Cold Fusion Hosting

Cold Fusion Hosting is all about databases. Cold Fusion, a software suite brought to us by the fine folks at Macromedia, which allows web-interactivity with databases. With Cold Fusion web hosting, you can now query, update, index, and chart databases from any web browser.

Developing Cold Fusion Hosting

Cold Fusion hosting adds versatility and interactivity to ecommerce sites. Cold Fusion allows you to publish and then have automatically removed from your site time-sensitive content, such as flight schedules or event calendars. It adds functionality to creating and managing mailing lists and business reports. It allows you to offer your visitors printable content and customized menus.

Anytime you see .cfm as the extension on a web page, as opposed to .htm or .asp for example, you know you’re dealing with Cold Fusion Markup Language (CFML).

Though cold fusion is built on the Java platform, CFML allows web developers the benefits of Java without its inherent technical complexities. You need not know Java scripting in order to use cold fusion. CFML is a tag-based language quite similar to HTML and XML which makes it easy for anyone with even the most basic knowledge of web scripting to learn.

Cold Fusion is a server-side language which means that any web pages using CFML are read and interpreted by the Cold Fusion hosting company’s server and converted into an HTML page prior to being sent back to the user’s browser.

Cold Fusion web hosting can be significantly more expensive than other forms of web hosting, and should therefore only really be considered if its unique set of tools are relevant for your site’s intended uses. Cold Fusion hosting is usually run on Windows 2000/NT/2003 operating systems, though you can also find support for Cold Fusion hosting on Linux and Sun servers.

In addition to all the usual factors you must consider when choosing any web host – cost, disk space, bandwidth, uptime, scalability, support – you now also have to consider certain factors specific to cold fusion hosting, including: potential tag restrictions, additional security concerns, whether the cold fusion hosting company provides database support, and which version of Cold Fusion they’re using.

One type of tag restriction that is also a security concern is “high risk” tags, such as those that can be used to find and erase selected files from a server. For some larger businesses, this functionality is crucial to their operation, though potentially detrimental if accessed by the wrong hands, in which case a dedicated server is probably in order. Fortunately, cold fusion hosting is offered on shared, virtual, and dedicated servers.

Cold Fusion is well worth considering if you’d like the functionality of the Java platform with the facility of a comparatively autonomous and user-friendly software system. Especially if your website is expected to generate an income, you may find that the intimidating price tag, in the long run, turned out to be a bargain.

Electronic Commerce (E-Commerce)
Allows Website customers to sell products and services online and accept payment at the same time, usually through a cgi-script of some kind.

Creating a professional website can be challenging. E-commerce web design is really a complex. To cut development time, many web hosting companies start offering web hosting templates or hosting with templates.

Whether you’re looking for a simple web site or a functional e-commerce website, the chances are that you may be able to find a few web templates from your hosting company. A simple web template may cost under $20 dollars, but a well-designed professional e-commerce website will cost a few hundreds or more if not thousands. The cost of web templates is still cheap comparing to custom-made e-commerce websites when Web designers charge anywhere from $20 to $100 per hour. If you want to check out some templates, go to www.templates box.com

Besides the requirements of standard web hosting plans, Web hosting templates for e-commerce operations needs a shopping cart that supports online catalog and online payment processing (here’s a clue, pick Pay Pal). Web templates for e-commerce often include common pages and navigations for online shopping – searching or browsing products, adding items to shopping carts and making payment. The web templates for e-commerce do not include or connect to any specific shopping cart. It’s up to the webmasters to add shopping cart to the site.

The alternative e-commerce hosting to web templates is e-commerce turnkey solution. EBay Stores, Yahoo! and GoDaddy.com are the most popular turn-key e-commerce solutions for small businesses that want to setup online stores easily. Different hosting plans may have different free structures. The cost of each hosting plan often varies on transaction volume.

When comparing functionality, there’re many questions to ask: 1) whether a shopping cart accepts online check or debit card.  2) Whether there’s a limit on the number of products and categories that you can setup; 3) whether it automatically sends out an email notification once an order is placed at your web-site.

When looking at the cost of commerce operation, you’ll need to ask questions about 1) what’s the basic monthly fee for transactions; 2) is there’s a setup fee for a new online store; 3) how about handling taxes?; 4) how much it charges for each transaction.

Talk with your hosting service on e-commerce issues and discuss the best plan to go with.