When I moved my website from Geo-cities (medivial ages huh?) back in 2000 to a perl based webhost, it was technically huuuge set of choices thrown at me. SSI, Basic auth protection, directory control, scripting languages etc. Most of them can be safely considered obsolete now. But there is something Apache hit straight on target. htaccess. this feature is still quite big. However, many new developers might not really know the power of this feature. for them, Here is www.htaccesseditor.com which comes handy.
Application cache (appcache) is a powerful feature in HTML5. However, it does come with baggage. Many (see links below) advocated ferociously against it due to tricky issues it comes with. For someone who is just testing waters, these issues may throw them off grid. Knowing them before hand helps reduce some unpredictable effects.