While searching for a good web hosting provider, you will feel quite overwhelmed.  As sometimes, you will find a web hosting service, where the features are great, but the charges are way to high, and sometimes you will find an economical web host, but their service will not be as good, so you are getting me I guess.

You will come across information, such as 25MB, bandwidth, ftp, email forwarding, php, cgi-bin and fantastico.  All of these features are offered in different packages that you will come across.  But before you make any decision lets have a look at what are the essential stuff you need to know before selecting any service for your website.

Usually the web hosting companies have their packages grouped by various features they are offering and of course the more features you want for your website, the more money you are likely to pay.  The basic package, which is offered is generally around 25 MB of web space.  This amount of space you will be allowed on the server of your web host.

This is what you will get when you are having a shared hosting.  There will be a lot of other websites hosted along with your site on the server of the web host and every site has their own web space according to their package.  Bandwidth is the amount of data you are allowed to use within a specified period of time, which specified on a monthly basis.  The bandwidth is being used every time you upload your web pages or images, or when your site is being visited.  If your web host allows say 50MB of space in bandwidth, then you might have a little problem if you are planning to have a big website or the traffic influx to your website is too high.

Ftp acts as a backdoor to enter a website, and allows you to upload your web pages and images and installation of the scripts in a very feasible manner.  All you have to do is to place all the folders in their proper places and in the correct folders.  Email forwarding is very useful and you can get any email that is sent to your website and is forwarded to another email account of yours.  In this way, you will get all the mails forwarded to only one account, which will be your main account.  Websites are basically coded in php.

Php is used for developing scripts and templates can also be desiged with php.  It is very recommended for their fast loading time.  Php scripts sometimes also require MySql database, and it is another feature which you can add.  Such databases are loaded very fast and they do not require maintenance at all after they are up on the web.

Another way to host different scripts is cgi-bin.  If you want to use cgi scripts, you have make sure that you have a cgi-bin included in your web hosting package.  They are abit difficult than php scripts, but many people opt for these scripts.

Now, let us talk about Fantastico, it is basically a compilation of several scripts, which you can install directly from your control panel.

You should research before selecting any hosting company and compare the packages of hosting services among each other.  If you are looking for a simple website, you generally do not require more than 25MB of web space and a bandwidth of 500MB will work out great for you.

You may even wish to try some free hosting until you understand how everything works. But, remember more than likely you will be offered a sub-domain like yoursite.theirdomainname.com. This is not the best way to get web traffic, so I would only use a free hosting company that would allow your own domain name and check out paid hosting as well. Many of these paid hosting companies can give you so much more than a free hosted site and the cost is not always tremendous.