabytes (GB).

Once again, your bandwidth use will depend on the type of website you create, and of course how many visitors it attracts. From our experience, here are some useful guidelines:

It pays to optimise.

Smaller web pages load faster. This is a good thing.

If the homepage of your website is 1MB in size, it would only take 1000 visitors to use 1GB of your bandwidth.

Centre Neptune can help you design, build and optimise your site properly, with fast pages in mind . Your visitors will thank you, your web server will be happy, and you will pay less for bandwidth in the long run.

Consider non-human traffic.

Not all visitors to your website will be human. Some will be robots. Some may even be spiders.

Don’t panic. Bots and Spiders are small bits of software that crawl the web and report on what they find. Search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing use bots to continually index the web and ensure their listings are up-to-date.

Bots are also used by large market research, keyword and SEO companies like Ahrefs and SEMrush, who conduct paid-for analysis on internet usage trends.

We mention this because non-human traffic can quickly consume your bandwidth allowance, so it is worth keeping an eye on how much your site is using.

Need help with your hosting needs? Get in touch.