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Virtual
Hosting Options - Part III
E-Mail
Options
A POP mail account is where all your messages are sent and received
from. If you are the only person maintaining the site, 1 POP mail
account will do fine. However, lets say you are the webmaster and
another person is for support. You would want to have 2 seperate
POP mail accounts. Get the idea?
An e-mail alias
allow you to create multiple e-mail addresses for a domain. e.g.
[email protected], [email protected], etc. E-mail aliases
are sent to a specified POP mail account.
E-mail forwarders
allow you to forward e-mail messages from one e-mail address to
another address. e.g. you could forward [email protected] to
[email protected].
E-mail autoresponders
(AKA autoreplys) are very useful. You can configure an autoresponder
so when a message is sent to an e-mail address, a reply is automatically
sent to the sender. A great use an autoresponder is to inform a
sender you have received their message. This is automatic feedback
to the sender.
Shopping
Carts
If you sell any products online, you will need a shopping cart system.
A shopping cart system is a series of forms to help your visitors
select and purchase your products with ease. You should pick a host
that has a reputable shopping cart system already installed. This
will save you time and the frustration of setting it up yourself.
There are many third party sites that provide good shopping cart
systems, and you can link to them from your site.
Mailing List
Mailing lists are a powerful form of communicating with your visitors.
Mailing lists are generally used for the distribution of site newsletters
or e-mail discussion forums. I have found that most provider, especially
UNIX and Linux plans, offer Majordomo as the mailing list program.
Majordomo is a very hard to learn and use. I don't recommend you
spend time learning it. There are many independent websites that
offer mailing list for your site that are inexpensive, or free,
and have many features.
Web Based
Control Panels
A very nice feature to have in administering and customizing your
site settings is a Web Based Control Panel. With this tool you can
change your sites settings like, e-mail address, sub-domains, site
stats, password protected directories, etc. You would no longer
need to rely on your provider to change/update these settings for
you. You have total control 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Resellers
Options
If you are a web developer and maintain many sites, this could be
a cost effective way to host all your sites at one location. Many
providers offer a substantial discount for multiple web sites. Anywhere
from 5%-25% off list price (depending on the amount of sites hosted).
Site Statistics
Web site statistics are important for any website. It allows you
to see the effectiveness of your site, dead links, most visited
pages, where your visitors are coming from and much more. Some providers
will offer you a online statistic package. With online stats, you
can view your current stats from any web browser. If they do not
offer online stats, make sure you have access to the raw log files.
FTP
All hosting providers must offer an FTP account, this is how you
will upload your pages to their server. There are many FTP programs
available. They can be found at hotfiles.com
and download.com.
FrontPage
Extensions
Did you create your site with Microsoft FrontPage? FrontPage will
work with any provider but, then you will need to have FrontPage
extensions installed in order for some advanced features of FrontPage.
This is generally provided at no charge, but make sure you specify
to the provider you will need the extensions installed.
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