Choosing the right web hosting tools is important in creating, maintaining, and protecting the website. The hosting platform forms the base while others enable some core functionality on the top. After 9+ years in web hosting, here are 10 tools I view as essential. After 9+ years in web hosting, here are 10 tools I view as essential:
1. CPanel – CPanel is the most widely used hosting control panel. It gives you a simple way of working with your hosting account, emails, files, domains, databases and much more. Some of the major points are the automatic installation of over 100 applications such as WordPress, simple mail configuration, the simple site builder, and domain and subdomain management etc.
2. Media Player – for sites that have multimedia content such as videos and music installed on them, the media player enables the user to easily manage the files. It has a user-friendly interface which can allow you to create and manage databases, tables, rows and users without having to type SQL code. Today, most hosts include phpMyAdmin in their default packages automatically.
3. Softaculous Auto Installer : installing apps such as WordPress can be very tasking requiring one to upload files- set permissions- create databases etc. Softaculous provides an easy solution by setting up the above apps with the push of a button. There are over 400+ popular web apps and it also comes with auto-update support. This helps to get your site online much faster than using the traditional methods.
4. SiteLock – This acts more like a blog security by ensuring that sites are not affected by malware and vulnerabilities which are quite rampant nowadays. SiteLock scans everyday for infected files, and other issues, such as Heartbleed and Open SSL vulnerabilities. It strengthens the WordPress security through remedies such as the capability to disable file editing and block bad IPs. Their firewall also has the capability to prevent over 99% of the malware traffic.
5. Cloudflare CDN – A CDN such as Cloudflare serves cached copies of your site to visitors based on their geographic location, thus enabling them to access your site faster. It shields against hazardous traffic and security risks using a global firewall with integrated machine learning. An indispensable asset to improve efficiency as well as protection.
6. FTP Client – Although CPanel hosts a file manager, I would like to have an efficient FTP client such as FileZilla that allows me to access and manipulate all hosting files independently. This enables one to upload and edit code, themes, images, etc, with tabbed interfaces, color coding, shortcuts and enhanced modes for the novices to the professional programmers.
7. Softaculous Cloner – The process of copying your site along with files and databases as well as other features to a new host, domain or subdirectory can be tiresome and tricky. Softaculous Cloner enables migration between hosts/environment while preserving everything hence no loss or impact after migration.
8. Server Monitoring Tools – Uptime monitoring tools like Uptime Robot check your site every few minutes from different locations in the world to inform you if your site has any downtime issues. They can email, SMS, Slack and provide historical uptime data and I believe something that is quite important. Some of the hosts also offer their own monitoring consoles, as mentioned above.
9. Analytics like Google Analytics – This is important in tracking the progress of your site in terms of growth and user engagement through users, geographical location, pages per visit, real time traffic among others. The most common tool is Google Analytics which is free and provides modern reporting options with optimization of content and performance insight.
10. Backups & Restore Tools – As much as one can try to secure a site, sometimes it can be hacked, users delete files, hosting companies mess up and your files are gone. The daily via CPanel or any other own developed software tool backup and the option to restore with the precise accuracy as a backup offers, are good insurance against such situations. The following are some backup tips which can be employed:
I hope you enjoyed this list of 10 web hosting tools you can’t live without! The hosting control panel such as CPanel and the ability to monitor the uptime, protect a site, optimize its speed, analyze its progress, and have dependable backup/restore options all create a powerful set of tools to effectively host and control any website. If you want some suggestions that may suit your particular hosting stack or meet some specific requirements please let me know.
