CMS hosting
Nowadays every modern website should be based not only to stable foundations, but also to a modern, robust and technological advanced platform. The Web was revolutionized at the time when static websites gave their place to their dynamic descendants. Programs, such as Arachnophilia, Dreamweaver, FirtsPage and Frontpage became obsolete, as new platforms were borning. Even today, I remember has I was struggling with one of the first versions of Arachnophilia to create my first website about my hometown, which I had uploaded to Tripod of course :)…
The new platforms are based on one simple, and at the same time marvelous idea. The content must be separated from design. Thus, maintaining a simple website ceased to involve web designers, and started to be a job of the content authors. Today, every newbie webmaster could start and maintain any website type. Developing Ecommerce properties, news websites and blogs are on reach for every individual, no matter what their skill level is. These platforms are known as Content Management Systems, or as there are more known, CMS.
Today there are many CMS available. We can differentiate them to commercial and open source. Some of the most well known open source CMSs are Joomla, Drupal, Typo3 and WordPress. Some may disagree that WordPress is a CMS, as it is in reality a blog platform, but if you will notice, some of the most exciting uses of WordPress involve the creation of content sites.
To have a very sophisticated, extensible and easy to use CMS is just the tip of the iceberg. You need a very stable, highly specific and always up-to-date hosting environment in order to have a hassle free experience. This is where the term CMS hosting has come to play a crucial role and to offer services that will fulfill any need, from small hobby websites to large, multimillion investments.
To find and signup with an appropriate web hosting provider, that offers CMS hosting services, is not an easy task. Nowadays, most web hosting providers are establishing within an afternoon, even under age could create a “web hosting business” in a small fraction of time. The key phrase here is reliability. Try to find those web hosting service providers that have a deep knowledge of your CMS of choice. Search the discussion boards of your beloved content management system, ask senior members and distinguished web developers. Before you purchase, ask the support team of the web hosting company what sort of features does it support, if they have expertise with your CMS platform, and most importantly, don’t stay at their word. Search, compare and finally decide. Finding the best CMS hosting is not so easy, but it is rewarding, as it allows laying down the most stable foundations for every ambitious online undertaking.
If you are a more experienced web developer, you must ask several questions that have to do with the hosting environment of your CMS script. PHP version, the existence of Phpmyadmin, htaccess support, ftp accounts, maximum execution time of your scripts and so on. Note that your CMS hosting provider is the only responsible for any downtime you may experience. Avoid the “Unlimited Web Hosting” providers which promise you unlimited resources, such as disk space and bandwidth. Keep in mind that nothing in nature is unlimited, so why these services can be.
After signing up you may notice that for every question you may ask for your CMS platform, the support personnel directs you to the community of your script. This is a strong indication that you must soon search for a new CMS web hosting provider. This is usually the normality in web hosting industry. Before purchasing, at the time when you ask all those presales questions you are the King. After purchasing you are a merely slave!
In a nutshell, you must trust the opinions of other web developers and real webmasters not all those “web hosting review” websites that are scattered at every corner of the Internet. Remember, CMS hosting is just another tpe of web hosting service, the real challenge is to find one provider that will have a strong knowledge and understanding of your platform. If you find it, just sign with them. You wont regret it, at least not really soon!