Top10WebHosting.com Blog

Shared hosting price war Returned !

BestHosting — Fri, 02 May 2008 14:50:47 +0000

Sometime ago, I have written a post about shared hosting price war ended . It is, however returned on 1st May 2008. Some large hosting company like Hostmonster, IXWebhosting, StartLogic and Lunarpages are offering the basic plan as low as $4.95/month.

To be qualify for this new low price, you have to sign-up for 2 years plan, which mean you have to prepay 24 months upfront. Plan comes with free domain registration.

I am not sure existing customer can enjoy this rate, but you can try threatening them by leaving to another host, see if they are willing to offer you a good rate :D.

Any how, if you are happy with your current host, stick with them. a good quality hosting is worth paying for.

Check out my update list of good cheap hosting.

About author : This original article is property of Top 10 Web Hosting (http://www.top10webhosting.com). List of best web hosting services company offering PHP and MySQL. Compare & save ! on web hosting fee.

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Apache 2 hosting

BestHosting — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 14:45:54 +0000

Apache 2.x hosting offer many new features compare to Apache 1.3.x, including

Unix Threading - On Unix systems with POSIX threads support, Apache can now run in a hybrid multiprocess, multithreaded mode. This improves scalability for many, but not all configurations.
Better support for non-Unix platforms - Apache 2.0 is faster and more stable on non-Unix platforms such as BeOS, OS/2, and Windows. With the introduction of platform-specific multi-processing modules (MPMs) and the Apache Portable Runtime (APR), these platforms are now implemented in their native API, avoiding the often buggy and poorly performing POSIX-emulation layers.

And many more, check http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/new_features_2_0.html

Lunarpages has recently upgrade their web hosting plan to include option to support Apache 2 hosting. Customer do not have to pay extra for this extra feature. If you are not sure which one to choose, pick 1.3.x as Apache 1.3 has been very stable for years.

Lunarpages is also running a promotion now, by entering coupon code “spring“, you will get $48 off your total bill for all 2 years hosting plan. Which also means, the hosting plan is as low as $4.95/month after discount. Click here to enjoy this discount.

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IXwebhosting 4.95 plan now with MySQL.

BestHosting — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 14:23:12 +0000

IXWebhosting has just upgraded their Expert Plan ($4.95 per month for 2 years contract).

Latest promotion from ixwebhosting is available here.

Database :
The plan was without any MySQL database, it is now comes with 50 MySQL database limit with total 1GB database quota. 1GB database is enough for most website, however, it may not be enough for large forum with more than 10,000 post.

Email :
IXwebhosting expert plan allows creation of up to 2500 emails account but with total 1GB email space.

Free ads credits :
You will get up to $433 ads credits from various online ads service provider like, Google Adwords, Yahoo! and Microsoft. This offer is limited to US and Canada customers only.

For complete list of review, please check out IXwebhosting review.

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PhpFreeChat Tool. Ajax chat server script.

BestHosting — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 14:51:58 +0000

php Free Chat is a free, simple to install, fast, customizable and multi languages chat that uses a simple filesystem for message and nickname storage. It uses AJAX to smoothly refresh (no flicker) and display the chat zone and the nickname zone. It supports multi-rooms (/join), private messages, moderation (/kick, /ban), customized themes based on CSS and plugins systems that allows you to write your own storage routines (ex: Mysql, IRC backends …), and your own chat commands !

Sample screenshots.

Simple

You only have to copy/paste few lines of code to have a nice working chat. It doesn’t require MySQL or any SQL database, messages and nicknames are simply stored in files. No problems with firewalls, this script is based on HTTP so you only need a web browser and an internet connection. (everyone can easily chat!) No problems with none-latin characteres ! Are you Russian, Japanese, Turk, Chinese, or Arabic? Whatever language you speak, phpfreechat will nicely display your characters because it uses XML with UTF-8 to encode characters.

Fast

AJAX technology is used to smoothly refresh (no flicker) and display the chat and nickname zone. Messages and nicknames are stored into a simple filesystem, so that server resources are saved as much as possible. Bandwidth is preserved because the server never transmits the same data twice, only new messages are transmitted.

Customizable

You can write your own customized CSS stylesheets, to completely change the appearance of your chat. All chat functionalities are customizable. For example, you can change the messages refresh time, you can ban users for changing their usernames, etc. The plugin system allows you to write your own storage routines. For example, you can write a plugin to store the conversations into your database.

Requirements

A Web server (Apache, IIS, Xitami …)
- Write access on the Web server (SSH, FTP, or other)
- Doesn’t works with “suphp” apache module enabled for versions < 1.0-beta5
PHP in your webserver
- PHP ? 4.1.0 for pfc 0.x and pfc ? 1.0-beta8
- PHP ? 4.2.0 for pfc ? 1.0-beta9 (because of “ctype” functions family)
- In some cases “safe_mode=On” makes problems
- “ctype_*” function family should be enable in your php for pfc ? 1.0-beta9
- flock php function needs to be available
By default, you don’t need a Mysql database. The chat uses files to store messages and nicknames.
Host that doesn’t insert advertisement.
Known good hosts .

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MailBee WebMail Lite (Free)

BestHosting — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 14:19:01 +0000

MailBee WebMail Lite is a free AJAX webmail application which supports skins and common e-mail protocols (SMTP and POP3). This application works on dedicated hosting, shared hosting including CPanel.

Users can receive, view, manage, compose and send e-mails through the web interface. ASP.NET and PHP editions available including the source code.

WebMail Lite 4.1 is available for ASP.NET and PHP platforms.

You can download the application and try a live demo here.

WebMail features

AJAX (drastically speeds up user interface and saves traffic) and classic HTML (compatible with old browsers) versions UI
“Back” button in AJAX interface mode is supported
Receives and sends mails from/to local and remote POP3/SMTP servers
Secure viewing HTML-formatted email messages, ability to view plain text version
Reply, Redirect & Forward functions
Deleting messages
Printing a message from the browser
Can view and download files attached to a message
Save messages to disk
Can show RFC-822 headers
WebMail Administration via web interface
Source code can be easily modified
Minimal system requirements (Database engine is not required, any mail server can be used)

P.S : If you encounter problem running

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Forwarding email to comcast.net

BestHosting — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 14:32:00 +0000

Question :

I have just signed up a hosting account and setup email accounts. I wish to forward all my emails to my comcast.net email account, it doesn’t work. Any suggestions on how to fix this ?

Answer :

Please avoid forward your emails to a comcast.net address. Forwarding doesn’t filter out any of the spam. So, the Comcast servers see a load of spam coming from your mail servers, and blacklist them. Then, none from the server can send mail to comcast.net addresses until the blacklisting gets lifted. But then, it just happens all over again.

There is absolutely no reason for forwarding email from your server. If you want to receive all your mail elsewhere then redirect the MX record. If not then simply set up your email program to retrieve from your host as well as where ever else you get mail. Most email programs can handle retrieving emails from as many millions of email accounts as you have.

Forwarding emails means that you run the risk of having the receiving account supplier misidentifying your server as a spammer source and then neither you nor anyone else with accounts on your server will be able to send mail to that email accounts with that supplier.

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How can i compress files on server?

BestHosting — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 14:49:56 +0000

Question :

i got more than 5gb files at the server, and need to compress it.
how to do this??

i don’t want to download, local compress, and uploading back.
painful experience.

Answer :

If you are using CPanel control Panel (list of host support cpanel) with the latest CPanel version 11, there is a function in File Manager where you can compress and decompress files/folders.

If you are using some other control panel. Check your online file manager, it may have something similar.

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Multiple domains on Yahoo web hosting, Possible ?

BestHosting — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 15:00:54 +0000

I have a client asked me, “I am thinking of shifting my websites to yahoo, however nowhere on the site they have mentioned about multiple domains. Can I do it with just one hostingplan. ?”

Looking at the hosting plans offered I don’t see anything about hosting more than one domain per account. They do give you a number of subdomains though.

see http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/webhosting/compare.php

Btw, you can get Yahoo hosting at $7.77/mo for the first 3 months via this link.

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Why you should do your own backup.

BestHosting — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 14:32:22 +0000

Most people rely on their host to perform backup for them. In fact it should your own responsibility, here is why…

Hosting company do backups of your site for their benefit.
eg. if the box crashes completely and they need to restore all the sites
from that box onto a new one.

All of the files from all the sites on that computer could potentially be jumbled
together on the backup.

Also you have no way of telling when they take a backup and which backup they will restore.

Basically their requirements for keeping backups of your site are different from your requirements for keeping a backup of your site.

If you were to accidentally delete some files from your site and then asked your host to restore them for you then if they were able to locate a suitable backup and restore it for you then they would be justified in charging you for that service since you are
taking staff away from their regular responsibilities to perform a task
that is really your responsibility.

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Globat network outage 21 Feb 2008

BestHosting — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 14:29:25 +0000

There were serious network outage happened on Globat.com on 21 Feb 2008.

Below is the email sent out by Globat CEO, Ben R. Neumann to their customer.

Today was NIGHTMARE-DAY! Globat.com just emerged from a major outage - the
worst in company history and everybody - customers and staff alike - still
feel extremely beaten up. Here’s what happened:

At approximately 5:00am Pacific Time on Thursday, February 21, 2008 we
suffered a major network outage, which effected nearly all Globat.com
customers, our own Web sites and service infrastructure as well as our phone
systems.

Our primary network switch in our main datacenter in downtown Los Angeles
failed completely and despite tremendous efforts by our technical emergency
response team could not be brought back online. This switch is a major brand
name piece of equipment and as such it contains internal redundancy. We were
able to switch over to the back up circuitry and begin bringing the system
back online at which time, for yet unknown reasons, the entire devise,
including backup system, failed completely.

After a short deliberation we decided to rush a new switch from our vendor’s
nearest warehouse to our data center. While waiting for the replacement we
initiated a work around to at least get email service re-established. After
several attempts all email systems finally went live and back to normal at
approximately 10:00am Pacific Time.

When the new switch arrived we went through the installation and testing
process and as a result were able to bring all our services back online, but
not before we had suffered a 5-hour outage for e-mail services and an 8-hour
outage for Web related services. In Globat’s entire 6 year history, we have
never experienced anything even remotely like this! The outage was so severe
that it affected our own Web sites and all but one of our telephone lines so
we were unable to communicate with our customers to update anybody about the
status of the incident. We decided to ask some of our staff members to post
updates on well known Internet forums, which helped a little in
disseminating the information.

Now that everything is pretty much back to normal I would like to tell you
that we ABSOLUTELY KNOW you count on Globat.com to maintain a high degree of
uptime to host your Web sites and that we take this trust very seriously.
Today, however, my team and I let you down and we all feel terrible because
of that. This has never happened before and we will do whatever it takes to
never let it happen again! I deeply and sincerely apologize for this outage
and the inconvenience and problems it may have caused. We promise to learn
from the events of this dreadful day (today was also my wife’s birthday, on
top of everything).

We are now taking the following steps to prevent a recurrence of this type
of failure. This switch is the only piece of equipment at Globat.com that
could possibly be a single point of failure. This equipment is usually
highly stable and has built-in redundancy. In additional it is being vendor
monitored 24/7. We will now keep a second switch, with its own built-in
redundancy, in our data center to prevent a prolonged outage in the unlikely
event of another switch failure. In addition, we are working with our phone
vendor to create an automated failover system so calls will be routed
directly to remote support sites in the case of a failure of our primary
phone system.

While nobody can completely prevent any form of failures in the future, with
these changes we can certainly minimize the effects of such failures and
reduce the impact on you, our valued customers.

Globat.com’s Director of Customer Service, Tom Cox, stands by to provide
even more information, in case you would like to discuss this event further
or are still experiencing any problems. You can reach Tom at cs_manager@globat.com.

At the time of me writing this message all of our systems appear to be back
up and running and I can assure you that our network operations team will
continue to investigate this unfortunate event.

In closing I would like to thank the entire Globat.com team (especially
Chris, Lou, Tim, Don and Rene) for working nonstop, without sleep or
interruption to resolve this issue and, of course, our customers for their
many encouraging comments and especially their incredible patience. You are
certainly very much appreciated!

Ben R. Neumann
Chief Executive Officer
Globat.com

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