Hosting Plan-Salient Features

Forwarding mail accounts are useful if you want to send your mail to a service like SpamCop or other email filter before you receive it. Rather than store it on your mail server, it will redirect all mail to another single email address where it is dealt with appropriately. This kind of account is useful for redirecting your emails to a common POP3 box.

Aliases are names that can be used to identify different types of email account, redirecting them to POP3 mailboxes on the server or other addresses, where they are processed again if necessary. What happens to the emails will depend on whom they are being sent to. A catch all alias is often used to collect and deal with email sent to people or departments not recognised by your mail server.
Autoresponders are not an email account in their own right, however they do have their own email address and simply reply to anyone that emails them for information. They are useful if you want to send out pre-prepared information to people requesting it, as opposed to you replying to all the requests manually.

FTP Access One other thing that is common amongst paid hosting accounts is FTP access. FTP programs allow you to upload files and to edit and delete your content on the server much more quickly than using a web-based interface. If you are hosting on a *nix system, you will also be able to change your file permission settings using FTP.

One of the better features I've seen offered with hosting, is the ability for you to create your own FTP accounts. This is great when you have someone helping out on the site or if you want to share your web space while keeping your user's files separate from your own. How hosts go about this can vary.

Some hosts will let you act like a mini hosting company, where FTP accounts that you create takes them to a special users folder specifically for their files; keeping them from your main files. Other hosts will allow you to create FTP accounts that you can define exactly which folders they have access to, and exactly what they can (and can't) do with them.

While having the ability to create multiple FTP accounts may seem trivial if you don't intend to host other sites on your web space; it can be useful for allowing temporary or permanent access to anyone helping you with your site, without you ever needing to give out your own FTP account details. Now that is a feature worth having!