Web Hosting Features

When purchasing web hosting, there are certain basic features that every customer should understand, to ensure that you are getting the most for your money and adequate resources for your website needs.

With internet web hosting, the price usually goes up with higher disk space and bandwidth needs, so make sure you don’t over or under purchase for your needs, while still allowing room for future growth so that you don’t have to change plans frequently.

Some of the features you will want to look closely at include:

Storage or disk space

You will need space for a number of tasks such as file storage and data transfer (the process that happens when someone views your website – this means every time your website is visited, storage space is taken up in the form of bandwidth). You will also need to take into consideration the types of files which count against your web hosting storage space.

Email options

This includes the number of separate accounts available to you as well as the type of accounts offered. Some of the most common email features to choose from are:

• POP3 – this is a full-service email account, each having its own address, identity, and password. There is normally a space limit and once the inbox is full, any additional emails will be bounced back to the sender and cannot be retrieved later. Delivery will resume once you delete some emails out of your box.
• Aliases – this is essentially a way of setting up a “dummy” name in your web hosting account, so that emails are redirected to a specified name in your email account. Using an alias can help you weed out unsolicited emails from unknown senders.
• Forwarding – similar to aliases, forwarding can be used as a method of filtering spam emails by way of redirecting incoming mail to a totally separate email account.
• Autoresponder – an autoresponder is not a fully functional email address in that its function is not to allow you to interact with the person sending the email to you, rather it allows a predetermined message to be automatically sent to each person who requests information from your website.

FTP

One of the most important aspects of your web hosting is the ability to upload and manage FTP files. This is the way by which you will add, edit, and remove files on your website. FTP is much more convenient than a web-based interface for managing your website files, because you can do everything you need to do right on your computer rather than while logged into your web hosting account.

Another advantage of FTP hosting is that you can set it up to allow others to have access to your account, for example if you have someone helping you maintain your website or are sharing your server with another website owner. This lets you keep your web hosting information and files private because they are stored on your computer, and the other user only has access to the part of the hosting account that they own or are managing for you.