Web Site Hosting Reviews

   A CGI-bin is where you would store CGI scripts. These scripts; are used to generate online order forms, guestbooks, shopping carts, counters, and more!

   PHP is a powerful server-side, cross-platform, HTML embedded scripting language. We have PHP 4.3.1 patched with latest security patches announced by Zend. Also standard php functionality is enhanced with Zend Optimizer that not only optimizes and increases performance of php scripts but also allows running scripts encoded with Zend Encoder.

   Microsoft Active Server Pages (ASP) is a server-side scripting environment that you can use to create and run dynamic, interactive Web server applications. With ASP, you can combine HTML pages, script commands, and COM components to create interactive Web pages or powerful Web-based applications, which are easy to develop and modify.

   ASP.NET makes building real world Web applications dramatically easier. ASP.NET server controls enable an HTML-like style of declarative programming that let you build great pages with far less code than with classic ASP. Displaying data, validating user input, and uploading files are all amazingly easy. Best of all, ASP.NET pages work in all browsers -- including Netscape, Opera, AOL, and Internet Explorer. ASP.NET lets you leverage your current programming language skills. Unlike classic ASP, which supports only interpreted VBScript and JScript, ASP.NET now supports more than 25 .NET languages (including built-in support for VB.NET, C#, and JScript.NET -- no tool required), giving you unprecendented flexibility in your choice of language.

   Secure Socket Layer protects the communications between your internet site and web site browsers from interception and eavesdropping. An encrypted link is established and sensitive information such as passwords and credit card information can be transferred back and forth. Evidence of activation can be use of the https: protocol in the URL, a blue color banner around the browser window or the unbroken key symbol at the bottom of the browser window. Use of SSL increases the rate of data transfer or bandwidth.

   Database is a structured collection of data. It may be anything from a list of products on your site or the large amounts of information in a corporate network. To add, access, and process data stored in a computer database, you need a database management system.

   MySQL is a very fast, multi-threaded, multi-user, robust and extremely popular Structured Query Language (SQL) database server. Most of the web scripts and e-commerce software support MySQL.

   SSI (Server Side Includes) allow you embed output of CGI scripts into your web pages. Webserver will automatically execute scripts when the web page is opened and parse content into the page. It is extremely useful when you want to have common template for your pages and parse in content using scripts or just change some part of the page like calendar, news box, etc.

   Mailing lists allow you to send email to a large number of contacts in a very efficient manner.

Our mailing lists are powered by Mailman (www.list.org) which come pre-installed with each account and features an easy-to-use web based interface for your mailing lists management.

   You can set up autoresponders to automatically respond to incoming e-mail. For example, if you had an order form which your customers e-mail to you, you can set up an autoresponder to e-mail the customer a confirmation message. They're also known as Infobots.

   A mail forwarder or alias allows mapping an email address to any other email address. It allows you to manage your mail more effectively. For example, you can setup all mail that comes to somemailbox@domain.com to arrive to your private email account at your ISP myaccount@myisp.com or gather mail from some email contacts of your domain to one mailbox. This way mail directed to admin@domain.com and webmaster@domain.com will come to admin@domain.com.

   Simple Mail Transfer Protocol is used for transferring mail between internet hosts. It is often used to upload mail directly from the client to an intermediate host. Can only be used on systems that maintain a constant connection to the internet.

    FTP is File Transfer Protocol, an internet protocol used to transfer materials over the Internet. It is very fast, very efficient, and very reliable. You'll need FTP (File Transfer Protocol) access. This allows you to transfer files to and from your Web site, so virtually all web hosting companies provide this service. Some may provide a different way to transfer files, such as using FrontPage. But even if you use FrontPage, it's nice to have FTP access too.

   .htaccess file is custom configuration file of apache web server. It contains special instructions for the web server regarding how it should treat the files contained in the same directory as the .htaccess file and the subdirectories of that directory. It allows you to specify yourself some custom settings for apache web server without need to edit main configuration files.

    Your Web site will be limited to a certain amount of disk space, though you can buy more. Small, low-cost accounts may have just a couple of megabytes of disk space, larger sites will get tens, even hundreds of megs. You can actually get quite a lot into a megabyte or two, and a really huge site will need only a few hundred megs.

    Uptime is the percentage of time that a web site is working. For example, if some cheap web host has an uptime average of 99.86%, this means that your site will be down for a total about 1 hour each month. Some hosts also offer "uptime guarantees" but this is not as valuable as it might appear.

    If you have more than one domain name, you can have them all point to the same Web site. For instance, you might have one domain name for your company and other domain names that you are using to promote specific products. There are different ways to handle this. All the domains can point to the same directory, or you can have separate directories for each domain. Of course, there are different ways to charge, too.

    You'll generally get an e-mail account with your Web site. Sometimes you'll get several accounts even though you may need no more than one. Some web hosting companies, however, may charge extra for the account.
With a single e-mail account, you can retrieve e-mail that has been sent to various addresses:

   • info@cover.com,

   • sales@cover.com,

   • joe@cover.com,

   • susie@cover.com and so on.