Choosing a webhost can be really confusing when you don’t know what all those “technical” terms mean. Continue reading find out the basic features you need to know before you choose your web hosting provider.
Storage space and bandwidth
The first things you might want to look for are storage space and bandwidth. Storage space is important because it is the amount of disk space provided to you for storing your website on your provider’s server. Your website size may vary, but the average website size can range from 5-50 MB.
Bandwidth is probably the most important feature to consider, as it influences the amount of visits you can get. When a visitor gets to your website, your site is transferred from the server to their web browser. The higher the number of visitors and page loads, the higher the data transfer. Look for high bandwidth if you expect to have a large number of visits, or unlimited bandwidth if you get lucky.
MySQL features
Most content publishing applications such as CMSs (Joomla, Mambo, Expression Engine…) or blogging platforms (such as Wordpress) need PHP and MySQL to work on a web server. The MySQL dabatase system is a open source application that rapidly handles server databases, and phpMyAdmin is a PHP script that handles the databases. These features work with each other, so they are very important!
FTP features
Transferring files to a server through an online interface is difficult and annoying, so you would want a third-party application that helps you through it. To be able to do so, a web server needs to provide you with a special FTP account username and password that you can use with a third party application. Also, you could need something called “anonymous FTP” if you want visitors to upload their files to your web server without having access to all your files, so look out for this if you need this feature.
Email
It’s common for websites to have their own email account for contact and support. This represents a problem if you don’t have the proper email feature. Email forwarding is a feature that allows you to redirect every email that comes on one account to another one: for example if your website address is john@website.com, and you choose to redirect it to john@normalmail.com, every email that gets to the first address is redirected to the second address. Then there are autoresponders, who automatically respond to received emails with a specific message, spam filters, and mailing lists (which are important if you choose to provide a newsletter.)
These are the basic features you need to know about web hosts. Yes, there are many more, but for beginners, these are the ones that matter the most. Just remember to verify that your chosen server meets the requirements of the publishing engine, or application you want to use (if you want to use one), and that it has the appropriate amount of storage space and bandwidth. Good luck when choosing your host!