When you compare plans by different web hosting providers you are usually shown a variety of features, usually these features are connected to a value or a description.
These features summaries can be very useful to understand if the plan you’re considering could fit your needs, but you need to understand what each feature means.
Many customers, especially those who are approaching the development of a website for the first time, don’t know the meaning of most of such terms: to help you better understand the hosting plan features page of most web hosting companies we’ll examine the main features that you need to understand to choose a hosting company.
As usual, should you need to understand a specific term, you can refer to our web hosting glossary.
In this guide we’ll analyze the features of a hosting plan that would be ok for most websites. As long as your website doesn’t need a “known to be problematic” script or content management system ( which I wouldn’t recommend you to start with, if you already know that would cause you problems ), you can assume that the features we’ll consider would be ok for your site.
Storage Space: this is the limit of physical space that you can use for your scripts and media files. This space can be on the physical disk of a web server or on a high performance network attached storage device, absolutely no difference for you. Just to give you an idea of how much space you need, a standard website with 10 – 20 static pages as could be a company website would need just few MB, where the majority of the space would be used by the images.
A clean install of Wordpress needs less than 10 MB of space. With most web hosting companies offering hundreds of GB of storage, space doesn’t have to worry you.
Bandwidth: Websites rich of media content like images or downloads can use large amounts of bandwidth when they receive a high traffic volume. Websites that host videos obviously burn a lot of bandwidth too. Additionally you have to add bandwidth to make your own daily or weekly backups ( which will count towards your monthly limit ). Most web hosting companies offer large amounts of bandwidth, well over what would be considered reasonable, surely more than you need. If you are starting your website don’t worry about bandwidth, at the time that your website will be so popular to reach bandwidth limits offered as of today by most web hosting companies you will be expert enough in this industry that you will have probably switched to having your own virtual private server or dedicated server. Not because shared hosting isn’t reliable enough but because, as you grow, you always need more customized services that just can’t be offered on a shared hosting platform. However, don’t worry about it now, you are probably years far from that point.
As we have seen so far bandwidth and storage space, despite they might seem the most important features to consider, are not the key points. They are vital for your website, but most web hosting companies offer way more storage and bandwidth that you will ever need.
Operating System: this is a key point that you must understand before buying a hosting plan. If you plan to build your website using PHP and MySQL your hosting plan of choice should be on a linux platform ( any distribution will work ). Many Windows® plans can run PHP and MySQL, but since PHP and MySQL were born to run under linux you’d better pick a linux hosting plan so you know you’ll be able to use all the features and functions without limitations of any kind.
Instead if you plan to use Microsoft® languages like Asp or Asp.Net and MSSQL or Access databases you would need a Windows® hosting service as such languages can run only on a Windows® operating system.
PHP and MySQL: most hosting companies support PHP and MySQL, but just in case you’re not sure about it then double check the presence of one or more MySQL databases and the possibility to run PHP code. This allows you to build custom dynamic websites or install open source content management systems.
Hostable Domains: each hosting company has a name for this feature. Basically it allows you to host multiple websites under a single web hosting account. This can save you big bucks if you plan to launch more than one website. For each additional website you will need to pay just the domain name and you will have the possibility to add it to your hosting account and create a completely separate website for this domain ( with separate emails and everything, it will actually be a separate website ).
Multiple MySQL/PostgreSQL Databases: Despite you could easily use a single database differentiating tables with a different prefix ( example: domain1_tbl1, domain1_tbl2, domain2_tbl1, domain2_tbl2 ) having separate databases can make things easier to maintain, and a lot less messy.
Email Addresses: make sure the company you are considering offers enough email addresses for your needs. Actually, you’ll find that most web hosting companies give you hundreds of email addresses or don’t even put a limit to this number.
Control Panel: fortunately the old days of web hosting spaces without a control panel are over. Having a control panel to manage your web space can be useful in a variety of occasions like when you’re travelling and need to access the contents or edit something via a web based file manager, create a new email address, create a new ftp user, add and automatically configure a domain. I am not aware of any major hosting company that doesn’t offer a control panel today, but just in case you found one…
Script Installer: this is not mandatory. Some prefer to install scripts manually rather than using an installer for a variety of reasons. These installers allow you to install content management systems in a couple clicks. Choosing a company that has a script installer can save you time and troubles if you are not an expert and if you think that you might find problems installing a content management system.
Other than these technical recommendations you should obviously choose a company that is reliable and dependable. You will be putting your website on their servers so, whatever the purpose of your site is, personal or commercial, you want it to be always available and you don’t want to have to face a different problem everyday.
