When choosing a webhosting solution like Exabytes, IPserveron, Bluehost or Bravenet, when you build your website, the control panel of the webhost that you choose will determine the usability. Of course the simpler your website that you make, there will be less impact if the control panel is buggy. However if you need to do something more you might find yourself struggling and perhaps hobbled by what buggy control panel that your domain is hosted in.
Just the other day I was trying to use the email alias feature in Exabytes HELM control panel. FYI, HELM control panel is used for those webhosting using Windows. The email alias is another name for email forwarding. In some webhost they just call it plainly as email forwarding and others they use the term email alias. Don’t know why don’t just call it email forwarding and use some special term like alias which at first look, was not so easily understood until you study it a little more. Leave it to the programmers who want to coin up unusual name for something that explain easily and clearly like email forwarding as email alias.
Anyway, I wanted to create an email forwarding using the email alias feature in HELM and found it to be really buggy. At first it wouldn’t allow me to use an email address from Gmail and kept giving me errors. So I tried with other non-Gmail email address and I could register an alias. Strange, perhaps being Windows based webhost I guess they have something against Gmail or something and wouldn’t let me use gmail email address for email forwarding. No matter, I used one of my own domain name instead. Unfortunately, after sending several test emails, none came through, so that mean the email alias is not working. And that is real poor of HELM control panel. Now I not sure whether this problem stems from because it is using Windows as a webserver or HELM control panel itself. But that really limits the ability of using several emails that you don’t want to create a POP3 account. You just want to channel them to a single account for easier email management.
So as alternative, I tried creating a POP3 email address and use the email forwarding feature (also known as alias again) and it didn’t work either. And again if using Gmail address it will spew out errors, but no problem if it was other domain name. I noted that the POP3 webmail is the same one that was being used in Webserver.com.my, and I have no problem creating alias for email forwarding. However my Webserver.com.my is running on a Linux server.
So that leaves me with the conclusion that a Windows webserver is of poorer value than Linux Webserver.
Such a simple thing like email forwarding also don’t work that tells you something about choosing between a Windows Webserver and a Linux Webserver. Usually when my friends call me up and says they want to sign up for a webhosting solution and would like to have some advise, I will tell them to sign up on the Linux Webserver package and not the Windows Webserver package. I guess I’m rightly justified not just based on the above email forwarding issue, but there are also a host of other extras that you can get from using a Linux Webserver that you can’t have on a Windows Webserver.
So in this regard when you are for example signing up with Exabytes Webhosting Company in Malaysia, you have two choices, Windows server or Linux server. I recommend that you choose the Linux server, not just because of the email forwarding, but you can also host more than one domain, plus Linux server is much more stable than Windows server (but you probably won’t feel it since this is backend) and has better security.