Hosting Your Content Management SoftwareChoosing a host for your Content Management Software (CMS) website can be difficult because there are so many hosting companies available to choose from. Price is an important factor, of course. But equally as important is the operating system, space restrictions, supported database types and supported scripting languages. If at all possible, choose the Content Management Software before you choose a hosting package. Many open source Content Management Software run best on a Linux or Unix operating system rather than on a Windows operating system. It can be daunting to choose to host your website on an operating system that you may not be familiar with, but running your CMS on the operating system on which it was originally created is the best bet. A popular database/scripting language for open source Content Management Software is MySQL/PHP. This is very important when choosing your hosting package and provider. If the CMS you choose was created to run on a specific database, you should do your best to run it on that same type of database. The scripting language is very important. You don't want a CMS written in PHP and set up hosting with a provider that only supports ASP scripting. Make sure your host supports the language in which your CMS is written. Much of the available open source Content Management Software can be found online with a demo of its capabilities. Do a little research and find out if a certain CMS will work best for your needs before downloading it. An online demo will usually showcase enough of the software for you to determine if you will feel comfortable working with it on a regular basis. Once you find a CMS you like, find out the hosting requirements. This will assist you in choosing your hosting provider. Trying to fit a Content Management Software onto your current host can be even more difficult than finding a host after you decide on your CMS. If you have a website already hosted on a Windows platform, you may run into problems when you try to switch your site to a CMS that runs on a Linux platform. Most hosting providers have the option of choosing which platform you want to use for your website. In addition, if you start with a Windows platform, you can usually switch your hosting package to a Linux platform without any change in cost. Occasionally, hosting on a Windows platform will cost more because Windows is a licensed operating system while Linux is an open source operating system. To a user of a website, there is no difference between Windows and Linux hosting. A main difference between the two platforms is support of scripting languages and databases. Windows supports MS SQL, ASP, ASP.NET and Access. Linux supports PERL, PHP, MySQL and CGI. Linux hosting is generally conceived as more stable and secure than Windows but the stability and security of both is getting increasingly closer as Windows comes out with newer versions. |