Most registrars for your domain will offer hosting for your domain.  Some will offer free hosting (Godaddy does but with ads at the top) and others not, but most of them will not be great offers.  The hosting offers convenience for you when buying the domain, and they count on you not actually looking at alternatives because it involves some work.  For most people, taking the registrars hosting services will be just fine (even though they’re paying more than they would be if they shopped around).  For some of us though the hosting from the registrar will fall a bit short of what we want/need.

We’ll look at a few different factors for your site when looking at a host.  These include: monthly transfer, number of databases, number of domains, storage space, number of emails, and available stat tracking.

The monthly transfer is the amount of bandwidth you’re allowed to use up with the host.  If you have 50GB of monthly transfer and you use that all up before the month is up then your site will be down for the rest of the month (or the host will charge your credit card overage fees that’ll probably be excessive).  Most websites won’t use that much bandwidth, but if you’re promoting your site on social networks like digg or reddit you could receive a traffic boost that takes your site down.  There are some webhosts that allow you unlimited bandwidth.

The number of databases allowed for a site varies depending on the host.  Most hosts will let you have at least 1, but you should look for more.  If you plan on installing blogging software and forums (or any number of free tools available for creating websites) you’ll need a database for each.

The number of domains allowed sometimes confuses users.  If you buy hosting from the registrar you likely have 1 domain per hosting account.  If you’re not buying domains through the registrar some hosts will let you put multiple domains on your account for the same price.  You could save yourself a lot of money by purchasing a hosting account that you can host many domains on.  Most of the time it’s only a few dollars more to host 5-10 domains than it would be to host just the 1 through your registrar.

Storage is another important factor.  If you have a good host that’ll let you have unlimited transfer and 25 databases but they limit you to only 200 MB of storage on their server your site will quickly grow to be too large for your account.  Many these days will give you hundreds of GBs for storage and a few will give unlimited storage.

Email addresses are only going to be important if you plan on giving a lot of them out.  Most of us don’t have a large userbase that want their own email addresses at yoursite.com but if you do plan on giving a bunch of them out make sure you have a couple hundred at least available from your host.

Stat tracking is possibly the most important part of your hosting package.  The ability to track your websites statistics greatly improves your chances of increasing traffic, pageviews, and earnings.  Knowing which page is viewed most often, and time on the page can help you determine what pages need work, what pages don’t
need work etc.  Look for a host that will give you all the stats you want included in your hosting plan.  Some hosts (godaddy) will charge you extra for access to the important stats for your sites.

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