Add a Chat Room to Your Website
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Chat rooms are a cool addition to your website. They also come in handy if you want to have some kind of live chat support or engage with your visitors in an up close and personal kind of way.
What You Need to Create a Chat Room
Before you install a chat room on your web server, you need to ensure that your web hosting company provides the right kind of platform.
Almost all paid hosting plans provide what you need. For example, Website Palace's hosting plan comes with a pre-installed chat room script that you can install with the click of a button (free web hosts do not provide this.)
So all you would do is login to your hosting account, go to the area where the free applications are located, and instruct your host to install the script and create your chat room.
Your chat room will be up and running in no time.
Gone are the days where you have to download a script, configure, upload and launch. Hosting has come a long way and installing a chat script is no longer the headache it used to be.
Chat Room Setup Overview
So let me back up a bit. All you need to setup a chat room is a domain name (yoursite.com) and a web host. Stay away from free hosting because you will not have the rights to install a chat room.
If you don't already have a domain and host, you can go to Website Palace and sign up for both. Once your hosting account is active, just login to your account and go to the Applications tab located in the "Hosting" section.
Browse the scripts until you find the chat script you want. Click "Install" and your chat room script will be installed instantly.
Warnings About Chat Scripts
As cool as they are, chat scripts can be resource hogs and can really bog down a server.
There are also security issues with some of them so be careful about installing just any old chat script. Usually the ones provided by the hosting companies are pretty safe so stick with those or a paid script.
Many of the free scripts online are full of bugs and security exploits so use at your own risk.
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