FrontPage Web Hosting

FrontPage Web Hosting has arisen from the success and popularity of Microsoft FrontPage.

First of all, what is FrontPage? Simply put, it's a software program that helps the user to create dynamic, interactive web pages without the need to posses any knowledge of HTML or other web programming scripts. This user-friendly point-and-click model, based around a straightforward "What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get (WYSIWYG) display, is familiar to most users of other products in the Microsoft office suite.

Given FrontPage's popularity, many market-savvy web hosts now offer FrontPage hosting to clients as a comprehensive package. Some companies are even choosing to specialize in FrontPage Hosting.

For the slightly more advanced user, FrontPage allows you to compose your site in HTML and/or view and edit the HTML code generated automatically concurrent with the point-and-click method. For the slightly less advanced, or the more time-crunched, FrontPage also provides various templates of web pages of all different styles and sizes, for all different needs, from pleasure to business and back again.

The primary benefit to using a FrontPage hosting service for your site rather than any other generic web host is that a FrontPage web hosting provider has FrontPage extensions enabled, which allow you, the user, to bypass the cumbersome, intermediary step of using a 3 rd party FTP client to publish your site.

This feature alone makes it well worth considering FrontPage and a FrontPage hosting provider for all your web-presence needs, as you continue to reap the benefits every time you update your site (which will be often, believe me) and every time save yourself 5 or 10 minutes of unnecessary labor.

FrontPage server extensions, as Microsoft puts it in their MSDN library, are programs to support, administer, author, and browse FrontPage websites.

The second benefit to choosing a FrontPage hosting provider for your FrontPage website(s) is that there are numerous juicy FrontPage features that are only accessible via a server with FrontPage extensions enabled.

If you plan to use any of the following on your FrontPage website, you must choose a FrontPage web hosting provider, specifically:

• Hit Counter - for tracking the number of visitors hitting certain of your site's pages

• Forms- for sending data inputted into forms to a file, an email address, or a database

• Discussion Forum - for sending and displaying comments sent by visitors to the site

• Search - for more detailed search functionality both within your site and on the overall web

• Mult-User Authoring - for allowing more than one programmer to work at the same time creating and editing pages of the site

• Remote Authoring and Administration - for permitting authorized users to perform administrative and editorial duties from any computer connected to the web.

These tools will only work on a server with FrontPage extensions enabled. If you don't run your own server on which you can install these extensions yourself, your best (and cheapest) bet is to go with a FrontPage hosting provider.

If you already have FrontPage, but have yet to find a FrontPage hosting provider, one easy way to do it is by clicking the "WPP" button in FrontPage's "Publish Web" dialogue box. WPP stands for "Web Presence Provider" which is just a fancy way of saying "web host".

Once you've taken down the names of a few FrontPage hosting services, come back to this website (www.hosting-review.com) for thorough reviews and recommendations on which ones may be best suited for your specific needs.

View our list of Top 10 FrontPage Hosting Companies