Webhosting (this is a question, not spam)

[LaLou]

So I am in need of a web host. How do I decide which one to take?
I mean, they all promise me all sorts of stuff but these things are jibberish to me.
Can you please enlighten me?

[Clarence]

I use Hostgator

Cheap and lost of space

It's all I know really

[Moe]

Personally, I rent a Virtual Private Server[VPs] then install the shazam! I want, but that's a little high level, as it required knowing and using Linux command line.

Clarence, what does a base hostgater come with? Do they have the option to install stuff for you?

Do they have packages you can choose from as far as software you can use? (Such as a preinatalled WordPress or Joomla! Installation)?

[Clarence]

Check the website, I think I'm at the cheapest package but this was years ago I set it up

Pay about 10 dollars a month or so

[Moe]

What all are you looking for Lal?

Hostgator could be nice simply because we have a resident expert.

What hosts were you looking at? What were they promising and what parts were jibberish I might be able to explain what that jibberish means

[LaLou]

Ok, I was looking at this:
https://www.vimexx.nl/webhosting
(Dutch site becasue, well, I'm ...Dutch.)
Looking at the cheapest option:
What is SSD?
Data traffic, is 2 GB a lot? (sounds like it to me, but what do I know?)
Domains, 25. Huh?
RAM, Oh, I know that one, Read Access Memory. 1 GB sounds like more than I need at the moment.
SSL certificates, unlimited. If you say so.

I don't think I need a .NL domain, a .com domain will do.

The website will primarily be to promote my book. In the future I maybe want to start selling hand dyed yarns (or threads depending on who you ask) for tatting and lacemaking. There will most likely be more books and I'm thinking of translating them to English, thus creating a bigger market. Also a blog is one of the possibilities I'm considering.

There is so much difference in webhosts. I found another one that is more expensive (three times: 1.50 a month) but has only a quarter of the SSD thingemy.

So basically, what should I look for? I can't see the forest through the trees.

[Moe]

I'll got top to bottom.

An SSD is basically a hard drive that uses flash memory (In the same way as a smart phone does, it stores data on chips rather than spinning discs), and is typically faster that a standard hard drive. If you are just running a basic website (basically unless you have a shazam! tonne of pages) the extra speed from an SSD won't be noticed all that much. (2GB is not a lot, I usually look for around 10-25GB on the low end)

Data traffic. Where are you seeing the 2GB for this? The only 2GB line I'm seeing is for the storage space?
Either way, It's how much traffic they allow your site.
Think about when you are downloading a file, and hwo fast that file usually downloads for you, now think about a lot of people downloading that exact same file at the same speed. The server that is hosting that file has to be able to support that much outgoing data. People who sell webhosting like this are typically trying to run a lot of servers from the same place, and so they often have to limit how much traffic a site hosted on their servers can get.
There are tow different things to look out for on this, Data traffic (which I would assume to mean "how much traffic the site is receiving at one time") and bandwidth (Which would mean "How much traffic the site recieved over the last 30 days")
When you hit a data traffic cap, your site will start to feel slow because too many people are trying to access it.
When you hit a bandwidth cap, the host can do 1 of 3 things; Slow it down to make it use less data, charge you extra for going over, or they can simply block your site until your bandwidth clears up.
See how photobucket does it with images that use a lot?

If you are running a small site, and to promote a book, it would be a fairly small site, this would likely not be an issue.

Domains: 25. A lot of webhosts have an option in their control panel to set up a domain pointing to your website (like levelgame.net, or google.com) And 25 just means that they won't let you have more than 25 of them.
Some webhosts also limit how many subdomains you can have (like forum.levelgame.net or game.levelgame.net)

RAM, You nailed it! The server will keep important data in the Random Access Memory to make it load faster for the user, and for a smaller site, you probably wouldn't need more than 1 GB.

SSL Certificates can be easy or they can be complicated. an SSL certificate is typically used when a site is loaded on https://domain rather than on https://domain. For promoting a book they are unnecessary, but if you want a storefront it is really important. SSL is used to encrypt data (like for when you enter your card number to pay, it sends the server an encyrpted version of the number rather than the number itself (as in 23dfvjm4jfhfl over 2345 7253 9884 2563) so that people cannot steal that data as easily.)
An SSL certificate, to be put simply, just lets the user know that "Yes, this is a legitimate site". It's what lets your computer know that it is, in fact, at Google, not somoene's fake google.
To get into the complexities, there are validated certificates that come from offically recognised organisations, and self signed ones, that allow a site to use the SSL protocol, but don't garuntee the same security.

For selling things, you would really want to look for a host that supports store fronts (which is a type of site that you can use to make product pagesand be used to handle transactions. This isn't 100% necessary if you wnt to do it the self-sold way, where you would say something like "Hey, if you want this, let me know, I'll make it for you, and you can transfer money to my paypal/bank account from your paypal/bank account.

If you want a blog as on top of that, you might want to look for around 2GB of RAM, because that''s when a site can start to get bigger and use more RAM.

[LaLou]

Thank you. that really helped.