Web hosting for a lot of people means disk space, monthly transfer, email account, database, or the support to run the scripts. In the very beginning of the web hosting industry, those definition are probably correct, but as the growth in this industry, more and more bonus features have been added to the package, and the webmasters can those as free.
Below are a list of new free features provided by the most web hosting service providers now a day:
1) Free application scripts
Free web site scripts which will allow to setup a Blog, CMS, Forum, or Wiki quickly. The scrips are integrated into the control panel, which will give you a convenience by setting up a web site by some clicks.
2) Web Site Statistics Tools
These tools will give you a status report regarding the traffic of your site. A powerful one will even tell the information about where the traffic coming from, the pages are visited most, which key work in search engine have brought you the most traffic. All those are very helpful for you to understand the current status of your site
3) Web Promotion Tools
Once you setup your web site, web promotion will be your top priority tasks after building the content. With a power web promotion tools, you can know your ranking under each key word in search engine, generate the site map for search engine to index, get free PPC advertisement credit from Google or Yahoo to get the paid traffic, and more.
4) Web Design tools
If you want to setup your web site, a site build tools and some free web site template will make the thing easier if you don't have strong web design skills (which is common to the most of the people)
5) eCommerce Features
This feature will enable you setup an ecommerce site easily. Usually, you will be provided with scrip to create a shopping cart, and SSL certificate which will be required during payment.
