The critical point to remember when evaluating hosts is the most essential quality is responsiveness – of your site and support people. Your site should be up virtually all the time (unfortunately, computer crashes happen, but they should be rare and far between), and it must be fast. In addition, all good hosts react promptly to support issues and questions. You can tell when a host is going wrong from the failure of these critical areas – unresponsive technical support, slow servers or constant downtime.

This information is intended as a kind of checklist – what is essential, essential if you need it, optional and not important at all? Look it over, and then when you sign up, you will know we have all listed.

Essential Qualities

Reasonable support – You won’t know this until you’ve started using our services, and I know you will not need much help. However, when you have a question, concern or problem, you must have a way to contact our support staff. Just as important is handling the issue, which needs to be fast and efficient. We provide more than reasonable support as we have a toll-free number for you, plus a live support link to us on every page. This is up and running for you to reach us 75% of the time, as we have to rest, too. But you can always use it to send an email which gets answered quickly. Or just call the toll-free number.

Even if you don’t have any particular reason to contact support, it’s a good idea to send off a message occasionally just to see if we are on the ball.

Access to control panel -We give you a well-defined control panel. What does this do for you? It allows you to control your website (account) features from your web browser. For example, using the menu, you can upload files, protect directories, add autoresponders, etc.

Excellent automation – This is perhaps one of the more essential features that Cpwebhosting.net/.com has. Automation. You can access everything you want from a well-designed menu and do virtually anything without involving a human being.

Control of creating protected directories – Sometimes, it doesn’t seem important, but you will almost certainly want to create a protected directory sooner or later. This directory (or
folder or file) on your website requires a username and password. We’ll allow you to do this directly from your account menu.

Error pages – Create your own 401, 403 and 404 error pages. You’ll like letting visitors know nicely when there is a problem. We allow these files to be maintained from the control panel. Also, you can edit your .htaccess file directly.

Reasonable performance – A website must load quickly. It’s hard enough to get page sizes down to the point where they load reasonably quickly without your web host slowing things down. We won’t let this happen, and every server is monitored for performance to ensure this won’t happen.

Domain Parking – It’s beneficial to park a domain on your website. This can be useful for having several closely related domain names (internet-tips.net and internet-secrets.net, for example) and reserving fields for future use. We allow you to do this.

They are good stuff to have if you need them, and we at Cpwebhosting.net/.com provide them when requested.

Telnet access – Accessing your site from Telnet (command line) is helpful, but most webmasters will never need this function. This is especially true because procedures such as CRONTAB (scheduling tasks) can be done through the control panel.

Custom CGI scripts – Every site can install your own CGI scripts. This is not important, of course, if you don’t plan on including any of your scripts.

PERL Support – If you use PERL routines, then this is essential. Again, this is not absolutely necessary if you are not using PERL.

SSI Support – Server Side Includes are a lovely way to make it easy to make changes to your web pages. Again, you either need it or you don’t.

PHP Support – PHP is a tremendous server-side scripting language (far superior to ASP). We provide you with this resource.

MySQL Support – MySQL is a database tool. This allows you to get input from visitors, store it on your website and allow your visitors to retrieve it later. You can do many more things, but again, this is like many of the resources you may never use, but we provide it just in case.

Unlimited autoresponders – Autoresponders are a great way to automate your website, so it’s a good idea to have them.

Direct access to server logs – You can get along without access, making it easier to tell how your site is doing. We provide them to you.

Upload from the control panel in addition to FTP access – Not essential, but nice to use occasionally.

SSL Support – This is needed to run secure web pages from your site. We provide this interface.

Subdomains – A subdomain is a domain in the format of the subdomain. Domain. For example, shop. Scratch. Com is a subdomain. These are very useful for separating functional areas of your site. We allow you to have as many of these on your site as possible.

FrontPage Support – Well, if you use FrontPage, then you will obviously need to be able to upload pages and use the Frontpage extensions.

Not incredibly useful to most people

Some bells and whistles.

Search engine submission – You can use to submit your site to the search engines.

PERL modules – We will install PERL modules for you. This is a way to extend the functionality of PERL, and it’s not very useful to most webmasters.