What are the Basic Features of a Web Hosting Plan?

Here is a list of basic features that most of the website hosting plans provide:

Disk Space

Disk space means the amount of storage space provided to you by your web hosting provider. You need disk space to store your web files composed of text, images, video, audio, etc. disk space is measured in megabytes and a good hosting company will provide packages with differing amounts of space to cater to the needs of all sizes of websites- from smaller personal websites to larger company websites.

Bandwidth

Bandwidth means the amount of data that a website can transfer over a period of time. It determines the speed of your website. More bandwidth means more speed. The less bandwidth your site has, the slower it takes for it to load. Some hosting service providers provide unlimited bandwidth whereas some others have different prices based upon the amount you use. If your website has heavier pages like those with lots of images, videos etc. then you will need higher storage along with greater bandwidth.

Uptime

Uptime means the percentage of time that a hosting server stays up or running. 99.99% uptime would mean that your website will go down only for about 8 hours in a year while 98% uptime would mean that your website may remain down for about 7.3 days in a year. If your website is an ecommerce website and your customers pay online or you get any type of business through your website, more downtime can mean greater losses.

Programming Services

The website hosting packages also let you create web pages with programming languages including HTML, PHP, ASP as well as databases. The best offers can be called those providing PHP language and mySQL database.

Customer Service

This is one of the basic and most essential features that one should look for while selecting website hosting service.Customer support options like those provided through chat, phone and email etc. are extremely useful in the event of any technical or other problems related to your website. 

Are there Additional Features in a Web Hosting Plan? 

This depends wholly upon the webhosting service provider. Some web hosts give additional features like free domain; email accounts for your domains; content management system (CMS); Google adwords credit or some other form of advertising; site back up options; set ups for social features like forums, bulletin boards; website builder with free website templates; set ups for ecommerce websites like online stores templates; choice of operating system (OS) including windows, linux and java hosting. 

Some web hosting providers even make special attractive package that includes everything you need to make your own website such as this website builder tool called EasySite which includes drag-and-drop website building tool with free hosting and email accounts along with over 10000 website templates with such features as maps, videos, flash, social networking integration, and ecommerce features.