The key point to remember when evaluating hosts is the most important quality is responsiveness – of your site and support people. Your site should be up virtually all of the time (unfortunately computer crashes do happen but they should be rare and far between) and it must be fast. In addition, all good hosts react in a timely manner to support issues and questions. You can tell when a host is going bad from the failure of these key 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, then when you go sign up you will know we have all listed.

Essential Qualities

Reasonable support – This is something you won't know until you've started using our services and I know you will not need much support. However, when you have a question, concern or problem, it's essential that you have a way to contact our support staff. Just as important is the handling of the issue needs to be fast and efficient. We do provide more than reasonable support as we have a toll free number for you plus on every page a live support link to us. This is up and running for you to reach us 75% of the time as we do have to rest too. But you can always use it to send an email which gets answered quickly. Or just call on 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 access to a well-defined control panel. What does this do for you? It allows you to control the features of your website (account) from your web browser. For example, using the menu you will be able to upload files, protect directories, add autoresponders and so on.

Excellent automation – This is perhaps one of the more important features that Cpwebhosting.net/.com has. Automation. You will be able to 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 sooner or later you will almost certainly want to create a protected directory. This is a directory (or
folder or file) on your website which 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 errors pages. You'll like the idea of letting visitors know in a nice way 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 make sure this won't happen.

Domain Parking – It's incredibly useful to be able 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) as well as to just reserve domains for future use. We allow you to do this.

Good stuff to have if you need it and we at Cpwebhosting.net/.com provide them when requested.

Telnet access – Being able to access your site from Telnet (command line) is useful, but most webmasters will never need this function. This is especially true because functions 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 own 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 very nice 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 great server-side scripting language (far superior to ASP). We provide you this resource.

MySQL Support – MySQL is 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 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 accessing server logs, but it sure makes 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 be able to use once in a while.

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

Subdomain's – A subdomain is a domain in the format of subdomain.domain. For example, shop.rcrrich.comt 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 you want.

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.