When you setup a website you will undoubtedly get a web hosting plan that includes not only a set amount of hard drive space for your pages, but also a budget of bandwidth that your site can utilize.  This number can be anything from 100 Megabytes (MB) per month to thousands of Gigabytes (GB) per month.  Often this vital statistic is ignored as people are looking forward to the problem of having too much traffic.  While most web sites that are created don't consume massive bandwidth, don't plan for your own failure by completely ignoring this factor when you sign up with a web hosting company.  At least ensure you get a reasonable amount of bandwidth based on what your site will be doing.  For instance if you are hosting home videos for a large group you may find that even 10 GB per month is not enough.  If on the other hand you have a modestly designed site that leverages background colors more than graphics you may find that 100 MB is more than enough even once you get the site to your desired user community.

The bottom line is to factor in all the relevant areas so you don't find yourself regretting your choices.

When you sign up for a web hosting company to put your site on their server you are typically looking at a very low price (under $20 per month and sometimes under $5 per month) and in these cases the web hosting company is actually not using a dedicated server for your site.  If they were then they would be out of business very soon.  The fact is that in this situation you are signing up for shared hosting and that means that your website might me one of dozens or even hundreds of other web sites hosted on that same server.  The advantages of this of course is the price.  You could never get a dedicated server for the same price (they typically run over $100 per month for the bare bones package and can run into the thousands per month).  The disadvantages are more numerous.  On a Shared Hosting plan you cannot install any software that isn't already part of the package, you might be sharing the same IP address as many other sites and the server is distinguishing requests by address once they arrive at the server, and most importantly if someone on the same server as you compromises the server with their web application (in the case of dynamic code) then your site is going to be dragged down too.

This isn't an attempt to completely scare you off of Shared Hosting solutions, but be warned about the disadvantages before you jump at the price.  I use shared hosting of simple sites that I consider low security, for everything else I go Dedicated Server all the way.

When we talk about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) we have to start with Google.  It has by far the largest audience and therefore is the big fish if you get top rating for the search terms you choose.

Google, like most search engine companies, tries very hard to keep those of us on the outside guessing about what exactly they look for in a site that puts it at the top of their list.  But even so we know that their patented Page Rank is an important factor.  Page Rank is like a measure of the percentage of votes a site gets from other sites indexed by Google.  Most people think that votes should be given by users, but that is too easy and also is information that is not readily available to Google.  What they use is the number of links and the quality of the links to your site.  This is a gross oversimplification, but for this first introduction to the topic it will do (we will delve deeper in other posts).  This means that if you get linked to by a web site that has great popularity then it helps you alot, whereas a link from a family web site that is unknown to the world at large is relatively less helpful.

The easiest way to get to know Page Rank is to install the Google Toolbar and enable the PageRank function.  You will likely catch on quickly when you see that www.Adobe.com and www.CNN.com are highly ranked.  Most of the web sites you encounter will either be unranked ("no data" or "0/10") or will be in the 2 to 6 out of 10 range.  If you can get your websites to 5/10 you are doing quite well and you have a shot a top 10 position for moderately competitive search terms.

I found this service being offered by Internet Service Providers (AKA Web Hosting Providers) that lets you use their Internet accessible storage as an always available file share.  I had heard of these services before, but I didn't realize that the prices were so low.  Companies like Godaddy are offering storage for under a penny per MB per year!  It sparked my interest because we are dealing with employees that are working from home or traveling more and more and I wanted to get rid of their VPN accessible home directories.

The one I am looking at using is here.

I decided to characterize this as Web Hosting because it is all about putting your resources on someone else's server so I think that fits.

When you embark on starting your web design there are two competing temptations.  To automate and make dynamic as much of the content as possible holds the allure of having the site take on a life of its own.  Allow users to contribute and you might get out of writing a web page ever again (dream on).  The other hand holds the getting to market faster and cheaper because dynamic content costs more in time and often money (programmers are not typically cheap). 

When you have static content there are those that argue that it makes it easier for you to get good search engine positioning and while the jury is out on that assertion, most people can whip out html with tools like your standard word processer whereas dynamic content typcially involves databases and very talented programmers to make even the first page display.

A solid and proven compromise is to start your web design and architecture by putting up a HTML page or two and then pin dynamic and static content onto that base as time goes on.  This gives you cheap and fast when you need it and still leaves you open to leveraging the power of dynamic technologies like ASP, ASP.Net, JSP and PHP to allow you to scale to thousands of pages tailored to the actions of your users.