Hosting
Hosting is the term used when you purchase space on the
Internet for your site. Today, however, there's really more to hosting
than the space, and more to a web site that what the user sees.
With a good hosting provider you can expect a number of
other useful things, which are generally made available through a control
panel page you have to log in to.
Mail Server
Even the smallest hosting providers will provide you with
a mail server. The mail server sends are receives mail for you using
your domain name. you will also be able to log in to
the server to read your mail. In a good system, you will also be able
to set up an unlimited number of mail accounts for all your staff members.
Reports
Your web server tracks about every aspect of the operation
of your web site, including recording what pages are accessed, how often,
by whom (identified by domain), and missing pages that someone tried
to access. There is also a
Database Support
Many hosts allow you a limited number of back-end databases,
typically using MySQL and php support. Many of the blogs and forums use
these, as well as shopping carts. In addition, a popular utility, phpMyAdmin,
can be used to browse, configure and edit the databases.
Script Support
Script support is the ability to run scripts, or short
programs to do various things. Many of the contact forms are driven by
scripts. In addition, you can run periodic scripts with a server utility
called cron. A cron job can update some aspect of your site every 5 minutes,
as well as run on a daily basis. The Tyler Web Sites site search database
is run daily, and the Tyler Forums mail2forum utility checks Tyler Forums
mailbox for email posts to the forum.
Installations
One of the best things about the control panel is the ability
to install various utilities and applications automatically. Many of
them are quite powerful, although they are also quite complex to configure.
Mailing lists, guest books, forums, blogs, counters, shopping carts and
more are available from these automatic scripts.
