Content Management Systems and Hosting

Most Web hosting plans tools to help build and maintain a website. Packages often come with simple domain registration, easy-to-use site building software and content management tools to help you manage all the different elements on your online property.

A content management system, or CMS, is a system used to organize, control and publish a large body of documents and other content, like images, video and audio to your website. Besides the obvious benefit of having a tool that makes it easy to manage the content on your site, a CMS also offers workflow benefits, moving electronic documents along for either approval or for adding content through your internal network or over the Web. Some general CMS features include Web-based publishing, format management, revision control, indexing, search and retrieval.

There are a few different CMS options you will run into when looking for the right Web hosting plan, so it's good to keep this in mind while doing your research and see which option may be right for you.

Some Web hosting providers have partnered with companies that specialize in content management software, like CM4all (www.cm4all.com) and have customized the solution to their private label requirements and automatically included them in their Web hosting packages. These providers include 1&1 Internet (www.1and1.com) with plans starting at $3.99 per month and Verio (www.verio.com) packages starting at $11.95 per month.

You can also purchase a CMS from a third-party provider and install it on your server or use it as a hosted service. You can find software that ranges in price from close to $2,000 to free, so it's up to you to decide which one will best suit your needs and technical comprehension. SpinPike (www.spinpike.com) offers downloadable software you can install on your server starting from $495 and Typo3 (www.typo3.com) offers a free open source content management solution.

Another option is to create your own CMS using back-end scripting tools like PHP, ASP, JSP or ColdFusion combined with a database using a WYSIWYG editor like Dreamweaver. This type of solution offers many of the dynamic page building capabilities of CMS but not too much of the project management and workflow elements.