There are so many web hosting providers that provide these exact same requirements. However, not all of them give the same prices for it. So, they need to be aware and compare the plan and prices for each web hosting plan.

If you’re just starting out in the internet marketing business, there are several web hosting requirements that you should have. These are the minimum requirements, but feel free to have maximum ones. First, you need at least 300MB of disk space to accommodate your files and websites. Having a smaller disk space will make you run out of spaces to put your files faster. Next, you need to get at least 10GB bandwidth monthly. It’s to make sure that your visitors could access your website before you run out of it and make your website can’t be accessed.

Next, get at least 50 email accounts. Since you will be doing a lot of promotions or email marketing, you need to have many email accounts to handle these specific activities. The rest minimum requirements that you should have are 20 sub-domains, CGI-bin, and 3 MySQL database.

Other supporting features that you need in your web hosting plan are an autoresponder and add-on domain name. With autoresponder, you could do the email marketing activity automatically. Once you get your visitor into your email list, it would be easier for you to send your marketing or promotion emails week after week and month after month. Just make sure that you don’t do it more often so that your visitors won’t unsubscribe. Add-on domain name is the next thing that you should have. It will show you how many domain names you could put into your web hosting account before it reach the limit. If you could put 10 domain names in it, it means you could have 10 different websites in your web hosting account.

Other tools that you could take advantage of to boost your income and your visitors are lead capture system, ad tracking, shopping carts, scripts, and also affiliate programs and commissions. If you’re an affiliate, you’re likely don’t need any shopping cart because you’re only have to show the visitors the right website with your affiliate URL on it, and let them do the shopping themselves. But if you really sell something from your websites which is not an affiliate product, you definitely need this one. The rest of the tools is not essentials but proven to be helpful in building the money making website.

Everyone knows that choosing the web hosting in a complete package could make your life easier since you don’t have to purchase each of them separately. However, if you short in cash, you could save several dollars by making a separate purchase in your web hosting plan and features, and only choose the most essential ones that you believe could facilitate your website needs.

The web hosting providers today should be more creative to lure their customers. They need different offers to give to their customers so that their customers don’t move their web hosting account to other places. That’s why you could see that there is so many offers or web hosting deals across the web that giving you some ‘extra features’ when you buy their web hosting plan.

One of the best web hosting extra features is dedicated IP address. If you have a shared hosting, the chances are that you endanger yourself and your website when you used the shared IP address. Why? Because when one of the other web hosting customers get blacklisted from some websites or services, you could get blacklisted too. So, having the dedicated IP address at least will protect you from other web hosting customers.

Another extra is anti-virus and anti-spam. Both of these features are the best features that you could expect and get direct benefits from it. The anti-virus will protect your website files from any attacks that constantly happen in the World Wide Web.

The anti-spam could protect your email and banish the spam emails that trying to penetrate your inbox. If you want to get the web hosting plan that offer you some extras, make sure you included both of this into your list to protect your website.

The last but not least extra feature is website statistics. You could track your website statistics day after day, week after week, even month after month. If you own any online business or if you sell something from your website, this is the best offer that you could expect.

With this, you could do some experiments with your marketing methods, and see the results right away. You could track down where are your visitors come from, what they do in your website, or which pages that they love most. You could then build a stronger offer for them and use the most effective way to generate more traffic into your website.

For some people, the extra features could be very helpful for their website. While others might think that it’s just some extras that they don’t need. No matter what they think about it, you need to get the extra features according to what your website needs. However, you need to be careful when you get these extra features because some of them are free and some others are not. If you want to get it for free, make sure that there’s no additional fee to get it.

There are so many CPanel features that you could use right away to manage your website and improve the user experiences. Here are some of the features of CPanel that you’ll find useful:

1. Site Tools

Included in this site tools are File Manager to manage your website files, Search Engine Tool to submitting your website into search engines, Install/Uninstall FrontPage Extensions, Redirects, Custom Error Pages, Web Protect, and so on.

2. Email

This email program allows you to add, edit, remove, delete, and change your passwords while using your email accounts. CPanel also brought this email feature further by giving you the Webmail, Auto responders, Mailing List, Spam Filters, Forwarders, and more.

3. Backup

This is the most important part in your CPanel. You need to backup your files often just in case your website can’t be accessed or got attacks from “bad people” that could erase all of your data. You could do an automatic backup for your website too if you like.

4. Stats

This is a feature that will track down your website popularity. Some of the tools available in this feature are View error log, View bandwidth usage, View latest visitors, AWStats, Analog stats, Webalizer web stats and FTP stats.

5. FTP

This is the feature that controlling your FTP account. You could add, edit, or change the password to access it. There are also other ability such as Anonymous FTP controls that could change your FTP login message, and the ability to kill the FTP sessions.

6. Advance Stuff

This is related to your domains and sub domains. You could manage your domains in here and doing some Sub domain Redirects and checking the Stats.

7. Advance Tools

This is provided by CPanel for you to increase maximize your usage of Cron Jobs, SSH access tools, and GPG keys.

8. Add-on Tools and Scripts

Further, you could also find many of open source scripts plus other pre-installed CGI scripts in the CPanel. These scripts are provided by your web hosting provider and different provider will have a slightly different pre-installed scripts. Some of the pre-installed CGI scripts that you can use is phpMyAdmin, MySQL databases, DNS Lookup, Java Countdown Generator, Java clock Generator, Advance Guestbook, Random HTML Generator, phpMyChat, HTML Chat, Java Chat, Bulletin Board, Agora Cart, and more.

CPanel works with almost all web browsers, such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, and so on. Because of the simplicity of the interface in CPanel, most beginners won’t find it hard to manage their website hosting account with it.

Just like the web hosting plans, you could also see the features that the web hosting providers give you. You’ll notice that there are huge differences between each plan. For example, the disk space or bandwidth for standard plan might be smaller than the premium plan. It’s to ensure that you could choose the exact plan that matches your need while saving more money.

To figure out which web hosting type that will fit your need, you could see some of them below:

1. Dial-Up Access Hosting

This is the most basic web hosting type. You could find this type in almost any web hosting providers. The main feature that you could find in this type is the web builder that you could use to build your website fast and easy. This dial-up access hosting is the first and the oldest of all web hosting types.

2. Development Hosting

This development hosting usually used by the web developers. They bought their own servers, and they setup the independent hosting in it for their clients. Every time they have a clients that ask them to build a website or web applications will be hosted in this server, and the web developers could make more money by selling the web hosting plans that they have to their customers.

3. Web-Hosting ISP’s
This web hosting company usually specialized in business web hosting. The users don’t need any dial-up access because they could access their websites through FTP (File Transfer Protocol). This is the majority web hosting type that you could find in almost web hosting plan on the Internet.

The web hosting plans that being offered by this web hosting type could be used by the companies who need lots of bandwidth for their website. The pricing also slightly higher than other types because the web hosting provider who offer you this plan usually completed their offers with a good data processing and support systems.

If you’re a SOHO business owner, the last web hosting type is a good choice for you. You could start with smallest plan that they have if you’re just starting and don’t know how many disk space or bandwidth that you could expect. After you figure out the numbers, you could upgrade your web hosting plan and increase the disk space and bandwidth capacity.

Whether you have a simple website or a complex one, any data that you input into your website will store in a database. To do the changes in your database such ass add, edit, delete or process your database, you need a database management system. MySQL is one of the best database management systems that you can use for your website.

MYSQL also has the ability to create a relational database management. It means that you could input the data, and then put it in the several tables at once. This will make your database organizing more structured than putting it all in a large tables.

Using MySQL database doesn’t always require you to have remote servers. You could also install it in your own PC to build any applications that you have in mind. To interact with various databases that you have, you could use commands from PHP script.

There are several things you need to consider before you choose the web hosting plan with MySQL in it. It’s not just as simple as picking the web hosting plan that has the biggest bandwidth, disk space, email accounts, or addon domains. It’s much more than that. Here are several points that you should have in your web hosting plan in order to run this MySQL database successfully:

1. Database

Figure out how many databases that you want to have for your website. A web hosting provider usually limits the MySQL database amounts according to the web hosting plan that you purchased. MySQL web hosting usually allows you to have multiple websites and more than 5 MySQL databases.

2. Interface

Because you’ll be working with your database frequently, you need a web hosting plan that designed specially for admin interface. It should be easier for you to manage your database in MySQL using the interface they provided. If you’re working on a team, you probably need to create multiple user ID’s. It’s to make sure that only specific person could access specific data. You could choose the web hosting provider that using CPanel because it has a good user interface and dashboard.

3. CRON Support

A cron will helps you to run some scripts regularly and automatically. By using this, you could set up when you want to run the scripts for your website. CPanel has the option for crons that you could take advantage of.

4. PHP

As you probably know, MySQL is the closest friend of PHP. You need to check out for the MySQL web hosting providers that could give you PHP extensions. Before you subscribe to any of the MySQL web hosting plans, you need to figure out the capabilities of that web hosting in managing your databases and PHP. If you failed to do so, you could be very disappointed with it in the future.

When you have intent to run MySQL databases in your website, it’s better for you to choose web hosting providers that offers a complete solution rather than just a usual web hosting that offer pure basic function.

So what exactly are the dangers of overselling Unlimited Space & Bandwidth?

” Overselling is a term used in the web hosting industry to describe a situation in which a company provides hosting plans that are unsustainable if every one of its customers uses the full extent of services advertised. The term is usually referred to the web space and bandwidth transfer allowance ( source).”

That basically means, a web hosting company will sell you a service that it really cannot offer. This can be called false advertising, however, not one person has been able to prove a web host wrong because of three main factors:

1. The first reason why no one has successfully revealed a web host wrong that offers unlimited disk space is because the web host will suspend that individuals account as soon as it appears to be using more than the allocated space (usually 1GB) that web host may have set that you as a customer do not know about.
2. Secondly, all web host that provide unlimited space and bandwidth will have in their terms of service many restrictions that most customers simply bypass without paying any attention to. These restrictions usually include all types of websites that use up a large amount of space such as the following:
   • Backup websites
   • Warez or Illegal Content websites
   • Streaming videos or music
   • Downloading software, movies, music etc websites
   • Sites that offer free resources to the public
   • and the elongated list goes on…
3. Lastly, when it comes unlimited bandwidth you have to be careful about that as well. “Bandwidth refers to the amount of data that website visitors can download from a website (source).” Most unlimited bandwidth provides will claim they have unmetered bandwidth which can be true, but, the tricky part is, if your website consumes too many CPU resources your account will be suspended. Most host give your individual web hosting account a 10% CPU resource limit, but if you go over that limit your account will be suspended. Most customers have no idea how to prevent this from happening, and lack the knowledge of rather or not their type of website is suitable for such an shared environment.As you know, you are sharing the server you are placed on with other individuals just like you. If one person uses too many CPU resources or creates a high server load at any given time, that effects your website as well, which causes downtime or slow response time to your website. Many web host that provide unlimited bandwidth will eventually face this horrible factor.

Andy Anderson, an individual currently involved in the web hosting market had this to say about overselling disk space and bandwidth:

How much room do you actually need for a site? Looking through my server logs most people use 500MB (megabytes) of disk space and about 5GB (gigabytes) of bandwidth. That is plenty of room for the average person with only 1GB of disk space. But most people will not ever look at how much space they are using. They only look at storage space when they are looking for a host. The hosting market these days are very competitive. Web Hosts bank on your lack of knowledge and promise you TB (terabytes) of space and bandwidth. If you look at burst.net they have a terabyte hard drive for $400.00 a month per host. So think for a minute, how can a host offer you a $1.95 month web hosting plan for a terabyte of space? Mathematically they cannot possibly do it, and yet, they know about it and lie to your face that they can. They also hide behind their TOS (terms of service) saying you must have active sites etc. Do you think Google.com would pay for 1,000’s of servers if they could host at DreamHost, who oversells web space, for $7.95?

The bottom line is, if you are serious about the future of your website, it is best to do your own research and actually pay for what you receive. If the offer looks too good to be true, more than likely it is.

Written By: Robert Smith (CEO of HastyHost)