Tuesday, October 7, 2008

Basic Features of a Web Hosting Plan

By Bob Willis

Web hosting plans come outfitted with varied features, tools and functionalities in order to cater for diverse needs and budgets. In this article, we would be discussing the basic features of a web hosting plan and which features and tools are best suited for your website. This will help you determine and ascertain the type of hosting plan that befits your website needs.

Disk Space: Disk space is the amount of space offered by the hosting provider to store all your files. Here it becomes important to determine the exact amount of disk space that your website would require. Different web hosts offer different amounts of disk space for individual hosting plans. It is advisable to have an estimate of your disk space requirements. Try to ascertain as to how much space you would require for storing your email, web files, databases and log files.

Once you get a breakdown of these figures you would be in a better stead to work out the disk quota required for hosting your website. It is important to note here that certain we hosting providers would also include email and/or logs in the quota. This could make your disk storage estimate a tad difficult. Therefore always keep a safe margin in selecting your disk space since your email and log file needs could change as your website grows.

Email Accounts

Email accounts are a common and essential feature offered with hosting plans. While with some hosts, you may wield control over mail settings, putting restrictions on mail activities (for example the number of accounts or maximum size of mail boxes) on the server side, other web hosts would do the entire set up for your account. There are essentially 4 types of email accounts including POP3, forwarding, aliases and auto responders. How you wish to configure each is of course a matter of preference.

FTP Access

Most paid hosting accounts come equipped with the FTP access feature. These FTP programs allow the users to upload files and to edit and delete the content more quickly and conveniently as compared to the web-based interface. In fact, hosts also offer the option of creating one's own FTP accounts. This is a highly utilizable feature if you wish to share your web space while keeping the user files separate from your own or if you want someone help you on your website.

Bandwidth

This is one vital feature that needs to be taken into consideration when selecting your hosting package. Choosing the right amount of bandwidth is imperative for the growth of your website. A wrong decision here could either make or break your website. The amount of bandwidth or data transfer differs depending on the type of website you own. Therefore the requirement varies and this explains why web hosts make different hosting packages available. Once you have a rough estimate of the amount of bandwidth required for your website, make sure that it suits your monthly hosting budget. For this one also needs to ensure that the company has mentioned all prices in a clear format and there are no hidden costs involved.


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