Understanding Web Hosting Package

Before you set out to find a web host, you must know what you are dealing with in the future, and what are your requirements. I will now tell you some of the basic features you should have in the web packages.
There are many more features, depending on the package, but here are the core ones.

Shared or Dedicated Hosting
Go for shared hosting. It is slower but cheaper. You will need to learn how to manage a dedicated hosting account, not recommended for beginners.

Uptime
uptime per month is minimum. Nothing less.

Disk Space
Assuming each webpage, including images, are at around 20KB in size, you will need 200MB at least. If you are paying for
a web host, go for at least 1GB, depending on your budget.

Bandwidth
This determines how much data transfer is allowed for your site. 15GB/month should be enough for a small website.
Be careful of the unmetered/unlimited bandwidth. Its not 'unlimited', email the support team of the web host to ask them
what is the actual bandwidth.

Price/month
Small websites should look for the range of USD$2 to 8. These are usually good enough.

Discount Coupons
A code that when entered, gives you discounts, freebies etc. Usually found somewhere in the host website, in web hosting forums, or just do a search in Google.

Add-on domain
Host more than 1 domain (or website) in 1 account with no extra charge! You need to pay for the additional domain name too.

Park domain
These are for parking domain names not in use.

Privacy Whois
Not really important, protects your identity from others when they do a search (domain whois) on the domain name.

Email Accounts
Get your own email@mydomain.com email account. Get at least 4 of these, the more the better of course.
This is very important as some webmasters/web directories requires you to contact them with your own website email account.

mySQL Database
Required if you are installing some sort of application on your web site, such as WordPress, osCommerce, etc.
Around 4-10 of these will be good enough.

Web Stats
A must have if you want to monitor your website traffic, where your visitors come from, and which page they went to.
Alternatively, you can use a free tracker, like Google Analytics.

Fantastico
A script that installs applications on your website with a click of the button. You can install a shopping
cart easily with this, or even a forum.

SiteBuilder
Create a website even if you do not know HTML. Perfect for beginners.

Control Panel
The members page where you manage your website and access web tools like Fantastico.
The most commonly used is the cPanel.

PHP 5, phpMyAdmin
PHP is a scripting language that is really important to web building nowadays. Get at least PHP 5 supported packages. phpmyadmin
is a web based tool to manage your PHP. More for advance users who knows the language. You might need to use it for some
application installations by following the manual.

.htaccess supported
.htaccess is 1 of the most critical part of your website, allowing you to password protect your files, deny certain IP
from accessing your website, redirecting users, custom 404 error page and many more. Most free web hosts do not provide this.

FrontPage supported
Only needed if you are using FrontPage.

Backups
Make sure your web host provide regular backups of your website. Paid web hosts mostly do this. Added bonus if you can find a free host that does this too.

Alvin Ng has been actively engaging in the webmaster community since 2000 and shares his techniques to making money online with fellow Internet users.
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