Well, this is the last part of our small recapitulation of the previous articles. Hopefully these “recaps” have given you something to think about and helped you a little bit. In this part we will talk about the last couple of more important features we left out in the previous “recap” posts.
The email accounts
I do not regard e-mail accounts to be that much important. It’s because you can still have your own e-mail account at Gmail or Yahoo and use this e-mail account for your web site needs as well. It is not required to have an own e-mail account associated with your domain name. But I can tell you, that it looks much better if you’re a representative of web site e.g. Icethunder.net and send e-mails from addresses like some_name(at)Icethunder(dot)net.
It looks much more professional this way an the only thing you should think while on your search for the best web hosting package is whether or not you will need more than a couple of aliases. Different companies offer you different amounts of e-mail aliases, but I think that most of the time you will be fine with e.g. 10 and less. But the amount of e-mail accounts you will need depends on the purpose you need them for. If you are a company with 50 employees and each needs and email address – you need 50 and more. But if you are only a blogger I think you will be perfectly fine with one or two.
Either way while starting your search you need to decide how many accounts you will need and if you can or can’t use Gmail, Yahoo or any other service instead. The other important thing to remember is, that even if you are allowed to create Unlimited number of accounts they all, most of the time, share the same quota [e.g. 2GB] and thus all the account together can’t store more, than 2GB of data [mails]. Be careful about this limit as it’s a standard one!
The FTP accounts
I said it so many times – FTP is an insecure transfer protocol and thus don’t use it in public places and networks (read more here). Despite it’s lack of security it’s the feature of choice when you need to transfer data between your local computer and your server. It’s fast, but insecure and this should you keep in mind all the time!
I think you will not need more than one or two accounts if you are not hosting an upload web site. The only reason I can think of you would need more than two accounts is when you would host multiple web sites with different content. In this instance you would want to create as many accounts as there are web site to totally limit each account to exactly one domain name and thus web folder! It’s good for security reasons 
Add-on domains and Sub-domains
An add-on domain is any domain you can host in your web space as allowed by your hosting company. You are given the right (an option) to host more then the domain name you signed up with. But all the domain names share the same bandwidth and web space.
A sub-domain is a domain created from your second level domain name. It’s like subdomain.main_domain.com where sub-domain is the name of your sub-domain and main_domain is the name of your domain name 
Sub-domains are pretty handy if you are trying to host different parts of your “portal” in different sections. You could have a mail.yourdomain.com just for your e-mail login interface etc.
Hosting companies tend to offer anywhere from +/-5 subdomains to unlimited and it’s the same with add-on domains. There is not standard for this as there is with nothing in web hosting.
Conclusion
For our small blog we have discussed and used for this mini tutorial I would look for a hosting provider who offers me at least 2 FTP accounts and 10+ sub-domains options. It’s because over the time I could decide to create a sub-domain for my “beta” testing, I could create a forum, other language mutations of the blog etc. And I definitely would want more than 2 FTP accounts to have the ability to assign each one of them to only one sub-domain, but I would definitely try to search for a host who would offer an SFTP instead of FTP. It would be a big bonus if I would find such a host. If you are not able to find such a host, than it’s OK and you can still manage the upload and download trough the web interface as the web interface tends to be trough HTTPS
Have a nice day and see you next time!
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