Best Hosting Blog

Up until recenetly, finding out who visits your website, where did they come from and which pages did they visit was a difficult task. Free services such as the Webalizer gave partial results, not very usable or deep enough. Other services, which provided real insights and analysis, were more costly and webmasters were usually required to purchase them in addition to the costs of shared hosting accounts.

 And then came Google. The giant search engine bought Urchin in March 2005, one of the main stats providers, and it released a new free version dubbed as Google Analytics in November 2005. The service allows you to find out very interesting things about people who browse your website - for example, you can tell which pages were viewed by users from a distinct source (such as MSN search). You can alos set up goals (such as online purchase of a product) and then have the ability to slice and dice the data related to that goal.

This service is highly recommended. Easy installation and you will be ready to go! Don’t pay the hosting companies for statistical information - there is a better free tool in town. 

When you look at the different packages that hosting companies offer, remember that most chances are that you are not going to use most of the features. The average shared hosting account will do well with any package that offers more than 1GB of sapce (almost any respectable hosting company these days). Bandwith should not be an issue to most sites as well, as even some of the sites I support, who have 50,000 unique visitors per month and hundreds of thousands of page views load up nicely on a simple shared gosting plan.

Today Midphase announce they increase accounts size from 25GB to 200GB, and traffic was doubled to 3,000GB of bandwidth a month. Obviously, they would not offer these “deals” if people would actually take advantage of it. Since almost no one reaches these limits, they can keep increasing them as a marketing tool.

So unless you plan to open the next YouTube, disregard space/bandwidth info when you choose a host.