The web hosting providers today should be more creative to lure their customers. They need different offers to give to their customers so that their customers don’t move their web hosting account to other places. That’s why you could see that there is so many offers or web hosting deals across the web that giving you some ‘extra features’ when you buy their web hosting plan.

One of the best web hosting extra features is dedicated IP address. If you have a shared hosting, the chances are that you endanger yourself and your website when you used the shared IP address. Why? Because when one of the other web hosting customers get blacklisted from some websites or services, you could get blacklisted too. So, having the dedicated IP address at least will protect you from other web hosting customers.

Another extra is anti-virus and anti-spam. Both of these features are the best features that you could expect and get direct benefits from it. The anti-virus will protect your website files from any attacks that constantly happen in the World Wide Web.

The anti-spam could protect your email and banish the spam emails that trying to penetrate your inbox. If you want to get the web hosting plan that offer you some extras, make sure you included both of this into your list to protect your website.

The last but not least extra feature is website statistics. You could track your website statistics day after day, week after week, even month after month. If you own any online business or if you sell something from your website, this is the best offer that you could expect.

With this, you could do some experiments with your marketing methods, and see the results right away. You could track down where are your visitors come from, what they do in your website, or which pages that they love most. You could then build a stronger offer for them and use the most effective way to generate more traffic into your website.

For some people, the extra features could be very helpful for their website. While others might think that it’s just some extras that they don’t need. No matter what they think about it, you need to get the extra features according to what your website needs. However, you need to be careful when you get these extra features because some of them are free and some others are not. If you want to get it for free, make sure that there’s no additional fee to get it.

There are so many CPanel features that you could use right away to manage your website and improve the user experiences. Here are some of the features of CPanel that you’ll find useful:

1. Site Tools

Included in this site tools are File Manager to manage your website files, Search Engine Tool to submitting your website into search engines, Install/Uninstall FrontPage Extensions, Redirects, Custom Error Pages, Web Protect, and so on.

2. Email

This email program allows you to add, edit, remove, delete, and change your passwords while using your email accounts. CPanel also brought this email feature further by giving you the Webmail, Auto responders, Mailing List, Spam Filters, Forwarders, and more.

3. Backup

This is the most important part in your CPanel. You need to backup your files often just in case your website can’t be accessed or got attacks from “bad people” that could erase all of your data. You could do an automatic backup for your website too if you like.

4. Stats

This is a feature that will track down your website popularity. Some of the tools available in this feature are View error log, View bandwidth usage, View latest visitors, AWStats, Analog stats, Webalizer web stats and FTP stats.

5. FTP

This is the feature that controlling your FTP account. You could add, edit, or change the password to access it. There are also other ability such as Anonymous FTP controls that could change your FTP login message, and the ability to kill the FTP sessions.

6. Advance Stuff

This is related to your domains and sub domains. You could manage your domains in here and doing some Sub domain Redirects and checking the Stats.

7. Advance Tools

This is provided by CPanel for you to increase maximize your usage of Cron Jobs, SSH access tools, and GPG keys.

8. Add-on Tools and Scripts

Further, you could also find many of open source scripts plus other pre-installed CGI scripts in the CPanel. These scripts are provided by your web hosting provider and different provider will have a slightly different pre-installed scripts. Some of the pre-installed CGI scripts that you can use is phpMyAdmin, MySQL databases, DNS Lookup, Java Countdown Generator, Java clock Generator, Advance Guestbook, Random HTML Generator, phpMyChat, HTML Chat, Java Chat, Bulletin Board, Agora Cart, and more.

CPanel works with almost all web browsers, such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, and so on. Because of the simplicity of the interface in CPanel, most beginners won’t find it hard to manage their website hosting account with it.

The web hosting company who provides you with free web hosting services often makes their money from the ads. They strategically place these ads in your website, either at the top or at the bottom of your website. In this way, if by any chance someone is visiting your website and clicking the ads, the web hosting company would make money from the click itself or from the purchased goods that been done by the visitors.

Free web hosting services usually have more limited features if you compare it with the other premium plans. The web hosting company probably will give you about 5MB – 100MB disk space to begin with. You could take advantage of this offer by building your website and sell some products or services, and eventually purchase the premium plan to access more features and benefits. Some of them are a bigger disk space and bandwidth, free website templates, able to manage your database, additional scripts, and so on.

The domain name that you’ll get for this free web hosting service is the subdomain. For example, if the web hosting company has a domain name called www.myhosting.com, yours will be yourname.myhosting.com. If you have some cash to start, you could invest it by building your own domain name, and linked it to your website that you host in this free web hosting.

There are so many advantages and disadvantages for this free web hosting service. The advantages are you could start building your website without spending any money, you’ll get your own subdomain name, and you could manage your own website. The disadvantages are, your website will be penetrated by the web hosting company ads, usually you’ll get no database and no multiple email accounts, and sometimes you can’t included the modules like PHP, DHTML, and Flash in your website.

Even though there are several advantages and disadvantages of this free web hosting services, you could use this service to build your own website, and work your way out to purchase a bigger plan.

Whether you have a simple website or a complex one, any data that you input into your website will store in a database. To do the changes in your database such ass add, edit, delete or process your database, you need a database management system. MySQL is one of the best database management systems that you can use for your website.

MYSQL also has the ability to create a relational database management. It means that you could input the data, and then put it in the several tables at once. This will make your database organizing more structured than putting it all in a large tables.

Using MySQL database doesn’t always require you to have remote servers. You could also install it in your own PC to build any applications that you have in mind. To interact with various databases that you have, you could use commands from PHP script.

There are several things you need to consider before you choose the web hosting plan with MySQL in it. It’s not just as simple as picking the web hosting plan that has the biggest bandwidth, disk space, email accounts, or addon domains. It’s much more than that. Here are several points that you should have in your web hosting plan in order to run this MySQL database successfully:

1. Database

Figure out how many databases that you want to have for your website. A web hosting provider usually limits the MySQL database amounts according to the web hosting plan that you purchased. MySQL web hosting usually allows you to have multiple websites and more than 5 MySQL databases.

2. Interface

Because you’ll be working with your database frequently, you need a web hosting plan that designed specially for admin interface. It should be easier for you to manage your database in MySQL using the interface they provided. If you’re working on a team, you probably need to create multiple user ID’s. It’s to make sure that only specific person could access specific data. You could choose the web hosting provider that using CPanel because it has a good user interface and dashboard.

3. CRON Support

A cron will helps you to run some scripts regularly and automatically. By using this, you could set up when you want to run the scripts for your website. CPanel has the option for crons that you could take advantage of.

4. PHP

As you probably know, MySQL is the closest friend of PHP. You need to check out for the MySQL web hosting providers that could give you PHP extensions. Before you subscribe to any of the MySQL web hosting plans, you need to figure out the capabilities of that web hosting in managing your databases and PHP. If you failed to do so, you could be very disappointed with it in the future.

When you have intent to run MySQL databases in your website, it’s better for you to choose web hosting providers that offers a complete solution rather than just a usual web hosting that offer pure basic function.

To get a domain name, you’ll need to register it with a domain name service registrar. Please note that there are no two domain names that have the same words or numbers. It’s because each domain name is unique, and if there is already a person register the domain name www.mysite.com, you can’t buy the same name.

ICANN is the organization that’s responsible for providing procedures and standards for certifying any companies as a domain name registrar. It means if you want to start a business to sell a domain name to end users, you need to be registered with ICANN first.

The domain name service is still growing throughout the years. You could find that there are more domain name registrars today than ten years ago. The first domain name registrar that you could find is Network Solutions (www.netsol.com). A domain name registrar is allowed to access and change the master database domains on InterNIC servers. The fee to access this master database is determined by the registrar. That’s why you could see that the price of a domain name will be different between each domain name registrar.

For a small business owner and companies, having a domain name is a must, especially if they’re planning to launch a website online. The domain name will be their identity so that people could find it easier on the Internet. The domain name could also used as a branding tool. You could build an excellent websites, services, or customer supports in your website, and people will remember your domain name every time they want to buy your products or services. Putting your domain name on the advertisements media or name card will boost your sales because people who can’t come directly to your place could access your website online, and buy it from there.

To buy a domain name, you need to get a domain name registrar first. You could go to GoDaddy (www.godaddy.com) or NameCheap (www.namecheap.com) to register your domain name. After that input the domain name that you wish to buy. The registrar will do the check first whether the domain name is already bought or not. If it is, you’ll need to insert another domain name, if it’s not, you’ll proceed to the payment page. After you do the payment, the registrar will need about 24 hours to activate your domain name before you can use it.

Domain name registrar usually has complete packages that you can choose. They put together a deal for you to have a web hosting along with a bonus domain name. This is a great choice for you to have a domain name and web hosting at the same time.