5 Basic features you should look in a web hosting service.

May 11 2009

Posted by Webmasters-central.com as Domains and Web hosting

Disk space
Band width
FTP access
Good control panel
Support

Disk space:

Disk space is the amount of the hard drive space alloted for your web site. How much space you are going to need?

Ask these questions yourself:

How many pages to put up to complete my entire web site?
Am I going to enlarge my web site in future?
How fast?
Am I going to keep ‘.exe’ ,’.zip’,’.pdf’ or audio and video files on my server?
How many?

If your answers are:

10 pages web site
No
Slow
No
None

Then 10MB disk space is more than enough for you.

Select a web host with starter plans that provide all basic features with 10-25 MB disk space. After few months you can upgrade to next level with increase of disk space. By this method you won’t end up with paying $20-25/month from the beginning.

Bandwidth:

Bandwidth is the amount of data transfer alloted to your web site.

Usually for a beginner (in starter plans), you will be offered 2GB of band width. This is more than enough for a single profduct or few product web sites.

How much is one GigaByte?
1 GB = 1024 MegaBytes
1 MB = 1024 KB
1 KB = 1024 Bytes

You have a web site with 12 pages. Each page averages about 10 kb. Daily you will get 100 visitors. On average each visitor surf thru 5 pages. So per day your bandwidth usage is around 5000 kb (10X100X5). When calculates for 30 days, you will end up with 150000 kb or 150 mb of bandwidth usage. If you have few more graphics or small downloads on your site this goes a little more high.

Fact about the band width: There is no such thing like ‘unlimitted bandwidth’.

If you read your web host’s policy, you might see some rules on using this band width. So always read the terms and conditions before signing up for an account. Most of the web hosts include your email, ftp, http in to your bandwidth usage.

Some hosts put some restrictions on bandwidth usage: Some of them don’t allow commercial email advertising , Big photo galleries, Installing chat rooms and certain forum software etc.

FTP access:

File Transfer Protocol or FTP is the method used to “upload” your web site files to your server.

Three types of ftp access:

One default FTP account is alloted. This is for your personal use. If you want to give access to others you have to share your username and password.

Multiple FTP accounts are allowed. So you can give your members or friends access to your site with their usernames and passwords. Here you can specify which folders they can have access to.

Anonymous FTP accounts. Here you can give permission to your visitors or whole world to upload and manage certain folders on your server. Most risky … eh? Some hosts doesn’t allow you to have anonymous ftp accounts in starter plans. Anonymous ftp has its own pros and cons.You will have a folder like ‘public_ftp’ on your server to allow others to login as anonymous and do file transfers.

Security issues: If you keep a folder that is world read and writable, anybody can upload and edit the files in that folder and misuse the feature.

Control Panel:

Control panel is a web-based interface that allows you to manage your domain through a web browser. Most of the control panels are with icons that are easily understandable of their purpose. With a click of a mouse you can do many things with out knowing any of the html or some other programming languages.

You can do most of the things from your control panel like:
File uploading
Managing email accounts
Managing CGI scripts
Mysql database management
Cron jobs etc.

Good Support:

You are not getting reply for your requests and questions from your host with in 24 hours? Then change the host!

No … I am not kidding. Support is very essential part of the web hosting service. Especially when you are a novice. Hosts should provide helpdesk, forum, phone support, Live chat etc. for fast customer service.

Author: Radhika (c)
http://www.webmasters-central.com/

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