What web hosting features do I need?

The web hosting features you need will vary depending on the nature of your website. Larger business websites designed to sell a reasonable volume of products will need much more data space and more features—particularly ecommerce features—than small personal websites. Below is an explanation of common web hosting features and what exactly they mean to you.

Disk Space

This is the amount of space you have for your website and accompanying features like photographs, scripts, and so on. The more you want to add to your website, the more disk space you will need. If you plan on creating a large e-commerce site to sell your products, you'll want ample disk space to store images of and information about what you're selling, not to mention to run your shopping cart and any other store features. More space is usually better—unless you don't need it, in which case you should consider a simpler plan, so you don't pay for what you don't need. Most smaller sites with 5 to 10 pages use just 1 MB of storage space. That can increase quickly when you add photos, videos, and audio, however, so bear in mind that the space you use will change according to the content you offer.

Web hosting plans with lots of disk space include plans from 1&1 Web Hosting and HostMonster Web Hosting. IX Web Hosting even offers a plan with unlimited disk space.

Data Transfer

Data transfer space may also be called bandwidth. Both of these terms refer to the amount of data exchanged over a connection (from your hosted website to someone who is accessing it through the internet). Like disk space, you'll need a greater data transfer allocation for larger sites with more high-bandwidth features (like video, audio, pictures, and so on). You can calculate your data transfer needs by figuring out the size of the different web pages on your site, and estimating the amount of traffic you expect to visit these pages in a month. The page size multiplied by the page traffic (i.e., number of times the pages are loaded and the data is transferred) will give you the number you need. If you find out that you require more space than you have signed up for, consult with your web hosting service about an upgrade. Here's a handy Bandwidth Calculator that can help you figure out how much bandwidth you need based on your page sizes and expected traffic.

Plans with lots of data transfer space include plans from 1&1 Web Hosting, HostMonster Web Hosting, and IX Web Hosting.

Mailboxes

This may seem like an exciting feature, but in reality, most web site builders—even those with large businesses doing e-commerce online—will not need the thousands of email addresses advertised in some web hosting plans. It's a nice feature, but getting even 100 vs. 1000 email addresses is not a dealbreaker when it comes to a web hosting plan, unless you have some significant email needs.

If you need unlimited email addresses, you can get them from HostMonster and IX Web Hosting.

Languages

This is relevant mostly for people who plan to do—or hire someone to do—some significant programming on the site. If you have a programmer who prefers a particular language, or at ask you want to do something that requires a language, make sure your host supports it. This is a slightly more technical feature, so if you're not familiar with what languages you might need, confer with the hosting service's tech support and/or your own technical team (if you have one).

Yahoo Web Hosting and 1&1 Web Hosting offer popular programming languages like PHP, Perl, and Python.

Logs & Statistics

Tools for logging traffic and activity on your site are important for understanding more about what your users are looking for and doing on your site. When you understand user behavior, you can make better decisions about how to design and organize your site. These changes can help increase your sales—assuming you have an ecommerce site!

Yahoo Small Business Web Hosting has some of the best tools to help you understand and analyze traffic to your site.

Web hosting is not as hard as it may seem—sign up for a web hosting service today and start building the website you've always dreamed of!