Following up on my last hosting post, here I am again to see if I can shed a little more light on the subject.

I had a query from a client of mine a few days ago about how hosting costs work, what exactly the monthly fluctuating costs are for and why we need to pay them. I decided I would head back to the trusty Grant W for some more information.

Domain Names

Firstly there is the domain name registration cost. You would normally pay this a year or two in advance for “owning” the name. Each name has to be individually bought and secured, but can be managed from one account. A good idea when buying a domain name is to also buy all the different spellings or variations of the words in your address to stop people from domain squatting. In the registrar settings you can then forward each domain name to the address where your site is found.

As an example, consider if a user typed in quirkrocks.com (rather than quirk.biz). If I was clever enough I would buy this domain name too and then make sure my user gets forwarded to the correct address – quirk.biz.

The Monthly Costs

So on to the more contentious issue of the costs, which are the actual monthly fees your hosting company charges. This is normally broken up into two separate fees:

• One is a monthly (or yearly) fee for the actual storage space you use on your hosting company’s servers. This is normally a static cost and should not change particularly often.
• The second is the bandwidth cost. This cost depends on a few things, including how many people visit your site. As a rule of thumb, the more visitors, the higher the cost. When you get a bill at the end of the month which is higher than expected, be glad, it hopefully means more people are visiting your website!

To simplistically explain this cost, think of the hosting cost as what you would pay for your telephone line rental. When your website is being viewed, bits of information and pictures are being transferred down some wires away from the server and to a computer. In essence with a website such as quirk.biz, I am paying for the lease of the lines to transfer that information to the user. To put it simply - the higher the number of users, the more the telephone lines are used and the more money you have to pay on a monthly basis.

The confusion which comes in here is because users, to some extent, are paying for their own bandwidth. I tried to explain these costs to my flatmates who are rather “computer challenged” as I like to call it and the best way I could do that was to use an easy example.
When we signed up with Sky Internet there was a bandwidth cost involved. Users are not expected to pay the full cost to view a website. The owner of the website pays a fee too, namely the bandwidth cost you see on your hosting invoice.

It is not just the number of users that increase the bandwidth. Bandwidth is also heavily reliant on the number of pictures and videos on a website. The more there is to download, the more you are likely to pay on a monthly basis. I'm sure you've all sat and waited for a video to download from YouTube. You're not the only one paying for that video. YouTube has to absorb some of that cost too (and yes their hosting bill must be GIANT!).

OK, so I hope that makes things a little clearer. As before, you know where to reach me and if I can answer some more questions, just let me know and I’ll ask Grant W. :)