Bandwith

[Selenaah]

If I were to host an online site for a small company, how much bandwidth would I need? What type of connection should I purchase to supply the bandwidth?
Any help would be greatly apprietiated.

[JPnyc]

To host a site yourself is really a lot of hassle. But if you're intent on doing it, I recommend a T-1 line. The issue with hosting is not download speed, but upload. For instance the avg. cable connection's download speed is usually several times faster than a T-1's DL speed. However the UL speed is usually half, or a smaller fraction of a T1's. If you're fortunate enough to live where fios is available, that would be fine. That has an UL speed of about 2mbps which is generally a bit faster than a T1. The avg. cable UL speed is under 1 mb

IN addition, you'll need either a server OS (like windows server 03 or similar) or Apache server software. If you try to host a site with a regular windows OS and no server software, you'll only be able to support 6 connections to the site at any one time.

[Corey Bryant]

You will also want to check with your ISP to make sure they will allow you to do this. As JP recommended, I will expand on it. Your site needs to be up 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. You need to get a company like HyperSpin (http://www.hyperspin.com) to ping your site and let you know if it is down. Otherwise, if it goes down at 2a, you won't know until you wake up.

One hosting company is TechEvolution (http://www.techevolution.com). They are a smaller company but have their own data center, which not a lot of hosting companies can claim. I would recommend them to host your website.