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Posted by dani cass on March 19th, 2009

When you choose to create a website, one of the most important things you will need to set up is a hosting package. Simply put, your hosting package is the space that you website will occupy on the internet.

Hosting packages come in all different sizes, with all different types of additions. Some of the terms you may come across when setting up your hosting package are:

Disk Space – Disk space is the amount of data you can add to your website, the larger the disk space your hosting package has, the more you can add. Text pages usually only take a small amount of disk space, the addition of pictures and music to your website will use larger amounts of space, so if you have a very image rich website you will require more disk space.

Bandwidth – Bandwidth (also known as monthly data transfer) relates to the amount of people that can visit your website, the larger your bandwidth allowance, the more people can visit your website. Every time a person visits your website, bandwidth is used to transfer the data to and from the server. Once your bandwidth allowance has been reached, websites will become unavailable and usually display a ‘bandwidth exceeded ‘ page until the amount resets. If you are expecting lots of visitors to your website it is important to make sure you have a large bandwidth allowance to make sure your site is available when people visit.

Pop boxes – Pop boxes or Pop3 boxes relate to your emails. When you set up the domain name for your website, you may also choose to set up an email address on that domain e.g. if my domain was danicass.com my email address might be dani@danicass.com. If I wanted to use my email address with a program such as Outlook or Incredimail (my personal favourite email program – any program that lets me add animated smiley faces and glittery backgrounds gets my vote!), I would need a Pop3 account to make my email address work. Usually setting up an email address is as easy as going through the steps on a setup wizard, or your hosting supplier should be able to help you do this if it requires anything more technical. Once everything has been set up, your emails will then be received directly to your computer when you connect to the internet rather than having to sign into websites such as yahoo and google to retrieve them. The only real downside to Pop email addresses is the emails are stored on your computer so if your computer breaks, your old emails that you may be keeping will be lost.

Ftp access – FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol. When you have created your website, you will use ftp access to transfer the pages, images, music, etc, from your computer to the server that displays your website on the internet. Some hosting packages allow you to login to a control panel and upload your website directly, others will provide you with the details to transfer the files using third party software where you ‘drag’ the files from left (your computer) to right (the server).
If using CMS you shouldn’t require ftp access as the changes will be made directly to the site and will update when you save.

MySQL or MS SQL – These are databases used to run applications on your website. SQL is the ‘language’ used to communicate with the database. MySQL is an open source application, this means you don’t need to have a licence to use it, and it will run on any kind of server. MS SQL is the Microsoft version, Microsoft products require a licence and the database will only run on a Microsoft server.

Forwarding – Forwarding packages are used when you have multiple domains to transfer the website and/or emails to the main domain name, for example, if my website was at danicass.com i may also register dannicass.co.uk (people often try to guess a company’s domain name so it is good to register the variations they may type), the forwarding package means that when my visitors type in dannicass.co.uk the page will automatically change to danicass.com, so they will still see my website, meaning that I wont lose my visitors. Forwarding is also good if you have various company names operating under an umbrella company. If someone sends me an email to dani@studio2dani.com I could forward it to dani@danicass.com so I don’t need to set up and check lots of different emails, and I could still use the company name that my visitors know, making it less confusing.

If you come across any other jargon whilst setting up your hosting, please reply to this post and I will try to explain what it means. I may not know, but we have a brilliant technical team that should certainly be able to make sense of it!

Dani
Studio 2 Online
Web Design Leicester

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