Your source for web hosting industry news.
December 29th, 2009
Getting Magento installed on DreamHost has never been easier. GimmeSoda.com has a script which handles the install for you!
Installing Magento Commerce on DreamHost – A PS machine is recommended! Click the link to read more.
Categories: DreamHost, Hosting Providers, Shell Scripts, Software
December 14th, 2009
We’re looking to add more hosts to our system, but since things are a little on the tight side we want to make sure we’re picking YOUR popular hosting company. So we are running a quick twitter contest, here is what you need to do:
1) Follow @WhereToHost on twitter: http://twitter.com/WhereToHost
2) Send a message @WhereToHost telling us who your favorite web host is and why.
We’ll look over the messages and select the most creative, that person will get a free domain – heck we may give more then one.
–The WTH Team!
JJ
Categories: Contest, Hosting Providers, Site News, Twitter, WhereToHost News
April 4th, 2009
zenPhoto is now at version 1.2.4, which now includes the addition of Zenpage as an official plugin.
Great to see the advancement on a project like this!
Their changelog includes the following about zenpage.
Zenpage now included as official plugin
- Performance improvements [sbillard]
- More internal restructuring and integration with Zenphoto [sbillard,acrylian]
- Content scheduling and expiration [sbillard, acrylian]
- Some pure theme related plugin options moved to theme options [sbillard ,acrylian]
- Zenpage setup integrated with main Zenphoto setup [sbillard]
- Zenpage default theme
- Homepage option to choose any unpublished page [sbillard,acrylian]
- Thickbox theme option [acrylian]
So great job to the zenPhoto team, keep up the good work! You can check out their notification about this here:
http://www.zenphoto.org/2009/03/version-124/
Categories: Software
March 8th, 2009
So there were a few things I never ended up doing since the last development post, a few I decided not to do, and some things I actually did do. In any case things are finally coming along although slower then I would have liked.
So I never actually did that, I just activated the host list page about a week back and left it at that. A few of the major hosts that were going to setup accounts for us fell though, unfortunate but we’ll find a way to grab the info anyhow even if it means shelling out the cash to grab an account.
I eventually figured that the cloud for the hosts might be a bit too redundant and decided to just drop the idea, at least for now.
Still going to do, of course, but there is quite a bit of information I haven’t gotten around to getting into the system and I have higher priorities at the moment.
I should have done this already but haven’t with any luck I’ll get it up within a week or so.
This was actually a rather large rewrite of the current template class that runs the system, stripped out a few unnecessary functions and added a few more while I was at it.
Better then just doing that I setup an openX install for the advertising server. I now get weekly reports of all ads that get displayed, click throughs, impressions all the basics and more in a rather easy to use system. Quite nice!
So beyond all that I’ve also integrated a list of all the php extensions we check for on a host, so if I’m missing something important let me know! You’ll find that over here on the PHP Extensions We Check page. Each of the links on that page lead to another with more detailed information about that particular extension in PHP.
Finally we’ve activated three hosting companies in the current beta system, two are paid hosts and one is a free host, they are: DreamHost, GoDaddy, and 000WebHost.com. If any more hosting companies are interested in getting themselves into the system let us know!
-JJ Galvez
Black Falcon Solutions
WhereToHost Webmaster
Categories: Main Site, Site News, WhereToHost News
January 25th, 2009
BlueHost
Bluehost.com president Matt Heaton posted to his blog on the 20th of January about the pain of backups. Included in this post is information regarding the solution they have developed and plan to release; a kernel patch that creates a list of modified files which should be backed up. Matt claims that using this system has given Bluehost an increase of 10x over their previous method of creating backups.
They also plan on releasing the addon they are creating. Check out the post over on Matt Heaton’s blog.
Categories: Hosting Providers
January 20th, 2009
We’re dedicated in getting this system up and running as quickly as possible! The development has been rapid and the response from hosting companies is wonderful. Thank you to everyone who is helping in making this system a reality!
For anyone who is interested the following additions have been made very recently.
Changes to come soon…
Categories: Main Site, WhereToHost News
January 18th, 2009
I’ve been reviewing applications and scripts to add into the system and I’ve come up against a pretty difficult choice. There are a large volume of useful scripts that have been written some time ago using the PHP4 scripting language, which due to the way they are written won’t run on 90% (or more) of properly setup and secured PHP5 environments. Do I add them to the system?
On the one hand we’ll be able to help people with these scripts toward the goal of finding a suitable host. On the other we’re promoting scripts which might just be relying on register globals and long arrays being enabled, that’s bad!
My personal belief is that, as webmasters, we must be responsible in selecting the scripts which run our sites and engines. We should not select a script that will not run properly in a modern environment, nor should we be buying or using scripts which developers have simply stopped keeping up to date with the latest in standards and compatibility.
I suppose that should answer my question… no PHP4 applications will be added to the system if they require any features such as register_globals or register_long_arrays to be “On”.
Sorry to everyone who this will be affecting!
Categories: WhereToHost News
January 18th, 2009
We’re getting ready to start getting the beta hosts into the system and manually adding popular applications. Currently WordPress, zenPhoto, bbPress, Drupal, Joomla!, Knowledge Tree, Laconia, MediaWiki, WordPress MU, and zenCart are being added to the applications database. Hosts which have agreed to running the compatibility checking software will be announced soon.
Categories: WhereToHost News
January 18th, 2009
The main idea behind WhereToHost is to write an application that is capable of checking the compatibility of any given webhost to the requirements (and optional features) needed for an application to function.
So what we do is hook up with a bunch of web hosts, where they agree to install a very small set of files (currently only 3) that runs a check on their PHP environment. That is of course one of the problems with this little system, it’s currently only for web hosts running Linux and PHP. I’ll eventually expand this to Ruby, Python, Perl, and so on but for now I’m sticking with PHP, so if you’re looking for a host that can handle something we don’t check for automatically head over to the forums. If there is a PHP application that you think should be added to the system add a request for application to the system.
Categories: WhereToHost News
January 15th, 2009
When looking over DreamHost and their compatibility with zenPhoto I found that they have an “Easy One Click” install available. This means two things:
In fact I put together a quick video of the installation process. Enjoy!
Signup For DreamHost! – Get $50 Off With “WTH” Promo Code
Features of zenPhoto – from the zenPhoto website.
- Internationalization/localization
- Multi-lingual titles and descriptions
- Plugin system
- Slideshow
- Automatically generated thumbnails, custom crops possible!, and sized-down images
- Upload via FTP or via the admin interface
- Move/copy/rename images and albums without loosing any data
- Upload images, albums (folders) or even zip-archives
- Comments on images and albums with powerful spam filters
- AJAX-powered edit-while-you-browse
- Sub albums; interface for moving/renaming images and albums.
- Video support for Flash Video (.flv), MPEG4 (.mp4), Quicktime (.mov) and 3GP (.3gp)
- Audio support for MP3 and MP4
- Password protection for gallery and albums
- EXIF and IPTC support
- Watermarks for images
- Powerful search with boolean expressions
- Tags: Categorize you images with tags
- Image and album rating
- Dynamic albums: Generate albums from searches!
- Highly customizable theme engine
- rss for gallery, albums and comments
- Multiple administrative users with varying rights
- Cruft free, search engine friendly URLs with mod_rewrite
http://www.wheretohost.net/news /
