The choices readily available with a web hosting package are very wide ranging, and can be a bit confusing to recognize – specifically since the possibilities are presenting in a big number of strategies, and condensed in a variety of methods, when shopping for a package on the internet. Hopefully I can give you a breakdown of the categories these capabilities fall into and enable you to focus on the features that are crucial to you.

I break the functions down into ten categories, and will go over the categories 1 by one to give you a firm grasp of the alternatives and make an informed acquiring choice.

10 Categories of Web Hosting Package Options

1. Operating System

two. Internet Server

three. Bandwidth

four. Disk Space

five. Domains

6. E mail

7. FTP

eight. Database

9. Manage Panel

10. Applications / Programming

1. Operating Method

The operating system is the underlying software program that runs on the host. It manages the physical hardware of the server and attempts to optimize the use of RAM, disk space, network, and CPU for the requests coming into the machine. The underlying OS does not have to be the same as your desktop or even the OS you use to create your web site. In fact, due to most of the management functions getting driven by means of a web GUI, you might by no means know or care what the server operating system is.

The predominant operating systems you will uncover whilst shopping for a net hosting service are Windows and UNIX. With Windows you will see versions obtainable such as Server 2003 or Server 2008, and with UNIX you will see several brands of Linux, normally CentOS, Debian, or Redhat. Choosing involving UNIX and Windows is an essential decision, and entails a lot of variables, but in the end it merely signifies deciding if you want to build your web page with open supply technologies or with Microsoft technologies.

Investigation the application you want to use or run as your web site and check to see if it has any Microsoft technology specifications (MSSQL database, MSAccess database, ASP, ASP.Net). If you obtain no pressing explanation to use Windows, then UNIX will most probably be a improved choice for you. UNIX runs the open source scripting languages slightly faster and is also slightly less expensive than Windows.

There are a couple of specific sub-characteristics of the operating method that might be of importance to you.

Do you require a virtual private server? This provides you a dedicated virtual operating system all to oneself instead of you sharing the OS with other people. You nonetheless share a machine with other individuals, but there are stricter walls in location to guarantee you bandwidth, CPU, and memory even if a web site on the similar machine is having heavily hit. It also gives you fantastic configuration alternatives with every thing because it is your personal OS. These packages are more high priced than the shared selections, but are worth if as your site grows. The VPS packages mostly differ is the quantity of RAM devoted to you, so I would advise going with the smallest package and monitoring the RAM usage more than time and upgrading into a bigger package as necessary.

Do you need to have a committed SSL certificate? Web hosting present a shared SSL certificate, which is fine for some smaller sites, but if you are operating a medium or huge ecommerce web-site you will want a dedicated certificate. Some buyers justifiably will not send in their personal and credit card information without having a assured valid SSL private certificate. Also some purchasing cart applications require the devoted certificate as nicely. Be cautious when shopping for this – some hosting solutions say they give a SSL certificate with all their hosting plans but do not explicitly inform you that it is a shared certificate. If the program does not include things like a dedicated IP, then it is a shared certificate.

To directly remotely administer your site, you may well have to have to either shell into with UNIX or Remote Desktop in with Windows. The UNIX shell choice is at times referred to as SSH Shell, Secure Shell, or telnet. These choices are only useful to you if you intend to do low level upkeep and tweaking, mostly in the VPS packages. With a superior hosting package with a higher powered manage panel, you will not want either of these.

You could see mention for the capacity to schedule cron jobs – this is the UNIX version of scheduled tasks. This capacity is only necessary if you want to run scheduled tasks at set instances, such as a nightly backup. Most of the very good control panels provide an interface for the cron job entry, but they also give interfaces for performing upkeep tasks such as backups. You will probably under no circumstances need to have this feature.

two. Web Server

The internet hosting companies generally supply Microsoft IIS or UNIX Apache net servers. Both have their plusses and minuses, and it will only make a distinction to you if the web page you are establishing or the application you are operating requires a single or the other. Apache, becoming open supply itself, has slightly improved hooks in it to run several of the open source content management systems and blog engines based on PHP, PERL, and Python, so go with Apache if that is all you need. The Windows IIS also has quite great open source content management systems and weblog engines primarily based on ASP and ASP.Net, but I would suggest not going with a PHP/PERL/Python net application on Windows IIS – see the above discussion of the operating program as to why.

The SSL certificate is hosted by the internet server, and the net server has to do added processing of SSL HTTPS requests – it has to encrypt/decrypt and confirm data passing between the client and the server. For this cause, some would argue that you need to shy away from net hosting packages that offer totally free SSL shared certificates to everybody. You could possibly end up sharing a server with 100s of other web sites that overtax the server. A nicely run website will only go into HTTPS SSL mode for the actual getting into of credit card data, not for the whole web site – but you do not know if the other sites on your server are effectively run.