Beginners Guide - Features Chart Explained

Currency

The currency of the monthly price, i.e. USD, GBP, CAD or AUD. Most plans listed in our directory are in USD.

Monthly Price (Setup Fee)

We record prices for 6 different billing cycles - 1 month, 3 months, 6 months, 12 months, 24 months and 36 months. The monthly prices shown are the average hosting cost for each month based on the specific billing cycle. Setup fee is charged only once when you order a new account. Usually, monthly price is cheaper and setup fee is waived if you prepay for a longer period.

Disk Space

Also known as disk storage. Calculated in the unit of MB (Mega Bytes). Disk space is used to store the contents of your web site, including all of your HTML files, images, videos and anything else that is downloadable by your visitors. Your allocated disk space is also used to store your emails, web access log files and database files. Text files (HTML) will not consume a lot of disk space. It is the binary files that will take up a lot of disk space. Binary files include pictures, MP3s, videos, sharewares and others. Disk space is only meaningful with sufficient allocated bandwidth. Web hosts usually offer sufficient disk space (> 200 MB) with their plans. These days, amongst increased competition between web hosting providers, it is common to find hosting plans with unlimited disk space, which coupled with domain add-ons is a great value (A domain add-on allows you to publish multiple websites under the same hosting account).

Bandwidth

Also known as data transfer. Measured in GB (Giga Bytes, 1 GB = 1024 MB ~ 1000 MB). Bandwidth is more valuable than disk space. Your bandwidth usage is the amount of data transfer from your web site to your visitors. It is measured on a monthly basis and is 'reset' at the beginning of each month. Your bandwidth usage will vary every month depending on how large your files are and how many visitors you have to your site. Bandwidth is like real estate, except in this case, it is virtual space on the World Wide Web that you are leasing.

If you assume there will be 5,000 visitors to your site in a month and each of them will download 10 of your pictures that are 50 KB each, you will need 5,000 x 10 x 50 KB = 2,500,000 KB which is equivalent to 2.5 GB of bandwidth. This is the easiest way to estimate your bandwidth. Usually text files (HTML) will not consume a lot of bandwidth because they are naturally small in size. Your bandwidth estimation should be based on the binary files usage (pictures, ZIP files, Macromedia Flash, MP3s ...). Again, with heightened competition amongst web hosting providers, unlimited bandwidth usage is not uncommon. If you are on a low monthly budget and cannot afford long-term hosting packages with unlimited bandwidth, use the aforementioned formula to estimate your bandwidth usage and choose a plan accordingly. You can always upgrade or downgrade your hosting package at a later time.

FTP Accounts

FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol. FTP allows you to upload and download files to/from your account. This is the most common way people use to send files to their web host. You will need a tool to do so, and there are several free ones out there. We can safely assume all paid hosting providers allow their members to FTP to their site because it is just too common and important. However many free hosting providers do not allow FTP because they need to force their members to use their web-based upload tool so they can display advertisements. You will need a correct username and password to FTP to your account, which you will choose during account setup. Keep in mind that FTP is not the only way to publish content to your website. In fact, a more common method (and easier one) are WYSIWYG web publishers like Front Page and Microsoft Expression Web (more info below).

CGI-BIN, Perl, SSI

CGI stands for Common Gateway Interface. You certainly have reached some web sites that require login or do some online purchase. In a login process, the server needs to check and verify your username and password and/or check your credit card information, which is done by executable scripts. CGI is the interface between these scripts and the server. CGI-BIN is a special directory used to store these scripts. CGI scripts can be written in many languages but the most popular is Perl (Website). SSI stands for Server Side Includes. SSI offers some dynamic features to your web pages, such as including a current date to your page.

Perl scripts were popular in the old days, but have been challenged by PHP (see definition below) for the last few years. PHP is more powerful and yet more easy to use because it is designed for the Web. Perl is a programming language which is not designed for the web to begin with. SSI is also rarely used nowadays because of its limited features. Everything that can be done by SSI can easily be done in a PHP script. Regardless, a CGI-BIN, Perl and SSI are usually included in a paid hosting package.

PHP

PHP stands for PHP Hypertext Preprocessor (Homepage). It is a very powerful scripting language created specially for the web. It can be used to write a lot of scripts, i.e. scripts that check for login information, discussion forums, shopping carts and many more. PHP is not difficult to learn, especially for those who have programmed before in other languages. If you are interested in learning it, it is recommended that you get a book about it.

FrontPage Extensions

Microsoft FrontPage (Homepage) is a very popular WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) web builder software. With FrontPage extensions installed, you are allowed to publish your site directly to your web host via Microsoft FrontPage. If you are concerned whether FrontPage is compatible with a Unix server, the answer is Yes! There are FrontPage extensions specially written for the Unix systems which allow you to publish your site to a Unix server. Our sites are published from Microsoft FrontPage running on a Windows PC to a Unix server. The fact is, most FrontPage users are actually publishing their sites to a Unix server without even understanding what Unix is! The FrontPage program may soon no longer be available, but no worries, because, Microsoft is replacing it with a WYSIWYG program called Microsoft Expression Web, that performs even more functions than FrontPage.

Raw Log Files

Raw log files are text files generated by your web server. Basically raw log files contain information about your site visitors, i.e visitor IP addresses, accessed files, the site visitors came from (referrals). Raw log files are hard to be read directly as they are still 'raw', but there are many Web Statistics software programs available to analyze raw log files. The analyzer will generate useful and easy to read Web Statistics (with numbers and graphs) for you. One such popular tool is WebTrends.

Protected Directories

When someone visits a protected directory that has been created by you, they will need to have the correct username and password before they can view the contents of that directory. For an example, you might want to have a section of your pictures available only to your paid members. All you need to do is put those pictures in a protected directory and assign a username/password pair to each of your paid members.

Anonymous FTP

This feature allows you to give permission to anyone for downloading files or even uploading files to your account via FTP. Of course, you will have to create a special directory for this so they won't mess up your important files. If you have anonymous FTP enabled, anyone can login to your account via an FTP tool without the need of a username and password. Usually, the web host requires a visitor to login using anonymous as username and their email address as the password. Let's say you want your visitor to send you new photos to publish. Instead of asking them to email you the pictures, which would take several emails depending on the file sizes, you can ask them to FTP the pictures to your account. Of course, they will need to know how to FTP! :) Most web hosts do not offer anonymous FTP with their plans.

Telnet/SSH

Also know as Shell Access. It allows you to login to your host's system and execute commands on it! You may delete files, upload files, and check emails on the remote system. Due to security concerns, almost all hosts do not allow Telnet/SSH. For basic web publishing, shell access is not an essential feature anyways.

Email Accounts

You should already be familiar with this. An email account looks like [email protected] and allows you to send mail and receive mail from it. Email account are usually accessed with an email client such as Outlook Express or Eudora. They can also be accessed with your browser (i.e. Internet Explorer, Netscape, etc.) if the Web-Based Email feature is provided. Most hosts provide web-based email.

Forwarders (Alias)

An email forwarder is an email address but is not a real email account. It will just forward any email received by it to another email address that you have configured. For an example, you can setup a forwarder [email protected] and post it everywhere in your site. When somebody sends an email to it, you can configure it to forward to your sales manager [email protected]. The benefit of posting [email protected] instead of [email protected] to your homepage is that you won't have to change everything in your site if Joe happens to quit his job. Instead, all you have to do is login to your email control panel and reconfigure your forwarder.

You can configure an email address to be both an email account and a forwarder. In this case, you can send mail and receive mail with this email address, while at the same time, all emails received will be forwarded to another email address.

Autoresponders

An autoresponder is also an email address. It will send a preset message to the sender when it receivs any email. The most basic use of an autoresponder is to notify the sender that the email has been received successfully. Another good use of an autoresponder is to send a list of top FAQ's to the sender. This will save a lot of time for both you and the sender if the answer he/she needs is in the FAQ!

If an autoresponder email address is not setup as an email account, the emails received will not be saved. So, if messages received with an autoresponder need to be read later, it must be configured as an email account as well.

Web-Based Email

If this feature is provided, you can access your mailbox with a browser (i.e. Internet Explorer, Netscape, etc.) just like a Hotmail or Yahoo email account.

IMAP Protocol

Ordinary email accounts are POP accounts. POP stands for Post Office Protocol. It is a very simple protocol to receive email. When an email is sent to a POP email account, the server stores it until the user checks and retrieves the mail through a mail program like Outlook Express. Once the mail is retrieved, it will be removed from the server. You must use the exact computer the next time you want to refer to this specific email. This creates a problem when someone is using their email account from multiple places/computers, such as an office and home. For example, if you retrieve an email via POP on your office computer, you won't be able to view that email or reply to it from you home computer. IMAP is a new protocol created mainly to solve this problem. IMAP stands for Internet Message Access Protocol (Homepage). An IMAP email account will have all the emails stored and managed from the server. No matter which computer you are using, your email client will access the same mailbox at the server so you do not need to worry about where you have saved your email. However, POP is still far more common than IMAP today. Email clients that support IMAP efficiently are Outlook Express and Eudora.

Mailing List

A mailing list allows you to control a list of email addresses effectively. You can manage it through a control panel with a lot of features such as adding and removing members. Users can also opt-in or opt-out of the mailing list by clicking on a link or using a web form. You can also determine who can send email to the mailing list. If you are the only one who can send emails to the list, then it is probably a newsletter. If all people are given the right to send email to it, then it becomes a discussion mailing list.

Money Back Guarantee

This one goes without saying. It's the number of days in which you can ask for a refund if you are unsatisfied with the service, and in the world of web hosting most hosts offer a money-back-guarantee. If they don't, you may want to think twice about opening an account. It is always a good shopping practice to look for hosts that offer money back guarantees. Note that only hosting fees will be refundable. Setup fee and domain registration fee will not be refunded for almost all cases. But you will still own your the right to your registered domain name.

Toll Free Support

Allows you to call your web hosts toll free. It's a good idea to choose a host that does so. Unless you have unlimited coast-to-coast cell phone minutes, toll-free support is an important feature to have - especially if this is your first time having a website hosted. Otherwise, hosting companies usually respond very quickly through email and forums.