Web Hosting with cPanel®, PHP, MySQL

Doug Hockinson's goal is to assist small businesses by optimizing and leveraging their website's exposure in order to increase sales, generate new leads, and disseminate information about goods and services in a cost effective manner.

Services include web site hosting, web design and development using a custom built content management system, search engine optimization, and domain name registration. With a little help from the web designer, your custom web site can be beautiful in addition to being fully functional and frequently visited. Professional web site design will help your website become an effective marketing tool for locating new clients and relaying information to existing clients.

Doug currently provides web hosting to about 100 domains which are professionally hosted through a web hosting reseller account with HostGator.com. Problems with HostGator.com have been few and far between. Other web hosts used during the past ten years have done all sorts of stupid things, such as migrate from one data center to another and change IP addresses without advance notice. Other hosts have chosen to make unannounced changes to the server operating system, resulting in multiple websites crashing for no apparent reason.

HostGator.com provides professional Linux based cPanel® web hosting for more than a million domain names, and is owned by a single individual who cares about offering good service. HostGator.com does a remarkable job of maintaining a high quality shared hosting environment. Up-time on most hosting networks is 99.9% of the time, which means at some point, down time will occur. Down time may result from incoming spam attacks, denial of service attacks, hardware problems, software problems, routing issues, or another user momentarily hogging resources in a shared hosting environment. Service interruptions often last less than a minute.

Annual web hosting is typically billed at $120 per year, in exchange for which several links to your website will be placed on our websites in order to help you with SEO. If you require a dedicated IP address, add $25/year. If you require an SSL certificate, contact us for details (approximately $75/year for SSL). Invoices for web hosting and related services are sent via email link to QuickBooks.com where payment can be made using a credit card. Hosting fees are payable in advance from the date service is established (not from the date that the site is complete).

HostGator is one of the world's largest Web hosting companies. It has about 225,000 customers and more than 8,000 servers under management, and it hosts more than 3 million domains, accounting for 2 percent of the world's Internet traffic, according to the company.

High quality Dedicated Hosting can be arranged for about $300+ per month (which is why most websites reside in a shared hosting environment). A good web server can handle hundreds of websites in a shared hosting environment because at a given moment only a few of the sites are being accessed. Data centers monitor server activity on a daily basis, and may periodically relocate rapidly growing sites to servers that are less busy.

cPanel® is a Website Control Panel

cPanel® is a brand name of website control panel. cPanel® provides developers with an easily accessible set of software applications which are often required in order to create a professional website. Proprietary website control panels are generally inadequate in many respects (from a programmer's perspective) and often serve primarily to promote the sale additional hosting features and/or other unnecessary services.

cPanel® is roughly similar to a Windows control panel in terms of controlling various server settings and the configuring email accounts. Web hosts who offer alternative control panels are trying to do business on the cheap, rarely update their servers, rarely update server software, and generally don't care if anything more than basic email administration can be accomplished using a non-cPanel® interface.

A cPanel® demo can be accessed with the login of demo / demo at cPanel® Demo.

Email Accounts

cPanel® facilitates the creation Email Accounts and Email Forwarders. The difference between an Email Account and an Email Forwarder is that messages sent to an Email Account reside on the web server until removed by Outlook or similar email software, while Forwarders simply forward messages to other Email Accounts. Forwarders offer a method of sending copies of messages to multiple people.

Many clients have migrated to either Gmail or Google Apps for email management because one of the many benefits is that storage quotas are measured in Gigabytes. Usage of Google Apps is very popular due to a wide range of free services that are otherwise unavailable through standard web hosting.

Squirrelmail is a legacy software application provided by most web hosts. Squirrelmail is not intended for regular, daily use. For security reasons, it logs users out after a few minutes, which results in the loss of messages currently being composed. Gmail is infinitely more user friendly than Squirrelmail.

Website Statistics

The website control panel includes AWStats which provides concise statistics regarding hits and the number of unique visitors. The term hits includes requests for images and other file. The unique visitor count is a much more meaningful statistic.

With respect to content residing in the content management system, page requests can be logged so that page popularity is easily determined.

Fantastico and other resources

Fantastico is a cPanel® feature capable of instantly installing a wide variety of Open Source applications, including blogs.

The searchable Hostgator Support Portal is an excellent resource for locating technical information on a wide variety of topics.

Hostgator cPanel® Tutorials

Coupon code JK26M0JQRT is good for a one-time discount of $9.94 on new web hosting accounts with HostGator.com (the largest privately owned web host in the USA).