Website Hosting Services

One of the main reasons people have difficulty choosing a website hosting provider is because they get confused by all the different 3 letter acronyms like SSI, SSL, SQL, PHP, ASP and the 101 different service/feature options.

 Generally most of the options offered with even the basic packages today are not even used.

Before you can decide on what services your website needs you need to know what you want your website to do!

So rather than focus on the actual services themselves I will focus more on what you may want to do with your website and the features that the host website will need to accomplish this.

Function	Web Service/Feature
Provide private area or membership site	Password protected web pages /directories
Sell products	Ecommerce features if you have many products to sell. If you only offer a small selection then it is far easier to use third party solutions like PayPal- See selling online.
Newsletter	Pre-installed Newsletter script or use third party autoresponder service
Contact Form	Pre-installed Form to email script or PHP support and make your own/use pre made third party script.
Forum	Pre-installed forum software or obtain software usually requires php and MYSQL support.
Flexible Navigation	As your website develops you will find that the navigation changes. In order to change the navigation you may find yourself having to change all your existing web pages. This can be overcome by using JavaScript, Iframes, PHP or Sever Side Includes (SSI) for navigation. JavaScript and Iframes is done on the client not the server.
Common content on each page	This can be a copyright notice, site headlines, adverts and of course site navigation. Choices are the same as site navigation.

If you are unsure as to what service you need to do something with your website then just use the Askwebmaster form and I will do my best to help.

The Website FAQ page has a list of common services/functions and what they do