February 17, 2011 - Web Hosting Reviews and Guidance

Best Opencart Hosting Reviews

Opencart introduction

OpenCart is an open source "out of the box" shopping cart solution. With Opencart, you have the ability to create your own online business and participate in e-commerce at a minimal cost. You simply install, select your template, add products then you're ready to start accepting orders. The system provides order management with multiple payment gateways built in, the most important is opencart team provides lifetime free support and free software updates.

Best Opencart Hosting

The best Opencart hosting awards turns to Arvixe LLC. The opencart official site is actually hosted by Arvixe.com! Being the official open cart hosting sponsor, arvixe hosting is fully optimized for opencart website purpose. With only $4/mo you get full access to your open cart installation and database files. Arvixe provides 24*7 developers support by experienced technicians.

Arvice Opencart hosting features

Unlimited disk space / data transfer
Multiple domain name hosting
One FREE domain for life
Opencart one click auto installer
24/7 professional tech support
99.9% uptime and 60 day money back guarante

Arvixe web hosting is combination of unmatched reliability, quality and affordability and well known of "Arvixe Advantage", the advantage of working with the best. Being an Inc500 fortune group and solid hosting group, arvixe is simply the most successful choice for open cart site!

How to select the right Opencart hosting?

Unlike many other e-commerce solutions which has high system requirements. Opencart can be deployed to various web servers as long as php mysql supported. what you really should look at is the opencart site performance and the hosting support level. Especially on the following:

Enterprise grade server plan: Shopping cart sites need high performance to archive business success. A high quality opencart hosting plan must be setup on powerful hardware platform with enterprise grade CPU/RAM and disk space. The arvixe hosting servers are advanced DELL production with custom reinforcement on security and system level optimization. Not only the bare servers, their data centers provides extra support for security based the strong hardware facilities.

Ease to use service: Ease to use not only refers to a good hosting control panel, it also means the service response time, service upgrade and communication between user & support team.

Professional support: Arvixe support people are everywhere from the country. they have very free work style and can be always contacted when there's need. Beside live tech support, their people created resourceful documents &　FAQ knowledge base　for opencart. Because arvixe is official sponsor of opencart project, the support team is capable of offering perfect solutions for development support.

Opencart Hosting Advantages

Opencart is actually a light weight but pretty powerful shopping cart software that's being supported by lots of social communities in the world. Currently the core system is available in multiple languages.

Open source – Opencart is an open source project with all codes public. Beside, there're many nice templates /plugins to choose from in order to make a professional store. The official site alreayd provided lots of free themes to download and many other commercial templates are provided by lots of groups.

SEO Friendly – OpenCart is search optimised allowing pages to be indexed by all major search engines and includes support for custom product and category META tags.

Multi-store function – You can manage several stores from one admin page, this is extremely useful if you want to promote many different products.

Payment gateways – They payment gateway system is absolutely the most outstanding feature with opencart. Almost all online transaction methods are supported, this key feature let people be able to setup online store even from the most undeveloped area. The different gateways are mainly offered by opencart local community support and there's some fee included.

Comparing to all other shopping cart softwares, opencart is pretty clean from both layouts and management interface. In case it's a challenge to manage a sophisticated system, open cart simply cuts most tasks and just leaves what you really needed for store setup. However, further functions can be added through modules /plugins directly. In this way, opencart is perfect ecommerce software solution for both start users and developers.

More about Opencart

We played with Opencart before and I have to say it's probably the most easy shopping cart comparing to all other solutions. You don't have to be a programmer or developer in order to use this software as everything could be done via friendly GUI. The best we liked is about it's social community support. At the moment opencart is supported by hundreds of communities in different countries via multiple languages. They developed opencart skins/modules as well as local payment gateway plugins to fulfill our requirements. There's not another shopping cart software managed doing so at the moment. Since it's a lightweight software, you don't have to worry about the hosting compatibility issue like magento or other big ones.

Best Magento Hosting reviews

Magento Hosting Review

Magento is an open sourced ecommerce solution led by ebay inc. The software is capable of any class shopping cart development. Magento Commerce Platforms provide the scalability, flexibility and features for business growth. Magento provides feature-rich eCommerce platforms that offer merchants complete flexibility and control over the presentation, content, and functionality of their online channel.

Best Magento Hosting

The best magento hosting awards goes to Arvice LLC, The arvixe shared hosting server is fully optimized for magento website purpose with automatic installation from hosting control panel. Magento stores on arvixe server are isolated from each other through a custom-made server setup so each site could never affect the others. The arvixe experienced Magento tech team apply server level security fixes frequently along with official development fixes are released.

Arvice Magento hosting features

Unlimited space / data transfer
Multiple domain names hosting
One FREE domain for life
24/7 live tech support
cpanel auto installer for magento
99.9% uptime and 60 day money back guarantee

While the arvixe shared hosting is fully magento commerce compatible, please keep in mind it's only good for small shopping cart. In case you're deal with a big store or you have a good plan to promote your site, we highly recommend you to check out their VPS server plans. The arvixe vps servers are setup via newest hardwares with rich feature plans. Everything is pre-configured and optimized for a magento site.

Why magento?

Magento is probably the most powerful shopping cart software that's designed for enterprise store purpose. When you have lots of different products and need to sell via multiple stores for efficient mangement, you don't have to have multiple installations, you just manage everything from the same store admin center. It's extremely helpful especially when you like to have retailers for your products. You'll be able to monitor how's going for all users. Magento is best choice by advantages below

Open source – Magento is complete open source ecommerce solution and you can customize everything according to your requirements.

Multi-store function – If you like to have different brands and would like to open different web stores for each, you just manage them under the same admin interface so you don't have to deal with multiple logins with different credentials.

Reliable and secure – Magento is definitely the art of ecommerce solutions. The code already optimized in most degree and is quite search engine friendly. SEO is absolutely the most important for online business site.

Payment solution – No matter if you prefer to use credit card of paypal or bank transfer, magento have everything ready for you and you just fill out a single form to setup the complete order process.

Which version magento is suitable for you?

Magento has Enterprise and Community Editions. the main difference is you get different level support from their official team. As for start user, the free community edition is good enough.

How to select the right magento hosting plan?

Before you search for the proper magento hosting plan, you should know about the sfotware basic requirements and what you're going to use the store for. Let's check the magento system requirement first.

Apache 1.3.x ~ 2.2.x
PHP 5.2.13+ with no less than 256Mb memory limit
Mysql with InnoDB storage engine
Schedule jobs with php5
more details available here

We see, the hosting provider must offer Linux with latest php support and be able to run schedule jobs. It also has requirements of Mysql InnoDB engine and PHP system memory. Not every hosting be able to meet all above. A budget hosting service is always set at a low standards with strict system limits. Because of this, we don't recommend to try out those cheap hosting service that's designed for personal or hobby site purpose. What you really need is a magento hosting optimized provider, they should also offer upgrade options in case you grow out the shared server.

Web.com Hosting Reviews

Web.com Brief Introduction

Web.com is one of the longest history US hosting company and a leading provider of online marketing services for small businesses with easy and cost-effective solutions. The company was founded in 1997 and is part of a large network of brands providing a wide variety of internet services including: web design, search engine optimization (SEO) and Ecommerce. From their business begining till present, hundreds and thousands of websites have found their success with web.com hosting.

Web.com Hosting Plans

Web.com provides both windows and linux hosting service with plenty of great features. The company uses commercial release redhat linux OS other than popular Centos or cloudlinux. In this way they can get full system tech support and just focus on business.

Linux Hosting: Total of 3 classes plans – Essential, Professional and Premium. Each class plan provides the same technical support, the actual difference is the amount of resource support such as disk space, number of supported websites, mailbox size etc. General features for starter plan include:

1 Free domain name
100 email boxes
25 Mysql database
JSP scripting support

Any other available technical features of standard redhat installation is supported like php, python and ruby on rails etc.

Web.com Windows Hosting: Only a single plan offered with all general technical features support. The server platform is configured on windows server 2008 with IIS 7.0 and .net 4.0 support. Instead the same version ms sql server support, it's on sql server 2005.

Windows Server 2008/IIS 7.0
asp.net 3.5, 4.0, PHP5
Unlimited disk storage & traffic
SQL 2005 and Mysql 5
One free domain for one year

The company handles top class domain registration service from networksolutions inc which is partner brand of web.com. After acquisition of multiple famous IT groups, web.com becomes one of the biggest service providers in US.

Web.com Networking

The company manages a huge network in US. They have tier 1 backbone connections to the Internet with multiple OC-48 Internet connections. Each data center space has redundant diesel generator backup and UPS battery backup. HVAC cooling with humidity control and VESDA system fire protection with 24×7 physical security protection.

Based user experiece in the past few months, connection to web server is done within 5 seconds and ping response is under 200ms on different locations of the country.

Web.com Support

The company provide customer support during business hours via phone call, email and ticket. After business hours, you can only connect via ticket or email. Comparing to most hosting providers, their support service seems so weak, especially in this competitive market.

Web hosting is actually not the main focus of Web.com’s business model, it is not configured by following the traditional offers like the popular hosting providers and it's rare to find any special offers from web.com service. As such, it is difficult to compare the company to other hosting companies.

What's good of web.com hosting?

A dedicated team – Web.com is supported by a dedicated and solid team from start, you can find their execute team support directly from the according service pages. All their support are certified engineers or developers. I think this is the basement web.com be able to offer various services no matter how complex it is.

Reliable service – Web.com has longest history in hosting business and it's respected by many other hosting providers. After decades experience of web hosting and online marketing, web.com definitely be able to offer your successful web solution

Complete solution – That means no matter if you need linux or windows support, or any other website solutions, web.com will always have something valuable to check out. If you're a newbie, they have web design and advertising solutions, if you're webmaster, their hosting plan features will absolutely fullfill your requests.

What's the bad of web.com?

Their bad or weakness can be point out easily in one minute.

First, there's no live chat support on official website. Although they can offer 24 x 7 tech supports, but people would be happy to go if there's a person to talk with immediately. They offer initiative phone support but not make me feel happy since i'm not talktive on phone, I prefer live chat support. It's absolutely a big weakness especially to foreigners.

Second, their hosting plan pricing is not logical at all. There's big price range for very small tech feature difference, but who will go with the linux since 99% other hosting providers can offer it at only $5/mon? It might be the redhat concern for commercial support costs. But for whatever reason, they should try to offer competitive service at affordable costs. Or they just want to win enterprise business..

Do we recommend web.com?

From our point of view, web.com offers average excellent hosting solution to start user. As long as you don't wish to spend time on hosting stuff and able to bear with the slow support sometimes then it's a good provider. We dealt with web.com before and the experience is not good. I send several tickets/emails to their admin but never got replied. If you ask if I recommend their service to people, the anser is no. Looking for best alternative hosting? We highly suggest check out www.arvixe.com for quality service and best support!

Justhost Coupon, Up to 50% Off

Justhost Coupon Overview

Justhost is one of the best linux hosting service and provides us very good price to get started. However, the price terms change over and over again in the last few months which is a headache for us to claim their best offer. In this article we'll tell you how to get the 50% discount which is the most promotional offer from justhost company.

How to get justhost 50% Off Offer?

To the the 50% off coupon, please follow the steps below:

1. Go to www.justhost.com site and click sign up.
2. Close the order page explorer, yes! close it.
3. A chat window will pump up and give you a 20% discount
4. But, please wait! you can follow our experience below to get the best 50% off coupon! Below is my chat with their virtual support:

Connecting to Agent…
You have been connected to Amber

Amber Says: Hey Wait! We would hate to see you go without seeing what's made us Award Winning Web Hosts, so just this once we would like to offer you a 20% discount on our unlimited hosting plan. To take advantage of this last minute offer just CLICK HERE

Amber Says: When you are ready just say "Hi" and we can get started….

You: Hi, I need a more promotional code. How can I get it?

Amber Says: Hi my name is Amber thanks for visiting Just Host today!

Amber Says: Is there anything I can help you with? Or if you would like to check out our last minute 20% discount, please CLICK HERE!

You: No, I saw a code says 50% discount.

Amber Says: I shouldn't really be doing this but I can give you a 50% discount as you asked. Just CLICK HERE for a 50% Discount

You: oh really?

Amber Says: You get a free domain, free instant setup and you can host unlimited domains, plus much much more.

Amber Says: Today only I can offer you this special 20% discount, it may not be available tomorrow. Just CLICK HERE to get this today only offer!

You: are your a real person or robot?

Amber Says: Ok, you got me, I am a live virtual agent.. hehe

Amber Says: But I am very intelligent, so I should be able to answer any questions or problems you have. What did you want to ask me?

Amber Says: Alternatively to speak to a real agent please close this window and select live chat on our homepage.

You: Thank you, that's all for now. I'll go ahead to check out the discount page.

Amber Says: My pleasure. If you need any further assistance just ask…

Above is our communication with the justhost virtual customer support. pretty cute, right? Well, regardless how you think about the trick, at least we're able to get 50% discount! That's the most important thing! Although it's handled by robot, their actual customer support is handled by real people so you don't have to worry about anything.

Any other justhost coupon available?

Previously, justhost provided promotional offer in multiple ways, the "secret link" is the most popular discussion by people. Before, at the website bottom navigation there's a link called "secret link" for 20% discount. Just click on it and you'll be redirected to 20% off promotion page. Go ahead to complete the order and discount will be auto applied.

Their default coupon is "freedomain" which generates us a free domain registration, but since this offer is included for plan features so it's not a really serious offer especially when we talk about coupon code.

Generally speaking, no matter what kind of promo you get from justhost site, you will always get some kind discount so don't be disappointed if the discount rate is not too high. Considerring the amount of features we get and the price we pay, it's fair enough.

Get started with www.Justhost.com today!

Best Sitebuilder Hosting

Sitebuilder Quick View

Sitebuilder is quick solution for people who want to put up a website without dealing with programming. Users just follow up pre-designed templates and publish the site step by step. No coding skill required on its GUI interface. There're many sitebuilder solutions like RVsitebuilder and instant website etc that are used by lots of hosting service.

After trying and testing all those popular sitebuilder solutions, we are going to introduce the best – Parallels Plesk Sitebuilder

Parallels Plesk Sitebuilder Overview

The Plesk sitebuilder wizard is an easy to use, scalable web application designed to create and manage websites. This next-generation software can be integrated into any business process. Parallels Plesk Sitebuilder is the ideal marketing tool for converting your site traffic into a new client base.

Parallels Plesk Sitebuilder Outstanding features:

INSTANT Website, Shopping Cart, Blog, Forum, Guestbook, Flash Intro, Photo Gallery, Member Registration and more!
Professional Templates and Supports All Languages!
You can choose over 2000+ professionally designed and customizable templates to create your websites!
No Software to download!
The administration/publishing interface is web browser-based, so it can be accessed from anywhere in the world at anytime.
Navigation Bar / Buttons / Menus
Allows you to create customizable / professional looking navigation menus and buttons.
WYSIWYG browser based editor
Interactive editor that allows you to style your html contents without knowing html codes or any other programming language. This editor is very similar to MS FrontPage/Dreamweaver and it's web based!
Real Time Integrated Shopping Cart
There is an integrated Shopping Cart that can be added VERY quickly. The shopping cart has real-time UPS shipping integration, 3rd party credit card processor integration, and a fully customizable administration utility.
List Manager
Build-in list manager that will allow your visitors to subscribe their email address to your site. You can then broadcast your advertisement or information to your subscribers as easy as 1-2-3!
Real Time Stats
Real time webstats that will display traffic and visitor information of your website. This will help you manage your growth and marketing directions!
Page Colors
Select from over 1000's of background colors, text colors and link colors for that unique look.
Background Images
Most templates allow you to choose from over 100's of background images for your page. The background images are optional. You can even upload your own!
Image Library
Select from over 1200 images in the image library.
Icon Library
Some of our templates use an Icon for the upper left of the page. You can select from our library or upload your own Icon.
File Up-Loads
File up-loads through the browser, both images and HTML files.
File Management
Complete file management through the browser. Eliminating all need for FTP. You can Up-Load Files, Rename Files, or Delete Files.
Advanced Page Editor
The HTML code for your pages can be edited at any time. You may add JavaScript or enhance your pages in any way.

Sitebuilder Online Demo: http://www.parallels.com/products/plesk/sitebuilder/demo/

Plesk sitebuilder is previously developed by SWsoft group, after merged to Parallels, it's named to plesk sitebuilder and got it's further development. They have both linux and windows editions and working as independent software package. The wizard can be easily integrated to any hosting control panel via it's API.

Best Plesk Sitebuilder Hosting

HostGator is award winning provider of best plesk sitebuilder hosting. The sitebuilder service is standard offer for every hostgator plans and offered for free. The hostgator sitebuilder service provides up to 4500 templates in various categories. No matter if you just want to create a showcase site or photo gallery or ecommerce application, you can get it ready in few minutes by following template.

Hostgator sitebuilder hosting includes:

Free siteBuilder tools
4,500 free website templates
Free website & database transfer
$100 Google adwords offer

Visit Hostgator for sitebuilder hosting plans www.Hostgator.com

More about Sitebuilder Hosting

Almost every hosting provides some kind of sitebuilder service. Besides the software itself, what more we should focus on is service quality such as server performance, security and customer support etc. For today's web hosting, we have more choice to setup a website by one click installer. Especially when we need to build a high performance dynamic website, those open source solution like wordpress and joomla are best choice because it's supported everywhere by a large community in the world.

Top World Class Data Centers

17 February 2011
by: Kenny
in: Blog
note: no comments

Data center Overview

From Wikipedia, Datacenter (also called IDC) is a facility used to house computer systems and associated components, such as telecommunications and storage systems. It generally includes redundant or backup power supplies, redundant data communications connections, environmental controls (e.g., air conditioning, fire suppression) and security devices.

Top US Data Centers

With the fast growing of E-business as well as the technologies, more and more companies especially web hosting companies setup their own datacenters. Here're some Top US data centers.

1. SoftLayer (SL)

Official site: www.softlayer.com

Softlayer is the world NO.1 datacenter by overall ratings. it's setup in 2005 with Cisco network and redundant lines. there're three datacenters included by far: Seattle datacenter, Dallas datacenter, Washington, DC Data Center. The join of Theplanet datacenter definitely consolidated the industry leader position of softlayer. It's the largest datacenter till present.

With its large size, it's powering lots of web hosting companies. The most famous brand is Hostgator who has actually occupied half of the datacenter space.

2. Krypt (KT)

Official site: www.Krypt.com

Krypt was setup in 1998 in Los Angeles, California. Currently running about 100Gbps bandwidth and serving over 15000 servers globally. Santa Ana Datacenter is the most famous one under KT. If you're looking for west coast web hosting service, KT backend brands can be considered for fast loading.

Test IP: 66.186.45.1 66.186.37.1 74.222.128.1

3. PacificRack

Official site: www.pacificrack.com

PacificRack was found in 1999 and locates at Los Angeles, Their main bandwidth providers including Mzima, Level(3)，Global Crossing, Sprint, Savvis, PCCW/BTN, Any2Exchange Peering – 1 Wilshire etc. Because of such facilities, the datacenter is primary choice over hundreds of hosting providers.

Test IP: 204.152.194.1 216.45.55.1 216.144.225.250

4. FDC

Official site: www.fdcservers.net

FDC is Located in Chicago and Denver, Over 60GB bandwidth to US main line. 24 x7 technical support and server monitorring. Bandwidth providers including Comcast, Tiscali, TATA communication,Level3,Nlayer,XEEX,Seabone etc. FDC is most well known for it's dedicated server service for it's stable and fast connection network.

Test IP: 66.90.64.1 208.53.128.1 76.73.0.4

5. SK

Official site: www.sharktech.net

SK is actually part of FDC datacenter but still perform excellent in the industry. Unlimited bandwidth with free ddos protection and BGP4 firewall support. Since they invested a lot to haredware protection so their price is relatively higher than others.

Test IP: 208.98.0.*, 208.98.1.* 216.104.46.1

6. AK

Official site: www.awknet.com

AK is one of the most affordable service provider who can offer ddos protection. Their main bandwidth is connected from He.net, Fast customer response is the most outstanding feature of AK.

Test IP: 205.209.190.1, 66.79.172.1, 204.13.65.1

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