Internet web hosts are plentiful, offering many different services for different needs. If you are a casual webmaster who has only recently begun to consider buying your own hosting, you will need to know which services apply to you, and which services will make your life as a beginner much easier.
Some webhosts will advertise the fact that they have a website builder that makes it easier than ever to get a website up and going .This is nice to have for beginners, but it certainly won’t teach you good web development skills. If you just need a quick template up and going quick, this is a good option until you can either learn to develop a website yourself or hire a professional to do the act for you.
If you are new there are several key terms you need to be familiar with. Two important terms are bandwidth and storage. You likely already know that storage is the amount of space your host allots you- but do be sure that the size of your files is under the maximum limit so you don’t incur penalties. Bandwidth is the amount of data transferred each month- which is also limited and usually only a concern for high-traffic websites.
Not all webhosts are friendly to every web development technology in existence. While some may allow you to make use of things such as PHP frameworks, others will be fairly strict on what they install. A framework such as Cake PHP can help in your development cycle, but it requires a server add-on that many hosts won’t put on a shared server environment due to security concerns and performance reasons.
If you are just starting out you likely won’t have need for a large amount of FTP accounts, databases, email addresses, and add-on domains. It is still nice to get a host that allows for unlimited use of these resources in case your website grows and you need to expand. Usually this isn’t a problem, as hosts these days are now offering unlimited of each resource to grab more attention.
Statistics are nice to have, but if your host doesn’t support statistics this isn’t a bad thing. Third party services may be obtained that will find out statistics for you. Due to a lack of offering statistics, which can take up a lot of server resources, most webhosts cut a better deal to buyers in exchange for this fact.
Final Thoughts
No one knows webhosts better than other webmasters. If you are having problems making the selection, ask other webmasters you know for a helping hand in the decision process. If you don’t seem to have any, go online to find helpful advice from communities.
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