Top 5 Features To Look For In A Web Host

Top 5 Features To Look For In A Web Host

1) Unlimited Disk Space and Bandwidth

With so many hosts offering unlimited disk space and bandwidth, don’t settle for an account with only a few hundred meg. If you have a popular site with lots of traffic, you’ll need the bandwidth so you don’t risk having your site inaccessible for a portion of the day or month. Take some time to figure out what type of files you will be storing in your account and displaying on your web pages. Storing files on your account like images, video, and .pdfs take up physical space on the disk and it adds up fast. Displaying images and video on your pages or allowing downloading of files creates traffic from your server to the user’s computer. That’s bandwidth. You’ll also need extra space if you’ll be hosting multiple domains on one account and that brings us to the next topic.

2) Host Unlimited Domains

Never buy a hosting account that doesn’t allow you to host unlimited domains on one account. Only a few years ago you had to buy new hosting for each domain name. Not anymore. If you have a lot of domains and a reliable web host that you’re happy with, you can host them all on one account. One caveat, though. If you have revenue generating sites you might want to distribute them across different web hosts in the event of a data center critical downtime causing event like power outage, disk crash, DDoS attacks, etc. Your income streams could suddenly stop. (While most web hosts have fail safe procedures in place to deal with such occurrences, it can still happen from time to time.) Back in the day it used to be an expensive undertaking for a beginner to have a domain name and web hosting at $35/year for a name and around $50/month for a 100 meg of hosting. Times have changed. Now, even a teenager on a fixed allowance can afford to operate many domains for pennies.

3) Unlimited Email Accounts

This is especially important if you’re running a business or hosting multiple domains on one account. Absolutely do not buy web hosting from a company that’s going to charge you extra for adding email or one that limits the number of email address on the hosting account. You may want a general email address for personal use, one for a website contact, one for ecommerce, one for customer service, etc. They add up fast.

4) cPanel Control Panel

cPanel is the leading GUI interface control panel for administrating your web hosting account for things like managing email accounts, adding more domains or sub-domains to the account, using redirects, installing software on the server, FrontPage/Expression Web extensions, creating custom error pages, viewing web logs, and more. Most web hosting companies use cPanel, but some have odd ball custom control panels that may limit access to some features of the account. Even if you’re only starting out with web hosting, go with a host that has cPanel as it will make your learning curve so much easier.

5) Unlimited Databases

Now you may be thinking to yourself, “I’m not a programmer. I don’t even know how to use a database, so why would I need to have unlimited ones?” The #1 reason that floats to the top of the list is blogging. Each installation of a blogging platform like WordPress on your web hosting account creates a new MySQL database. If you’re a blogger and love messing around with templates and plugins, you don’t want restrictions on the number of databases.

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