Gone are the days when all the information a student needed was found between the covers of a book or when they could write everything down in their notebooks (of the paper kind). Like almost everything, education too has gone online.

Young students today – by the time they reach middle school – are proficient at navigating the internet and know how and where they can get information. By the time they reach high school, they will have mastered the online world well enough to contribute to it by adding their own information to social media sites or even creating small personal web spaces where they can share their knowledge.

By the time they reach college, they know much more about it so much so that they can actually create new things – sites, apps and data archives. Not too long ago, a young man named Mark Zuckerberg collaborated with his dorm-mates to create a phenomenon that would forever change the way we communicated and interacted with one another – Facebook.

Although there is no denying that most of the work came from the genius that was his mind, there is also no denying that he had some help from, say, web hosting providers – even if it was the “borrowed” Harvard servers that gave him the space to plant and grow his invention on.

Students need web hosting services and providers that accommodate their unique demands. But what are these demands and what should hosting providers offer to cater to them? Let’s see:

1. Price: students aren’t rich – at least the vast majority of them aren’t. They need to watch every single dollars, and will continue to do so for a very long time…until the loan is fully paid. Therefore, it only makes sense that hosting providers lower their prices for students. But that doesn’t mean they should compromise on other features like security or the resources that are available to them. iPage has a hosting planning, for example, that starts at less than $3 per month and comes with essential features any website owner would be proud of.
2. Free Domain Names: yes, it might sound a little too fair to hope for cheap hosting and a free domain name, but students can do with all the breaks they can get. Unbelievable as it may sound, there are actually hosting providers out there that throw in free domain names with their cheapest hosting plans. Just ask the people at Bluehost who do exactly that.
3. Easy Navigation: not all students that want hosting space are computer science majors. Hosting providers should have easy-to-use menus, with clear instructions and detailed help information.
4. Easy Site Builders: again, there are many students who have no clue on how to go about building a website. Providers should include the easiest-to-use but most enabling site-building tools so students can create their sites using drag-and-drop designing and end up with a site capable of handling and performing advanced functions and services.
5. Advanced Design Tools: there is a high chance that students that go online to create their sites will do so with the intention of using it for mathematical, scientific or engineering purposes. Hosting providers should have the tools (like add-ons) that will make it easy to run complicated mathematical calculations or physics equations without crashing. They should have design tools that can convert data into charts and graphs with ease. Simulation software would help the students better understand the data they have at hand.
6. Email Hosting: email exchange is the most common way of communicating with one another. Students will always be looking for providers that will allow them to host their own mail servers so they can use their domain name in their addresses – it looks and sounds “cool” to have one’s truly own email address.
7. Secure Hosting: just because the site belongs to a student doesn’t mean it doesn’t need to be properly secured. In fact, it should be the opposite – an inexperienced student can accidentally open his web site and eventually the whole host server to attacks by hackers. Hence the hosting providers might actually need to give extra attention to sites owned by inexperienced students.
8. Impeccable Support: everyone who owns a website will at one time or another requires the help of their hosting providers’ support staff. As beginners in the website-ownership business, students will require even more help and guidance.
9. High flexibility: students’ sites will probably expanded and contract with the presence or absence of new assignments or the ebb and flow of their own interests. A good hosting provider makes sure they have plans that are highly versatile and can be re-configured without any fuss or downtime.
10. Money Making Opportunities: as mentioned earlier, students aren’t exactly known for their financial prowess. Hence any affiliate program that can be run from their sites will help them make money on the side. At the very least, the hosting provider should be open to having other paid ads displayed on its clients’ sites.