Hosting Plan Features and Popular Web Hosting Control Pane
Often hosting plan features are tied into the type of control panel that is provided with the hosting plan. Most people take for granted that a control panel should be part of the package, but in smaller countries outside the USA this is often a 'luxury' that is not part of the hosting plan.
Finding out whether your hosting plan offers a control panel to manage your website is the first essential feature that you should look for. It is unacceptable to sign up for a hosting plan if there is no control panel!
Common control panels for Linux hosting are:
- Helm
- Plesk
- Cpanel
- DirectAdmin
All these control panels have their supporters and detractors. Most users prefer CPanel, as it offers a lot of functionality and a user-friendly interface.
The following features, available with a CPanel hosting plan, are the kinds of features you should be looking for in a good hosting plan:
- Email management: Under email management, you can create and delete all your email accounts. You also have access to a Webmail facility, so that you can read your email online (as opposed to linking to your email account with Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express). You can also set up forwarders to forward one email account to another. Your hosting plan will give you access to set up simple autoresponders to send an automated reply back if anyone sends an enquiry email to a specific email address.
- Website statistics: Ensure that your hosting plan provides statistics facilities, it is worthwhile to make sure that yours does. Some hosting providers think that the statistics programs consume too many resources on a shared environment and some of them, therefore, remove the facility. But statistics and the ability to analyze your traffic is essential when you set up a website and purchase a hosting plan, so make sure that you select a hosting plan that does provide you access to a web stats package.
- FTP: You should have FTP access to your website in order to upload files. This is absolutely essential if you want to manage your website. Cpanel also allows you to register new FTP accounts to give other people access to your website. You can restrict their access to specific folders on your website and specify if they should have read and/or write access.
- File manager: If you are not comfortable with using an FTP package to upload your files, you can always use the file manager available in CPanel. The file manager enables you to upload files, unzip files on the server, and to copy and delete files.
- Backups: Your hosting plan should allow you to make a backup of the files on your server, as well as to backup your MySQL database if you have one. This is very useful and should be done regularly. You cannot depend on the backups ran by the hosting plan provider, since the hosting plan provider itself might just close its doors unexpectedly and you might not have access to your site, not to talk of your backups!
- Subdomains and add-on domains: You can add subdomains and even add-on domains (depending on whether your hosting plan provider allows for this).
- Redirects: This is useful to temporarily or permanently redirect pages to another website or other website pages. Be careful though with using temporary redirects, as these might cause problems with the search engines.
- Protect directories: You can set up password protected directories on your website.
- Pre-installed scripts: The Fantastico installer is one of the best features of the Cpanel control panel! This installer helps you to quickly and easily install lots of open source (in other words, free to use) tools and utilities, such as shopping carts, forums, project management tools, WIKIS, and much more.
The CPanel control panel allows web hosting plan providers to make a lot of web hosting plan features available to clients who can then easily manage these features themselves.
