Linux shared website hosting

Linux web hosting features

Unlimited domain aliases

Domain aliases allow you to point multiple domain names to the same web site. For e.g. if you register a domain on your company name myBusiness.com which is the primary domain name for the hosting package and you also wanted to point myBusiness.NET, myBusiness.ORG, keyword-another-keyword.COM (additional TLDs) to the same web hosting package, i.e., myBusiness.com, then you would specify these additional domain names as domain aliases. The important point to note is that the way a domain alias functions - the visitor is not redirected to the primary domain name - the domain name that he or she typed in the browser continues to be displayed as-is through out the visit and all the visitors of your primary domain and aliased domains will see the same content.

You can add unlimited Domain Aliases with each hosting package that you purchase. If you use our DNS server, DNS entries for the domain aliases will be taken care of by us, however, if you use third-party DNS services, you need to setup DNS entries for aliased domains.

Domain access with and without "www"

Our web and email servers are configured to allow domain access with and without the "www." in front of the domain name i.e. http://www.myBusiness.com and http://myBusiness.com will both work perfectly.

FTP features

File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a software standard for transferring computer files between machines with widely different operating systems. With our hosting packages, you can use any FTP based client to upload data / content to the web space included in your hosting package.

Unlike some hosting companies which restrict the amount of data that you can upload and download on a daily basis, with ALL our hosting packages - you get the ability to upload and download data 24x7, unlimited number of times. Add to this, you get the ability to add up to 100 FTP users. Using the FTP Manager in the hosting control panel you can do all of the following:

• Add / Remove FTP users
• Restrict access of a FTP user to a particular folder
• Set disk quota limitations on a per FTP user basis
• Change passwords
• Suspend / unsuspend access of FTP users

You are also given access to the Complete Log of Actions performed by each user i.e. you can find out which FTP user connected from what IP Address, at what time, and uploaded / modified / deleted which all files.

Private folder for storing sensitive data

A private folder—allows you to store data and files via FTP— is included with the hosting package. Private folder is outside your web site directory i.e. not directly exposed on the internet via HTTP, in simple terms, it can not be accessed via web browsers for display/ reading. This Private folder has special security permissions such that no user, other than the FTP users specified by you, has read or write access to the data in this private folder.

You can create sub-folder(s) within this private folder and restrict access of FTP users to specific sub-folder(s), share files and reduce or eliminate the need to copy data on disks for overnight delivery, and save both time and money. Our FTP servers allow you to resume partial transfers where they left off (if you use appropriate FTP client software), so even if you get disconnected or end a session, you can always reconnect and resume the transfer where you left off.

Web traffic reporting

A web traffic reporting tool is included within your control panel. Web traffic reporting tool generates web-based graphical reports and provides insight information about your web site visitors, such as, the number of unique visitors, number of page views, hits, average duration spent by users on your web site, most viewed, entry and exit pages, search engines, key phrases and keywords used to find your site, etc..

Using the Web Statistics Manager in the control panel, you have the:

• ability to password protect your web based traffic reports to ensure that only authorised people have access to this data
• option to automatically delete web log files after generating the web based traffic reports to save disk space
• ability to disable the generation of the web traffic reports
• ability to customize your web traffic reports by setting the following parameters
• Skip Hosts - Specify hosts / IP addresses from which all data (hits/page views etc), should not be taken into consideration while generating statistics
• Skip Files - Specify filenames / directories which should be ignored while generating statistics
• Only Files - This is the opposite of the 'Skip Files' option. The option is used to include in stats, only accesses to URLs that match the specified filenames / directories
• Not Page List - List of file extensions which must be counted as 'Hit only' and not as a 'Page View'

Webalizer

Webalizer is a more complex stats program that produces a nice variety of charts and graphs about who has visited your site. This is probably the most popular stats engine available today. The different graphs will show you where your users are from and provide great detail about who has accessed your site.

Password protected directories

Directory Protection is an easy-to-use web based tool included in the control panel that allows you create as many password protected areas as you want without requiring any programming. This allows you to store sensitive material online and give browser based access to such content / data to authorized users only. A password dialogue box will automatically popup in the browser when an attempt is made to access the password protected directory or any of its sub-directories.

Your own backup policy manager

The Backup Manager provides comprehensive and cost effective protection by allowing you to define highly flexible backup policies that will protect their critical data. The web-based backup policy manager provides an easy-to-use one-step wizard to add each policy. You just needs to follow the steps mentioned below:

• select the directory for which the policy is being created - this could be the entire website directory, a sub-folder or the database directory - depending on what critical data you wants to backup
• specify the frequency of the backup - daily / weekly / monthly
• specify the number of backup files to keep - backup archives are rotated 'no of backlogs' times before being deleted

For e.g. you can add one policy which takes a backup of the entire website on a daily basis, with 5 backlogs. Another policy, which takes a backup of the entire website on a weekly basis, with 4 backlogs, and yet another policy which takes a backup of the entire website on a monthly basis, with 6 backlogs. With the above set of policies, you has creat ed a comprehensive backup plan with multiple restore points for his website. You can roll back to a point in the last 5 days, or restore a backup which was taken every week for the last whole month, or a backup that was taken monthly upto 6 months ago.

Download MySQL database backup

You can to download all MySQL databases that are a part of your account. As these databases change frequently, you may require to download them more often than the files in your /home directory.

Raw log files

Comprehensive Raw Log files are made available in this web hosting package in logs folder. You need to make sure you do not turn off this feature in order to access raw log files as well as web traffic reports. There are two types of raw log files:

• Web log files: These files are generated by the web server to record all requests made to the website. They are primarily used by website statistics software to generate reports on essential marketing metrics for your website such as the no of visitors, pages viewed, visit duration, referring websites, search engines, keyphrases and keywords used to find your site, visitor's computer configurations etc.
• FTP log files: These files are generated by the FTP server to record all logins, uploads and downloads made to and from your hosting package.

The Log Files Manager in the control panel has several options to manage these raw log files. All options can be configured seperately for Web and FTP log files. The user can choose to disable a particular type of logging in order to save disk space. If the user chooses to enable logging, the system allows the user to specify log rotation options to delete older log entries automatically so that the log files do not continue growing in size indefinetely. The user can specify the no of backlogs to maintain for each type of log file, set a max log file size and set log rotation frequency (daily/weekly/monthly).

Customizable error pages

When a visitor attempts to connect to a website and an HTTP error occurs, a generic message is sent back to the visitor's browser with a brief description of what happened during the attempt to establish a connection. For example, if a visitor attempts to connect to a page that no longer exists on the web site, an HTTP error will be returned in the form of an HTML page that contains the statement "The requested URL was not found on this server." You can customize the following HTTP errors that are sent to clients when web server errors occur.

• 401 - Authorization Failed
• 403 - Permission Denied
• 404 - File / Resource Not Found
• 406 - Resource Not Acceptable
• 500 - Internal Server Error

Unlimited web forwarding rules

The Redirect Manager in the hosting control panel gives you the ability to forward requests for any local folder, sub-folder, file to another domain name, URL, or IP address seamlessly. For example if you want http://www.yourdomainname.com/corp to redirect to http://www.someotherdomain.com, then you can add a rule for the same OR say, you have a web page which you retired and have a new web page in its place, you can setup the forward old page requests to automatically go to the new web page.

Chatroom to your website

Using the control panel, you can to add an HTML or java based chatroom to your web site. Also, you can enter the chatroom from the control panel. cPanel will provide you with the code needed to place a gateway to this chatroom on your web page. Users can then enter a nickname and join the chatroom from your web page.

Bulletin board to your website

You can add a bulletin board to your site. This board can be used to discuss things such as products, help, current events, or anything else you wish users of your site to be able to discuss.

Shopping carts

Agora shopping cart

The Agora Shopping Cart is a fully featured shopping cart that can be installed with the click of a button.

Interchange shopping cart

The Interchange shopping cart is a fully-featured shopping cart that can be installed with the click of a button.

Wide support for web publishing tools

You can upload data / publish content on your website / transfer files to and from the server using any of the following:

• FTP Based Clients
• Microsoft® FrontPage®
• Macromedia® DreamWeaver®

Microsoft® FrontPage® Manager

FrontPage is a WYSIWYG HTML editor and web site administration tool from Microsoft. You can enable/disable FrontPage Extensions support to your website from FrontPage Manager. If you enable frontPage extensions, you can directly publish your website through FrontPage itself, instead using a separate FTP client software.

SSL Server Manager

Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) technology protects data by creating a secure connection between a client (your web browser) and a web server using encryption enabled by a server's SSL Certificate. SSL is required if your website is an ecommerce website and accept credit card on your website itself (may not be required if you are using third-party payment gateway) or has any secure login areas or requires any secure pages. SSL Manager allows you to add, remove, and view SSL keys, manage your CSR's (certificate signing requests), public and private keys, SSL certificates provided by your CA and self-signed certificates generated by the server.

mySQL database services

MySQL is a multithreaded, multi-user, SQL (Structured Query Language) relational database server. If the hosting package that you have purchased includes MySQL Database(s) then you get 100 Database Users per Database that you have purchased, and the ability to do the following from your hosting control panel, using the Database Manager section:

• Add / Delete MySQL Databases
• Restrict Access to the database from a set of IP Addresses / Hosts
• Add multiple database users for a single database
• Define granular level database access policy on a per user basis i.e. you can decide which all privileges a user should be given from Select, Insert, Update, Delete, Create, Drop, Grant, Reference, Index, Alter Privileges
• Change Passwords
• Suspend / unsuspend access of database users
• One-click Access to phpMyAdmin - a web based tool for administering your MySQL database that allows you to create/drop/alter tables, delete/edit/add fields, execute any SQL statement, manage keys on fields etc.

HTTP compression: Boost your website speed

HTTP compression automatically enhances the speed of your website by several times and it could be as much as 20 times. The web server compresses the content delivered to the client when it is sent across the network. It uses the browsers ability to uncompress this data seamlessly. This does not require any changes in website code nor does it require any additional software on the client. All browsers starting from Internet Explorer 4.0, Netscape 4.06, Opera 5, Lynx 2.6 support this feature. Our solution will simply not compress the data if the visitor has a non-compliant browser. HTTP compression can boost the speed of all of the following:

• all static pages i.e. html, js, css files etc
• all dynamic pages i.e. php, perl, cgi, python files etc
• all images and downloadables i.e. gif, jpg, png, doc, pdf, xls files etc

Supported web development technologies

This hosting packags supports all the popular web development technologies as listed below, empowering you to create your website or web application in the language of your choice.

• PHP
• Perl
• CGI
• Server Side Includes (SSI)
• Wireless Application Protocol (WAP)
• Real Audio / Video HTTP Streaming
• Macromedia Flash
• Macromedia Shockwave

Unlimited sub-domains

Sub-domains allow you to access different directories by using a domain name which you do not have to register with the registrar and does not have to pay any additional amount. For example, if you want to access forums on your site, you can create forums.domain.com and link it to the directory that your forums are in.

Image manager

The Image Manager allows you to view and modify images in your account. You can change the size of your images, convert their file type, or just view them with the image manager.

Directory indexing

The Index Manager allows you to customize the way a directory will be viewed on the web. You can select between a default style, no indexes, or two types of indexing. If you do not wish for people to be able to see the files in your directory, choose no indexing.

Virus scan

Using ClamAV anti-virus software, you can scan your email, home directory, public web, or public FTP space. Scanning consistently for viruses will help keep your site running properly, and can prevent many problems.

Search engine submission

You can submit your website to multiple search engines at the same time so that people on the web can search for your site through a major search engine.

Bandwidth usage report

This function allows you to see the bandwidth usage for your site. It shows the current month's bandwidth usage as well as your total bandwidth usage. This will include all HTTP (web) and POP (mail) bandwidth usage and may include FTP bandwidth usage if your system administrator has enabled FTP bandwidth logging.

Hotlink protection

Hotlink protection prevents other websites from directly linking to files on your website. You can use hotlink protection to keep other sites from linking to your images, videos, and other files. If another site links directly to your images or other files, they will be using your bandwidth to display those files rather than theirs.

IP deny manager

The IP Deny Manager allows you to prevent an IP address, domain name, or block of IP addresses from accessing your web site. If someone is using a lot of your bandwidth, posting malicious content, or should not be allowed to access your site for another reason, you can preventing them from doing so in the IP Deny Manager.

Custom MIME types

MIME types tell browsers how to handle specific extensions. For example, the text/html mime type equates to .htm, .html, and .shtml extensions on most servers, and this tells your browser to interpret all files with those extensions as HTML files. You can alter or add new mime types specifically for your site (note that you can not alter the system defined mime type values). MIME types are often used to handle new technologies as they appear. When WAP technology first appeared no one had these extensions set up on their server. With MIME types, however, you could have set it up yourself and begun serving WAP pages immediately.

Other Supported Web Development Technologies

All our windows hosting packages support all the popular windows-specific web development technologies, empowering you to create your website or web application in the language of your choice. Supported web development technologies include:

• XSL 2.1
• Wireless Application Protocol (WAP)
• Real Audio / Video HTTP Streaming
• Macromedia Flash
• Macromedia Shockwave