Archive for March, 2010

Top Web Hosting Providers

Wednesday, March 17th, 2010

After researching the Internet I have found the following web hosting providers to be in the top 10 in the hosting industry. They have hundreds of thousands customers and host millions of web sites. All are USA based web hosting companies.

HostGator – over 200,000 customers and 2,500,000 websites hosted on their servers.

Bluehost – more than 1,000,000 websites hosted

Hostmonster – 600,000 plus sites.

Ixwebhosting, Webhostingpad, Justhost, Lunarpages and Dreamhost. All are top rated hosts and you will hardly find bad reviews for any of them, though there are some bad reviews, but with such big number of clients that is normal. They all offer many features including: PHP, MySQL, control panels, FTP, one-click installers for wordpress, drupal, joomla, shopping carts, galleries and other applications, at least 30 days money guarantee, 24/7 support etc.

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Overview of Web Hosting Control Panels

Wednesday, March 10th, 2010

With hosting control panel you can perform many tasks with your hosting account. You can upload/download files (with File Managers), create databases with users permissions, setup FTP accounts (with quotas per user, and access restrictions), add new domains (addon, subdomains), server logs, view statistics/logs and other hosting related tasks. With control panel it is much easier to maintain website(s) because, it is very easy to use, simple yet have tons of features. Panels do not require any technical knowledge or skill like system or server administration. Popular control panels are cPanel, Hsphere, DirectAdmin, Plesk and all of them support linux hosting, while windows hosting is not supported by all. cPanel is the most popular panel and only supports Linux environment (preferably CentOS or RedHat). Most of the companies offer this panel to their clients. Fantastico is addon to cPanel which allows fast, easy installation of popular web applications like wordpress, joomla, drupal, shopping carts, galleries and lots of others popular web scripts. This makes it very easier for the average user to create a website.

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WordPress VS Drupal

Sunday, March 7th, 2010

Which is better? First an overview of both web applications.

WordPress

WordPress is blog publishing platform and a content management system. Have many features including user registration with simple permissions, blog posts, static pages, RSS feeds, cross blog communication tools (pingbacks and trackbacks), comments, extension system (plugins), template system and many others.

Drupal

Drupal is content management system. Shares many features and hosting requirements with WordPress including the above mentioned, but more powerful user system (permissions), ability to create your own content types and better (more complex) administration panel.

So which is better?

This depends on what your web site will be about. Both are very good applications and are very popular, with lots of extensions and themes. If you are starting a personal site/blog than wordpress would be the choice because it is easy to manage and have good and simple admin panel. Although drupal can be used for personal websites, drupal tends more to be community driven, and is better for large corporate websites. So the choice is yours, whichever you choose you won’t regret.

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Drupal Web Hosting

Thursday, March 4th, 2010

Drupal is free, open-source content management software. It is powerful CMS script with lots of features including user managenent (permission system), content managent with custom content types, RSS feeds, internationalization/localization in many languages, modules – extensions system, theme system (with widget support) and many others. It is licensed under GNU General Public License that gives much freedom to developers. Drupal have gained popularity in recent years (fact is that many corporate and government sites use drupal (whitehouse.gov)), and become among top 5 most used CMS. The official package can be download at drupal.org, and it is called the drupal core. Drupal core have the core modules and components needed to create simple website, blog or online community. It can be run on any web server (Apache httpd for example) with PHP language and MySQL database support. Some special PHP settings like register_globals must be turned off in order drupal to be installed. It is somewhat difficult for first time user to maintain drupal web site, but once it get used to it is much easier. Hosting acounts at the following hosts: Hostgator, Bluehost, Hostmonster, IXwebhosting, Webhostingpad, Dreamhost, Justhost are perfectly setup so you can run drupal without any problems. They also support custom PHP.ini for register_globals option and have one-click installers that will help you install drupal without need of download/uploading script, setting databases and files.

Posted in Drupal Hosting, Web Hosting, Web Hosting Services, WebHosting | 1 Comment »

Shared Web Hosting

Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010

From all web hosting services, shared hosting is the cheapest and the most popular  hosting service. Shared web hosting allows many users to share single server. It is the simplest way for you to have a website for few dollars monthly. Today many hosting providers offer many features on single shared hosting account (PHP , MySQL databases including Remote MySQL, FTP accounts, add domains, Perl, Rails etc), control panel to make it simpler to you to manage files (File Manager), setup databases (add new users, create databases),  create FTP accounts (setup quotas and permissions), check server status, install web scripts (wordpress blogs, joomla cms, drupal, galleries). Most popular control panels in the shared hosting industry are: cPanel, Hsphere, DirectAdmin, Plesk and others. For operating system linux is the choice for shared hosting, though windows shared hosting is offered but is more expensive because of Windows OS licenses. In general, the client does not perform server configuration, install updates or other administration tasks, as this is done by the hosting company’s staff. So if you want to create a website or blog this is the choice for you.

Posted in Shared Hosting, Web Hosting, Web Hosting Services, WebHosting | 1 Comment »