Control Panels for Web Hosting

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.

The Windows Platform and the Control Panels for it.

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 needs: Helm has the ability to facilitate an unlimited amount of servers, users and domains whilst being able to swiftly increase or decrease the number of servers. Helm has a high level if integration and can be used alongside SmarterMail, MailEnable, Merak and Mdaemon. Amongst the other programs it can be used aside include Imail, Mail Servers, hMailServer, Serv-U FTP, Microsoft FT, MySQL Server, Gene6 FTP Server andMicrosoft SQL Server, amongst others. If that was not enough, Helm is able to support Perl,ASP.Net, ColdFusion and PHP ASP.

* 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.

* Managing customers: An additional feature of the control panel provided via web hosting is that it allows hosting plans to be created for resellers. In addition to this, there is the ability to quantify how different resource limits are being filled with respect to transferring data, the use of domains, emails and the amount of disk-space that is on offer.

Control panels for websites based on Linux platform:

There are some web hosting control panels that only operate on the Linux platform and these would include DirectAdmin, cPanel and Interworks. Many people like the services offered by DirectAdmin as they are availale for a low cost and is an extremely easy and convenient control panel to use. Similarly, many people choose Interworx as they find it a simple interface and it too offers a variety of additional features. However, these control panels cannot match the popularity of the cPanel service, which is by far the most coveted Linux based control panel. The cPanel service serves in excess of ten styles of Linux. One of the reasons why many of the companies who provide a web hosting facility like cPanel is due to the low cost of its hosting. There are also other benefits of this brand of software package which provides a great number of other services. These services include deploy applications, provide the ability for customer accounts, offer an account transferring service between servers, provides a secure server and many other key features.

Key benefits of using cPanel:

* Website statistics: The cPanel provides statistics facilities that enable a website owner to analyze the total amount of traffic. Most of the web hosting providers believe that the statistics programs consume a lot of resources on a shared environment and hence tend to eliminate this facility. Thereby it is always better to check whether the web hosting company is actually providing the web stats package.

* Email Management: This particular web hosting control panel provides an email management facility that allows the website owner to create as well as delete email accounts. They provide Webmail facility that enables their clients to read mail online. The cPanel further offers other email related facilities such as setting up forwarders in order to forward one email account to another, setting up simple auto-responders in order to send a computerized reply back to the sender in case there is an enquiry email.

* Providing File Manager and FTP facilities: Having FTP access is useful to upload files and cPanel provides this service and this facility is incredibly important when trying to manage a website. There is also the provision for a website owner to use the cPanel to give other people access to newly created FTP accounts. There is still the opportunity for the website owner to dictate the access rights of other users, a power shared by them and the host firm. Using a FTP package may not be for everyone and for those uncomfortable with using this process can have access to a File Manager in cPanel to control their files. The beauty of the File Manager is that it offers users the opportunity to load up files, unzip files and manage the copying and deletion processes of the 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.

Benefits of using Plesk:

* Having shared hosting: Plesk is able to provide an identical various-platform design that allows any user to take control of their shared hosting landscape. This facility can also be undertaken on a self-administration basis. No matter the technical level of the website owner, they will find they are able to take full control of setting up, creating and fully managing their accounts.

* Having dedicated hosting: Of course, some clients want to do more for themselves and this is where the technologically smart clients can do their own work. The Plesk control panels offers the RPM installation which makes the Dedicated Hosting providers able to set a challenge for any skilled tech owners. This is done by the use of tools such as XML-API and 3rd party applications which are not available anywhere else.

About the Author

This article is published with permission from http://www.webhostingmadness.com, a publisher of hosting company ratings, comparisons and detailed articles about the web hosting industry.

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