What questions to ask?

II. About the hosting plans and the features that the company offer. What to look for?
Well, these days each hosting company offers plenty of features along with each web hosting plan. So you need to decide which ones are important for you and which ones you are going to need and use on your site. Among all of the features there are few of them that are really important. In our opinion, these are the following:

web space - the amount of space available for your site files, database (sometimes offered separately), and space for emails.
traffic per month - the amount of traffic that your site can consume per month
email features - these include the number of mailbox you may have, the quota for each mailbox, spam protection, anti-virus, web mail
server side scripting and database - what server-side programming languages does the web server supports, what database is included in the package


Q: How much space do I have with your plan. Is the space taken by emails and database counted towards the total web space available?
Your host will be offering a certain amount of storage space on their hosting server for you to store your website files which contain your web pages. This storage space is your disk allocation within the hosting package. Different amounts of space will be offered by a web hosting company in different packages. As a general guide, 25MB of disk space will be enough for around 500 typical web pages and generally you won't need as much disk space as you think you will. However, have in mind that most webhosts will count the space taken by your email boxes towards that space. In most cases the space taken by database files is also counted towards the web space allotment. So in our opinion 100-200 MB of web space is more than enough for starting sites.

Q: If I need more space, how can I upgrade. Are there any costs involved? Will there be any downtime for my site.
As the sites usually grow in time, they become popular consume more space and traffic, it is important to know how easily you can upgrade your web hosting account. Many hosts will not charge an upgrade fee, just the difference in the monthly cost of the bigger package.

Q: What email features are available for me? How can I access my email?
Web hosting companies can vary in their offerings for email services. This includes two major aspects. First, the number of mailboxes that are included in the web hosting plan. You need to decide how many mailboxes you will actually need. We are talking here about real mailboxes with separate username/password to check email. Please note that some web hosting companies offer the so called "aliasing" or "forwarding". For example you can have 20 forwarders on your website and all of them will be delivered to a mailbox that you specify. The second thing is how you will be able to read your email. Most webhosts offer POP and IMAP access to the hosting server. These are the most commonly used ways to check and read your email. Almost all email programs support them - MS Outlook, Eudora, Mozilla Mail, Entourage, etc.
A useful feature is the web based email access, also called Webmail. This gives you the ability to check your email messages anytime, anywhere from any computer. It's the same like Yahoo and Hotmail, but with email user@yourdomain.com.