What is a domain name?

A domain name is the Web site address for your site, such as www.sisterplant.com or www.microsoft.com. Each site has to have its own unique name.Domain names are obtained either from a registrar (such as hostnexusdomains.com, register.com, or godaddy.com) or bought from an individual holder. You have to pay an annual renewal fee to retain the name. Sisterplanet can take care oif this and roll the price into your package. You can check the availability of a domain name here.

What is Web Space or storage?

Web space is the amount of space all of the files associated with your web site take up. Most web sites do not take a lot of space, so most webmasters never have to worry about the limits of their hosting plan.

What is Bandwidth?

Bandwidth is the amount of data transferred from your web host.

Each time someone accesses a page or file from your site, it has to be transferred over the Internet and downloaded to the person's computer. (If it is a web page, the person's web browser, such as Internet Explorer, will then display the downloaded page.) If you add up all the data transferred from your web site, you get the amount of bandwidth used by your site.

Web hosts typically give you a certain amount of bandwidth for free with your account each month (although sometimes it is a daily limit.) They usually measure the amount of bandwidth in Gigabytes (GB). 1 GB is approximately 1,000 Megabytes (MB), and 1 MB is approximately 1,000 Kilobytes (KB). Therefore, 1 GB is approximately 1,000,000 KB. By taking the size of your pages and how much bandwidth your web host gives you, you can do the math and determine how many users your site could get in a given month without going over your bandwidth limit.

For example, on this web site, a typical page is about 8 KB. Each web page on this site also includes over a dozen other files, mainly images, such as the logo, pictures and graphics. These additional files add up to about 22 KB. Therefore, accessing a complete web page, with all the images and everything, uses about 30 KB of bandwidth. Therefore, assuming our web host provides 5 GB of bandwidth per month, this site could have about 160,000 (5,000,000 / 30) page views a month, and still be under the limit.

Plus images are typically cached by Web browsers, so they do not need to be downloaded by the same user for each page they access. Therefore, if you tend to have repeat visitors, or if a visitor accesses multiple pages that include the same images, your bandwidth usage will be even less and you can support more users per month with your given bandwidth allotment.

What about Unlimited Transfer?

Some web hosts promise "unlimited transfer". This may sound tempting, but it likely means the company is not being honest. They simply would not be able to afford to do this for real.

Check the fine print of the agreement, and you'll likely find a limit there. Typically with these companies, if you hit that limit (or even a limit not mentioned anywhere), they will turn off your account.

Do I Need and Uptime Guarantee?

The short answer is no. To explain why, we'll start from the beginning.

Your web site is stored on servers. These servers are computers, and just like your home PC, they can lock up, crash, or otherwise malfunction. Obviously, you would like your web site available 100% of the time, but with computers this is impossible. You'll need to settle for a reliable web host that knows how to keep their computers running well, so your web site will be available a very high percentage of the time.

Uptime is the amount of time a server and/or network is up and running correctly. It is typically given in a percentage—the percentage of time it has been up. For example, if a server was down (not working) for a total of 2% of the time last month (around 14 hours), the uptime for the month would be 98% (100 - 2).

Many web hosts have an uptime guarantee—a guarantee that your site will be available a high percentage of the time. One may offer a 99% guarantee, another 99.5% or 99.9%.

You may think that it is best to go with whoever has the highest number. However, in reality, these numbers have little to do with the actual reliability of the web host. If you read the fine print, you will likely find that you do not get much if they do not meet their uptime goals. Therefore, an uptime guarantee usually doesn't mean much.

What Are Subdomains?

A subdomain is one that resides under your top-level domain name, but behaves as an independent domain. For example, accessing subdomain.mydomain.com can take your visitors to a different page from www.mydomain.com.

More Coming Soon!