Media Hosting Sites

Many webmasters check for bandwidth before buying hosting package. They are in a misconception that the more the better. It is not a body building competition to buy more and more bandwidth. If you are planning to setup and information website that contains only text then 10Gb would more than enough for a month. Also bandwidth utilization depends on number of pageviews you get permonths. One of my website has about 240,000 page views per month and it has flash games, pictures etc.. but the bandwidth utilization barely crosses 100GB mark... You can calculate the bandwidth required like this.. assume each page is about 100kb size..

Average Size of Page (in KB)	100
No of Page Views/month	100000
Bandwidth Required /month	9.536743

As you can see a site with 100000 pageviews per month needs 10GB /month... 100000 are for really large websites... and if you are planning to setup 10 such sites 100GB or 200GB/month plan would be ideal. and far more than enough. If you are planning for a personal website even 1GB is redundant... :)

PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor is a server side scripting language which is most suitable for website development. Php is placed in HTML pages. PHP scripts are executed on the server. PHP supports many databases like MYSQL, Oracle etc.. You can query from db & retrieve data. Almost all free webhosts allow php or provide this service.
PHP files contain html tags and are sent to browser as plain html pages. They might have extension like .php or .php3 or .phtml .
PHP is platform independent.

To practice php on you computer you need to download php parser from http://www.php.net/

What is the most efficient way to save bandwidth?
Outsourcing!!!!

Thing you can outsource
video
audio
documents
pictures

Dude that includes all!!
Nope you cannot outsource  web pages (obviously!)

Video
          Serving large sized video files like movies or video tutorials can really mess up your bandwidth. If that video tutorial is popular it will consume a lot of bandwidth. Let say you video is of 50MB in size. About 10 visitors download this video every day. Then total bandwidth utilization only for that file is 15000MB/month (50x10x30). OMG! thats a lot.15GB of bandwidth for only one single video file. Just imagine how much bandwidhth you have to buy if a single video file takes 15 gb of bandwidth.

There are large websites like YouTube & megavideo where you can upload your videos and they provide you with code to embed that video in your blog or website. Megavideo also pays you for you video views. I suggest uploading your tutorials to megavideo as they allow video size upto 500mb for a free-registered member while YouTube allows only 100MB & limits the length of video to 10 min. Uploading to these popular video hosts also has other benefits like, free traffic. Many of these popular video sites bring large traffice to your website. Most of the visitors who are visiting youtube finds your video then comes to your homepage for more information (given you have lfet a link to your website there.)

If you don't want to stream vidoe files you have to upload these huge video files to free file hosting websites. There are really some good free file hosting websites. They have been popular these days. There is a seperate post on free file hosts( the topic is too large to discuss here).

Returrn to top
Audio Files
Most of the time you can upload all audio files to free file hosting websites but there are some services that stream audio for you. Supload is also one of these hosts that provide you embed code to put in your website to play these audio files.

Documents
Can documents occupy large space. Yes and no. Depends on size of the document. IF the document is of 1 mb just keep it in your website. If it is more than 10 mb share in free file hosting websites. There are some good & popular document hosts like SCRIBD where you can upload almost all types of documents and embed them in your website. The visitor doesn't need to have any special software (expcept ADOBE flash player) to view that document. These document hosting sites are popular so you can get some free traffic from these site to your blog or website. Just don't forget to leave a link to your website in the documents you have uploaded and your profile in that site.
Returrn to top

Picture:-
Yes pictures cost a lot of bandwidth for you. IF you are a template builder or a designer who caters free templates then i highly recommend uploading the pictures you use in templates to either photbucket or imageshack. Don't upload pictures used in your website to these file hosts. You images are loaded every time a person opens you website so its better to keep in a place where large bandwidth is available (your webhost). But imageshack does allow about 300 megabytes of transfer per hour for each hotlinked file. So you might consider using it.
Returrn to top

What is html?
                  HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) is a computer programming language that is used in website development. Html files are just some simple text files with extension .html or .htm with tags in it. HTML is basic website development language. You can learn basics of html in just an hour of reading and practice. There are other types of html like shtml where there are some serverside scripting lines that are executed before the file is sent to the user. Html is powerful static web programming language or dhtml which combines javascript with html to produce dynamic pages. There are some good WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editors that can generate HTML automatically for you. All you need to is drag and drop images or type text as in Microsoft word.

ASP (Active Sever Pages) are the web pages on a ISS (Internet Information Services). ASP is a server-side scripting environment (not a scripting language) developed by Microsoft that allows embedding of scripting commands in HTML pages to create dynamic web pages. If you want to code or develop a website using ASP technology, you have to get a windows webhosting. ASP also includes jscript and VBScript engines. As the scripts are executed on the server there is no need for browser to support scripts. Optimized asp coding can reduce network traffic. You source code is secure as it cannot be viewed from the browser. There are many more advantages. It can save your time as it takes less time to develop website in asp.

Virtual hosting is same as share hosting. Shared hosting or virtual hosting means that you are sharing the web space or bandwidth of the server with other many websites. Usually there are few websites that require dedicated hosting. Shared hosting suffices the need of most people and this option is reliable and cheap or affordable. Dedicated hosting costs from 150$ /month where as you can get a very good shared hosting for 100$/year.
But there are limitations to shared hosting. In shared hosting you will be sharing the server's CPU & memory (ram) with other many more websites. Shared hosting is recommended for websites that have traffic less than 100,000/month (one hundred thousand).

The process of renting bandwidth and disk space to setup a website of your own is called webhosting.
You can get a free webhosting. There are numerous web hosts that provide free webhosting like Doteasy.com , 110mb and many more web hosting companies (more than 250). But most of them place ads on your website and it can become annoying.

Anyway nothing beats paid hosting. Paid hosting is always reliable than free hosts and they allow ads on your websites. There are many types of webhosting like

Free web hosting
Reseller webhosting
Shared web hosting
Dedicated Webhosting