Fantastico

Posted by Average Joe on January 31, 2009 under Hosting | Be the First to Comment

One of the most difficult things about setting up a website is often installing the scripts, or files that will run your website. For example this website is run by a script, and so are many many other sites.

For me to manually install this site i would probably need to put aside the best part of an hour to go to the site of the company offering the script, download the script, read the instructions on installing it. Then i would need to upload the files by FTP, which can take a while sometimes. Before then going through the couple of steps to set some default settings and such. I would also need to go and setup a database and a database user and have that information ready for this process.

Or i can save a really big amount of that time and make use of the wonderful feature that many web hosts offer, called Fantastico. I suppose it would was called that because it truly is a fantastic tool, that you can use to make your life so much easier. At time of writing my webhost has 49 different scripts that you can install using fantastico, everything from blog scripts, to Content Management Systems, Shopping Carts and at least half a dozen different other type’s of scripts.

The best part of all of this is that the time it takes to install a script is greatly reduced, and simplfied. What may have taken you an hour before now takes as little as one or two minutes, no downloads, no FTP uploads, almost no setup options, database created automatically. Basically if you are not to sure about much to do with getting a website started this is the first option you should be looking for when looking for web hosting.