Web hosting, bandwidth, slashdot – what?

For a while now I’ve been thinking about moving my blog to my own domain rather than use this Typepad one so I thought I’d start researching web hosting and so on. I’ve had some experience with this for the safarisuit.com domain but wanted to find out more.

In my research I realised that if a website is, or becomes, popular and therefore uses a large amount of bandwidth, the proper web host and web host package is essential to cover this. Safarisuit.com is hosted within Australia and which is apparently more expensive than a US based one. Correct me if I’m wrong. It’s unlikely the website will ever be really popular unless safari suits become popular amongst celebrities or something.

In researching this bandwidth thing I kept coming across this term ‘Slashdotting’. Not knowing what the heck this was, I did a Google search and found heaps of blog posts by people very happy to have the extra traffic from being Slashdotted. The downside seems to be that your web host might just take down your website, or charge a heap of money for the extra bandwidth to your site. This of course is a double edged sword and one to be wary of when choosing a hosting provider.

I found the slashdot.org website but apart from it looking like a news type website I couldn’t find out what it is about apart from the tagline; ‘News for nerds. Stuff that matters.’ One of the fundamental rules of Web usability, particularly for an organisation, is an About us page outlining what the website/organisation is. I eventually found the explanation I was looking for on Wikipedia and after doing a text search on the Slashdot homepage found the About link buried at the bottom. All the other navigation on the page got in the way of me finding it more easily.

I digress though. My goal had been to research web hosting providers and I’m no further than when I began. As you can see I got waylaid by the whole bandwidth thing which is the trouble with the web. It’s too easy to be distracted from your original goal and forget about what you started doing in the first place.

I wonder if this is a common phenomenon or whether it depends on an individual’s personality. I find myself easily distracted when doing housework. For instance, I’ll go to put something away in my bedroom because I want to clear up the kitchen. Once in my bedroom I’ll see something there that needs doing. I’ll eventually find my way back into the kitchen and see that I hadn’t finished in there but not remember what I’d originally planned to do. Therefore a small task turns into a much larger one because what started out as tidying up one room ends up being a whole house tidy up.

So I’m still no closer to finding a web host to host the domain whose name I can’t even decide on yet. In the meantime there’s heaps on the internet to keep me occupied.