As you probably know, the competition in the web hosting business is very tight, and they need to get creative to get new customers everyday. Giving a free web hosting plan for the customers in one of the way to gain more subscribers for their web hosting plan. However, it is not an easy task because their competitors will likely use the same strategy as they do.

For us, the customers, this is a very good opportunity to get benefits that these web hosting providers give us. We could get the free web hosting plan, and actually host our websites in there without worrying about the monthly or yearly payments. The free web hosting service usually comes with limited features.

However, this shouldn’t be a big problem since most of the essential hosting features already included in the plan. You could upload your website directly from FTP or web interface. It depends on how the web hosting provider prepares their plan. The web interface one will be easier to use since you’re only have to do some drag-and-drop to create a beautiful website while FTP will took you longer to upload and maintain if you know nothing about it.

For a small business, free web hosting is a bad move. Your visitors will think that you’re not serious about your business, and eventually won’t buy anything from you. It’s better for the business owner to host their website in the paid web hosting provider since it could give you more control of your website, more features to benefit from, and also higher trust from your customers.

If you want to build a personal website or just hosting your personal blog, then by all means, choose the free web hosting plan. You could save more money by doing that and only use it to buy a domain name. However, if you’re totally broke, you could use the free domain name that already provided by the free web hosting provider. The domain name will look like this: http://yoursite.freewebhosting.com. It’s a subdomain, but it’s a good one.

To find the free web hosting is easy. Just open up google.com on your browsers and type “free web hosting”. This will pulls out tons of results that you could check one by one. Don’t forget to check out what other people says to when they use this particular web hosting. You want to make sure that they’re saying positive reviews for it because you don’t want your website suddenly disappear and can’t be accessible one day.

As you read before the free web hosting is completely the perfect choice if you want to build a personal website or blog. However, it probably won’t suitable to build a business website since you need a more reliable web hosting to host your website. But, you could use the free web hosting plan to test the features first before you purchase the web hosting plan for your business just to make sure that you’re familiar with the system and comfortable using the features.

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.

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.