The most common type of web hosting used today is shared web hosting. This means that several different web sites are sharing the resources of one web server. In this type of a set up, there is no one customer of the web hosting company that can have total control over the web server. However, customers want to have control over their web site. To address this issue, the web hosting company will have a web based control panel on the web server so that each customer with a site on that server can access their web site files, services and configurations.
There are many different web based control panels used today, some of which are cPanel, Plesk and Helm. In a shared web hosting environment, the company that runs the web server is responsible for the maintenance of the server overall including the installation of server software, security products and technical support. They will also install a control panel application such as the ones mentioned above, that allows the web server owner to allocate resources for the web site customers using their services. This same control panel application will give limited access to the web site owners so that they can configure their web sites and load files to the server accordingly.
If you are interested in doing your own web hosting, you will need to purchase a good control panel application in order to give your customers the features that they require. Be sure to do your research on the different types of control panel applications before continuing to set up your web servers. It is very important to understand how these control panel programs work and what the requirements are if you are gong to install them on your system. Some will only work with Windows or Unix operating systems, while others will have a version available for both.
You will also want to select the control panel application that you use based on the size of your web hosting company. If you are running a single server, a much more inexpensive control panel application may work fine for you. However, if you have multiple web servers or are planning on adding more web servers in the future, you will most likely want to choose a control panel application that is scalable and can be added to without down time. After all, the last thing that the customers want from the web hosting company that they pay is down time.
If you are trying to set up a web server for free web sites so that you can make money on advertising, there are free web hosting control panel solutions available such as web-cp which is an open source solution. Of course, with a free program, the technical support should you run into problems is just a support forum or chat rooms where other users have had some experience using the software. This may be a great solution if money is a concern, but it is not going to be efficient enough for paying customers.
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