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 5 different billing cycles - 1 month, 3 months, 6 months, 12
months and 24 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 are used to store the contents of your web site,
including all you HTML files, images and anything else that is downloadable by your visitors.
Web space are cheap today. Web hosts usually offer sufficient disk space (>
200
MB) with their plans. Your allocated disk space are 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.
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 be vary
every month depending on 'How large are your files' and 'How many
visitors to your site'.
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 based on the binary files usage (pictures, ZIP
files, Macromedia Flash, MP3s ...).
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. Our favorite FTP tool is Filezilla
(Download page). We can safely
assume all paid hosting providers will allow their members to
FTP to their site because it is just too common and important.
Usually many free hosting providers do not allow FTP because they
need to force their members to use their web-based upload tool
so they could display advertisement. You will need a correct username
and password pair to FTP to your account.
CGI-BIN, Perl, SSI
CGI stands for Common Gateway Interface (Related
Site).
You certainly have reach some web sites that require login or do some online
purchase before. In a login process, the server need to check and verify your
username and password, these are done by some executable scripts. So as when the
server need to verify your credit card information. CGI is the interface between
these scripts and the server. CGI-BIN is a special directory used to store those
scripts. CGI scripts can be written in many languages but the most popular is
Perl (Website). SSI stands for Server Side Includes (Related
Site).
SSI offers some dynamic features to your web pages, such as including a current
date to your page.
Perl scripts are popular in the old days but has 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 at the very first place. SSI are also rarely used nowadays because
of its limited features. Everything that can be done by SSI can easily be done
in a PHP script. Anyway, 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. Most people concerns are
whether if 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 site 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
understand what is Unix!
Raw Log Files
Raw log files are text files generated by your web server. Basically
it contains information about your site visitors, i.e visitor
IP addresses, the files they accessed, the site they came from
(referrals) ... It is hard to be read directly as it is still
'raw' but there are many Web Statistics software available to
analyze the raw log files. The analyzer will generated useful
and easy to read Web Statistics (with numbers and graphs) for
you. One such popular tool is WebTrends (Homepage).
Protected Directories
When someone visit a protected directory that has been created by you, he
will need to have the correct username and password before he 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 to 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 to download files or
even upload 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 could login to your account via an FTP tool
without the need of username and password. Usually the web host require a
visitor to login using anonymous as username and their email address as
password. Lets say you want your visitor to send you new Britney Spears
pictures, instead of asking them to email you the pictures, 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, check emails on the
remote system. Due to security concern, almost all hosts do not allow Telnet/SSH.
Email Accounts
You should be familiar with this. An email account looks like
you@yoursite.com 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. It could also be accessed with your browser (i.e. Internet
Explorer, Netscape, etc.) if the Web-Based Email feature is provided.
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 you
configured. For an example, you can setup a forwarder sales@mycompany.com
and post it everywhere in your site. When somebody send an email to it, it
actually directed to your sales manager joe@mycompany.com. The benefit of
posting sales@mycompany.com instead of joe@mycompany.com to your
homepage is, what if Joe quit the job and Jimmy replaced him? You will have to
change everything in your site, instead of just 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 received an 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
sales FAQ to the sender when then send an email to your sales team. This will
save a lot of time for the sender if the answer he/she need 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 accessed 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 store it until the user check and retrieve
the mail. 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 create a problem when someone are using their email account from
multiple places/computers, such as office and home. IMAP is a new protocol
created mainly to solved 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
accessed the same mailbox at the server so you do not need to worry about where
you have saved your email. However, POP are still far more common than IMAP
today. Email client 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 email 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
The number of days where you can ask for a refund if you are unsatisfied with
the service. It is always a good shopping practice to look for hosts that offer
money back guarantee. Note that only hosting fees will be refundable. Setup fee
and domain registration fee will not be refundable for almost all cases. But you
will still own your the right to your registered domain name.
Toll Free Support
Allow you to call your web hosts at toll free. The toll free number
usually available only to people from the US and Canada. Other
countries might not be benefit from it. However, most hosts that
provide toll free support will usually have phone support available
to their international customers.
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