What criteria to use when looking for the right host. (3.)

I have slightly modified the heading of this series, but it should not be such a problem as our mission is still the same – to give you some basic  thoughts about how to define some rules for finding the right web hosting company.

We have covered the basics in my previous two articles and now we should have an image of what we are looking for. We know what resources we will need and we should know whether we will leave ourselves defenseless to ad’s, or we will don’t care about them and go our own way

Today we will move one step further and discuss the other possible features you could need to consider when looking for the right host. There are so many features hosting companies offer you, that it’s really hard to choose, but there are some basics you should know. The features offer by hosting companies are almost the same and the most important areas where they differ is the support and HW/SW used.

The features

There are features I would call standard and there are the ones I would call special to one or the other hosting company. Some companies offer something more and some lack a feature, but they all offer nearly 99% of the standard features.

What I understand under the term standard hosting features is:

1. set amount of FTP accounts
   • Most of the time you will get more than  1 account, but if you are looking only to use the web space by yourselves it is not that important to you.
2. set amount of email accounts + email quota
   • You will be enabled by your host to create a set amount of email accounts [aliases] e.g. “admin@yourdomainname.com” and all your accounts will share a certain amount of disc space e.g. 2GB. IMAP, POP3 and STMP are all standard, but don’t forget you have a quota and thus you are limited in how many emails you can store for “future” use
3. add-on domain  names
   • This one is a standard, but I would say, that many hosts limit the number of sub domain you can add to your account
4. Database access
   • If your host is not from the South Pole, than he pretty likely offers you a database to use and the number of databases you will be able to create can vary greatly, but 1-25 is what  I have come across over the years.
5. Main domains
   • You are allowed to se your own second level domain name, but here the hosting companies limit their users and if you want to host more, than one domain with different content, than you should read carefully how many main domains you are able to use with a certain hosting package.

This article is a starter and I will expand on the other features in the next one Have a nice day and see you next time!

No related posts.