Of all the competitive industries today, the web hosting service is one of the most keenly fought and consumers have witnessed web hosting firms engage in a battle to win customers. This has led many to provide a variety of different hosting plans at a pleasant price in order to stand out from their peers. Another way that companies can differentiate themselves is by the performance they offer. There are many different aspects that a web host can offer and these can include offering to build a site for their customer or giving them a domain name free of charge. These issues and the price itself can sway a customers decision but the most important factor is the control panel. This means it is imperative for a web host to offer the correct service for a customers website needs. This service ensures that a web hosting firm is able to observe every aspect of a website and it does so through the software that makes up the control panel. Whether it is to open FTP accounts, provide an email server or offer statistical analysis of what is occurring on the website, the control panel enables it all. There are a number of control panels available and what one is right for you depend on many things, including what platform you operate on. There are control panels that only work on Windows, some which work on Linux and others that work on both.
What control panels are suitable for Windows Platform
The Windows Platform has a number of dedicated web hosting Control Panels that only work for them. Two examples of these include Helm and Hosting Accelerator. If an easy to use and customer friendly interface is required, Helm is generally held in the highest regard. A major reason that Helm stands apart from its competitors is due to the way it operates its billing information. More often than not, Control Panels do not contain information about the billing process so this is one area where Helm can be differentiated from other firms although H-Sphere also offers this advantage. In addition to this benefit, Helm is easy to operate and many users are able to interface with the system very comfortably.
Benefits of using Helm:
* Managing your server: Helm can interact in many ways with your server and can operate with unlimited servers and domains. It is also possible for users to add or remove servers with the minimum of fuss. There are many servers that Helm has compatibility with and these include, MailEnable, SmarterMail, Merak and Imail. In addition to these servers, Helm also works with MDaemon, Mail Servers and hMailServer in addition to Serv-U FTP, Microsoft FTP, Gene6 FTP Server, MySQL Server, and Microsoft SQL Server etc. Helm is also capable of supporting ColdFusion, ASP, ASP,NET, PHP and Perl.
* Billing: They allow the hosting company to use either Helm’s own internal billing system or utilize any other 3rd party billing solution. It also enables to create the bill in any currency and provides the option of sending and viewing the invoices either in HTML format or in plain text format.
* Customer Management: This web hosting control panel also creates hosting plans for resellers as well as specifies the various resource limits including the amount of data transfer, domains, email accounts and disk-space.
The Linux Platform and the Control Panels for it:
A client has a choice of a few web hosting control panels when it comes to the Linux platform and these include DirectAdmin, cPanel and Interworx. There is no doubt that the low cost of hosting and the convenience of its control panel are factors in people choosing DirectAdmin. Another choice for many consumers is Interworx as they provide many additional features including a simple to use interface. Yet cPanel is the most popular control panel for the Linux control panels and it has the ability to serve over ten different styles of Linux. This consumer preference is also shared by companies who provide a web hosting service and this is mainly down to the low cost of its service. There are also a number of other services provided by cPanel that are attractive to customers and these include deploy applications, customer account provisions, having the ability to transfer a number of accounts between servers and many other useful services including secure servers.
Benefits of using Helm:
* Statistical analysis of a website: If a user would like to know how much traffic they receive, cPanel can provide them with a full range of statistical facilities to obtain these figures. Many web host providers do not offer this facility as statistical programs take up a whole host of resources. If having statistical information is vital for your site, be sure to ask any potential web host that they provide the service.
* Managing your emails: Having the ability to create and delete email accounts is something that many website owners crave and this is offered by cPanel. One of the major benefits is the Webmail facility that can be used by clients to access their emails online. There are a number of other programs that cPanel offers within its email range, with one of the most popular being the ability to create a forwarder that will pass emails in one account to another. There is also the facility to create a basic auto-responder that will send a pre-constructed reply to the sender if they submit an email about an enquiry.
* File Manager and FTP: FTP access is required to upload files and cPanel is capable of offering this facility and this is one of the most important features a website should be offering to its clients. Another thing that cPanel allows is for new FTP accounts to be registered so other people can have access the website. The power to restrict and specify access rights regarding certain files or folders will always remain with the website owner and the hosting company. Not everyone is happy with using an FTP package to load their files to a website and they can use the cPanel File Manager instead. This will grant the user to ability to unzip files, place files upon their server and be able to duplicate or erase any files.
Control panels that can be used on both the Linux and Windows platforms:
The web hosts discussed so far have only been for one platform but some hosts are able to cater for websites created on Linux and Windows. These dual application hosts include H-Sphere, Ensim and Plesk, which are probably the most common types of these control panels. They all have their own benefits and the H-Sphere is capable of offering many services that start at providing key functionalities and go all the way up to providing complete automation. There is no doubt though that Plesk is the most popular provider of both Linux and Windows control panel facilities. This is best shown by the fact that most companies that offer services for both Linux and Windows platforms choose Plesk. The interface of Plesk will be familiar to users of Windows XP but be aware that Plesk is expensive, which is due to its ability to serve both platforms.
Key benefits of using Plesk:
* The ability to have shared hosting: A huge benefit of Plesk is that offers facilities like self administration and a design that is identical for multi-platforms which makes it an ideal service to manage an environment of shared hosting. This can be undertaken even by people with no technical skills at all as Plesk aids the setup, creation and managing accounts process.
* Dedicated Hosting: The RPM installation and modular design of the Plesk control panel enables the Dedicated Hosting providers to satisfy the various requirements of tech savvy clients. It offers a number of unique tools such as XML-API and other 3rd party applications.
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