Choosing a Web Host - What to Look For? Standard Features
By Bogdan Enache
After you have determined that your future web host is a reliable, well established company, let's look at their offer's technical details and understand what they stand for. Here is a list of some of the standard features that all hosting packages have in common:
* Storage capacity. It is the amount of disk space that you can use. For 95% of the websites, the size of any hosting package is more than enough. Because with the new hard drives getting bigger and bigger, web hosts can now offer large amounts of disk space.
* Bandwidth. As explained before bandwidth is very important because once you reach the limit, you're site becomes either inaccessible or you are being charged very high rates for the extra bandwidth. For example, you can pay $7.99 to get 400 GB of data transfer and be charged $3-4 for any additional 1 GB over that limit.
* 24/7 Customer Support. Let's hope this is a feature that you will not use, but when bad luck strikes, you will want someone to talk to and quick. Look for toll free telephone numbers.
* Uptime. 99.9% uptime is good, 99.999% is perfect. The web hosts should also monitor the servers 24/7 and provide protection from DDOS attacks.
* Email features. If you have an email client like Outlook for example, you can use it to get your emails from the server (POP3, IMAP) as well as send them via the server (SMTP). See if you can get unlimited Email Accounts and Email Forwarding, Spam Protection and a web mail option (a web based client like: Horde, Squirrel Mail) in case you don't use an email client software or you just want to check your email from an Internet Café.
* Free domain. What was in the past considered a bonus has now become a standard feature. You should get a free domain name when signing up for a 12 months or a 24 months contract.
* CGI-BIN support. This is more of a legacy programming language but there are still around quite a few CGI scripts and websites running them.
* PHP, Perl, Phyton support. Some of the most popular technologies used in website development.
* Databases. MySQL and postgreSQL are two reliable databases types. Normally if you have a simple site you will not need them, but think big!
* SSI support. Server Side Includes (SSI) is a set of HTML tags that allow dynamic content on a web page. SSI is most typically used to "include" the same file on numerous pages, thus simplifying updates. Ask your programmers if they need it.
* Content Management. You will need a way to access and modify website settings, to see traffic results, reports, logs, etc. cPanel and Joomla! are two popular and user friendly CMS' (Content Management Systems).
* FTP Access. FTP (File Transfer Protocol) is used, as the name suggests, for transferring files. You will use this to upload your website files to the web host server.
* Add-on domains and sub-domains. Add-on domains make it possible for you to have an additional website (with email) on the same hosting account. This is great if you decide to build another website and you're not using all your bandwidth and storage space. As for sub-domains, you should be able to create unlimited sub-domains. Sub-domain example: if the website is called www.myhosting.com, a sub-domain can be the following address: www.members.myhosting.com.
* Shopping cart(s). A useful feature for e-commerce websites.
I hope you have now an idea about the content of the "Learn More..." page of a hosting plan, and I hope you can decide if you need or not a specific feature.
The author is the webmaster of HostingProfs.com, a website dedicated to providing free information about web hosting, hosting terminology and guidelines to follow when choosing a web hosting package.
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