Five reasons why bloggers must use a cPanel Hosting Company

OK let’s get a bit geeky: the vast majority of companies that host WordPress use LAMP technology, (see below). But don’t panic — as a blogging beginner you do not need to know very much.

1 – cPanel is the market leader

It is the market leader by far. Most LINUX based hosting businesses, big and small, use cPanel to allow their customers to control their websites.

2 — cPane has a host of features

cPane allows the user to control e-mails, databases, accessed the website, check statistics and do a remarkable number of technical things that the majority of us do not need to do. However, as you develop your online career you will find that some of these features are useful when you load more complex packages.

Cpanel also allows the hosting company to add extras.  So some hosts will give you links to programs that will let you build a website, give you access to clip art images or website templates. However, I find that most of these features are not very useful.

3 – cPanel makes it very easy to change host

Once you know your way around one cPanel host you know your way around them all. Therefore it is very easy to transfer to another host and know your way around the new system in minutes.

4 — The fantastic Fantastico

Fantastico it’s an add-on to cPanel.  It allows the automatic installation of around forty different open source programs: these include blogging packages, mailing lists,discussion boards, e-commerce, customer relations software and many many more packages.  All installed by the click of a few buttons plus entering your details on a simple form.

Do not subscribe to a host unless they have Fantastico.

5 – cPanel has fantastic support

As the package is very popular all you have to do is Google your problem and you will see dozens of solutions and tutorials.

If you belong to a technical support forum, such as the very helpful Daniweb, you’ll find dozens of people who will help you with any cPanel problem.

Personal story

For the couple of years I have a resellers hosting account with a respected company. Although the installation of WordPress was non-standard I was very happy with the service.

That was until I needed to install a couple of other packages. I then found at my non-standard host gave me what you technical problems. This involved me spending hours dealing with their support people and finding out but there were quite a few technical limitations from this company.

I then had quite an argument with this company getting part of the money back that I have paid, (as I had pleaded in advance for the year). Fortunately I know the English law reasonably well and was able to come to an agreement with the company.

I will now only use cPanel hosting and I’ll never pay more a quarter in advance. I hope you will learn from my problems.

My links

Blog Basics: Installing WordPress using Fantastico

Conclusion

Unless you have a good valid reason, (such as your uncle owns a hosting company), you need to use one of the many hosting companies that offers Cpanel with Fantastico.

Arghh – geeky stuff

A quick overview of LAMP technology

L stands for LINUX, A stands for Apache, M stands for MySQL and P stands for PHP.

LINUX is a free, open source operating system that is used to support Internet servers. From the user’s point of view it is harder to use than say Windows, but the experts tell me that LINUX is more secure and has more features. That’s all you need to know about LINUX, unless you want to go into developing computer systems at a high level.

Apache is free, open source server software. It is the most popular server technology on the Internet. It has a host of features and is very well supported. That’s all you need to know about Apache servers.

MySQL is a free, open source database package. It is extremely powerful and has been used by large corporations very affectively. Fortunately as a blogger you do not really need to get into detail with MySQL, unless you are into developing interesting plug-ins for packaged like WordPress.

PHP is a server-based programming language. This means that when you call a page of your blog the PHP does clever things such as finding the content, displaying the date, sorting out some of the layout and pulling in sections of your blog, such as the header, footer and sidebar.

WordPress is written in this language and it is possible that you may need to know a little about PHP if you get into customising your WordPress themes.

You don’t really need to know much about these technologies to use WordPress efficiently.