Cold Fusion Web Site Hosting

Before we jump into the things to look for when considering cold fusion web site hosting, let’s take a brief overview of Cold Fusion itself.

Cold Fusion web site hosting is really all about databases. Cold Fusion is a software suite from the fine folks at Macromedia, which allows web-interactivity with databases. With Cold Fusion web hosting, you can now query, update, index, and chart databases from any web browser.

Cold Fusion web site hosting adds versatility and interactivity to ecommerce sites. Cold Fusion allows you to publish and then have automatically removed from your site time-sensitive materials, like flight schedules or event calendars. Cold Fusion adds functionality to creating and managing mailing lists and business reports. It also allows you to offer your visitors printable content and customized menus.

Whenever you see .cfm as the extension on a web page, as opposed to .htm or .asp for example, you know you’re dealing with Cold Fusion Markup Language (CFML).
Even though cold fusion is built on the Java platform, CFML allows web developers the benefits of Java without its inherent technical complexities. You need not know Java scripting in order to use cold fusion. CFML is a tag-based language very similar to HTML and XML. This makes it easier for anyone with even the most basic knowledge of web scripting to learn it.

Cold Fusion is a server-side language, which means that any web pages using CFML are read and interpreted by the Cold Fusion hosting company’s server and converted into an HTML page prior to being sent back to the user’s browser.

Cold Fusion web site hosting can be significantly more expensive than some other forms of web hosting. It is definitely worth investigating if you think you might find its unique set of tools are relevant and useful for your site’s intended uses. Cold Fusion web site hosting is typically run on Windows 2000/NT/2003 operating systems, though you may also find support for Cold Fusion hosting on Linux and Sun servers.

Along with the usual factors you must consider when choosing any web host - cost, disk space, bandwidth, uptime, scalability, support - you now also have to consider certain factors specific to cold fusion hosting. These include: potential tag restrictions, additional security concerns, whether the cold fusion hosting company provides database support, and which version of Cold Fusion they’re using.

One type of tag restriction that is also a security concern is “high risk” tags, like those that can be used to find and erase selected files from a server. For some larger businesses, this functionality is crucial to their operation, though potentially detrimental if accessed by the wrong hands, in which case a dedicated server is probably in order. Fortunately, cold fusion hosting is offered on shared, virtual, and dedicated servers.

Cold Fusion web site hosting is well worth considering if you’d like the functionality of the Java platform with the facility of a comparatively autonomous and user-friendly software system. This is especially true if your website is expected to generate an income. You may find that cold fusion web site hosting, even if it has an intimidating price tag, in the long run, just might be a bargain.