What to do with your web hosting - Get the most out of a hosting package w/ web disk, email servers, etc.

In todays web hosting world, your hosting account can do more than just serve your web page files out to the internet. Your web hosting plan is capable of doing many different things. This article will teach you how to get the most out of the package you pay for.

Setup Email accounts with your own domain name - mail@yourdomain.com

You can turn your web space into more than just virtual hard drive space by adding an email address to your account through your cPanel control panel. Once you have added the email address, your account is instantly ready to receive and send emails from the email address you just created. You can use the multiple web mail clients within cPanel, or you could setup an email client on your computer such as Microsoft Outlook.

Turn your unused space into remote personal file storage

Theres no sense in letting all that disk space go to waste. Right within cPanel, click on the web disk button to begin setting up your extra space as a personal web disk. After the config screen, install the application provided to setup your computer to access the virtual disk as if it were just another drive on your personal computer.

Remote MySQL database server

This little feature can allow you to use your hosting account as a remote database server. All you need to do is setup the database and configure a remote access host which can both be done right within cPanel. This will allow your database to be accessed by any remote server that passes the authentication credentials.

Anonymous FTP Server

If you have purchased a dedicated IP address for your hosting account, you can turn your space into an anonymous FTP server. This is great for file sharing or mirror software distribution. Send them to your public FTP space through ftp://yourdomain.com/ and they can start downloading your software through the file transfer proto call.