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The web hosting service is one of the most competitive fields and this has encouraged the various web hosting companies to provide various hosting plans at affordable rate. This has further forced these companies to stand out other others performance. Though the extra features such as site builder, free domain name and the costing plays significant roles, it is the control panel that makes a major difference. Therefore, it is very important to select the proper service depending on the type of website. These control panels are actually a set of software offered by the web hosting company in order to manage and control the website. It is through the control panel, that a web hosting company supervises each and every activity of a website. These activities include opening of FTP accounts, creating email server, preparing and maintaining statistics report etc. In fact there are a variety of control panels. Some of these control panels work only for Windows platform, some only for Linux platform and some others work for both the platforms. Control panels for websites based on Windows Platform There are certain web hosting control panels that work only for Windows platform. Hosting Accelerator and Helm are the typical examples of Windows only web hosting control panel. However, Helm is one of the most popular Windows only web hosting control panel due to its several customer friendly features. One of the most outstanding features of Helm is the billing information as most all the normally used control panels do not posses billing information within the control panel. The only exception is the H-sphere. Moreover, Helm is also very convenient to operate as well as has a very good standard interface. Features and advantages of 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. * The ability to manage billing: A hosting company will have the choice of using the internal billing system provided by Helm or any billing system offered by an external partner. the customer can have their bill created in the currency the like and they have the option to provide these invoices in plain text format and HTML 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: The DirectAdmin, Interworx and cPanel are a few examples web hosting control panels that works only for Linux platform. The DirectAdmin offers a low hosting cost and is the most convenient type of control panel. The Interworx offers an easy to use interface along with several other features. It is the cPanel, which is the most popular Linux based control panel and serves for over ten flavours of Linux. Most of the web hosting companies also have a preference for cPanel, due to its low hosting cost. This particular software package provides several other services such as deploy applications, provision customer accounts, transfer accounts from one server to another, servers secure and many other useful services. Features and advantages of cPanel: * 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. * FTP and File Manager: The cPanel offers FTP access to a website so as to upload files. It is an extremely essential feature for managing a website. Moreover, if the website owner needs the cPanel also allows to register new FTP accounts in order to enable other people to access the website. However, it is the website owner and the hosting company that have the right to restrict and specify others access to specific folders. The one who are the not that comfortable with FTP package to upload files can use the File Manager available in the cPanel. The File Manager allows the user to unzip files, upload files on the server, as well as copy and delete files. What control panels are suitable for the Linux and Windows Platform 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: * 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. * The ability to have dedicated hosting: A good number of technically proficient clients would like to undertake their own dedicated hosting and Plesk and its control panel facilitates this by means of its RPM installation and its modular design. There are a whole host of tools on offer to the client and these include XML-API and other unique 3rd party applications.
Article Source: http://www.articlesfeed.com
About the author: Matt Hedges is a 12 year veteran of the web hosting industry. Hedges is the head staff writer for www.webhostingmadness.com, a web hosting review site.
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