phpBB (PHP Bulletin Board) is one of the best free open-source community forum creation software. It is built with php and uses mysql (postgresql, mssql, oracle and other database management systems are also supported) as a storage engine for forum data, settings, permissions, post, threads etc, licensed under the GNU General Public License. It supports module system with auth and other apis, where developers can easily add new features and settings to the standard ones. There is also a theme system where webmaster can add new themes and change the layout of the forum. Other standard features included are: user management with user registration, permissions per user/thread, administrators, moderators, usergroups, internationalization (available in several languages) with UTF-8 support. The current version is 3.06 released on 17 november 2010. Development for version 2 have ceased on 1 January 2009 and it is no longer supported. PHPBB3 is the best and the latest version offering much more features than the previous version, better security and optimizations. Many mods and templates are available free and paid ones. Before I installed vbulletin on my hostgator account I had phpbb version 2. I did not like that version so I bought vbulletin license. Currently I have vbulletin and though phpbb3 is very good forum software, I will not replace it with vbulletin because many features are same in both scripts.
HostGator Uptime for January 2010
I have free account at serviceuptime.com, where I have setup they to monitor my website – rsmkd.com uptime. The uptme for Janurary 2010 is 100%! This is great, by far it is the best uptime among all other hosting companies I have an account with.
Here is the screenshot, for the previous month:
You can see the report live here. Hostgator overall uptime for 2009 have been 99.977% which is excelleint in my opinion. This is well above the 99.9% mark host gator guarantees. The overall uptime measured so far is 99.972%, with average response time of 0,364 seconds, which is also excellent. My account with serviceuptime.com is setup to monitor my site every thirty minutes. In January 1696 checks have been made and none of the failed! I am very happy for my websites hosted with Host Gator. In about two months I will make 2 years with HostGator, and my experience with them have been and it is still great! They are really one of the best web hosting providers out there.
HostGator Vbulletin Forum Hosting Review
Vbulleting is a commercial web software written in PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor – the most popular web scripting language) for creating online communities (forums) produced by Jelsoft. Together with phpBB (php bulleting board) are the most popular forum software programs in the world. The latest version of vbulletin is 4 which comes with 2 more solutions – blog and cms (content management system) platform – all together called Vbulletin Suite. It offers many features: user registration with ability to edit users or add them from admin control panel, powerful permissions system for administrators, usergroups restrictions and permissions, moderators and forum users, forum and subforum based permissions, ajax editing, templating system, extension system (for add new features) and much much more. There are many templates and extension modules available. It is the best to date forum software available and it is very easy to manage . Only downside is that it is not free, but you get what you pay for!
Vbulletin on Hostgator
Hostgator account is perfectly setup so you can run vbulletin without any problems. I have it installed on forums.phpweby.com (hosted at hostgator) - webmaster forums where you can see it live. It is fast and all features are supported. Signup with hostgator, buy vbulleting license and build your community today.
HostGator Drupal Hosting Review
Drupal and Joomla are the best free and open-source CMSs (content management systems) in the world, both licensed under GNU General Public License. Drupal like Joomla supports templating systems (hundreds of free drupal themes available), a module system (core modules – shipped with the standard official drupal package, available for download from drupal.org), core features worth mentioning here are user manager with powerful permissions system, content manager, RSS feeds, logging, administering the system, and thousands other modules (contrib modules) that add new features and functionality to Drupal. You can create any type of websites, anything between personal blogs/ web sites to social network or corporate websites and more. Drupal was originally created by Dries Buytaert (buytaert.net) in 2001 and in recent years have grown in popularity. Many websites are powered by Drupal, popular ones like michaeljackson.com, political – whitehouse.gov and many personal websites/weblogs. It have large community of developers and supporters making this content management system the next choice for your online presence an excellent choice.
Drupal on HostGator Review
Drupal runs perfectly and fast on HostGator. You can see live Drupal installation on rsmkd.com/drupal/ . I have installed drupal manually by downloading the package from drupal.org, but you can install it via fantastico. Installation via fantastico is not recommended because not always the latest version of Drupal is available immediately via Fantastico cPanel tool. Happy Drupaling with Hostgator!
HostGator Joomla Hosting Review
Joomla is one of the most powerful open source content management systems (cms) around. Written in PHP, it is distributed under GNU General Public License. It is full of features that allow you to create any type of websites, whether it would be personal, corporate, blog, social network and more. Together with Drupal are the most popular cms in the world.
Joomla supports templating system that allows you to easily change the look and feel of your site. There are many free and paid professionally designed templates available. And most of them can be easily edited if you want to change some parts. In addition to templating system, this content management system supports extension system. The extension system extends Joomla functionality by adding new features. The so-called components add even more functionality to Joomla. There are more than 3000 extensions available in extension directory website.
List of features:
* User management – (add, edit users with various types of options and permissions)
* Media management – (manage media folders and files, configure MIME types, etc)
* Banner management – (rotate banners, add, edit, clicks etc.)
* Web Link management
* Content Management (publish articles, create static pages, edit content and more)
* Menu – manage menus
* Syndication and newsfeed
And much much more features. Check joomla.org website for more details on features, where to download joomla, support etc.
HostGator Joomla Review
I just installed Joomla on hostgator hosted website rsmkd.com. Works flawlessly and fast. You can access my joomla site at rsmkd.com/joomla/ . Though it is not advised to install Joomla via fantastico I installed it just for test purposes. Always install software manually, because the latest version is not always up to date on Fantastico one-click installer.
HostGator Free Website Templates
Designing your website can be time consuming and not all people can do it. If you your website looks ugly visitors won’t come to visit it again. For company websites ugly websites can send bad message to potential customers and lose sales. Hiring a web designer can be an option, but it could be costly and time consuming. The best option would be free professional templates.
If you sign up with host gator web hosting, not only you get many features, best 24/7 support, but you also get access to more than 4500 Free Website templates. These templates are available to all customers and all hosting plans (shared, vps (virtual private server hosting), reseller, dedicated). There are over 120 template categories available:
* Accommodations
* Web design
* Hosting
* Business
* Martial Arts
* Advertising
* Art
* Hotels
* Law
* Animals & Pets
* Insurence
* Medicine
* School
* Real Estate
and much much more. Every template can be easily edited. Signup with hostgator today and get access to all free templates!
HostGator WordPress Blog Review
WordPress
WordPress is a web content management system, written in PHP and MySQL, for creating blogs. WordPress today, along with Movable Type, is the most popular in the creation of Weblogs (blogs like this one). The causes of its rapid growth are, among others, the type of license (open source), its ease of use ,and its features such as content management. Created by Boren and Ryan Matthew Mullenweg, is free, distributed under the GNU General Public License.
WordPress Features
* Generates XML, XHTML, CSS in accordance with W3C standards
* Management of links integrated
* Structure permalink friendly to search engines
* Extensive plugins
* Nested categories and multiple categories for articles
* TrackBack and Pingback
* Typographic filters for formatting text and styling
* Static pages
* Multiple Authors
* Supports tags (since version 2.3)
WordPress supports templating system,which is used to set the appearance and structure of your blog.
There is a official community, both professional and amateur, engaged in the design of these templates, and offering support to wordpress users, that are listed on the wordpress.org site once they have been tested and officially approved.
Although the philosophy of a strong commitment WordPress valid according to W3C guidelines, the possibilities of this system, both in terms of design, structure or management, and flexibility of the system with Themes and Widgets in particular, are enormous and can be used practically to create anything between single blog to a custom CMS.
HostGator WordPress
HostGator supports PHP and MySQL which allows running WordPress on their servers. You can either install manually wordpress, by creating mysql database in cpanel, uploading the WordPress files package (downloable from wordpress.org), pointing the web browser to your domain and following the instructions. Or you can install it with Fantastico which will do everything automatically. Any way wordpress runs great on hostgator. Personally I have installed many blogs on hostgator and all work great!
HostGator MySQL Database Hosting Review
What is MySQL?
MySQL is a database management system, relational database, multithreading and multiuser with more than six million installations.
On one side is released under the GNU GPL for any use consistent with this license, but for companies that want to incorporate it into proprietary products the company should buy a specific license allowing them to use MySQL in their closed source products. MySQL is developed mostly in ANSI C.
Unlike projects like Apache, where software is developed by a public community code and copyright is held by the individual author, MySQL is owned and sponsored by a private company, which owns the copyright to most of the code.
This is what enables the licensing scheme mentioned above. Besides the sale of proprietary licenses, the company offers support and services. Hire workers for its operations around the world who collaborate via the Internet. MySQL AB was founded by David Axmark, Allan Larsson and Michael Widenius.
MySQL is widely used in web applications, like Drupal or phpBB, platforms (Linux / Windows-Apache-MySQL-PHP / Perl / Python), and bug tracking tools like Bugzilla. Its popularity as a Web application is closely tied to PHP, which often is in combination with MySQL. MySQL database is a very quick reading when you use non-transactional MyISAM engine, but may cause integrity problems in high concurrency environments such alterations. In web application there is low turnout in the modification of data and change the environment is data intensive reading, what makes MySQL ideal for these applications.
HostGator and MySQL
MySQL is very fast on host gator. In my almost 2 year hosting with them I never had problems with mysql what so ever. It’s very easy to create new database (you can have unlimted MySQL databases), and manage it with phpMyAdmin. The tools to create the database is MySQL databases tool and MySQL Database Wizard tool. When you want to connect to MySQL you need to create a user and add that user to the database with appropriate privileges. You can do this with the tools above. There is also an option for Remote SQl if you want to connect remotely to your database on hostgator.
HostGator PHP Review
What is PHP?
PHP (acronym for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) is a free scripting language mainly used for producing dynamic Web pages via HTTP – HyperText Transfer Protocol or simply internet surfing, but can also function as any interpreted language locally, by running programs command line. PHP since version 5 features offers full object model. Due to its rich library, sometimes is referred to as PHP platform rathar than just language. PHP is used primarily as a scripting language on the server side, which means that it is the server (the machine that hosts the Web page in question) will interpret the PHP code and generate code (consisting generally of ‘XHTML or HTML, CSS, JavaScript and sometimes) which may be interpreted by a web browser. PHP can also generate other formats in connection with the Web, like WML, SVG, PDF, or bitmap images such as JPEG, GIF or PNG. That is why PHP THE web programming language is the most powerful and most popular web scripting language. It is required by popular web scripts: WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Mambo, phpbb, vbulletin, mybb and many more in order for them to run. PHP with some database engine (MySQL mostly) is the back end of todays many websites including this one (WordPress powered). Most popular sites that use PHP are Facebook, Wikipedia, milions of wordpress blogs.
HostGator PHP Review
Host Gator have the latest version (PHP5 at the time of writing this review) installed on their web servers. PHP is very fast on Hostgator and it comes with many features (libraries that extend the functionality) e.g zip for managing zip archives (extract, create, list and more). You will be able to run everything from blogs like this one(wordpress), bulleting boards – forums (phpbb, vbulleting, mybb), content management systems like Joomla, Drupal and more with blazing speeds. There is even support for custom php.ini files to further customize settings, like for examle turn off or on register globals.
HostGator VPS (Virtual Private Server) hosting Review
What is VPS hosting?
A virtual private server (commonly VPS) is nothing but a server connected to the Internet. Unlike a regular server, ie a machine that actually exists and has a fairly high cost of maintenance, a VPS is a server shared with other users. In other words, is a way to split a physical server into several independent computers together.
Any user who has available a service of this kind is as if its a server, so has its RAM, its share of the CPU, its tree of folders and everything else. The main advantage is the cost, not least the fact that you can work on a highly configurable, with the guarantee of automatic daily backups, electrical continuity and connection to the network. Each VPS can install any operating system, usually without a Unix graphical interface (this would occupy too much RAM). It is accessible through a “panel” via HTTP, console, SSH, Telnet or FTP. Each server can be rebooted independently.
The practice of dividing a single server to appear as multiple servers has long been practiced with mainframe computers, but has recently seen a renaissance with the development of software and virtualization technologies for other architectures.
HostGator VPS Review
VPS hosting plans at hostgator are the middle between shared web hosting and dedicated servers. You have full root access the the VPS server with ability to install your own applications, and you can easily upgrade the VPS plan at anytime. The servers are Dell Power Edge servers with Dual Nehalem CPUs, DDR3 Ram, Raid-10 disc with Gigabit links. The Operating System of the VPS is CentOS enterprise 32-bit with Virtozzo Control Panel. There are nine levels or 9 VPS hosting plans. Depending on which level you will choose you will get allocated CPU, Disc Space and RAM memory. Level 1 starts at $19.95 a month with 0.56 GHZ, 384 MegaBytes RAM, 10gb space and 250gb bandwidth. Higher levels offer you more CPU, RAM, Space and Bandwidth. Level 9 is with 5.94 Ghz, 4435 MB Ram, 231 Gigabytes disk space with 3150gb bandwidth at the price of $209.95 / Month. All levels come with 2 IP addresses with option to purchase up to 32 dedicated IP addresses.
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