Archive for March, 2010
Web hosting control panel is a set of tools and interfaces designated to maintain and monitor a hosting account. On shared and reseller hosting plans such panels are installed and configured by a provider company. Depending on the type of VPS and Dedicated server, control panel software can be either pre-installed or be absent at all. The main advantage of using a control panel is the ability to control your account via a comfortable web based graphical user interface, which, in turn, means that you do not need to possess any knowledge of OS specific console commands to maintain your hosting. Control panels features normally include (but are not limited to):
- Viewing server logs
- Monitoring quotas usage (e.g. disc space, bandwidth, mail accounts, ftp accounts etc.)
- Working with e-mails (creation, modification, termination and checking of e-mail accounts, modification of MX records, autoresponders, forwarders and many more)
- Managing FTP accounts
- Managing domains, addon domains, subdomains and parked domains.
- Managing databases
- Collecting and viewing web statistics (e.g. visitors, pageviews etc.)
- Working with files of the hosting account (using a web based file manager)
A fast and feature rich webhosting control panel can significantly increase both productivity and quality of any online business or project. Webmasters obtain impressive management tools for performing most crucial administrative procedures for every day account operations with the help of it. In absence of an efficient hosting control panel every webmaster and user would need an extensive internet and OS administration training in order to effectively use their hosting accounts. There are many control panels these days (you can find a list of 4 famous ones at http://webhostingrating.com/articles/2009/12/4-most-influential-control-panels/ ), but not all of them are as popular and widely used as cPanel and Direct Admin. This is mostly due to the unique set of features and capabilities included in the latter two. Although cPanel has a Windows platform version as of today, both cPanel and DirectAdmin are normally regarded as Unix OS designated. Read the rest of this entry »
Knowing and understanding the way people find, browse and leave your website is important for marketing purposes. This kind of data is generally called web tracking statistics. In order to obtain this information you will need a website analysis software. Today, numerous products exist for the purpose of tracking web visitors, as well as collecting reports about how they navigate around your web resources. The simplified concept of such programs is to get information about a user visiting a site (e.g. type of browser he is using, operating system, language etc.) from a requests made in a browser, combine it with data about the pages he is visiting at the moment, the source he came from and the page he left the site at, store this info and provide means for its convenient analysis. Understanding website statistics allows performing well-grounded changes to the site, plan and estimate efficiency of marketing campaigns and generally understand the behavior of visitors.
Probably, the best available service for collecting advanced web metrics is Google Analytics. It has a huge list of features and capabilities. The best part about it is that it is totally free to use. Moreover, it is hosted on the Google servers, so it causes no load to your host. Google Analytics setup is relatively simple, which makes it not only the best software with vast capabilities, but also a very popular and widely used one. In this guide you’ll find a step-by-step instruction on how to set it up and start getting quality information about your visitors as soon as possible. Read the rest of this entry »