If you've got or are considering a web hosting account with PHP & mySQL support, you'll find a wealth of free programs & scripts to take advantage of their powerful combined capabilities.

Web hosting providers, from free to expensive, have always included some free pre-installed scripts to their customers in the way of guest books, counters & calendars. If you're shopping around now, though, you'll find that the toys & bells & whistles that you can install on your web pages include hundreds of scripts & applications. You can set up one of dozens of forums, choose from lots of picture galleries & photo albums, & serve classified ads, offer auction listings & dating services - in short, just about anything at all that you can do on the internet, you can do with a free PHP script from your web hosting provider.

two of the handiest types of free tools that lots of web hosting companies offer for free are:

One of the best free services to look for is Fantastico, a web-based script installer that allows you to add any of dozens of free goodies to your website with just the click of a mouse. If your web hosting provider offers Fantastico with its hosting accounts, you've got access to over a dozen different content management systems, half a dozen user forums, several different blog packages, shopping carts, including Zen Cart & OS Commerce, an easy FAQ maker & one different customer support options so that you can offer help & support on your website.

Content management systems make it easy for you to add & remove pages & information to & from your website. Most include modules that let you add discussion boards, shopping carts, polls & instant messaging, as well as user authentication & security to your website easily. Among the content management systems that your web hosting company may offer for free are Mambo, Post-Nuke, Xoops & Drupal. All are open source program with a lot of user support beyond the support offered by your web hosting company, so there's always new modules & new tricks being offered for all of them.

Portals & Content Management Systems

Blogs are online publishing tools that make it easy to update your website as often as you like. we automatically put the latest entries up & move older entries down in the reading queue. One of the most commonly used is WordPress, which lots of web hosting providers include as a free setup script with your web hosting account.

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