What should you look for in a host?
Most hosting companies provide a range of services, starting with low-budget packages and moving up to more advanced, expensive features, such as secure servers, and on to managed hosting. Obviously, when you pick a hosting plan, you need to make sure it provides enough disk space for your site at a price that's within your budget. But what else should you watch for? At the very least, consider the following points.

Usage limitations
Most hosting plans limit how much data you can transfer to and from their servers in a given month. Once you reach 500MB or 1GB of data transfer, most companies charge you by the megabyte for any additional traffic. How many megabytes (or gigabytes) do you need? That depends. Even fairly busy sites that average more than a hundred visitors a day transfer less than 200MB a month. (One graphics-light site we clocked had 5,000 visitors viewing a total of 15,000 pages a month, yet it used only 166MB of its monthly allotment.) However, if half of your visitors also download a medium-quality, three-minute MP3 file or a short video clip, your site will soon break the gigabyte barrier. If you have some idea of your anticipated traffic, pick a plan accordingly. If not, estimate and watch your usage like a hawk for the first few months.

Script and extension support
If your WebSite uses or will soon use MySQL databases, CGI scripts, or FrontPage 2000 extensions (not just basic FrontPage HTML generation), you'll need a hosting plan that supports these extras--likewise with PHP and Active Server Pages. These sorts of higher-end development tools don't usually come standard.

File-transfer options
You'll need to upload your site from your local machine to the server it lives on, and you may want people to be able to download files directly from your site. Look for a host that offers unlimited password-protected FTP uploads to get your site online. If you prefer using FrontPage or a Web interface for uploading files, make sure your service provider supports it. And if you intend to broadcast streaming media from your site (say, if you want visitors to be able to watch a video from your company's most recent press conference), make sure you know from the get-go that your hosting plan will allow for it.

Mail options
How much e-mail will you need for your domain? Estimate the number of mailboxes you'll want. You might pick one for each employee, for example, and add some for functions such as sales, info, complaints, and feedback. Take into account how you want to receive that e-mail. For example, if you want to be able to use your favorite e-mail software, such as Microsoft Outlook, you'll want full POP3 access. However, look into Web-based e-mail if you want to be able to check your messages from any computer when you're on the road, at a library, or at home or work. Also, look into e-mail-forwarding options so that you can relay messages to an established e-mailbox. And, if you want, make sure that you can send mail from that box and that the box size and allowable individual message size are sufficient. Many hosts limit message sizes to less than 2MB, which may not be large enough for some messages, especially HTML or image-heavy newsletters.

Site statistics
You may not think much about hit rates and browser versions and types now, but once you get the site off the ground, you might want site statistic tools so that you can evaluate traffic and plan future site development. If you know which pages on your site are the most popular, you'll know by default what's most important to your visitors. If you know which browsers visitors use, you'll make sure your pages look good in those browsers. And, most important, you'll want to know how your visitors got to your site in the first place. Hosts that offer analytical tools for reporting on traffic are keepers, and if you're serious about keeping tabs on your numbers, look for access to raw server logs so that you can run all sorts of numbers using your own statistical software.

This article was supplied Courtesy of Cnet Hosting News