Resources to consider when choosing a Hosting Plan

When purchasing a hosting plan, you have probably come across terms like Disk Space, Bandwidth, Memory (RAM), and Inodes.

Understanding these statistics is crucial for the success of your website. Plus, it is fundamental for helping you choose a good server environment to ensure your website runs smoothly.

In this tutorial, we will dive into these statistics and how they affect your hosting. Let us get started!

Disk Space

Disk Space is the amount of space available on your server for storing content such as images, videos, websites, or email files. As you continuously update your website, the content occupies the disk space.

Therefore, keeping track of your disk usage is crucial. You need to estimate the amount of disk space you need to accommodate the growing pains you might experience as you update your site. To know the amount of disk space you need, look at the type of website you want and the amount of content you anticipate. Essentially, images, audio, and video files occupy more space in a website. Plus, if you are running a blog or an e-commerce shop, you might end up needing more space than a stand-alone business or institutional website.

Your web host provides all the information of the resources allocated to you on your control panel dashboard. Hence, you can check the disk usage. Opting for a hosting plan with more disk space can boost your chances of online success.

Bandwidth

Bandwidth is the amount of data transferred between your website and your web visitors. The amount of bandwidth you need depends on your website needs and traffic level.

If you are launching your new site, chances are you might not need much bandwidth. However, if you are running a website that receives many visitors at once, you should opt for a hosting plan that accommodates a lot of traffic. Keep in mind the popularity of your site and how this might affect its performance. Plus, opt for a package that allows you to upgrade your bandwidth as your site expands.

As with other resources such as memory, many web hosts limit the bandwidth. In that, if your website grows to the point it is taking more bandwidth than allocated, you will need to upgrade your hosting plan.

Memory(RAM)

Another crucial statistic to pay attention to when choosing a hosting plan is RAM (Random Access Memory). RAM holds temporary data when your site is running multiple processes simultaneously. RAM is directly linked to server performance and can impact the ability to respond to requests. The amount of information that a server is capable of processing depends on the RAM.

Before choosing a hosting plan, it is crucial to gauge how much RAM you will require for your site. If you are running an e-commerce site with lots of traffic, you will need more memory than a site with minimal traffic. If your website has limited RAM, your users will receive a 500 internal server error, which can negatively affect your conversions.

Other factors to consider include; the type of CMS you use(WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla! need more RAM), server operating system, and whether your site uses caching, in which case you need less RAM.

Inodes

An inode is a data structure keeping information or attributes of a file on your hosting account. The number of inodes indicates the number of files and folders you have on your server.

Currently, there is a limit of 250k inodes on our shared accounts. To reduce inodes from taking up more space on your hosting account, you can delete any emails or files you no longer need. If you want to retain a copy of your emails, you can download them on outlook.

Equipped with these hosting statistics and how they affect your hosting, you can now choose the best hosting plan for you and your website. While most new websites can start with fewer resources, as your online presence expands, you will need more resources to maintain your site. Ensure you opt for a hosting plan that is easy to scale as your website grows.

Need reliable hosting for your website? We offer affordable hosting solutions and security features to get you started! Contact us via live chat or support@hostafrica.com for further help.