Web Hosting Fan

Once a web site has been established and is ready to roll, an important piece of software that might make the road to success a bit easier is a good control panel.  Control panels allow web site owners the ability to administer their accounts via a web interface.  Of the many programs available, DirectAdmin is one control panel that is easy to use, stable and is competitively priced.

User Features

On the user end of things, DirectAdmin has a number of helpful features that make administering a web site a thing of ease.  Five different menus are presented – e-mail, ftp, dns, statistics, and sub-domains.  FrontPage extensions can be easily enabled or disabled by clicking a button.  Instead of using ftp, users can opt to use the built in file manager to upload files and create new directories.  DirectAdmin also has an advanced tools section where users can install SSL certificates, view server information and even enable site redirection and domain pointers.

Reseller Features

For resellers, DirectAdmin is an administrative gift.  New hosting accounts can be created instantly and current accounts can be modified or deleted as needed.  Predefined account packages can be created allowing even quicker account creation.  The built in ticket support system is designed to allow resellers to contact all resold account owners in case of system wide messages.  IPs can be allocated and name servers can be personalized.  All in all, DirectAdmin works well for resellers.

Administrator Features

Server administrators benefit greatly from DirectAdmin as well.  Resellers and admin accounts can be created quickly, predefined reseller packages can be set up, and IPs can be easily allocated all within the administrator’s portion of the DirectAdmin program.  Every aspect of server administration is controlled through the control panel making the life of an administrator just a bit less hectic.

Overall Features

DirectAdmin comes bundled with a ticket support system.  When logging into the system, administrators and support staff will be greeted with how many messages are waiting to be attended to.  The ticket support system can be configured to send e-mail notifications when a ticket has been created.  DirectAdmin is set to update live which means no more having to manually download and install new versions of software.  A quick click on the “licensing/updates” button performs the update without hassle.  The control panel program is also completely customizable allowing web hosting providers to make their “premier” control panel unique and part of their web site theme.

Cost

Pricing for DirectAdmin is split into several options.  For $29 each month, web hosting providers can opt for a monthly license.  To save a bit of money, providers can go with the yearly option offered at $200 per year.  The most economical over time is the “Lifetime License.”  For a one-time fee of $299.00, web hosts can outright own their own copy of the control panel software.  This last option also comes with 90 days of technical support.

Final Thoughts

Administrating a web site, reseller site or an entire server should not be a chore.  DirectAdmin is one control panel that takes the hard work out of being a web site owner and makes it fun again.

FrontPage 2002 showed designers that tables could not only be used to present tabular data, but also create page layouts.  After you get them down to a science, you will find that tables can help you design a pretty nice looking website with relative ease.  If you have a FrontPage hosting package, this is a great way to organize your site and thus, make it easier for visitors to navigate.

Why Use Tables for a Layout?

Using tables for layouts may be a hard concept to grasp, especially if you have never worked with them before in Access, Excel, Word or other applications.  In fact, it took some rather creative web designers to learn that you could place data into these spreadsheet-like fields along with text and graphics to create professional looking web pages.  The nice thing about designing with tables is that the information is organized in a way that enables it to be easily imported into your other documents or pages.  FrontPage can also use tables to produce dynamic templates which could save you a lot of time when creating new pages.

Creating Your Table

The easiest way to create tables in FrontPage is to select “Table” from the “Insert” menu.    You also have the option to import a table or draw one of your own.  Choose the page where you want the table inserted and it will show up. When setting up a table, FrontPage will ask questions about what type of table you want to actually create.  The main options you have are the number of columns and rows.  These cells are very useful as you can fill them descriptive text, your logo image, links to other pages and more.  It will probably take you a little time to get a hang of the cell structure, but all you really need to do is figure how many rows and columns you need for your table.  Remember, this isn’t a spreadsheet, so every cell doesn’t have to be filled.  Just think about how you want the layout to look and creating your table should be much easier.

Customizing Your Table

After getting your columns and rows together, FrontPage gives you other options to choose colors and borders for the table.  At this point, you can select the properties of each individual cell to create a more appealing look for your table.  Once you save the table, you can then add text, graphics or even tables within those cells.  This will take some experimenting but after a while, you are sure to get the hang of it and likely never rely on the task pane to design your page layouts again.

Conclusion

Using tables to create page layouts is just one of many tricks that can be performed when hosting with FrontPage 2002.  Aside from a low cost hosting solution, you can easily create a well organized, highly functional, professional website that looks just as good, if not better than the competition’s.

Automation is everything in the web hosting arena.  Without it, many of the same tasks that have become simple would revert to being tedious.  Even the most skilled administrators dread dealing with the raw aspects of a web server and operating system.  These are some of the factors that have led to the advent of administrative tools like Plesk.   The Plesk software makes a popular control panel choice for web hosting providers and end-users in shared, virtual or dedicated server environments.  Compatible with both Windows and Linux platforms, it provides all the tools needed to control a complicated web server or simple website.  It is also highly regarded as the most stable and reliable control panel on the market.  This article will give you an introduction on Plesk and overview some of its capabilities.

Plesk Features

The Plesk control panel aims to the simplify various administrative processes.  It lets you create and manage domains, install SSL certificates and even access the built-in site builder for putting your website together.  You can perform a number of simple tasks such as setting up email accounts, webmail and autoresponders as well as more advanced functions like billing customers and blocking spam with greylisting.  In addition, Plesk gives you the ability to manage files through a web-based file manager or by means of a FrontPage administrative panel.  Whether its viewing a website’s bandwidth usage or managing customer accounts, it can all be done within the confinement of this extremely capable control panel.  Plesk offers tremendous power, able to reduce operating costs and resource usage by automating a variety of tasks.

Control Levels

Plesk offers four levels of login, each with their own responsibilities and privileges.  These levels include:

Administrator – The highest level, this login allows the administrator control virtually every component of the system.  Once logged in at this level, you can centrally manage multiple servers be it an HTTP web server like Apache or a database server like MySQL.

Client – The client level login allows resellers to obtain creation rights from the system administrator.

Domain – The third level login is designed for the website owner or end user.  These permissions are what provides a user the ability to manage their hosting account.

Mail User – The fourth level login is designated for individual mail accounts.  Here, users can login and maintain their email accounts, change passwords, configure spam filters, change virus settings and more.

Plesk is One of the Best

Though it extends benefits to the end-user, the Plesk control panel was designed with professional web hosting providers and experienced system administrators in mind.  It enables companies to be very successful by providing the ability to maintain thousands of accounts per server with a high level of performance and better security than most competing control panels.  The software comes bundled with a variety of tools and even includes an application installer that allows end-users to incorporate blogs, bulletin boards and other types of program.  Plesk delivers the seamless automation needed to enrich and simplify the technically challenging hosting operation.

The web hosting business is driven by powerful systems and technologies, most of which are enabled by software tools.  Software is also a major draw of hosting packages as web hosts tend to offer a myriad of free programs.  Let’s go over some of the software you are bound to encounter when on the hunt for a web hosting service.

Control Panels

One type of software you will have frequent and direct access to is the control panel.   This application will provide the interface that allows you to set up email accounts, manage your webmail, add on domains and various other administrative tasks.  Some web hosting providers offer third-party control panels such as Plesk and cPanel while others develop their own custom programs.  Although the features and functionality may vary, all control panels strive to meet one goal – provide you with authority over your web hosting account.

Site Builders

In the web hosting world, site builders are exactly what they sound like: tools that allow you to create your website.  Almost every hosting provider offers some type of site builder or at least support for others.  This could be integrated utilities such as RV Builder or compatible applications like Microsoft FrontPage or Dreamweaver.  Regardless of the vendor, most site builders cater to the users by enabling you to build a site from scratch with pre-designed templates and drag-and-drop functionality.

Content Management Systems

A content management system or CMS, can be viewed as a more robust and capable alternative to the traditional site builder.  These programs offer features that surpass the norm, allowing you to effectively manage the content on websites of various sizes.  Some of today’s most well known content management systems are totally free to use.  These variations include open-source applications like Mambo, PHP-Nuke, Drupal and the award-winning Joomla CMS.  The CMS has become so popular that many customers flock to hosting solutions based solely on the content management tools offered.

Server-Side Scripts

Although server-side scripting refers to programming technologies, these languages and frameworks are actually enabled through software packages.  For example, a web host that offers PHP, Perl or ASP.NET is able to do so because they have these software applications installed on their web servers.  This allows you to enhance your HTML pages with dynamic, interactive features.  Server-side programming languages get more advanced with each release so there is virtually no limit to the functionality your site can enjoy.

Mail Servers

The mail server is one of the most important elements of a hosting package.  This type of program acts a transport agent that processes email from within the same domain.  Some of the most common examples of mail servers include Sendmail, qmail, Exim and Microsoft Exchange.  These applications typically work in conjunction with mail clients such as Outlook and Eudora, which forward messages to the server.

What’s Your Software?

There is definitely no shortage of software tools in the web hosting business.  Whether you are a novice or pro, your needs modest or complex, the features you get the most out of will surely be enabled by one form of software or another.