If there are three or four steps between your hosting service and the backbone, your Web site performance will be affected, Storm said. Market researcher Forrester Research Inc. recommends companies buy hosting services only from outsourcers with well documented engineering guideklines and tested disaster recovery plans. Storm recommends a visit to the offices of candidate hosting companies. He eventually chose BBN Planet, the hosting service of BBN Corp. of Cambridge, Mass., to run his Web site. Hosting services typically charge a start-up fee and a monthly service fee.
Prices depend on storage and throughput required.
As one of the largest national hosting services, BBN Planet offers many pricing plans. The service includes 60 megabytes of storage space. BBn doesn't specify the traffic throughout for this type of hosting account. It says this service can handle four megabytes of Internet traffic each hour. It can manage 20 megabytes of traffic per hour and store up to 40 megabytes of content.