Cpanel proxy: Enable your web hosting clients to access cpanel without a firewall.

Today, one of my clients had a problem. His firewall was preventing him from using the cpanel control panel on the regular port.

Happily, the site5 support stuff pointed me towareds a solution: using cpanelproxy. This is a simple PHP script which redirects traffic so that the cpanel account can be accessed through a normal http connection.

Links

• cpanelproxy.net
• site5
  

Effective web hosting control panel selection

One of the most important decisions you have to make when selecting your web host is your web hosting control panel selection. With a good control panel, you are saved of remembering the many technical details involved in hosting your web site, and have some more spare time for developing your unique website.

Which CP is the best? The choices become wider each day. So many choices you may almost feel lost. cPanel and Plesk, Helm, Ensim and DirectAdmin are only some of the names you would see. Certainly, a lot of research is needed before you decide.

My suggestion:

• When looking for a control panel, look at who uses it, and for what.
  
• Carefully define your requirements, and ask questions in forums, if you are not sure.

When I've selected my leatest web host, the control panel selection became a critical issue, since it is usually bundled with the deal.

During my process of control panel selection, two candidates remained:

• Pleask 7.5 Reloaded has it's an all-new GUI, designed by great usability experts, and is sure to catch some market share. But it still young and not all features are ready.
• cPanel is alot more mature and proven in the field, and hence has a larger amount of applications. For example: an integrated backup solution. Auomated application deployment with Fantastico, and a built-in backup solution which allows me to easily move my files to another cPanel-based web host when needed.
  

Recommended reading: This thread summerizes the most important points. Especially, read madsere's response:

Which CP you would choose I think depend on you and what you want to do with it.

If you are running your own sites only, or only expect to give users FTP access Plesk looks nice. It has a somewhat easier learning curve for administrators and users alike. This is also the solution that will give you best performance = most sites on a server for any given server load.

If you expect to give your users shell access there are no alternative to Ensim, using High Security mode for sites. It is not without a cost though and you should not expect to be able to host anywhere near the same number of sites in this environment as in Plesk (or Ensim Low Security).

Cpanel - has a large following mainly for historic reasons - they were among the first around and way older than Plesk or Ensim. It always reminds me of a big house that started out as a small house and had a large number of annexes bolted onto it.

Helm thankfully doesn't exist for Linux but I find it quite similar to Plesk in many ways.

Amnon

Content management allows for affordable business hosting.

For affordable business hosting, you need a good content management system and strategy.

t's a long time since my last post. I've been busy checking and testing web hosting solutions. I've come to the conclusion that drupal is the best web architecture solution for the long range. Not only it's free, but it's also high quality and modular. Community is the main driving force behind the tool.

Before checking a tool, check the community that is formed around the tool. A great community allows you to get support, allows the product to get better, and allows you to work less and get more. This is true for all software tools, and especially for content management systems.

Checklist for Reseller Hostings

Reseller hostings are the most cost-effective type of hosting. Which features are needed? What should you look for? Take a look at my new reseller hostings checklist for effective hosting of reseller accounts.

To blog or not to blog - that's the question.

If you are a journalist or a writer, a blog is a good place for writing and sharing your writing with the world.

But blogs are also time consuming, and writing personal blogs makes you a public figure. Don't share things too personal. And don't share your opinions about your employer. Or about your mate. In the following page, the author explains why he doesn't write a personal weblog.

Blogging is a commitment, and not everyone wants to update his blog all the time. If you don't update your blog, it becomes closer and closer to a usuall site.

RSS is going to revolutionize journalism but not everyone is a journalist.

The following RSS guidelines site contains good information on using RSS for business. Business blogging tips are also included.

RSS (and business blogging) is great for short updates about the current state of affairs. It's good for marketing and for search-engine optimization. Blogs have their place. But don't over-use them. The world is not really that dynamic. The lifetime of a good article, for example, is much longer, and it takes less of your time.

Write your usuall way, and think of blogs as a distribution mechanism. Don't write unless you want to share it with the whole world.

Combine blogs with your usuall site, like I do with small-business-web-hosting-strategies.com. Be positive, and smile.

Business promotion - article submission services

How to promote your business site?

One of the most effective ways is to write articles.

But article distribution is very time consuming. Submitting your site to tens or hundreds of publications can take some time. An alternative is to use an article submission service.

A quick search discovered the following resources to help:

• Phantom Writers - a good article distribution comunity (here is an article from the founder's blog - Using content to help SEs find you.
• SubmitYourArticle
  
• Virtualize your business - offer an article submission manual at 39$.
  
• Discussion on the subject of article submission at seochat.com. Zongoo and GoArticles are recommended, as well as ArticleAgents (!!) and SimplySearch4it and ReviewAgent.
  

Web Hosting Jury - Web Hosting Reviews

So many web hosting options... Beyond price, the quality of support is the thing which really matters. But how to find it out?

One of the most effective ways is to search google. Checking ivhosting.com, I was looking at google for the name of the host plus the word support.
The following thread (in the tenth place) was enough in order to change my mind.

Then, I checked the support level of canaca.com. I googled for canaca + support. The WebHostingJury Canaca review was enough to change my mind.

WebHostingJury appeared again and again. Then I started to check WebHostingJury.com for the hosts in the first five places - which got no negative response.

I decided that a dedicated server (even with prices that start at 30$ per month) is too complex to manage (the cpanel costs another 40$ per month, and I have to get used to it first). It was a nice to discover much better packages, with live chat support, better disk space, more bandwidth, SSH, and extra domains.

Live chat support is essential for webmasters like me, who live outside the united stats - the price of phone support is too high, and email can't provide a bidirectional communication channel.

The listing now got more focused.

Affordable dedicated hosting solutions

In a previous post, I quoted 50$/month as the minal price in which you can get dedicated hosting. Now, I've found a hosting solution which is even better: At ServerPronto, you can get The World’s Most Affordable Dedicated Server for a price which starts at 30$ per month.

Plan your file transfer bandwidth. My small, 300MB site with 700 visitors per day used 10GB bandwidth last month, and 20GB in the month before. So the 200GB bandwidth is not really that much.

Hostrocket.com is the only company allows you to bandwidth rollover - A great tool to keep customers loyal. But it does so for a price. For the same price, at canaca.com, you can buy a bandwidth which is almost ten times larger then hostrocket.

Another important issue is the VPN. Without a VPN (or SSH / SFTP), external server connections are exposed to password hijacking.

File hosting or file sharing

Finding market trends for business hosting is now easier then ever

Tonight I was looking at the overture keyword selector tool.
I was searching for 'file hosting' keywords, in order to verify which words are the most popular. The traffic for 'file hosting' was very limited.

Then, I remembered a nice article I've read yesterday, about file sharing using bittornet, which allows for speed file downloads using a distributed, free technology.

So I took overture for another ride. The popularity of 'file sharing' was 66 times more!!!

WOW!!!

But why?

• Sharing, is a social thing. Hosting, means control. Collaboration, works faster.
• Sharing is fundumental to the nature of the net.
• While centralized hosting means control, it also means limited performance and larger security vulnerabilities (All resources are saved in one, or several central hosts). Distributed sharing networks can outperform it.
  

To put it in shakespare words: "To share or not to share, that's the question."

The next step is creating a secure sharing architecture.

Open source web-hosting architecture

Open source business hosting is a groung trend. Benefits include tools availability, skills availability, and easy maintaintability. But which architecture is the best?
OReily identified the trend and created OnLamp.com to discuss those issues. Lamp - defines how MySQL was used in conjunction with Linux, Apache, and either Perl, Python, or PHP. It's so easy to use the web to create new trends nowdays. How Lamp was formed? - read here.

Recommended business web hosting companies

Some months ago, I have looked for business web hosting companies - my Hebrew site is growing up and I need effective support.

The following services are unique:

• HostRocket - They have two unique features - chat based support and a fixed, low price for script installaion services. good interactive support
• IpowerWeb.com - dedicated server at 50$, with a huge 30GB disk space.
• LunarPages - outstanding customer service.
• HostExcellence - good storage volume
• Canaca - huge  storage volume and technology with a very cheap hosting price. Intended for expert webmasters and resellers who can provide their support.

How to select a web hosting company for your business site?

What matters most is the social network created around the web hosting service

• Take a look at my web hosting companies selection checklist
• Then take a look at review sites like hosting-chart and ixwebhosting.
• Then read my business hosting packages selection tips.

Announcing your blog site posts

After your create your small business blog, the next step is to add content to it. When you add content, how to tell the world when something new is posted on your blog? This is easily done by services like Ping-O-Matic.

Creating blogs to get search engines to notice your website

Do you have a new site? Does your site gets enough traffic? One of the best ways to get the search engines notice your site is by creating blogs. I used this article to get started.

Business hosting packages

How to easily find the best packages for business hosting? My new article contains essential tips on selecting the best business hosting packages. The social factor is the most important.

Welcome to my small-business web hosting strategies blog

This blog accompanies the development of my small business web hosting strategies site and documents it's development.

Blogging is quickly becoming an essential small-business tool. Read about it in my blog-hosting article.

Your comments are welcome.