WebHostRight

When you first have an idea for a website and decide to go ahead with getting a website setup it may be a completely new experience for you and web hosting may be something that you have never dealt with before.

It can be a bit confusing if you have never used web hosting services and your reading all of these terms and maybe wondering what they mean while visiting web hosting sites, so we will take a look at some of the common features that you see advertised on some of the web host websites and give you an explanation of what they mean.

Disk Space – Refers to the amount of disk space that will be available to you with the plan that you choose, the amount can range from as low as 50MB up to Gigabytes worth of space and if you know that you dont need much space it will often be ideal to choose a plan that suits this.

Whatever you host as files at your account will use up an amount of space, this includes your web pages, any media files and anything else that is part of your website.

Bandwidth - Or sometimes referred to as Data Transfer, this is the amount of data that can be transferred each month usually, everytime someone visits your website it transfers data and so each bit of activity on your website uses up an amount of the available bandwidth.

Often the amount available to you will be in Gigabytes, depending on what is available with the plan that you choose, if your website becomes quite popular and is visited by many people it can use quite a lot of bandwidth depending on the file sizes and if you host many images and video files.

Email Accounts - Or POP3 Accounts refers to the amount of email accounts that you can setup on the account, for example if the plan includes 10 email accounts, this means that you can setup 10 seperate email accounts, for example for 10 different websites hosted on that account, or maybe 10 email accounts for different departments of your business or group maybe and for just 1 website instead.

You can use them how it suits you, some hosting plans will offer the ability to create hundreds of email accounts. You will usually also have other email features included as part of the package.

Control Panel – This is what you will normally log into to access the features of your hosting account, some of the popular control panels found at web hosts are cPanel or PLesk, but there are plenty of others available, sometimes a web host will have their own custom made one exclusive to their hosting packages.

You may adopt a preference for a certain control panel, i personally like cPanel, i find it easy to find my way around the various features included.

At the control panel you can deal with everything from adding on domains, subdomains and email accounts, to setting up databases, backups, checking your statistics and more.

FTP Access – This is what you use to upload your website files to your account, it requires the use of FTP client software which is relatively easy to use and enables you to quickly connect to your account and upload files from your computer to the web hosts server or to download files from the server back to your desktop or laptop.

With many plans you can setup multiple FTP accounts so that you can assign them to a number of people, maybe you have a small business or are part of a small group where a number of you work on one website and need your own FTP accounts to login to the account to upload and download files while editing and making changes to the website, this makes it very easy for you to gain quick access to what you need.

Scripting Languages Support - Quite often you will see support for PHP, Perl, CGI, Ruby on Rails etc, these are various scripting languages and the web hosting packages will usually state which scripting languages they support so if your website is based around PHP then you know that the hosting plan supports this.

Databases – If your part of a team maybe and someone has been dealing with the technical side of things they may have setup the website with a database as part of the website.

At web hosts it will usually state how many databases you can setup and some may have a limit on the size that they can reach, if you choose Linux based hosting it will show MySQL databases available to you, the number can be anywhere from one to hundreds.

Statistics Software – This is quite common at web hosts and is included with your chosen package and it collects data about the visitors to your website/s so that you can see how many visitors you receive daily/monthly/yearly and how they reached your website, what country they are from, even what browser they are using and more.

It can be very useful in helping you to understand your visitors behaviour more and how to promote your website to better target these visitors.

Domains Hosted – Maybe referred to as domains allowed, this is the number of websites that you setup basically on one account, some plans will only allow for the hosting of one website maybe if its the smallest and cheapest of the plans available from any particular web host, and other plans will allow for more sites to be hosted, for example 5, 10, 20, 50 and more, so basically 10 domains allowed will allow you to setup 10 different websites on that account, all as seperate top domains.

These are some of the basic terms that you will see very often on web hosts websites, there are many more and the sheer amount of features can sometimes overwhelm someone who is not yet used to all of these terms so we will keep it basic for now and hopefully it helps you to understand better what some of it means so that as you continue to look around at various web hosts you can begin to absorb and understand what it is they are selling to you as a monthly or yearly package.

Welcome to the world of web hosting.