It’s from webhostingtalk.com and they have one really great tutorial on their forum. [click for the link]

It’s not great because it’s from this forum, but because it’s provided by people like you and me. It’s from people for people and there are lots of great things in there! One more reason to start your search for a web host on a forum instead of on a review web site

For those of you who do not like to blindly click on links I will post a few preview quotes from the guide, but you will get much more as soon as you visit this forum. there you can ask questions about your specific needs

Restrict SSH Access
To restrict and secure SSH access, bind sshd to a single IP that is different than the main IP to the server, and on a different port than port 22.

SSH into server and login as root.
Note: You can download Putty by Clicking Here (http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~s…/download.html). It’s a clean running application that will not require installation on Windows-boxes.

At command prompt type:
pico /etc/ssh/sshd_config

Scroll down to the section of the file that looks like this:
#Port 22
#Protocol 2, 1
#ListenAddress 0.0.0.0
#ListenAddress ::

Uncomment and change
#Port 22
to look like
Port 5678 (choose your own 4 to 5 digit port number (49151 is the highest port number AND do not use 5678  lol )

Uncomment and change
#Protocol 2, 1
to look like
Protocol 2

Uncomment and change
#ListenAddress 0.0.0.0
to look like
ListenAddress 123.123.123.15 (use one of your own IP Addresses that has been assigned to your server)

Note 1: If you would like to disable direct Root Login, scroll down until you find
#PermitRootLogin yes
and uncomment it and make it look like
PermitRootLogin no

As you can see even a task like securing your SSH is an important thing and it’s covered on this forum! Have a nice day and try to ask questions to use the advantages of the  forum to it’s maximum

Image: renjith krishnan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Use Content Management Systems [CMS]

When you are starting to build your online web site you are standing before a decision. You need to decide whether you will code the whole thing yourself and use plain html/css/php for your web site. But this route is not very funny. It’s because you are not able to use the advantages of databases and the data stored in them!

It is good, if you are trying to only host a static web site, but if you are trying to host a real web site. A web site with dynamic content. A web site with users and their input, than you need to find a solution which best fits your needs. You could build your own database driven solution, or you could use an already existing system. You might think, that this costs a lot of money, bu the opposite is true! you can use  a CMS and only then you will see the difference.

CMS systems are a very popular choice, because they make the administration of content, whole web sites, users and data  very easy. They give you a back-end and you are able to manage the whol eweb site from it with ease! All you need is to install the chosen CMS on your server and start to feel the difference. One thing to note here is, that you will need to follow the developpers and their “security” announcement as CMS [as all database driven systems] are less secure, than a static html and thus they are a good goal for hackers and crackers and security updates are release now and then.

To use a CMS is a great thing as you are not limited only by static web pages, but you can make your web site very creative and full of life. You can use widgets, add-ons or other extensions offered with your CMS

Free and paid CMS’s

If you think, that the CMS way is the way to go, than you should know, that there are two options. You can either go the free route and enjoy the free life, or you can buy a CMS solution, but the pure fact, that it’s paid does not mean it’s better [!!!]. Many free CMS systems are far better then the majority of paid solutions and the only advantage is, that you might get support from the company which developed the product and you bought it from, but there are huge communities behind free projects And a big community is sometimes better then a company support!!!

Do your homework and decide what better fits your bill! Have a nice day and see you next time!

Your budget matters

You may have seen many ad’s with hosts offering plans for $ 5 and less and others offering the same features for $30 per month. When you see such a big difference in prices you should start to wonder how is it possible? Well, sometimes the price difference is irrelevant, but sometimes it’s an indicator of the level of service you will get for your money. Many times you are told by the hosting community at different hosting forums, that in web hosting you get what you pay for, but it does not mean, that a shared hosting packages should cost $50 to provide you with a great service. I would say, that this saying is 90% true while with a VPS or dedicated hosting provider, because there you are renting the whole machine. But while with a shared hosting provider you should be able to get a good level of service for around $10 per month

The purpose of your web site matters

Another very important thing, that matters is your web site’s purpose. It is what intentions do you have with your web site. Do you want to host mainly video, or audio files, or you will turn it into a blog? This is very crucial when considering different hosting companies and you should always know what you are intending to put on the server.

Some companies don’t allow media and streaming web sites on their servers, but some do and thus you need to know the stuff you will put on the hosting companies servers to make the right decision!

The technology matters

In today’s world of virtualization it may not play such a huge role, but it’s always very good to know what your web site needs. What underlying software needs to be installed on the server your web site is hosted on. You can’t host a website, that is streaming music on a server without the required software which allows for streaming media Thus you need to make sure beforehand, that the chosen host has all what your web site needs to be up and running

The other part of this “technology matters” thing is that you need to make sure you are familiar with the environment. Basically this is about the control panel the host is using. Different hosting control panels require different knowledge. Some are easier to work with and some are not. I need to tell you, that there is nothing like a standard control panel and nothing else. There are many control panels and some hosting companies even use their own and thus you might be sometimes surprised how they look and how they feel.

Personally I have used three control panels over the course of the time and I have seenwo t great control panels and one very bad… . The very bad was from a Slovak hosting company [it was really archaic...and poor - and it was used to control a paid web service!!!] and the other two have been the 1and1 control panel and the Cpanel control panel. The latter two are really a joy to work with.

Hopefully this post has given you some reason and things to think about. Have a nice day and see you next time here at Icethunder.net!

Image1: renjith krishnan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Image2: Danilo Rizzuti / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Looking professional

The answer to the question is basically about how you want to be seen. Do you want to have a professionally looking image, or it’s not that important for you? This is the basic question you need to ask yourself. If you are trying to sell some kind of product, or service, than the image is an important thing for you and I think, it would make much more sense to go with your own email address. It adds the professional look and feel. You can always direct your customers to a third party mail address afterwards.

An own email address is not only about the image. It also helps to identify you on the Internet. Many people could register with your name at third party email services, but only you can create an email account based on your domain name! It is adds security and trustworthiness !!!

You don’t need to worry about how many mail accounts you will need and it’s good to start with just one, or two and add more if you will need them. Many hosts offer you the option to create hundreds of accounts, but you need to know, that they can share the same web space. This means you could be able to create 1000 accounts, but they would all share the same 2GB of storage

Looking secure, but less professional and trustworthy

I would like to take back this headline, namely the part, that this is looking less trustworthy. It’s very trustworthy, but only as long as your clients really know you and know that you are using a third party service. Else it is not very trustworthy as virtually anyone could create an e-mail account with Yahoo! Mail or Lycos and they could start to pretend they are you!

Use this very carefully and be sure to advertise to your clients what address is yours and what service you are using!!! To use third party services is a good thing if you are trying to get more out of your email as they tend to offer far more things and add-ons, than you could use with your own e-mail account based on your domain name.

Image: jscreationzs / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

What more back up strategies could be used?

We all know, that data are very valuable to use. We own a web site and users leave interactions on the sites, web sites change every day, we update them from time to time and thus data is valuable, but there is one more thing we could consider as very important. It’s our email messages!!!

It’s the area of backing up our email communication. It might not look like a very important thing, but believe me sometimes t pays off a lot! When I started my first online web site I had to send mails to get some approval to use some pictures and I forgot to back up the emails the people send me back. Well, and thus  I had to go through he same process once again.

But imagine you would be operating a commercial web site and it goes down. You are receiving tons of important emails every day and you would possible loose all your email… You should not count on the hosting company, that they do have back ups! Maybe the back ups will not be available and thus you will loose all the important mails.

In cases like this it’s good to have a back up, or emergency, strategy in place. It can be as simple as downloading all your emails for OFFLINE use trough a mail client like Mozilla Thunderbird, or you could use a third party email service like Gmail or Yahoo! Mail. Third party email services might look less professional, but you do not have to worry so much, as you emails are in a safe place outside your host. Thus if the hosting company encounters any problems you are safe

It depends only on the level of professionalism you need and on your own judgement. If you regard your email messages as very valuable always back them up. It might help you one time in the future! Don’t forget, that your files and messages are hosted on hardware outside your reach by a web hosting company. Hardware can brake down and no back up could be available. It’s always better to be prepared

Have a nice day and good luck in the next week!

Image: jscreationzs / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

What back-up strategies can be employed?

Basically, what this question tries to ask is what can be backed-up and what can not be. And it tries to ask what should be backed-up and for what reason. I think, that many of you will agree with me, that your data are very valuable to you and thus they deserve to be backed-up while hosted by a third party. But even when you host your data yourselves it’s a very good idea to back everything up!

Database back-up

You can back up different parts of your web site and the first thing I would perform is a very often database back up. It should be your first line of defense. To have a database back up is crucially important if something bad happens. But with a database back up you can get your data back very easily and quickly.

Database systems do have a back up feature build in, or there is another very easy way to back your whole database data up. you just need to read the documentation and figure out the best way.

Whole web space back-up

Another approach you could take i to back up your entire web space. This is performed by backing up the whole directory and all it’s contents. It requires a lot of additional disk space when performed, but this way you will not lose anything. Remember to back up the database as well, if it is not included and is hosted on a different server. This is very important, because the web files themselves are not that much valuable without the database

Always remember to download the back up to a different place and do not hold it on the same server as your web site! The server goes down and so doe your back up… .

Important files back up

In this scenario you just back up the most important files and folders your site needs and leave the rest of the site untouched. It’s good mostly when you really care only about the important parts of your web site and don’t regard other parts to be as important.

Once again, you should remember, that if you need the database data you need to perform a database back up as well….

I think, that many of you might come up with far better back up strategies. You are maybe even using a far better strategy. If you will like sharing your strategy with the rest of the world don’t hesitate to leave a comment and describe it  Have a nice day!

Image: Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

It’s all about : why it’s not a good idea to have your domain name registered with your hosting company. There are many opinions, but so far I think, that the majority thinks it’s never a good thing to make such a move. Many people like safety and thus I do not understand why would anyone want to expose himself to possible trouble.

The trouble is linked with the fact, that if your hosting company gets into trouble and you will not act quickly, or you will not even have the chance to act, than not only your web site hosted with that company gets into trouble, but you will not be even able to move your domain elsehewre! And this is a big security and service problem.

Basically when buying a domain name you have two options. You can register your domain name with a special domain name registrar like name.com, namecheap.com or godaddy.com , or you can register your domain name trough your hosting company. The first option gives you the feeling of of safety. It’s because your domain is independent and you can change your name servers at any time. The second option is less safe and it let’s you exposed if something bad happens to our hosting company.

It might look like a waste of time to register a domain name with company X and buy your hosting at company Y, but it pays back a lot as soon as you hit any possible trouble!

I like to have an option to manage my domain independently of my hosting as it gives me the chance to quickly move the domain if  something bad happens. It is only a matter of 48hours [and less!] for the name servers to propagate and my web site is operational again.

Consider this:

• Name server propagation around the whole world less than 48hours [sometimes even much much less!]
• Back ups of your web site – you can instantly upload and pretend nothing happened
• A one month fee to a new host less $8…

On the other side: If you have a domain and hosting with the same company

• If the company is under an online attack – you are in trouble…
• If the company disappears – you are in trouble
• If there are long lasting technical problems – you are in trouble
• In all these cases you would have a hard time to quickly move to a new location!

I don’t say it’s a NO-NO, but it is a bad idea and it’s always more clever to divide the risk between two places  Think about this the next time you buy a domain name from/trough your hosting company. Is it worth it the time you save? Wouldn’t it be more secure to do it the other way and divide the risk? Have a nice day and a great weekend!

Image: Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

What company would I choose?

I talked mostly in general until now and I would like to give my own opinion. Maybe you are asking who I would go with if I would have the choice. Well, I am a comfortable person and I am not willing to sit behind the PC for 24/7 and watch if my site is operational and if there is no problem. And thus I am very concerned about the support level and service level.

I need to know, that the company I am with provides me with a great service and that their support is really prepared to help me out if there is some kind of problem. But I am not too careless and I am monitoring my web site trough third party services. I am monitoring my web sites up-time and other things to be assured, that everything is OK.

I would never decide after seeing tons of ad’s and I would always perform my own research. I would use “my big GBY”  engine [Google, Bing, Yahoo!] to search for everything regarding the company I would be considering to go with.

This kind of testing and researching is not an easy and short thing and thus I always spend at least one week on research and then I do my plans with confidence. If everything goes wrong even despite this hard procedure, than I can rest assured, that I have done the research I
could and sometimes it’s all about luck

Hopefully this helped you a little bit as not only providing you with technical things is important. Sometimes it’s good to hear what people who went trough a hosting search process for more than one time use as their strategy to don’t make the wrong move. Feel free to leave your experience in the comments area Have a nice day!

Image: graur razvan ionut / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

The difference between hostin forums and hosting review sites

The big difference I am talking about is, that while on a review site you see tons of ad’s. But in contrast while on a forum you usually see only 1 or 2 banners… I know its because of the lack of space, but it’s still great

Did you ever visit a hosting forum? There is no so much free space to post ad’s and thus the space is limited. Hosting forums are limited by the space they can use for ad’s and it’s fine, because the ad’s do not distract you. Hosting forums and review sites do need to generate some kind of revenue and thus placing ad’s is the perfect way and I agree with this, but every owner has to decide whether his site should turn into an ad mess or be a great resource for knowledge and opinion… .And this is the big difference between them. Even review sites could be of high value, but many times the ad’s just brake their image apart

Why to use hosting forums instead?

As I said previously, it’s mainly because there you can get so much more. You are able to speak to people with different levels of knowledge, experience and even more – you are able to ask your future hosting provider if there is a representative registered!

The second most important thing about using hosting forums is the pure fact, that there you can find lots of hosting reviews provided by individuals and checked by hosting forum admins. And this is just great. If someone talks badly about a company on a review site in the comment area no one really checks his version, but hosting forums [at least the one I am using the most] check if the review is a true one or not! That’s just so much better.

The third reason why to check hosting forums on a regular basis is, that they are the place where smaller, but not worse hosts promote their products. These hosts do not have the ad budget the big hosting companies have, but they have many times a much better image. they offer better service and price, but you have to choose carefully What if the next day a better offer pops up?

Try to leave your opinion in the comments area. What do you use usually more often? Review sites or hosting forums and what do you think about them? Have a nice day and see you next time!

Why to trust hosting forums?

Frankly, I think you for sure asked this question. My answer is as  previously stated: a forum is a mix of humans. There are so many different people registered, that you are able to get your questions answered just in a couple of minutes. I know not all of the answers are really great, but they at least try to be helpful. And the most important part of all -> the answers and opinions are independent and provided by more than one human

At first it might seem very chaotic, but I think, there is no beter place to ask questions and get them answered really quickly… . All the forums do offer you the option t search trough different categories to find exactly what you are searching for. The answers to your questions are just a few keystrokes away

Why are review sites not like forums?

I believe, that most of the review sites started with a really good aim. They wanted to help the casual user to find the right host. They provided hosting reviews and opinions, but somewhere down the road they realized, that they need money to stay up. And they started to sell ad space.

First they used AdSense and other ad networks and then the opportunity came and hosting companies started to offer them affiliate money to promote a certain host in a certain place for a certain amount of money. And this is what I dislike a lot. While on a review site you, are distracted by so many affiliate ad’s, that you start to ask yourself if it’s really true what the site owner writes on the web site! Is the opinion of the owner or review person really independent? Or how can they actually review 50+ sites in under 1 year?

For instance I only provide reviews of hosts I was with and this takes a lot of time I have written an 1and1 review [although it has not been  fully published, yet] and I am currently working on a review of Hawkhost. I was with each of them for at least 6 months! How can someone review a host he has never been a customer of?

And the result of my last paragraph is, that it’s very hard for me to trust someone who has not thoroughly tested the company before and another big minus is, that user submitted ratings of hosting companies of these review sites are easily misused… .

I don’t say to ignore review sites or to don’t use them, but be always aware, that not all of them should be 100% trusted and, that from time to time some of them [the bad apples] provide opinions based on cash they can generate… Always try to perform a good search and the results of such a search should not be based only on one sources, but the sources should be consisted of 3 and more sites

To be continued….Have a nice and sunny day

How to choose between so many hosting offers?

Well, that’s the question which should be answered by this whole series and blog and no single article is able to answer this. But in simple terms the best way is to:

• Perform a research before actually signing up with a hosting company
• Perform some estimations to know what you really will need
• Ask on different hosting forums about your chosen hosting companies

What should be the decisive point?

It depends on the type of project you are trying to find the hosting for. It can differ greatly from project to project, but in theory the more important a project is to you the more time should be invested into the research part. To perform a thorough research before signing up with anyone can prove to be very important in the long run. Less problems with support, service and many other things can be the reward for the time invested into the research, but as we all know time is the most valuable asset and there is not a lot of it in the world.

I regard the research part of the whole searching thing as the most important one. If you are able to find a great hosting provider, than you can be sure, he is able to give you more value for your money. Some of them treat their customers with high regards and try to help them even beyond the levels set in their ToS. And thus the time invested into the research can pay back even more

Why are there so huge differences between hosts in pricing?

Frankly, this is a question I tend to ask everytime I am on a new search for a web hosting package of “my dreams” In pure theory th pricing should reflect the level of service you are provided, but I can tell you, that many times a $6.99 host can provide you with far better service than a $19.99 host… . It is all about the people who run the company, the companies etiquette and image.

Another important factor is where the hosting provider is located. The pricing could very well reflect the location as different areas in the world are priced differently and require different costs.

Conclusion

Well, this has been just a small reminder article to sum up some of my previous ones into a smaller format. If you have not read the previous ones this one gave you a short recap into what should matter the most on your search

Have a nice day and see you next time. Don’t hesitate to ask questions or leave your comments

The email accounts

I do not regard e-mail accounts to be that much important. It’s because you can still have your own e-mail account at Gmail or Yahoo and use this e-mail account for your web site needs as well. It is not required to have an own e-mail account associated with your domain name. But I can tell you, that it looks much better if you’re a representative of web site e.g. Icethunder.net and send e-mails from addresses like some_name(at)Icethunder(dot)net.

It looks much more professional this way an the only thing you should think while on your search for the best web hosting package is whether or not you will need more than a couple of aliases. Different companies offer you different amounts of e-mail aliases, but I think that most of the time you will be fine with e.g. 10 and less. But the amount of e-mail accounts you will need depends on the purpose you need them for. If you are a company with 50 employees and each needs and email address – you need 50 and more. But if you are only a blogger I think you will be perfectly fine with one or two.

Either way while starting your search you need to decide how many accounts you will need and if you can or can’t use Gmail, Yahoo or any other service instead. The other important thing to remember is, that even if you are allowed to create Unlimited number of accounts they all, most of the time, share the same quota [e.g. 2GB] and thus all the account together can’t store more, than 2GB of data [mails]. Be careful about this limit as it’s a standard one!

The FTP accounts

I said it so many times – FTP is an insecure transfer protocol and thus don’t use it in public places and networks (read more here). Despite it’s lack of security it’s the feature of choice when you need to transfer data between your local computer and your server. It’s fast, but insecure and this should you keep in mind all the time!

I think you will not need more than one or two accounts if you are not hosting an upload web site. The only reason I can think of you would need more than two accounts is when you would host multiple web sites with different content. In this instance you would want to create as many accounts as there are web site to totally limit each account to exactly one domain name and thus web folder! It’s good for security reasons

Add-on domains and Sub-domains

An add-on domain is any domain you can host in your web space as allowed by your hosting company. You are given the right (an option) to host more then the domain name you signed up with. But all the domain names share the same bandwidth and web space.

A sub-domain is a domain created from your second level domain name. It’s like subdomain.main_domain.com where sub-domain is the name of your sub-domain and main_domain is the name of your domain name Sub-domains are pretty handy if you are trying to host different parts of your “portal” in different sections. You could have a mail.yourdomain.com just for your e-mail login interface etc.

Hosting companies tend to offer anywhere from +/-5 subdomains to unlimited and it’s the same with add-on domains. There is not standard for this as there is with nothing in web hosting.

Conclusion

For our small blog we have discussed and used for this mini tutorial I would look for a hosting provider who offers me at least  2 FTP accounts and 10+ sub-domains options. It’s because over the time I could decide to create a sub-domain for my “beta” testing, I could create a forum, other language mutations of the blog etc. And I definitely would want more than 2 FTP accounts to have the ability to assign each one of them to only one sub-domain, but I would definitely try to search for a host who would offer an SFTP instead of FTP. It would be a big bonus if I would find such a host. If you are not able to find such a host, than it’s OK and you can still manage the upload and download trough the web interface as the web interface tends to be trough HTTPS

Have a nice day and see you next time!

Who am I searching for?

I think it’s very important to have a good understanding of who you are searching for. You know what you need, from the resources point of view, and you should also know who you are trying to look for.

I like to be sure, that everything is OK with any company before I give out any of my personal information. I always make a Google, Bing and Yahoo search before I sign up for anything online. You should not be careless as it could backfire in a bad way! As you can see I am not using only one search engine, but many of them. It’s because despite the fact, that Google is great, it still doesn’t catch all and using more engines gives you the extra feeling, that you have done a really good search.

At this point you need to make a decision. Will you only consider and look at big companies with big Ad budget, or will you look at the smaller, less visible ones as well? Does the size of the company plays a big role in your decision making? Will you prefer to go with a bigger company instead of a smaller one? These are just a few questions you should ask yourself.

I personally like to know a lot about the company before actually singing up with them and it does not have to be a big company. I am pretty happy with a smaller company as well. They just need to be known for providing good level of service, good support and service uptime.

A good way to find out if there are any problems, or “scandals” connected with a company is to search for

• “company name +
  • • • problem
      • scam
      • trouble
      • downtime
      • etc.

But I am pretty sure you are able to come up with far better word combinations Don’t hesitate to post your own clues and word combinations, in the comments section, you use when searching for truth

The unlimited or not?

I think, I have covered this a lot and in my previous article we have come up to the point when I told you, that we can be perfectly fine with 20GB of bandwidth and 1GB of web space and thus we have no need for unlimited things

Conclusion

At this point of our mini series I would choose a reliable and very well known hosting service provider. I would not decide to look at companies offering unlimited, because as  I stated in the previous post out imaginary blog does not need huge amounts of resources

Have a nice day and a great weekend

Prerequisites

I would like to start my own new blog, but I am not satisfied with Blogger and similar services as they do not offer personalization in the way I want it

The start of the hunt!

First things first, and thus the one and most important thing here – evaluate and  come up with a number. How many resources I will need?

This is the question, and the only question, I ask before starting any search for hosting plans! I need to know what I need before I will try to search for something.

I estimate, that my blog could in the future attract some 1000 viewers per day and each load of the website will consume 0.5 MB of my bandwidth [I have some pretty pictures on my blog ]. These numbers are the ones I need to figure out what bandwidth I will need. Remember, that it’s always better to have e.g. 25% more at the beginning than your actual need so you will not get into trouble later on

1000 viewers * 0.5 MB * 30days/month = 15 000 MB = 15 GB [I know, that 1000MB is not 1GB, but it's easier this way For the ones who wanna know it's 1024MB = 1GB]

Another my estimation is, that I will need to install WordPress for my blog and over the year I will write some 1000 articles Each article will hold one picture. At the end of the day I know, that I will need:

1000 articles * 0.5MB per article = 500MB

And as you can see although I am consuming 15GB of bandwidth per month I only need 500MB of web space!!!

Conclusion of the first part

As you can see in this short example you do not really need unlimited for a blog! All you would need is  a host who offers you 20GB of bandwidth per month and 1GB of web space. This is all you need to run a blog.

See you next time when I will expand this article a little bit Have a nice day and see you later!

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I would rate this feature as one of the more important ones, as it’s not that important, that you don’t have 3000 e- mail account’s , but it’s definitely very important. If you are not able to create a database of your “dreams” for your web site your whole project is destined  to failure. It will not operate without it and thus it’s more important than email accounts

The database

Hosting companies do offer you the option to have a web site with a database support. This database thing is very important if you plan to deploy a web site with visitor registrations, clients orders, or a site which would publish some kind of content and would utilize for example a software like WordPress, Joomla!, e107.org etc.

There are no so an yoptions in the world of database and most of the time you will be offered three options:

• MySQL [on Linux plans, maybe on Windows]
• MS SQL [only on Windows]
• Postrge/SQL [Linux...]

And they all have something the other one does not have, or has implemented in some other way. It’s software and it’s produced by different companies and thus they can’t be too similar

All you should care about is to make sure you know what type of database system your web site will need to be operational as there is nothing worse, than buying something to just find out, that your site can’t even run with this kind of software

Database – size, administration, numbers

As said so many times before – the number of databases and the rules governing their usage differ from company to company and thus I can’t give you any “this is the one solution used by all” thing here I can tell you, that most of the time you will be given the right [option] to have somewhere between 10- 30 databases created. The problem is, that companies tend to restrict the size of one single database [e.g. 1and1's used to limit 1DB to 200MB's], or all your databases share the amount of disk space allotted to your account and thus limiting the amount of data you can store on your server.

The usual way of administering your database is trough a web interface, but I can ‘t say it’s the only one. You’ll maybe run across another option as well

Conclusion & opinion

You should always know what number of databases you will need and what size they could rise to. You as well need to know what type of database you will need as different vendors sell slightly different implementations of the same standard

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It might not seem as a very crucial thing, but believe me you want to be sure your site will be able to operate well. I have not come across to many hosting companies offering other DB system then those mentioned. In fact I have not seen any others at all, although there are far more DB’s than those three… .

I would rate this feature as one of the more important ones, as it’s not that important, that you don’t have 3000 e- mail account’s , but it’s definitely very important. If you are not able to create a database of your “dreams” for your web site your whole project is destined  to failure. It will not operate without it and thus it’s more important than email accounts

Some examples:

• WordPress, Joomla!, e107.org, Drupal other CMS’s = MySQL [most of the time the database of choice ]

To remember:

• number of db’s you need
• size your db’s will need
• db type your site will be able to be run with