Features of a Hosting Plan

You could be planning to get your web-based application hosted by a professional vendor. But before selecting your vendor, you need to choose the best plan that lies within your budget. A basic hosting plan, by any vendor comprises of these features that you can compare while finalizing your hosting service provider:

1. Email Accounts

If you are getting your domain hosted, then e-mail accounts are a common part of the plan. Few hosts will let you have control over your mail settings, and may add restrictions on the number of accounts or maximum size of mail boxes that can be made available on the server side. Other hosts will do all the set up for you. Your hosting service provider can get you four essential main types of mail accounts which are:

• Forwarding mail accounts: Such accounts are useful if you want to send your mail to a service like SpamCop or other email filter before you receive it. Rather than storing it on your mail server, it will redirect all mail to another single email address where it is dealt with appropriately. This kind of account is useful for redirecting your emails to a common POP3 box.
• POP3 Accounts: With such accounts, you have space on a server to store your mail, allowing you to use an email program to log in and download your mail; each login and password combination usually equates to one account. This works a bit like an office Inbox where the mail is left until you do something with it. If it is full then your e-mail can not be stored and it bounces back to the sender.
• Autoresponders: These are not an email account in their own right. They are useful if you want to send out pre-prepared information to people requesting it, as opposed to you replying to all the requests manually.
  
• Aliases: These are names that can be used to identify different types of email account, redirecting them to POP3 mailboxes on the server or other addresses, where they are processed again if necessary. What happens to the emails will depend on whom they are being sent to. A catch all alias is often used to collect and deal with email sent to people or departments not recognized by your mail server.

2. FTP Access

FTP access is common amongst paid hosting accounts. You can create your own FTP accounts with your provider. These programs will allow you to upload files and to edit and delete your content on the server much more quickly than using a web-based interface. Some hosts will let you act like a hosting company, where FTP accounts that you create takes them to a special users folder specifically for their files; keeping them from your main files. Other hosts will allow you to create FTP accounts that you can define exactly which folders they have access to, and exactly what they can or cannot do with them.

3. Disk Space

You will be offered a certain amount of disk space that you can use to store all your files. It would be a good idea to have some sort of estimates on what you need for various tasks; for instance, how much space will you need for storing your email, web files, databases and log files?. By breaking down your usage like this it will be much easier to work out how much space you should go for. Your disk space usage will vary from host to host; so make sure you check exactly what files you will need to allow for when deciding how much disk quota you will need.

Consider the above features in your plan and then choose your hosting partner. Along with such features, a good hosting partner would also offer 24*7 technical support in case some technical issues creep up while your application has been hosted on their servers.