Tips for Frontpage Web Hosting
A Web Hosting Article Contributed by Frances Rhea
Frontpage Web Hosting Tips
Creating and managing a web site with Microsoft's FrontPage is easy if you find the right web hosting. The most important thing to remember for FrontPage Web hosting it that you need to pick a provider that supports the FrontPage extensions. It is equally important to find out which of the specific versions that they support (98 / 2000 / 2002). After you have signed up for Web hosting it is too late to find out that you will not be able to use FrontPage to directly manage your site or have the functionality the components provide.
Frontpage Web Hosting Extensions are Important
If your web hosting has the extensions installed, you will save lots of hours when publishing your site. This is especially true when compared to uploading your site with the use of a separate FTP program. Although the KISSfp add-in makes FTP uploading a breeze.
Why a Free Web Hosting is Not a Good Solution
Do yourself a favor and do not make the mistake of choosing free Web hosting. Free services do not support FrontPage and typically include mandatory banner advertising, do not provide adequate customer support, and have small bandwidth allocations.
One of the largest problems of free hosting is the ads that are placed on all of your pages. The problems incurred are that the ad is not placed correctly into the page HTML. This can cause your visitor's browser to crash.
There are other technical difficulties with free hosting services as well. Most free hosting companies are overloaded with users. This means that their performance will drop.
Some other problems that you might find using a free web hosting service are security and privacy problems, slow web site response times, and problems listing your web site in most of the search engines because of your subdomain URL. Most free web hosting sites only allow the use of their built in editors. This will limit the design of your or your business web site and not allow you to take advantage of the FrontPage software that you want to use.
Web Hosting for Frontpage Web Bots
FrontPage has several components that require server extensions. Even if the web server has the extensions installed, some of them will not work.
Unix servers support all of the FrontPage components including the counter and form-to-email. The FrontPage features that do not work on Unix are IDC/HTX and connectivity to Microsoft Access, Visual FoxPro, and Microsoft SQL Server. These are proprietary to Windows web servers.
The FrontPage registration component does not work on Windows 2000 web servers. You will also not be able to use Tools & Permissions to assign Users and Passwords to access your web site.
Conclusions
As you can see there are several things to take into consideration when finding web hosting for your FrontPage web site. Make sure you ask the hosting company personnel what features they support for FrontPage. If they do not provide the functionality that you want, look for another.
