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Saturday 19 December 2009

Hosting for Social Networks

Social networks have a unique hosting requirement. They need huge amounts of bandwidth to support the large amount of multimedia being shared in the network, as well as a vast amount of web space needed to host the various pictures, videos and text documents that belong on each user's profile page. This is mainly the unique requirement that social networks have. Another special need that social network websites have is that they have a high tendency to lag due to high latency. This is because of the large amount of bandwidth leaving the web server at any one time. Thus, when picking a web host for social networks, it is vital to keep these in mind before you select a web host.

Selecting a web host with a high bandwidth is vital. It is likely that you will not be able to find any web host that has such high bandwidth normally, you probably will have to get a special arrangement or special web hosting plan for you social network website. Having a high bandwidth cap is of utmost concern, you do not want your users to start leaving your network in droves when it goes down in the middle of the month due to a capped bandwidth. This is the same for the latency. Keeping the latency low by using a fast connection and low bandwidth is vital to keeping your website lag free. A common problem with most social networking websites is that it is very slow to load. This not only makes your visitors lose patience but it also hurts your advertising and other media that you need to show on the website.

A huge web space is not too difficult to find. There are various web hosts which even offer up to 1 TB of web space for you to use. With such a huge webs pace, backup is of paramount concern as any server crash can literally destroy your entire social networking site in an instant. Of course, having a large web space is needed to provide the space for your users to upload their files, photos, comments, and videos to your website. This can help increase the popularity of your website. Of course, a good content management system is vital to any website of this scale. Picking a good content management system such as Joomla can help you arrange and organize the huge amount of data in your website easily and quickly.

Ultimately, picking your web host for a website of this scale is of utmost importance. Any error in doing so can not only compromise your entire social network endeavor, but also cost you a large sum of money. There are many potential web hosts that you can use, all that matters is for you to pick one. However, pick wrongly and the consequences can be unthinkable. Use the above pointers to help you choose a suitable and functional web host. This can just bring your social networking website over to success.

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