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With hosting services waving and blinking at you on every virtual street corner on the Web, it is difficult to select the best one for your business and website. They all offer similar services with their multiple option packages. At times the price will be the same or so close that the difference doesn't matter.

Business owners, from the gigantic, major international corporations to the small "mom & pop" establishments found on the sleepy streets of any small town, are moving their businesses online in record numbers. The popularity of the original World Wide Web, and now Web 2.0 with all it's multimedia glamour, moved the entire world into our living rooms. Borders don't matter anymore.

When you are looking for a web hosting service for your business, whether a virtual storefront, Internet Marketing sales page or an information database to keep your customers happy, you need to know what options being offered are the best for your purposes.

The names of those options might seem strange and confusing to you at first, so here's a list of possible features to help you:

Disk Space: 50-100 megabytes should be enough for an average website. Hosting several domains on one account, or a large website with data tables, pictures of your products, video/audio enticements or explanations, will require much larger space requirements.

Bandwidth: (Data Transfer) 2-3 gigabytes should satisfy most average websites. More will be required for extremely large websites with interactive or multimedia applications.

Bandwidth is a measure of the amount of available website traffic available to you and your customers. When customers visit your website, data has to pass from your hosted website on a remote server to your browser. You will have a monthly limit expressed in either megabytes or gigabytes.

PHP: This is a language used to write instructions for a web server. There's PHP scripts offered all over the Web for your use, some free and some not. Check them out.

MySQL: This open-source (free) relational database management system is the most popular online database engine in the world. As a result, there's more support sites and tutorials than you could ever need. Using PHP and MySQL together will give you a powerful method to provide organized data to your customers.

SSI (Server-side Includes): a simple scripting language used almost exclusively for the web. Its primary use is to include the contents of one file into another one dynamically on a web server. Your hosting server should have a list of offered includes and some support for you.

FTP (File Transfer Protocol): This is a simple, secure way, to exchange files over the Internet. It is used to download files from the Internet to your browser and, more importantly here, to upload files from your computer to your website.

cPanel: This is the control panel you access to manage details of your website account. The graphic icons allow you to move easily through all the applications and options available to you as part of your hosting service.

Fantastico: Automatically installs scripts on your website, like blogs, forums, collections of images.

If you need more information on any of these common applications, use any search engine of your choice and you will find more sources than you can use.

Dan Thompson is a veteran website designer and has used numerous web hosts in his time. Dan specializes in writing web host reviews, his latest article is a Hostmonster Review. You can view Dan's latest web hosting review at http://www.hostmonster-the-review.com