Website Hosting Services

Website hosting providers provide a vast array of services/features.

Here I will discuss some of the most popular ones and what they are used for.

Management Services

Cpanel

cPanel ("Control Panel") is a graphical web-based control panel, designed to make administration of websites easy.

It is proprietary software and distributed by cPanel, Inc., is designed for use by commercial web hosting services.

Most of the major hosting companies use it and several add-ons like Fantastico make managing a web server incredibly easy for the not so technical webmaster.

Whenever possible give preference to a host that provides cpanel as a front end.

Fantastico

Fantastico is a commercial script library for automating the installation of web applications on a website.

The scripts typically create tables in a database, install software like WordPress, adjust permissions, and modify configuration files.

Scripts exist for installing, upgrading and removing more than 50 applications.

Again Whenever possible give preference to a host that provides Fantastico support.

Support

You need to ask yourself questions like do you want phone support, or will email support be ok?

Do you want support 24 hours a day? If you have a small Web site that is not critical then you probably don't need phone support or 24/7 support. It costs Web hosting companies to provide this type of support, don't pay more for a plan that offers this if you don't need it.

It is becoming more common to provide support via interactive chat and I would give preference to hosts like Blue Host that provide this.