For some people, they taught that all web hosting service are expensive. No! There are free and affordable services. These are the free and Shared Web Hosting. Definitely, the service is free in free website hosting. But the bad side of it is that you can only have a sub-domain name. If you want a professional service, you can choose the other types instead of free service. On the other hand, the shared website hosting has an affordable service because is the cheapest among other types. Compare to free service, in shared, you can have your own domain type but you are sharing a server from other users. You do not have your own server here. And it has a small storage capacity. This is only applicable for small business.
The availability of the network provides the uptime for the website. Usually, this network is located in data centers with powerful internet connection. Therefore, it will provide stable network for the websites to assure that the websites hosted are working perfectly fine. For the servers to be located in the data center, we called it the network uptime.
The selection of platform and database engine is connected. If your web host offers hosting on the Linux platform, the script language is PHP and the database is MySQL. For Windows based hosting, ASP/.NET and MSSQL is often used. Unless you are a programmer with special demands in regard to platform, this selection doesn't matter much to you. More web hosts offer Linux hosting because it is cheaper, hence Affordable Web Hosting.
SMTP is Simple Mail Transfer Protocol which is used for outgoing Email Server. Most hosting companies do not offer access to SMTP servers as they can be difficult to maintain and defend and the want to cut corners with their customers.
Check out the web hosting company customer support. The quality often varies between hosting companies. All hosting providers claim to have superior customer support, but most of the time; this is just not the case. You might want to contact current and past customers, and ask about their experiences. Most Shared Web Hosting UK hosts have community forums and online support options. Check these out as they may give you some insight as to the quality of the support you may receive.
Bandwidth (or data transfer as it is also known) relates to how many times your website is visited. Each file your page is constructed of all adds to the data transfer. If you have a page that is 2kb, with two pictures each of 199kb and you have a data transfer allowance of 1GB per month then you could have around 2600 visitors each month. That's about 87 visitors per day. The likelihood is you will have more than one page, and will want more than two pictures on some - if not all - pages. If you exceed your bandwidth then your provider will charge you a lot more for the excess, or will disable your website entirely. So the more bandwidth that a web host offers the better.
This is why comparing different services provided by affordable web hosting providers is important. While other hosting companies lure potential customers with additional services, others simply make sure that your site is up and running and available to anyone who wants to visit them.