Archive for the ‘Web Hosting’ Category:
What is Windows Hosting?
by: Mer Amer
Windows hosting is referred to web sites that are served through Microsoft Windows NT or 2000 Internet Information Server (IIS). It is an NT-based server that is installed with Microsoft Windows Server Edition such as Windows XP or 2003.It is widely regarded as having powerful end-to-end management, scalability and reliability features, hence its popularity for integrating businesses with the internet.
Windows hosting is the solution that you should go for if you intend to use specific Windows applications such as Active Server Pages (ASP), and if you plan to develop your website with Microsoft FrontPage. Furthermore, if your website will be developed with .NET, MS Index Server or Visual Basic scripts , Windows hosting is the better choice compared to UNIX. In terms of database, MS SQL is compatible for both UNIX and Windows hosting, but MS Access database is served only by Windows hosting.
The advantage of Windows hosting is for users to easily integrate any Microsoft products to websites due to the fact that millions of users are using Windows and use these Microsoft products. With Microsoft’s technology, you will also be able to integrate cross-browser script libraries from Java Script with ASP. Certain features such as ODBC database connectivity and ColdFusion may only be used for Windows hosting and may not by UNIX.
Cost-wise, Windows hosting are known to be expensive to set up due to its proprietary software and the use of Windows servers. However, when using a remote server, Windows hosting becomes very affordable and is very competitive compared to the price of UNIX hosting. Added to the fact that the good performance and the robustness of Microsoft application that this hosting type offers, the minimal extra cost is definitely worth spent.
In general, Windows hosting is the best for integrating your website with Microsoft products. Although it is slightly more expensive than UNIX hosting, the advantage of integrating all powerful Microsoft-proprietary application and scripts into this hosting environment far outweighs the costs incurred.
About The Author
Mer Amer writes in http://www.hostrecommend.com on various articles related to web hosting. Visit http://www.hostrecommend.com for more resources on web hosting and list of highly recommended web hosting services.
What is E-commerce hosting?
by: Mer Amer
E-commerce hosting is a hosting package designed for customers who require a complete online business solution for their websites. E-commerce hosting providers provide the infrastructure, systems and applications needed for a website to perform online transactions. Hence, it has become a very important requirement of online businesses since it enables the customers to transact over the internet easily and more importantly in a secure environment. Thus, it is of no surprise that e-commerce hosting has become one of the fastest growing hosting services, looking at the rate in which people are doing business through the internet.
The most common features of an e-commerce hosting are shopping carts that are used for online transactions. This service offers a fast and convenient way for online buyers to manage their purchases and make payments. The convenient navigation and ease of going through the motion of buying products has increased the popularity and take-up of shopping carts in websites. From web developers’ point of view, shopping carts provide the ability to manage the complexities of web purchases in a systematic and simplified manner. There are so many available shopping carts in the market that it is normal for one e-commerce hosting package to include three or four shopping carts to choose from. Names like Zencart, osCommerce and Agora are among the established shopping cart providers, providing end-to-end medium for purchases to be done over the web. These companies would normally provide a 24-hour technical support to provide immediate response to queries.
The other must-have feature of an e-commerce hosting is the Secure Socket Layer (SSL). With SSL, the security of an online website is going to be taken care of by the hosting provider. Since security is one of the most important, if not the most important feature of an e-commerce website, SSL guarantees the peace of mind of making transactions safely. With SSL, private information such as credit card numbers, telephone numbers and personal information can be sent through encryption that is virtually safe from theft.
The other functionalities that are important to look for especially for beginners are web templates for an e-commerce website. It would be of great advantage if users can tap in from the ready-made web pages of online stores and forms for customers to view, browse through and select products. These web pages can be very complex to develop, and thus it would reduce a lot of hassle and errors of doing it from scratch. Web developers can always build on these templates to create more advanced add-ons. The list of crucial e-commerce hosting services goes on with features such as online catalogues, customer order management, data collection, inventory management and analyses on customer demographics.
Overall, for online business owners and individuals alike, e-commerce hosting brings a lot of benefits due to its complete package, from the marketing of their products, purchasing by customers, and collection of data to eventually improve the business. Web owners can expect to proliferate their businesses, contributed by the convenience, security and credibility that come with a full-fledge e-commerce website.
About The Author
Mer Amer writes in http://www.hostrecommend.com on various articles related to web hosting. Visit http://www.hostrecommend.com for more resources on web hosting and list of highly recommended web hosting services.
What is Dedicated hosting?
by: Mer Amer
Dedicated hosting is a hosting environment where one or more servers are dedicated for a single client. The client effectively leases the server from the hosting provider. The hosting provider provides the server machine, the connectivity and the required software and operating system to run the server. Dedicated hosting can also be split into two categories - managed and unmanaged dedicated hosting. For managed dedicated hosting, the hosting provider will provide the services of running and maintaining the server within their own datacenter. This is a good choice if you don’t have the personnel, money or time to operate a server in-house. This is the choice for web developers who do not want to be bogged down by server management activities. While for unmanaged dedicated hosting, there will be a lot of support and maintenance features that are not provided by the hosting provider and will be done by the customers themselves. This is normally the hosting choice for system administrators who want to manage their servers themselves.
Dedicated hosting is the opposite of shared hosting where the resources are shared among different customers. It is crucial for large and complex websites that require plenty of disk space, bandwidth, applications and software to operate. This hosting type is the perfect choice for websites to maintain a high volume of traffic and fast data transfer. It enables the webmasters to have total control of their website since the performance of their websites is only controlled by internal factors and not by other websites. For web developers, installation and embedding of complex applications such as online shopping tools and automated tools can be done without affecting the stability of the servers.
It is important that you find out the range of services offered by different hosting providers as there is no standard set out for managed dedicated hosting. There will be different levels of support provided, depending on the packages and requirements by the customer. There are also different set ups and maintenance scope for the servers. For example, there are hosting providers who provide a shared infrastructure for backend database while the clients host their applications on a dedicated server. Conversely, there are also configurations whereby the application is hosted on a shared infrastructure while the backend database on dedicated server.
In terms of security, the control of security features for a dedicated hosting is far greater compared to a shared hosting. For a dedicated hosting service, the hosting provider will normally provide extreme security features to combat potential security threats to the hosted websites. Additionally, the dedicated server can only be accessed by the site owner and the hosting provider, meaning that there will be fewer possibilities of security breaches.
In summary, the take-up for dedicated hosting will definitely increase significantly due to the booming of complex e-commerce websites and various enhanced functionalities that websites are able to offer, thus requiring more resources and stability on the hosting platform. For beginners, the idea is to start small with shared hosting, then to scale up the hosting capabilities together with the website’s functionalities, and eventually moving to a dedicated hosting environment.
About The Author
Mer Amer writes in http://www.hostrecommend.com on various articles related to web hosting. Visit http://www.hostrecommend.com for more resources on web hosting and list of highly recommended web hosting services.
What is CPanel?
by: Mer Amer
Cpanel is an easy to use interface for web maintenance. cPanel is the leading web hosting control panel available today. Even a user completely new to web hosting can easily manage his/her own website. With the Cpanel hosting interface, you’ll have complete control over your website. When looking for a hosting package, CPanel is also a good indicator of the reliability of the hosting provider. The most well known and reliable web hosts would normally provide web hosting plans that are powered by cPanel control panel. cPanel hosting plans that are on the market predominantly support PHP and MySQL, FrontPage, Fantastico and RVSkins.
With CPanel, you will have access to lots of useful stats such as disk usage and space, bandwidth usage and sub domains through cpanel. The current version of CPanel is CPanel 11 or CPanel X, which gives you full control of every aspect of your account. Hosting packages that come with CPanel are a very cost effective solution as they allow you to host multiple web sites under the same account. Another very useful program-Fantastico can be directly managed from the cPanel control panel. Essentially, what Cpanel does is that it condenses the dozens of commands needed to complete one task to a single mouse click. CPanel takes care of tedious and complicated tasks, such as a simple change to the content of your web page, password protecting portions of your web site, or deleting a table in one of your databases. All these can easily be done just by some minor input from the end users. For webmasters that require assistance on web building, certain hosting companies would also provide cPanel control panel that comes with a range of powerful online building tools. Customers can use these tools to create, configure and launch their website.
Other available control panels normally restricts your ability to manage your website to just the basic functions like creating email addresses, managing files and adding sub domain names. Cpanel provides much more than these basic tasks, allowing access to the more advanced functions, such as MIME types, cron jobs, OpenPGP keys, Apache handlers, addon domains, password protected directories and a lot more. For the basic users, CPanel still provide the typical program such as to add or remove email accounts, view website statistics, install different PHP / mySql scripts, get access to your online Web Mail and more. Some other functions of CPanel are to create a POP or default email account, autoresponder, subdomain, custom error pages. Users can also create an MySQL database PHPMyAdmin to manage databases, install FrontPage extensions, redirect a URL, redirect mail change, create an add-on domain, create a FTP account and to password-protect a directory. All these vast array of programs would normally come with tutorials to assist users especially newbies to ensure that using CPanel would be an ease.
In summary, CPanel is an integrated program that combines the requirements of basic to advanced users in one user-friendly interface. It definitely will save you a lot of time and hassle of completing your tasks manually. The best fact is that it is directly linked to Fantastico, enabling users access to a multitude of programs that are extremely useful for managing websites.
About The Author
Mer Amer writes in http://www.hostrecommend.com on various articles related to web hosting. Visit http://www.hostrecommend.com for more resources on web hosting and list of highly recommended web hosting services.
What is Coldfusion Hosting?
by: Mer Amer
ColdFusion hosting is a server-side scripting language which is similar to PHP or ASP. A product of Macromedia, it is considered as a complete web application server for not only basic hosting, but extends to developing and delivering scaleable e-commerce applications especially for business websites. Mostly, ColdFusion is utilized in small and large businesses, and also for some advanced personal uses. It is due to the fact that in a short space of time, users will be able to create robust Web applications coupled with advanced data integration.
Since it is a server-side technology, ColdFusion hosting works by having a web server to process and deliver web applications, rather than just plain web pages. The language used is called ColdFusion Markup Language (CFML) which includes tags for querying databases, outputting text and interacting with different web services. The language uses tags and attributes, similar to XHTML, for the codes that interact with the website and its back-end functions. CFML is relatively much simpler than languages like C++. However, a strong understanding in HTML coding and relational database design is still very important.
From a web developer’s point of view, ColdFusion hosting requires less learning time and fewer code lines compared to ASP, PHP or JSP. Developers can develop their application locally using various tools such as ColdFusion Studio and only move to the real ColdFusion server when fully ready. The capabilities of ColdFusion hosting encompasses shopping cart-enabled web store,,back-end support for interactive Flash applications and to the extent of building a global network for a company.
In terms of cost, due to the expensive cost to set up a ColdFusion server and engine, the price for this type of hosting is normally more expensive than the normal UNIX and Windows hosting. However, with the unrivalled advanced features that it provides, and the availability of shared ColdFusion server, the hosting price has come out to be very competitive.
Overall, ColdFusion hosting is a technology that helps to build powerful web applications and services. Its biggest advantage over other hosting types is the simplicity that it offers to develop websites that would otherwise be more complex if coded in ASP, PHP or JSP. In short, ColdFusion hosting delivers powerful web capabilities using an easy-to-learn and highly productive server-side scripting environment.
About The Author
Mer Amer writes in http://www.hostrecommend.com on various articles related to web hosting. Visit http://www.hostrecommend.com for more resources on web hosting and list of highly recommended web hosting services.
