In this article I seek to explain some of the technical phrases used when you are shopping for small business web hosting so you can “translate” what they are talking about into plain English and better understand what you will get for your money.

Bandwidth / Data Transfer - This determines how many files can be transferred from your web hosting account to visitor’s computers. It roughly equates to the number of visitors you can receive to your website on a monthly basis though you need to bare in mind that different files have different sizes and therefore take up different amounts of bandwidth.

A visitor looking at a video on your site would take up far more bandwidth than someone looking at a plain text webpage, so the more “basic” and multimedia-light your site is the smaller the amount of bandwidth you need.

Subdomains - If a domain is www.something.com, then a subdomain changes the www. to something else which can be useful for search engine optimization and keeping your site neatly laid out - so you could set up computers.something.com, dvdplayers.something.com and so on.

Mailboxes - This essentially is how many email addresses you can have and for most small businesses 5 or 10 is more than enough. Perhaps one for customer enquiries, one for technical support, one to join your newsletter etc.

This is, in my opinion, not a major factor when it comes to choosing web hosting and some small business sites only use one single email address with perfect success.

Web Space - This determines the space on your server for uploading files. Think of it like the hard drive on your computer - so the more web space you have the more and/or larger files you can upload to make up your website.

For a basic small business website 30-50MB will be more than enough and isn’t difficult to find - though if you intend to use lots of graphics, audio, video etc then you might want to look for a little more web space.

Like the bandwidth, when you have ordered your web hosting your control panel will help advise you on how much web space you have available on your server to upload files to.

Autoresponders - Autoresponders are pieces of software that will automatically reply to emails and can be very useful from a customer service point of view.

If you’ve ever emailed a company and received back a confirmation message within minutes that said something like the one below you’ll know exactly what I mean:

“Dear Bob,

Many thanks for your email. This message serves to confirm your enquiry has been received by our web hosting customer advisors and will be replied to within the next 24 hours.

Yours,
Customer Support
X Small Business Web Hosting Team”

It looks professional and is reassuring when you have a real query that needs sorting out. Again, though, you’re unlikely to need too many of these so it isn’t a major factor in making a decision on which web host to use.

Uptime - Refers to the percentage of the time your website will be visible. Sometimes problems occur with a web host or routine maintenance has to be carried out and in these cases your website won’t be shown for a little while.

Clearly the shorter these periods of time are the fewer visitors and sales you’ll lose so look for good uptime figures of 95%+ of the time.

99%+ is entirely possible but anyone who claims 100% uptime probably isn’t telling the whole truth.

FrontPage Extensions - There are a multitude of web page generators out there and Microsoft’s FrontPage is quite a popular one. However, it being Microsoft, they have to be difficult (!).

So if you use FrontPage to build your site you’ll need to make sure your web host offers FrontPage extensions for your site to work properly.

Custom Error Pages - Sometimes people visit a page of your site that doesn’t exist. Maybe they typed it in wrong. Maybe you’ve deleted the page - or worse - forgot to upload it in the first place (d’oh!).

When this happens visitors will see a “404″ error - a dull, bland, unprofessional-looking page just telling them the page they’re after doesn’t exist.

A better options is to be able to create your own error page to match the rest of your site, apologising for the inconvenience and pointing visitors towards the other parts of your site that may be of interest to them instead.

I use them myself and the results are great.