Menu

Blog Archives
Kenny

Home

Author Archives: Kenny

About Kenny

Kenny is owner of webhostpark and has been working in hosting industry since 2006. We provide unbiased hosting reviews and release the latest promo news. Follow me on Google plus

Best Developer Friendly Hosting

developer friendly hosting

Programmer or Developer friendly hosting refers to some web hosting services that come with a bounch of features for web development and programming purpose. It's not an independent hosting plan but mainly evalued from hosting offers. In order to be developer friendly, there're many factors to check around. Here we're going to discuss the main features we should know about and review some of the quality hosting providers.

The scripting language support

A developer friendly hosting comes with side by side support for various scripting languages such as PHP, Python, Perl including up to date frameworks. Because not every developer is ken on the same language, the hosting server must be prepared to be friendly with at least 4 scripting languages support. Sometimes we might require multiple versions support such as PHP5.2.x or 5.3.x etc, the hosting server should have such pre-installed.

Web server software

Do we need Apache or Nginx or Tomcat or IIS web server? It's really hard to find a service with all those support because it requires both Linux and Windows server. So basically, a developer friendly hosting service must have both platforms selections and be able to offer above softwares in custom configurations.

Database Support

Database is a MUST for almost every web development, different web purpose might requires different database engines. For such cases, the hosting servers must get multiple database softwares pre-installed such as Mysql, Sqlite, Postgresql as well as SQL server database on windows server.

Level of access

In order to debug in quick time, some programmers prefer direct communication to hosting server via some protocols such as SSH or SVN. However, it's dangerous to offer such service for most providers, that's why only few hosting company offered such features with a signed paper. For IIS web server, there's an option called IIS remote manager which does the same work as SSH under Linux.

Support from hosting company

Support is considered the most important feature from hosting company. No matter if you're developer or user, you always wish instant response from customer care center. A developer friendly hosting must have 24/7/365 live support even on holidays! Because uptime requirements don't take vacations. Fast response and quick fixing is mostly desired for developers!

Above is a basic requirements list for developer friendly service. We might find sometimes it's hard to get all from a shared hosting environment, especially the web server softwares and SSH options. Sometimes, we really should look into higher hosting solutions other than regular shared plans. If we don't want to manage a server by ourselves, the advanced business plan or enterprise hosting is mostly recommended since the overall resource is shared by less people and further customization can be done there.

Best Developer Friendly Hosting

As we learnt from above basic rules, VPS or dedicated server is absolutely the best choice since we can fully customize it via our requirements. However, not everybody would like to manage server by themselves. A developer friendly hosting service must come with choice over multiple hosting solutions.

Arvixe (http://www.arvixe.com) is awarded the best developer friendly hosting provider by it's ease of use, affordable price and cross platform support! The Arivxe hosting is configured on both windows and linux platforms with leading offers. Their windows servers are all IIS remote manager enabled as default for windows users. Arvixe now place all windows accounts on windows server 2012 and people be able to take advantages of all available features. Like linux server hosting? Tomcat server can be offered via custom configurations for all linux hosting accounts. No matter if you choose their windows or linux hosting service, you will get free domain name opportunity and unlimited databases support!

Go to arvixe for developer hosting plans http://www.arvixe.com

Hackulous is Shut Down

Hackulous closed

I dont have an iPhone on hand, but yesterday one of my friends tell me that he can't install some programs because the shut down of Hackulous. After some diggs, I found it's a program cracking team. It's popularly recognized the terminator of Apple apps. Below is an article by enigmax for detailed explanation about the event.

Hackulous, perhaps the Internet's most famous cracked app community, has dramatically closed its doors. The community shut down yesterday but that isn't the only damage. Apptrackr, the web-based partner index for cracked apps and Installous, the app used by millions to transfer cracked apps to their iDevices, have also been disabled. The operators cite lack of activity for the shutdown but it seems unlikely that's the only reason.

Although there are plenty of sites specializing in similar things, the Hackulous community is particularly well known among users of jailbroken Apple devices.

Aside from the community forums, Hackulous is known for its direct connections with Apptrakr, a huge web-based index of cracked apps and Installous, a clever piece of software which allows the installation of iOS software found via Apptrakr and elsewhere.

But as of yesterday, Hackulous is officially no more.

"We are very sad to announce that Hackulous is shutting down," the team said in a statement.

"After many years, our community has become stagnant and our forums are a bit of a ghost town. It has become difficult to keep them online and well-moderated, despite the devotion of our staff. We're incredibly thankful for the support we've had over the years and hope that new, greater communities blossom out of our absence."

While the announcement was made on Hackulous, it didn't mention the fate of either Apptrackr or Installous, the software that relies on Apptrackr to function.

Installous is installed on millions of Apple devices such as the iPhone and iPad and was the key way for people to transfer pirate apps to their phones and tablets. However, following the Hackulous announcement the app has been rendered completely non-functional, apparently disabled by the Hackulous team that controlled it.

TorrentFreak tried to contact Dissident, the admin of the projects, for an official statement. He has spoken with us on numerous occasions in the past (and has even guest-blogged here) but the emails bounced. It appears that for whatever reason he's preferring to keep a low profile at the moment.

We did manage to speak to two other people familiar with the sites' operations and they told us they were surprised at the decision due to a number of factors.

The sites were apparently healthy and still had plenty of users. Indeed, the shutdown statement appears to carry a contradiction – "ghost town" forums are by their very nature not particularly difficult to keep "well-moderated" since nobody uses them. Nevertheless, this is the cited reason for the shutdown.

Also, Installous was used by millions and served up ads each and every time someone carried out a key app-related action within the software. Regardless of whether the Hackulous forums were doing well or not, Hackulous was still installed on millions of machines leading to (presumably) some half-decent advertising revenue to fund the project and more. It's difficult to see why that would be terminated due to a quiet forum.

The other issue is that Dissident has always gone out of his way to say how passionately he feels about the "try before you buy" aspect of Installous and how important it is to give people a chance to taste an app before committing to a purchase. Trials are certainly more readily available officially than they were before Installous began so it's possible that Dissident thought the mission was over.

The final piece of the puzzle could come on the back of rumors that a jailbreak for iOS6 won't be forthcoming. No jailbreak for future iOSs means that Installous and indeed the completely legal Cydia can no longer function on new machines. Did this play a part in the shutdown decision? We'll need to track down Dissident to find out more.

The closures of these Hackukous projects raise more questions than they answer but will still come as a shock to those who relied on Installous for their software fix. Time to start shelling out a few cents an app it seems – luckily that's not going to break the bank.

Bye to 2012 & Welcome to 2013

web hosting 2012 summary and plans for 2013

Only two days to welcome 2013 so far! Since we're all alive and passed 2012 safely, it's necessary to make a summary of the last year and make a better plan for coming year. This would be the last article posting in 2012 so it's time to give it a perfect end! The most important thing I would like to say is I wish all your people and your families a prosperous new year!

In this year, there're several big events that affected many web site owners. The google updates let many of us have to rebuild website ranks and The hosting acquisition let us have to rethink of the service quality. In a word, the 2012 is full of strugglings for online business.

Google updated several times in 2012 and each update will result in a fresh list for SERP. The google more and more telling us not to over-optimize our website or simply don't pay too much attention to it, what google really wants is a user friendly site that gives visitors they want directly. A website with good navigation and quality content is what we need to work on.

In web hosting, there're really too many things to learn about. Before we only knows endurance group for eating up the hosting brands, until it's sold by KKR we know it's just a piece of cake in web hosting (no matter what a big name it is!). Because of this, we have to re-think about our workk style and change the hosting review ways. We might have focused on specific brands too closely but forgot the company overall business structure, this is what we need to improve in coming review articles. In 2012, many hosting brands are actively merged into EIG. Fortunately, the problems are very few comparing to the early years. They don't force to migrate all people to their own platforms but keep everything the same so people won't feel any difference to the service.

Back to WHP itself, there's very limited SEO stuff as I can tell. The rank is not so good though but we're still working hard to offer what's needed from our visitors and provide our actual experience over hosting providers. In order to give out a quality review, we signed up directly with various hosting companies and do test independently. During the procedure, most providers are frindly and co-operate with our requests. There're also several providers trying to persuade us to post good reviews of their service by offering nice commissions, however we didn't respond because they're really bad with too many users' experience.

Anyhow, our WHP will continue to work as it is and grow up with your efforts. We thank you for visiting and communicating with us. We would like to send out the last wish for 2012. See you from 2013!

Best Affiliate Tracking Software

best affiliate tracking software

Affiliate program is an important part to most online business. Especially for newly setup service, if you have limited budget for advertisement, a good affiliate plan will attrack lots of people to advertise your service/products. But what software to use for our affiliate program? In case you're not so awared of, we're going to check some of the most popular affiliate tracking softwares.

WHMCS. It's probably the most popular name as being of the standard integration for cpanel control panel. If you're running cpanel based web hosting business and would like to configure affiliate program, you don't have to pay extra by using WHMCS. The WHMCS can be integrated with almost all online business for management over orders, clients, billings and all stuff.

Although WHMCS can be used for affiliate purpose, the core feature is about client and billing management, it's lack of support over affiliate program and only be suggested for easy and simple program purpose.

iDevdirect. It's a powerful and fully functional affiliate software. The sole purpose of this software is about affiliate management. There we can learn about the overall statistics, ROI as well as payment status etc in GUI interface. Since 1999, iDevdirect has been the industry leading product in it's class. There're thousands of user friendly features and technical support, we can fully customize it via addon plugins and modules.

Another advantage of iDevdirect is we can integrate with our existing website easily if we designed via Joomla, It will take over all user info and give each user affiliate role automatically.

Omnistar. A popular affiliate software that's being used by many IT giants such as Softlayer and Cisco. Omnistar is designed with fraud protection as well as thrid party integration such as google analytics and other monitor campaigns. All configurations can be setup in 10 minutes with worry free compatibility. If you're not sure if it's the right choice for your business, they proudly offer 15 days free trial to convince people!

If you are not ready to install those softwares yet but just want to take advantages of existing ones, Commission Junkie(CJ) is by far the most popular choice. Almost all business being advertised on CJ for it's reliable and professional service.

Of course, it depends your requirement. For some big groups like hostgator, iPage etc they programmed their own softwares and keep everything in hand. Affiliate program will bring us great business opportunities if we can make good use of it. A good affiliate tracking software will simplify the process to success!

Managed vs Unmanaged VPS

Managed vs Unmanaged VPS

Virtual Private Server(VPS) is more and more popular choice because of the advanced requirements from webmaster. However, not everybody fully understand the service and always have to switch over again and again.. Here we will give out some basic explanations for different types VPS plans and compare two of the most popular ones — Managed and Unmanaged VPS.

What's VPS? It means the hosting provider divide a single dedicated server into multiple virtual machines via some virtulization technologies like Vmware, OpenVZ and XEN etc. Each VPS machine works independently with its own operation system, we can install softwares and run server side tasks just the same as on actual computers. From hosting company, they always configure multiple service plans with different features such as managed vps, unmanaged vps and semi-managed vps plans. But, what does that exactly mean? If we're going to choose either service, we must understand it properly.

Managed VPS. Idealy, the hosting company will be responsible for side by side support on the server such as security update, server maintenance and all stuff. However it varies a lot in actual service offer. Most of the time it's only available with a control panel and customer manage services under the GUI interface without having to deal with command line, that's how hosting company explains "managed" in their words. Unlike the expected level support, the host might do nothing unless requested. We will have to monitor the VPS ourselves.

Unmanaged VPS. Just prepared with pre-installed OS with SSH or remote desktop connection enabled server. With unmanaged vps, we are responsible for everything on the server such as software configurations, maintenance and any other trouble shooting work. Because no hosting control panel available, most working is done via SSH connections.

Semi-managed vps. Actually this type service doesn't exist in live hosting plans. Even it's something between the above two services, I can only expect extra support from hosting groups. As for now, it's not a popular term any more for most service provider.

Managed vs Unmanaged VPS

which is suitable for me? As learned from above explanation, if we're professional in server managing and be able to configure all stuff well on server, unmanaged server is good enough and it will reduce our budget a lot. But most of the time, people just need a more powerful server for growing up website, they don't want to manage the server or spend lots of time in learning it. In such case, managed would be right choice since it will help us setup services in quick time. There's no bad for either service, we just need to choose the best one with our needs. There's no need to debate which is better and which is not.

Best VPS server plans

We introduced several popular vps providers on this vps hosting posting. But we would like to give out a new list on this holiday special.

Arvixe.com – Affordable managed VPS server with standard configurations. The arvixe VPS plans include both windows on websitepanel and linux on cpanel. The arvixe vps servers come with leading offers like free domain name registration and unlimited data transfer etc.

IXwebhosting – IX VPS servers are Actually some kind cloud platform based, there we have choice to use cpanel or plesk. Or we can choose to use neither and sign up as unmanaged server! For now, IX offers holiday's promotion where we can save 50% for the first month service of X4 plan.

Greengeeks – Leading green hosting provider with affordable vps server plans. There're multiple vps solutions from greengeeks and we can choose to sign up managed or unmanaged. Price is as low as $19.95/mo, we can even get further discount by applying their promo codes!

Merry Xmas 2012 & Happy New Year

xmas 2012 and happy new year

So today is Dec 22th of 2012, The Mayan Prophecy about end of the world collapsed itself. So what now? Means we finally dropped the long term fear from the fake story. Now we can feel safe and share the passions with everybody and celebrate the most important festival — Christmas 2012!

Summary of the year

In 2012, we have been learning and interacting with web hosting. There're many new tech released such as asp.net 4.5 and MVC 4.0, IIS 8.0 and SQL Server 2012 are also deployed on production server popularly. In order to provide up to date hosting reviews about those technologies we have to study everything from scratch and tell people our actual experience. During the process, we communicated more with hosting groups and our website followers and actually fixed lots of problems on WHP. We thank all people who have been helping us to archieve the best. We wish to work with you in further partnership in coming days.

On WHP we have been update with fresh news regularly with useful reviews and industry events, we accepted several guest posting from loyal followers and partnership groups. By doing that, the overal quality of WHP has improved greatly comparing to the single person working as before.

On direct support part, the WHP live chat client served around 30 visitors in 3 months which is reasonable stats. But I have to say sorry to many requests as I'm not online sometimes and always respond via email. From now on I will keep online as more as possible.

On hosting coupon section, we have posted up to date coupons/promo over 10 popular hosting providers. If you check out, most of them are still valid to save your money if you're ready to sign up those companies. We'll keep in contact with them and post their coming promotions in earliest time on WHP so you don't have to search around everywhere.

In a word, we will still work hard and continue to provide quality articles on this review site. It will not only help people choose the right service but also help ourselves build the integrity in long run. Personally, I would like to manage this site as long as possible such as 10 years or 20 years. As long as I'm connected to hosting business, I will keep WHP alive with fresh blood. God bless!

Finally, I would like to say thank you to every visitors to WHP and wish you have a great holiday and prosperous 2013! Merry Christmas!