No matter what type of web hosting solution you pick, whether it be a free web hosting offer or a paid (hopefully cheap) web hosting provider, you know you need a software solution to manage your web site (or multiple web sites). There are many different solutions, and here are some of the more popular ones.

cPanel is an organization that wins the loyalty of customers around the globe by providing feature-rich applications backed by a team of developers, technical support engineers & quality assurance specialists that provide stable builds, direct support, & fantastic customer support. The product allows you to manage multiple websites through a single interface and administrate every thing from web site design to complex databases. Traditionally a Linux-based solution, cPanel also developes a Windows Server counterpart named Enkompass.

A very popular cPanel alternative is brought to us by Parallels, and is called Plesk Panel. Plesk is a similar solution to cPanel in that it serves as a web hosting solution that includes the provisiong of new sites and automated billing, as well as a site builder to build new web site content. Plesk works in both Windows and Linux server environments.

If you are looking for more of a single site web design software there are plenty of offerings, including:

* Microsoft Web Expressions
* Adobe Dreamweaver
* Web Studio 5.0
* CoffeeCup
* Google Page Creator

Anytime we can save a little money is good, right? In times
like these where every penny counts we all have to be conscious and frugal
where we can. Hosting providers that offer free web hosting services are often
attractive to small businesses to make their presence felt in the online
community without cost, but is it wise to cut costs on what will essentially
represent you to the most potential customers?

By itself the idea of a free web site is great, you get to display
your products and services to the World Wide Web without costing you anything.
But how can a free hosting provider live up with the same quality as a web host
that is affordable and makes a living off of keeping businesses online? The
simple truth is that it likely falls short in some areas.

Stable and reliable web hosting is likely the most important
feature of a web hosting plan if you are going to make the move of putting up a
web hosting site to represent your business. The last thing you want is to
launch your business online and go through marketing campaigns to make its
presence known to the world just in time for a network outage or web server
reboot to make your site unavailable. A tried and tested hosting provider, even
the most affordable ones, certainly has precautions built into place to avoid
this, and a service level agreement (SLA) to make sure if they fall short you
are financially as a result of documented penalties.

How you communicate with your clients is of equal
importance, and reliable email hosting is the key to your business being successful
online. Assuming you can find a free web host that also provides email
services, can they really be expected to stand up to large amounts of traffic
and the ever growing issue of SPAM protection when they do not earn any revenue
from their hosting solution? On the other hand for most web hosting companies,
email hosting is an important part of their product that they know is the key
to you and your business. As a result they have redundant delivery systems,
filtering and scheduled backups to assume your mail arrives on time and is
secure.