Make Money Online

Web Hosting Package

Before you set out to find a web host, you need to know the requirements of your website and what type of hosting plan you really need. Looking at a hosting plan, a novice can be shock at the amount of foreign terms used. I will now explain some of the common terms and help you decide whether you need it or not.

Shared or Dedicated Hosting
Go for shared hosting. Shared hosting means your website is hosted on a IP shared with others. This means slower loading times but much cheaper. For dedicated hosting, you will be hosted on a dedicated IP and you may need to manage your own dedicated hosting. Not recommended for beginners.

Uptime
% of time your site is promised to stay up online by the web host. Usually goes by month. A 99.5% uptime per month is minimum. Nothing less. Go for 99.9% uptime if possible.

Disk Space
Assuming each webpage, including images, are at around 20KB in size, you will need 200MB at least. If you are paying for the hosting, go for at least 500MB to 1GB, depending on your budget.

Bandwidth
This determines how much data transfer is allowed for your site. 15GB/month should be enough for a small website. Be careful of the term 'unmetered bandwidth'. Its not 'unlimited', email the support team of the web host to ask them what is the actual bandwidth. When your bandwidth max out, you will either be charge extra or your website will be taken down for the month, depending on the web host.

Price/month
Small websites should look for the range of USD$2 to USD$8. You can get decent hosting package for this price, although the domain names allowed is usually 1.

Discount Coupons
This coupon is a code that you can enter when signing up for a hosting plan. It gives you discounts, extra bandwidth or any other form of bonus. Discount Coupons are released by the web hosting companies and can be found somewhere in their website or web hosting forums.

Add-on domain
Allows you to host more than 1 domain in your hosting account. You need to pay to register the additional domain name though.

Park domain
These are for parking domain names not in use.

Privacy Whois
Not really neccessary, protects your identity from others when they do a search (domain whois) on the domain name.

Email Accounts
Get your own email@mydomain.com email account. Get at least 3 of these, the more the better of course. This is very important as some webmasters/web directories requires you to contact them with your own website email account. You will want POP3 and Webmail too.

mySQL Database
Required if you are installing some sort of application on your web site, such as WordPress, osCommerce, etc. Around 3-5 of these will be good enough for beginners.

Web Stats
If you want to monitor your website traffic, you will need this. Alternatively, you can use a free tracker such as Google Analytics.

Fantastico
A script that installs applications on your website for you. You can install a shopping cart or forum easily with this.

SiteBuilder
Create a website for you even if you do not know HTML. Perfect for beginners.

Control Panel
The members page where you manage your website and access web tools like Fantastico. The most commonly used Control Panel is the cPanel. I would go for cPanel hosting only. Switching your website between web hosts using different control panel can be very diffcult. It is best to go for cPanel.

PHP 4 or 5, phpMyAdmin
PHP is a scripting language that is really important to web building nowadays. Go for at least PHP 4 supported. phpmyadmin is a web based tool to manage your PHP. You might need to use it for some application installations.

.htaccess supported
.htaccess is 1 of the most critical part of your website, allowing you to password protect your files, deny certain IP from accessing your website, redirecting users, make custom 404 error page and many more. Most free web hosts do not provide this. A must have for paid web hosts.

FrontPage supported
Only needed if you are using FrontPage.

Backups
Make sure your web host provide regular backups of your website. Paid web hosts mostly do this. Added bonus if you can find a free host that does this too.