Every Linux hosting account from 600host.net comes with Fantastico, an easy to use script installer. The icon is located at the bottom right hand side of your cPanel control panel.

Clicking on the Fantastico icon will bring up the following menus:

Navigation - you are currently at Fantastico Home. To return to your cPanel control panel, click Control Panel Home

Blogs - a selection of blogs including WordPress and Nucleus you can install

Content Management - a selection of great CMS software you can install on your site including Mambo and Joomla

Customer Relationship - if you’re a reseller there are some great packages in here, including Crafty Syntax LiveHelp (the same software we currently use for our LiveChat) and some great support ticket packages

Discussion Boards - including phpBB (you can also install YaBB from the cPanel main page)

eCommerce - including Zen Cart and osCommerce

FAQs

Guestbooks

Hosting Billing - again great if you’re a reseller, including the fantastic open source phpCoin

Image Galleries

Mailing Lists

Polls and Surveys (a great add-on for your site)

Project Management

Wikis

Other Scripts (some great PHP scripts here)

Extras - in here you can:

• Change the language
• Change the appearance of the side menus
• Set E-mail notifications of installations of Fantastico scripts
• Get an overview of packages you have already installed

The majority of scripts includes are open source - that means they are completely free to use and free of advertising. To install a script, select your required script and select New Installation. Also on this page are links to the support forum and a short description of the script.

Enter a directory you wish to install your script to - this has to be a directory which doesn’t already exist (for example if you were installing an eCommerce script you could choose the directory ’shop’ so your script would be installed at www.yourdomain.ext/shop, or leave blank to install in the root directory, ie www.yourdomain.ext).

Choose a username and password and click ‘Install’. Fantastico will then install the script and set up any required MySQL database for you, so all you need to do now is log in!

Customised error pages are an excellent way to make your site look a lot more professional and retain customers who could potentially be discouraged from you site by a coding error leading to broken links. Error pages are defined as follows:

400 - Bad Request

401 - Authorization Request (generally visitors don’t have required access credentials to password protected directories)

403 - Forbidden (user’s don’t have required access credentials)

404 - Not Found (broken link - a link to a page that doesn’t exist within your site)

500 - Internal Server Error (generally a PHP/MySQL/ASP problem - please contact our support department if you are continually receiving Internal Server Error messages)

Clicking on the Custom Error Pages icon will bring up a list of the above mentioned error pages. Clicking on any of the icons will bring up a window where you can copy and paste your code for custom error pages into a text field and save it. The easiest way to do this is to design is graphically in a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor such as Macromedia Dreamweaver, switch to the code view and select all the code displayed in the code window. Copy all the selected code, paste it into the text field and click ‘Save’.

The page also contained buttons which will insert dynamic features such as the URL from which the broken link came (referring URL), the IP address of the user, the requested URL which was not found, the server name (in our case this will be in the form of [servername].600host.co.uk, the visitor’s browser details (generally IE6/7 or a version of Mozilla Firefox) and the redirect status code (404, etc).

Using these features can give your site a more professional look and help visitors reporting errors to your site’s webmaster in establishing the cause of the error.

The Redirect button is extremely useful when updating sites and forwarding to other domains. For example, if you owned an online shop at www.myshop.com you may want to register the domain myshop.co.uk to prevent customers who accidently typed the wrong URL in from missing your online shop.

Log in to your cPanel account for the domain myshop.co.uk and click on the Redirects icon (as shown above).  Type the sub-address from which you wish to redirect (if you’re wanting to redirect from just the domain name leave this blank), then type in the domain you wish to redirect to. Choose whether this is a temporary or permanent redirect and click ‘Add Redirect’. Now, in this example, customers who visit the domain www.myshop.co.uk will be automatically redirected to the domain www.myshop.com.