cPanel Primer For The New Webmaster
If you are about to purchase web hosting, it is very likely that you will be using cPanel to manage your hosting. To get the most from your web hosting, you need to learn the workings of cPanel.
What Can Be Done with cPanel?
If your web hosting doesn’t offer shell access, cPanel will be the only way to manage your web hosting, cPanel is a web based server control software that allows you to do the following operations and a whole lot more. Common operations such as adding FTP users, creating databases, creating mail accounts and a multitude of other hosting operations can all be performed with cPanel.
Creating Mail Addresses
If you have the domain xyz.com and you would like to create a mail address called info@xyz.com, you can perform the following. Firstly click on the Mail tab from the front page. There you will see options to create, modify or delete mail accounts. If you to forward mail to an existing account here you can set an addres to forward to the account of your choosing. To read emails access the Webmail tab from the front page
Managing your domains
You may want more than a single address directed towards one web site, for example if you owned xyz.com and xyz.net, this can be achieved by using the Parked Domains tab, here you can type any address that you own to point to one of your web sites. If you hosting provider allows you to have more than one web site on your account, you can add domains via the Addon Domains tab. If you hosting provider supports the creation of sub domains you can create these via the Sub Domain tab.
FTP Options
You can create additional FTP users, set their access levels and other FTP related tasks using the FTP tab.
Database Tasks
To create a new database, or modify existing databases use the Database tab. Here you can perform all allowed database tasks, to perform more advanced database operations you will need to use phpMyAdmin, this can also be accessed from the Database tab.
Analyze The Logs
When running a web site you need to know what your visitors like, where they are coming from, which search engines are bringing the most visitors and all other data about them. Normally you will have access to the raw log files, but these are hard to analyze, to see data that is formatted about your visitors in an easy to read way go to Web/FTP Stats, here you will have the option to review your sites statistics using a variety of software such as Webalizer or AWStats.
Fantastico
Most if not all cPanel installations these days come with Fantastico which is an auto installer for many php based scripts. Fantastico can be used to install popular php scripts such as WordPress, Mambo, phpbb and many other php products. Using Fantastico is the easiest way to setup these php based scripts and will save you having to manually upload the scripts, and more often than not Fantastico will do all the configuration of the script for you which is a real time saver.
Final Words
cPanel is a very advanced application for configuring your hosting and learning all the tricks can take some time, but hopefully with this guide you will have the basics down and you can progress from here as your experience with web hosting increases.
David J. Smith has recently written a Bluehost Review, Bluehost use cPanel for hosting management to allow new webmasters and veterans alike to easily configure their hosting.
ASP Web Hosting Simplified
ASP stands for Active Server Pages. It is a technology that enables users to design and creative interactive pages for their websites, using something called “server-side scripting”. What do we mean by interactive? Forms, in-site search engines, blogs, user forums, newsletters, calendars, WhoIs searches, web-based email, polls, surveys, hit counters and more.
Best of all, with ASP, no longer do webmasters have to concern themselves with what browser a visitor to their site is using. With ASP hosting, your website will appear identically on all computers, on all browsers, a claim that HTML simply cannot make.
Anytime a browser requests a webpage that has the .asp extension where the more familiar .htm or .html would be, the hosting provider’s web server interprets any ASP scripts in the program first and foremost, before delivering any HTML info to the browser. This is why you cannot simply run ASP websites with just any hosting company. The hosting company you choose must have servers that support ASP, or else the ASP scripts you use will be rendered useless.
When examining web hosting companies to find one that supports ASP, you must look specifically for ASP support. Do not simply assume that because a hosting company supports “most web-based scripts, from CGI to Perl” that it supports ASP. If it doesn’t say so in an obvious place on the sales site, go to the hosting company’s FAQ and look for ASP. And since most FAQs are searchable, this shouldn’t be difficult to do. If you’re really enamored with a particular hosting company (or their current promotion) but can find no information on ASP support, consider contacting them via email, telephone, or web chat to find out. It’s possible that they do support ASP and just have a lousy sales site (which may be an indicator of an altogether different sort).
Microsoft brought ASP to the world, and as such provides the platform – Windows – on which ASP generally works best. In order to play around with ASP scripts on your web pages, you’ll have to download and install onto your system an ASP server, like Microsoft’s Internet Information Services (IIS) or Microsoft’s Personal Web Server (PWS) — one or both of which is included with most Windows packages for no extra charge. If you use Windows on your machine and have never encountered IIS or PWS, chances are it’s because you have to “Add” the program to your hard drive using the Windows software CD-ROM or through your control panel, since it’s often not included as part of the “Basic Install”.
Incidentally, Windows ME and Windows XP Home Edition are lacking in support for ASP scripts. But we’re willing to bet the forthcoming Windows Vista probably does.
For those webmasters on a PC that isn’t Windows-based, all hope is not lost. Sun Microsystems has developed a program called Chili!Soft ASP that allows other servers — such as Red Hat, Apache, and Secure Server — and other operating systems — such as Linux, Solaris, and AIX — to support ASP hosting.
Writing and using ASP scripts is easy too — at least it’s no harder than HTML, with all commands occurring between “<%” and “%>;” instead of “<” and “>”. Not so big a difference, is there? And you can find an abundance of software tools all over the web (many for free) that helps even the greenest novice create interactive web pages rife with ASP.
ASP is such a versatile language that more and more hosting companies are finding themselves compelled to add ASP support to their hosting packages just to remain competitive. This, of course, is only to your advantage as you can comparison shop around for the best ASP hosting offerings right alongside all the other features you’re looking for.
Hosting-Review.com is the premier resource on web hosting. Visit http://www.hosting-review.com for comprehensive reviews and rankings of over 50 web hosts, as well as informative hosting articles.
8 Things You Need To Know When Changing Your Web Host
Changing from one web host to another can become necessary if your website becomes popular and your current host can’t meet your needs for bandwidth, storage, etc. This can be especially true if your site is hosted on a free web host.
If a move become necessary, be sure to plan it carefully. The first step is to decide on a new hosting company, of course.
Once you have found a host that can meet all your needs, you need to move your site on to the new server. Before making any moves, be sure to back up your website from the old host.
If your website isn’t well structured and has been growing haphazardly, this is a good time to consider redesigning things. That could simply mean a new page design or it could mean redesigning your database and content storage.
For the first 48 hours after moving to a new host, you should use a redirect page on your old site, that automatically forwards people to the new one. This will ensure that your visitors will see the new site, even if its IP address hasn’t propogated yet.
It takes about 48 hours for a new website to get listed on most domain servers across the internet, so after that you should be fine.
A few more suggestions for an easy transition include:
1. Find out whether your new host is running on Unix or Windows and make sure it will be compatible with everything you’re moving from the old host.
2. Check to see how much storage you need for all your files and content on your current site, and make sure you get enough on the new host to give you room to grow.
3. Check to see what services your new host offers, and make sure anything you have been using on your current host (like autoresponders, mail forwarding, etc.) is available.
4. If your current website is created using Microsoft Frontpage, make sure your new host supports Frontpage extensions.
5. Check to see what your new host’s policy is for extra bandwidth, in case your site continues to get busier.
6. If the new host’s server is a shared server, check to make sure there are no adult sites hosted on the same system. They can get busy and cause all the other sites on the same server to slow down.
7. Check the review sites and forums for customer feedback about your new host before signing up. These are good indicators of the level of service you can expect.
Once you have your data uploaded to your new host, test your site to make sure it’s working properly. You should be able to preview your site before you fully switch your domain name to the new address.
John Lenaghan writes about free web hosting, business hosting, ecommerce and other website hosting topics on the Hosting Report website. Find out more at http://www.hostingreport.org
Small Business Owners Web Hosting Guide – Part 1
Your small business website needs to be hosted on a web server or simply a server (another name for computer) that is connected to the World Wide Web so that anyone can access your website.
Choosing a web hosting company for your small business website is easy if you follow the guide I have layout for you. Depending on the scale of your business, the type of business you run and your level of technical competency, there will always be a right hosting provider just for your business.
The general rule of thumb in choosing a web hosting provider boils down to:
Excellent Customer Support
Company Stability
Robust Datacenter
Affordability
Excellent Customer Support If all things being equal, I would rate customer support as my number 1 determining factor in choosing a web hosting provider. Relying on testimonials found on the provider’s site is a common approach to assess a company’s level of customer excellence but it is also quite an outdated one. After all it’s not uncommon for some providers to fake the testimonials. Instead I suggest you follow my way of assessing their customer support.
Sizing its level of customer support is sometimes as easy as finding out whether they have enough employees to support their level of business growth. You should look at the Customer to Employee ratio, CE ratio, as a benchmark.
For example, according to our records SiteSell Inc has approximately 15,000 customers and employs about 30 support staff, it has a CE ratio of 500 (15,000/30 = 500), you can expect a much higher level of customer satisfaction and a faster response time when compared to another provider who is serving 100,000 customers but only have 75 support staff. Their CE ratio would stand at approximately 1,333. Basically you should look for a professional hosting provider with a low CE ratio.
Getting As Close As You Can The other accurate way to assess the real status of its customer service is to get as close as you can to the company whenever possible via the following means:
Live Chat – Check to see if it’s 24/7. It helps to know that you can have your questions answered almost immediately with a live chat function. Test it out by answering some basic questions to see its response time and also test its level of technical competency. Not critical but it’s good to have.
Email – Send them a test mail to see how fast they respond, allowed up to 24 hours. Ask about anything but just do not be afraid to ask.
Number of Telephone Lines – Check to see if there are separate telephone lines for sales, customer service and technical support. I hate companies who use only 1 line to serve everyone. A professional small business hosting provider should have this in place. It is not uncommon for reputable providers to charge for telephone support.
Forum – The real condition of any web hosting company’s customer support is really found in its members forum if any. You will get a good dose of complains and praises but if the complains outnumber the compliments; it’s time to raise a red flag.
Company Stability A company’s stability can be measured by the length of time they have been in business, the number of customers they have served and are serving and lastly their financial standing.
Personally as a business owner myself, a web hosting company that has been around for at least 5 years would have weathered all sorts of ups and downs in the online world, and their chance of being around is much higher than a company that has been around for less than 1 year.
Financial Stability Though public listed web hosting providers have better financial transparency than the privately-owned ones, they are not necessary always in a better financial shape than them. Bottom line, you would host your small business with a company that you know is growing in their customer base. For example, Interland having been in business since 1995 is currently serving less than 200,000 websites and this number has been decreasing. It is most likely less profitable when compared to IPower in operation since 2001 and is serving over 400,000 websites as of this writing!
Another aspect of company stability lies in its ability to remain relevant in this highly competitive industry. For example, as the number of internet users increase and streaming multi-media becomes the norm, you want to place your business with a profitable web hosting company who is able to constantly improve on their offerings so that the performance of your website is able to keep up with visitors’ expectations.
Robust Datacenter Datacenters are where the web servers are resided on, and ultimately where your webpages will be accessed from. A strong and credible small business web hosting company would have the ability to own and managed their data centers or through colocation.
On one hand it might seem that is the best thing any decent web hosting company would do, but on the other hand, there seems to be a trend whereby the marketing and sale aspect of the hosting business has been outsourced to resellers.
The rationale behind this is quite simple, a web hosting company should focus on what it does best, i.e. make sure all servers are up and running. And a reseller role is to sell the hosting plans and is to focus entirely on doing just that without getting bogged down by technical issues.
Almost all the state of the art data centers should come equip with high level of security, uninterruptible power supplies and most importantly employs the latest technology to enable your website to be always up and running and is always accessible by high connectivity, i.e. fast access to your website.
Affordability Before I elaborate further, it’s important to establish that after qualifying a company with the above points, there is no such thing as the best small business web hosting plan, but only the right hosting plan for your business. This is probably the last thing you should look at before deciding on the hosting provider.
Generally there are 2 main types of hosting that are available for you to choose from. They are the Linux web hosting and windows web hosting. Within these 2 platforms there are also another few subcategories of web hosting types that you need to understand before you can finally decide on the right web hosting for your small business.
To continue reading this article, please visit my site Small-Business-Web-Hosting-Guide.com for a no-nonsense approach to assessing web hosting companies for small business owners.
Cynthia Wang, a small business owner shares a wealth of information about web hosting for small businesses on her website, Recommended Hosting Companies For Small Businesses.
Web Site Hosting : From Domain Registration to Getting it Online – Part 2
Once you’ve chosen your domain name and got it registered, what’s your next step?
Your web host will give you the details you need to get your site up and running. This will include passwords to log into your website account, the paths to the directories where you need to upload your information, and most importantly the addresses of your domain name servers.
DNS servers are the link between your domain name (mydomain.com) and your IP address (a numbered address like 123.456.78.9. Every web server on the internet has a unique IP address.
If your website is hosted on a dedicated server, your IP address is unique to your website. Your website will respond whether someone types the domain name or the IP address into their browser.
Most websites are hosted on shared servers, however. What this means is that a single server hosts many websites, and each one shares the same IP address. If you enter the IP address of a shared server in your browser, it won’t display your website.
DNS is the “translation” layer between domain names and IP addresses that allows multiple sites on one server.
Configuring Your Website On DNS
When you register your domain name, it will be pointing to the DNS servers for your chosen registrar. Until you have a account set up with a hosting service, your domain will usually point to an error page or an “under construction” page.
Keep in mind that there’s no time limit between registering your domain and choosing a web host. Some people register domains and never actually get a website hosted on them.
If you’ve bought your domain with plans to use it, you’ll need to sign up for an account with a web host and upload your website’s files to their server.
The first step in making your website active is to change the DNS servers on file with your domain registrar to the ones that are given to you by your web host.
The DNS server information will look similar to this:
Primary Name Server: NS1.SOMEDOMAIN.COM (123.456.78.9) Secondary Name Server: NS2.SOMEDOMAIN.COM (123.456.7.89)
You’ll get this information from your hosting company when you sign up for a hosting account. If you can’t find this information, you’ll need to contact your web host to get it. Otherwise your website won’t be accessible from the internet.
Once you have this information from your host, you’ll need to change the settings on file with your registrar to the new addresses. If your domain name was included with the purchase of your hosting, the web host will normally update this information for you automatically.
Once the DNS servers are registered it can take up to 48 hours for your site to be accessible across the internet. This is because of the way the DNS system works.
The domain names and IP addresses are stored in a database that is distributed through thousands of computers around the world. Each computer keeps a small part of the database cached and if they get a request for an unknown domain, they have to forward that request to another computer until the information is found.
This database gets updated on a constant basis on each of these computers, but it can take some time for your new website’s information to spread throughout the world.
John Lenaghan writes about how to choose business web hosting, ecommerce hosting and other website hosting topics on the Hosting Report website. Find out more at http://www.hostingreport.org.