While purchasing a web hosting package, you might have often come across the major components that are crucial to deploy your application. These are the core components of any hosting type (Free Hosting, Shared Hosting, VPS Hosting, Dedicated Hosting or Cloud Hosting). The web hosting packages offered by the various web hosting service providers if often comparable on these factors. The major among them are explained below:
Disk Space: A website of any size usually require disk space. If you plan to keep a lot of content, image, videos on your website the disk space consumption depends proportionally. Before purchasing a web hosting package, you should evaluate the disk space required along with the scope for future expansion.
Data traffic: A website of any size will need the bandwidth or data transfer on a monthly basis depending upon the visitors or customers you have for your website. If you have lots of rich media files like videos, audios, and photos on your website, then you need to plan more data transfer capacity for your website. You should keep a check on the bandwidth consumption by your website or application and the charges and provisions your web hosting service provider can give when you exceed your bandwidth package.
Processing Power:If you are buying a shared hosting then you cannot compute the processing speed of the server because you cannot be sure of how much speed will be given to you. But if you are buying a virtual private server or dedicated server, then you can check the processor and its speed assigned to your server.
Email account: The Email accounts associated with your domain should be configured with the server. You should get IMAP, POP, and e-mail forwarding options available with your domain email accounts. All the necessary setting required should be configured along with incoming and outgoing email limits appropriately defined.
Server Uptime:It is essential that your server should be up maximum time such that your visitors or customers can contact you for your products and services at any time of the day. Your web hosting service should have at least 99.5%-99.995% guaranteed uptime SLA(Service level agreement). In case your service provider does not comply with the stated uptime clauses as per the SLA then he must ensure that you are compensated as per the downtime.
Backups: Backups are the primary core components of any web hosting package. You should ensure that backups for your mission-critical data and application is in place as per the desired frequency- hourly/daily/weekly/bi-weekly/Monthly/Yearly. Backups are very helpful for mitigating any disasters. Many web hosting service providers might provide backup as an add-on service with the web hosting package or might charge you.
Control Panel:Control Panel acts as a backbone in managing the server for you. It helps in maintaining your hosting account through a UI based interface. This is easy to use and very helpful in managing the basic operations of your server. You can assign the rights to the server users as per the requirements they have like Administrator, Manager and many more.
Customer Support:An excellent and proactive customer support 24/7 for your server is a must need. If you are not technically sound in managing the server from the backend, then good customer support is a must for you. Before finalizing a web hosting service provider, you should check the support services available to them by email, ticket, chat or phone.