HostingOn (www.hostingon.com) is happy to announce the
substantial new improvements added to the Web Hosting Control
Panel. The Web Hosting Control Panel is now available in
Russian, Ukrainian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Simplified
Chinese, Traditional Chinese and French in addition to English,
German, Spanish, and Bulgarian. A completely new theme has
also been added to the Control Panel as well. The new theme is
available in the following colors: green, blue, sky blue, red
and orange. You can change the theme and its color from the
“Change Theme” button at the top right of the Control Panel,
through the “Account Profile” drop-down many at the top of the
page and through the “Change Control Panel Theme” link in the
lower part of the Control Panel home page.

An even more significant addition to the Web hosting Control
Panel is the introduction of Flash video tutorials for each
section of the Control Panel. The Flash video tutorials are
accessible from the “Support” drop-down menu at the top of the
Control Panel and through the “Video Tutorials” link at the
bottom right of the Control Panel homepage. When you access the
video tutorials you will be taken to a list containing all
available tutorial video and you can watch any tutorial of your
choice. You can also choose a section of the Control Panel from
the drop-down menus at the top of the page and you will be taken
to the respective section of the Control Panel, where next to
the “Help” link icon (a question mark) you will see a “Video
Tutorials” link and icon (a film strip). If there is a single
tutorial video associated with this section of the Control
Panel, it will start when you click on the “Video Tutorials”
link or icon. In case that there is more than one video tutorial
associated with the respective section of the Control Panel, you
will see the list of all available tutorials for this section.
You can watch the video tutorial that you choose by clicking on
the link with its title.

HostingOn.com hopes that the addition of video tutorials
will greatly enhance the usability of the Control Panel, while
the new theme will raise number of aesthetic choices and the
Russian, Ukrainian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Simplified Chinese,
Traditional Chinese and French version will increase the market
reach and presence of our services.

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Here is what you should look for in hosting plan features:

Often hosting plan features are tied into the type of control panel that is provided with the hosting service. Most people take for granted that a control panel should be part of the package, but in smaller countries outside the USA this is often a ‘luxury’ that is not part of the hosting package!

Finding out whether your hosting server provider offer a control panel to manage your website is the first essential feature that you should look for. It is unacceptable to sign up for a hosting package if there is no control panel!

Common control panels for Linux hosting are (my recommendation is to go for Linux hosting and not Windows hosting):

Helm

Plesk

Cpanel

DirectAdmin

All these control panels have their supporters and detractors.

I have to honestly say that my preference is CPanel. Cpanel offers a lot of functionality and a user friendly interface.

The following features are available with CPanel hosting:

~ Email management ~

Under email management you can create and delete all your email accounts. You also have access to a Webmail facility so that you can read your email online (as opposed to linking to your email account with Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express). You can also set up forwarders to forward one email account to another. You also have access to set up simple autoresponders to send an automated reply back if anyone sends an enquiry email to a specific email address.

~ Website statistics ~

Although most hosting providers do provide statistics facilities, it is worthwhile to make sure that they do. Some hosting providers think that the statistics programs consume too many resources on a shared environment and some of them therefore remove the facility. But statistics and the ability to analyze your traffic is essential when you set up a website, so make sure that you select a hosting provider that do provide you access to a web stats package. My personal favourite is AWStats. You can read an article on the different types of statistics programs as well as how to interpret your statistics here : http://www.tm4y.co.za/internet-marketing-tips/website-statistics.html

~ FTP ~

You should have FTP access to your website in order to upload files. This is absolutely essential if you want to manage your website. Cpanel also allows you to register new FTP accounts to give other people access to your website. You can restrict their access to specific folders on your website and specify if they should have read and/or write access.

~ File manager ~

If you are not comfortable with using an FTP package to upload your files, you can always use the file manager available in CPanel. The file manager enables you to upload files, unzip files on the server and to copy and delete files.

~ Backups ~

This allows you to make a backup of the files on your server, as well as to backup your MySQL database if you have one. This is very useful and should be done regularly. You cannot depend on the backups ran by the hosting service provider, since the service provider itself might just close its doors unexpectedly and you might not have access to your site – not to talk of your backups!

~ Subdomains and Add On Domains ~

You can add sub domains and even Add On domains (depending on whether your hosting provider allows for this)

~ Redirects ~

This is useful to temporarily or permanently redirect pages to another website or ther website pages. Be careful though with using temporary redirects, this might cause problems with the search engines.

~ Protect directories ~

You can set up password protected directories on your website

~ Pre-installed scripts ~

The Fantastico installer is one of the best features of the Cpanel control panel! This installer helps you to quickly and easily install lots of Open Source (in other words, free to use) tools and utilities, such as shopping carts, forums, project management tools, WIKIS and much more.

The CPanel control panel allows web hosting companies to make a lot of web hosting plan features available to clients who can then easily manage these features themselves.

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