Shared Web Hosting is an idea that is hard to understand for web newbies, especially when they are venturing into developing a web site. They have terms thrown around like web site names, web hosting, web design and graphic design. Web domain hosting when you understand the concept is an easy concept to understand. In short, shared web site hosting is a place to hold your HTML files and images.

Those deciding to purchase an affordable web hosting package will need to learn the different features included with shared hosting, such as hosting disk space, bandwidth, number of email accounts and types of programming languages you can use.

Disk Space

Disk Space is indicative of the title, and is similar to the disk space you have on your own PC. This feature lets you know the size in GB available to the webmaster to host your HTML files and flash files you have for your website. Multimedia, such as images will use more of your disk space, while your web source files will take up less of the space. The requirement for the disk space you should look into buying depends mainly on the file types you will be hosting, and the overall size of your web site.

Transfer Limit

Bandwidth for web hosting is much like the bandwidth you use for your internet. Every time a file is downloaded from your web site, it is added to your total for bandwidth used for your site. Bandwidth will be different depending on the plan, and you will need to select the bandwidth usage based on how much traffic your site will receive and how big your site is in file size. There will be lower bracketed offerings of hosting bandwidth all the way up to web hosting service providers giving unlimited bandwidth hosting.

Hosting Server Operating System

The final topic to cover here is the types of hosting server configurations available. The type of server will limit the file types, like PHP, that you will be able to host. All hosting servers will run HTML, CSS and JavaScript, since they are handled by web browsers, like Internet Explorer. The main thing to note is Linux server hosting is generally cheaper and Linux hosting with Apache supports the PHP programming language. Windows hosting runs with Internet Information Services and is generally used for ASP files. Linux is usually selected as most free to use software like Drupal run off PHP.

For your next or first affordable web hosting purchase, ensure to look at all these factors to make a decision.