Cold Fusion is a scripting language that gained popularity a few years back and was an alternative to VGI, Perl and PHP languages.

It is used to manipulate data from a database or databases to bring life to a website with actual time data retrieval. Many sites today use “CF” as it is called in the application world and we will know it from the extension of “.cfm” in the file naming process.

Cold fusion hosting popularity remains in its simplicity as the code resembles HTML as opposed to functions and other typical programming-related syntaxes. Many developers prefer CF due to the fact that it is easy and it can do anything other languages can do.
CF can work on both Windows, Linux, and UNIX platforms which offers quite a variety depending on the programmer’s preference. Also, because it is easier, it is also quicker to develop applications without having to deal with the complexities of their counterparts.
We also need to understand that Cold Fusion web hosting does have one disadvantage as it is an expensive piece of software for our provider and therefore the packages with CF included will be more expensive, however, CF does come with loads of extra tags that can do remarkable things with web development.

The first thing we need to look at is the version of Cold Fusion that the web host uses. Cold Fusion is up to CFMX 7.0, where MX is the next generation of CF development. It won’t make any sense to create our site in 7.0 if our host only has version 5.0 .

Version 7.0 is the most recent, most web hosts may not have it available, at least immediately. The majority of web hosts also utilize Cold Fusion on the Windows platform and if we are dead set on Linux/UNIX, then we will need to confirm this with our hosting provider.

It’s always good to use the latest version of Cold Fusion as it has the most updates and functionality to make our website that much better. As well as very fast.

Our research should include the obvious basics like support, quality of the network, and pricing, not to forget the version that the providers are using. Do we need to ask ourselves what is most important to us?

Support really should be our deciding factor as Cold Fusion is a specific type of software that the staff should have some tips about.

We do not need to be looking for experts but our web host should have an idea of issues that may arise that are CF specific.