Hosting TutorialPlease use this tutorial to resolve any myths or questions you may have regarding hosting before continuing your search for a hosting provider.Chapter One - Overview Chapter Two - Relative Pricing Chapter Three - Space Requirements Chapter Four - Bandwidth Requirements Chapter Five - Email Information Chapter Six - Counters and Statistics Chapter Seven - Real CGI-Bin Chapter Eight -Control Panel Chapter Nine - Mailing Lists/News Letter Chapter Ten - E-Commerce Chapter Eleven - FTP Chapter Twelve - Connection and Reliability Chapter Thirteen - Support Real CGI-binOverviewShopping for a CGI enabled Host Overview Counters, clocks, chats, guest books, re-directs, cookies, passwords, random images, or even advanced functions like web mail or a banner exchange are all available to the big guys -- so why not you? Many of these are available, even to the free websites, but they are branded or require you to carry a link to the owner's site, all making your web-site cluttered, hard to follow, and losing you customers to all these other links. The thing these big guys have that you don't is the ability to run programs or scripts. A Web Server is just that, a server, when you click on a link you are asking to view a file, the server sends you the file, your browser makes it viewable, the server only sends it, it does not run any HTML file. The strain was on the hard drive and the internet connection -- not the processor. To load and run a program or script, you must have special permission from the server to execute lines of code. We give this permission to the special folder we call the CGI-bin. There is risk involved with giving just anybody permission to run scripts on a server with so many other websites, you wouldn't want one lame programmer to crash the whole machine, or slow it down to where it is unusable to anyone else. These concerns have all been addressed with the monitoring systems we have in place. We have a separate, Real CGI-bin directory installed for every hosting account. And a Global CGI-bin for each machine in which we have pre-installed several useful scripts. This isolates one process from another. If a process produces errors it just reports them, if it fails to finish, the owner is the only one affected, if it crashes it crashes alone, multi-tasking processors continue with their other tasks. If a script does cause interference or use excessive processor time, IT WILL BE TAKEN OFF LINE. Back to the top Shopping for a CGI enabled Host Many hosts say they have a CGI-bin, some actually think that's a place to put them (like a trash bin) CGI stands for Common Gateway Interface, the bin reference is to Binary or executable programs. Often you will find yourself having to mail the script to the host and waiting days (or weeks) for them to install it only to find out that it doesn't work, will need a modification as simple as a misspelling and have to go through the whole process several more times before you are actually going. These types of hosts will actually tell you that you have used up your right to send anymore modifications for the month try again next month. Most of these will actually put your script right in with all the others, and security gets to be a problem if other users have access to your scripts. Then scripts have to be "approved" and you know that means waiting. At Rosserver.com Hosting we include a private directory called CGI-bin, that no one but you can access. Further more, since what we offer is Real Hosting, every option is clearly available to all of our users, you can set the permissions any way you want and even run scripts from another directory if you have the urge. Load and test them yourself, any time of the night or day, holidays or weekends, a hundred times if that's what it takes to get it right. Go ahead, just NEVER wait for the support guy to give you permission again! Back to the top
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