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Open Source App

Apache Introduction & Hosting

Apache – The world's NO.1 and most popular web server! The goal of apache project is to provide a secure, efficient and extensible server that provides HTTP services in sync with the current HTTP standards.

Apache is sharing about half of the web server market and leading in multiple areas for it's cross platform compatibility and great performance. Especially for the competitive hosting industry, apache is offered by almost all newly setup hosting brands for low cost hosting solutions.

Top Apache Hosting Providers

Most hosting services today are linux based and apache is the standard web server software. Although Apache can be deployed to almost all systems, for reliability and security consideration. LAMP system is the most popular environment for most webhosts. Because of this, We highly recommend from the top linux hosting providers. Especially the following providers that're verified by editorial experience:

Best Enterprise Class Apache Hosting – Inmotion

Inmotion is awarded the best apache hosting for enterprise class solutions. Inmotion Hosting provides leading performance and fast connection based their advanced hardware setup and huge network. Powered by both east and west coast data centers with max speed zone configuration, the Inmotion server is twice faster than most their competitors. Especially when you need cheap hosting solutions, you can not find a better hosting other than IMH. For only $5.99/mo you get unlimited SSD storage space and access to unlimited other services.

Visit www.InmotionHosting.com for apache hosting plans!

Best Developer Friendly Apache Hosting – Arvixe

Arvixe linux hosting service is 100% LAMP based and based standard cpanel software. Arvixe apache web hosting is extremely optimized to work with different hosting rquirements, thus different users/developers be able to find perfect solutions at arvixe service. By offering high quality service at low costs. Arvixe apache web hosting plans come with unlimited space and bandwidth for only $4/mo to begin with. The arvixe web server is SSD powered and apache tomcat is also available by extra costs.

Visit www.Arvixe.com for more details

Best Secure Apache Hosting – Hostgator

Hostgator is one of the world's largest LAMP hosting providers that's backend by the largest datacenter from north American. By utilizing the best datacenter service, Hostgator is secured deeply from both hardware and software ends to deal with common attacks such as virus and ddos attacking. Hostgator is rule maker for cpanel hosting service because of its huge business, a lot of hosting companies followed hostgator to setup their own plans.

Visit www.HostGator.com for more details

How should you choose the best apache hosting plan?

Even from your most desired apache hosting provider, there will be multiple hosting solutions. You have to evaluate the plan features carefully and learn about your website requirement for example the amount of disk space, database requirement, access level of hosting service etc. Only after reviewed personal requirement side by side, then you can compare out the best hosting plan.

What's good of apache?

• Cross platform support – Since from the born of apache, it's been designed to compatible with the most modern system including Unix and Windows. You don't have to prepare a standard server system in order to use apache, you can install it directly from your personal computer!
• Secure Server – Apache web server is quite simple and secure, all configurations are file based, you can manage the extension and configurations directly via notepad without third party softwares.
• Open source – Apache is 100% open sourced. If you're system administrator or developer, you can customize apache source codes to fulfill your actual production environment.
• Scalability – Apache is not just a web server for http, you can also use it for loading balance and proxy server. You can also develop a third party module to meet your project requirements.

For more features and newest information you can refer to apache official site http://httpd.apache.org/ to check more.

Popular Apache environment names

For apache, there're several environment available: XAMPP(Apache+MySQL+PHP+PERL). WAMP(Windows+Apache+Mysql+PHP). LAMP(Linux+Apache+Mysql+PHP), No matter what environment it is you will found Apache+PHP is always the golden partner. Especially when you like to offer hosting service to people, you will find it's pretty easy to deploy a LAMP server by taking advantages of various existing products like cpanel, WHMCS etc.

YAF Brief Introduction

YAF, short for Yet Another Forum, is a powerful Open Source discussion forum written with asp.net and Sql server by C# language, YAF is supported by an team of international developers who are professional in building community softwares. Lead by Jaben Cargman of Tiny Gecko, the software is frequently updated by latest .net technologies to ensure the advanced structures and security.

Since 2003, the YAF project has been developped in multiple ways. We can use it independantly for forum site create or use it as module for other popular .net solutions like DNN and Umbraco etc. It's pretty scalable based your requirements. Some key features from YetAnotherForum:

• Licensed under GPL
• Web Based Administration
• Unlimited number of boards forums and categories
• Template-based design
• Unicode (UTF-8) encoding
• DotNetNuke, Umbraco, MojoPortal Modules .

Best YAF Hosting provider

The best YAF Hosting research goes to Arvixe.com. Arvixe .net hosting plan is fully YAF compatible with standard websitepanel and sql server support. Your YAF forum will be running on blade fast server with dedicated server resources and development support. The arvixe YAF hosting brief advantages include:

• Free domain name
• Windows server 2012 & IIS 8.0
• Unlimited SQL Server 2012 support
• Asp.net 2.0 ~ 4.5 & dedicated pool support
• 24×7 live tech support over chat, ticket & phone
• 60 days full money back guarantee!

YAF is just a simple support by arvixe asp.net hosting service based their leading server setup. Besides YAF, arvixe is golden partner of lots of .net projects including Dotnetnuke, Nopcommerce etc. By powering thousands of popular .net web applications, arvixe have learnt how to setup the perfect server environmnet for successful website hosting.

Why arvixe is the best choice for yetanotherforum hosting?

Lots of server resource – No matter what forum software you used on website, as long as the forum get traffic, it will consume plenty of disk and bandwidth, arvixe yaf hosting plans provide unlimited support to these crucial features.

Friendly control panel – The arvixe user friendly websitepanel allows automatic YAF installation and full setup of asp.net services such as .net frameworks and application pools etc. It save you a big amount time in configuring a secure and high performance site.

Unbeatable uptime and support – The arvixe server uptime is more than 99% from continuous monitoring for the past few years and their people provide 24*7 live tech support. Their people are knowledgeable in handling different level support either on web chat or phone call or ticket system.

Why YAF?

There're lots of forum softwares like phpbb, smf, but why should we use YAF on our site? Well, its simply designed for different requirements and tech specs. While most other forum solutions are php scripts and work the best under linux environment, YAF is designed specificly for windows server. It's outstanding because of the following

Open source – YAF forum is 100% C# Asp.net based open source project without encoding. you always have the option to customize it according to your actual needs. No matter if you want to use it for forum creation or further development, it's a good framework to deal with.

Performance – If you're Asp.net fans you would know how fantastic of YAF coding design, the sql queries are all optimized to reduce the respond waiting time to sql server, the result is your YAF site speed improved.

Templates – The nice templates come with YAF project can be easily integrated to your current website, that makes your entire website professional.

Spam control – YAF has very strict spam control, moderators has the ability to moderate topics, posts and users signatures and monitor all current forum statistics.

SMF Brief Introduction

SMF is short for Simple Machines Forum, SMF is a free and professional software package that allows you to set up your own online community within minutes. The software is written in PHP and Mysql database while PostgreSQL and SQLite are supported too. Simple machines extremely simplified the process of forum site setup & management. Either the front site structure or backend setup, it's pretty clean and simple while keeping the professinality.

Best SMF Hosting

The best SMF Hosting award goes to Arvixe LLC. Arvixe is top recommended hosting for SMF tech support and high performance hosting server. Beside their rich feature hosting plans and friendly user control panel, the arvixe official forum is actually SMF powered since from the very beginning! With arvixe smf hosting, users get following unbeatable advantages:

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

How do we rate the best SMF hosting?

The best hosting for SMF is not only rated by hosting servercompatibility or performance but also the actual user experience. Arvixe hosting is 100% compatible for simple machines and come with lots of leading features and super stable hosting server. What really makes their service outstanding is they're actually using it for official support forum! Their people fully understand this software and quite familiar with its development. In this way, their tech team be able to provide professional and helpful support to users.

Most leading hosting groups be able to support SMF software and already added auto installer in control panel center. For arvixe, their smf hosting is outstanding on following:

• Sufficient disk and bandwidth – Space and bandwidth are most important with a forum site, especially for heavy traffic forum site, the website I/O is pretty frequent. Arvixe provides unlimited support based their advanced server setup and network backbones.
• Friendly control panel – Arvixe provides standard cpanel control panel with one click installation for SMF. SMF software works with both windows and linux server, In case you prefer windows, arvixe also provides standard websitepanel for service management.
• Uptime and support – The overall server uptime of arvixe server is more than 99% from the past few years and their people have never stopped to improve the performance. Their 24 x 7 support team is everywhere of the country to pick up your support request. In case you get into any problem you will be able to call the support at the earliest time.

More about SMF software

SMF is probably the best forum solution for light weight and mobile device compatibility. Just few MBs size with all forum functions included and supported by lots of big communities, you can run this software for worry free. The best of the best is you get it completely free and lots of themes for professional site looking!

Open source – SMF is complete open source project and provide all source codes as it is, you're welcomed to optimize and improve it.

Security – Anti-spam and Captcha is introduced into SMF system and reduce spamming at the deepest degree. Major actions have time and IP restriction to enhance the system security.

Statistics analysis – The statistics tracking system within SMF can easily track the board statistics such as member registration, topics and messages and detailed to individual member.

Light weight – While providing all the features you need for a professional forum site, smf simplified the entire structure and has minimal impact on the resources of the server. SMF is absolutely the next generation of forum software.

Mobile compatible – SMF is fully WAP compatible, you can access to your smf site from anywhere in the world just fine.

Vbulletin Brief Introduction

Vbulletin is powerful and scalable commercial forum solution which is built on php and mysql technologies, vbulletin is developped by Jelsoft Enterprises and vBulletin Solutions. The software design/layout is similar to lots of forum products, but if you want your forum site secured at the best level and consider the search engine friendly. Vbulletin is by far the best choice. Till version 5, it provides a mobile pack which is completely optimized for mobile device.

Vbulletin system is now powering over 40,000 online communities with world-renowned technical support. Being the leader of forum publishing solution, the company provide side by side support to make sure every client be able to use it for worry free.

Best Vbulletin Hosting

The best vbulletin hosting service is not only compatible with vbulletin tech requirements but also be able to offer high quality support over common problems and fast web server. After reviewed 50+ vbulletin supported web hosting service, the following hosts are highly recommended with editorial experience:

Best Vbulletin Hosting for Business – Inmotion Hostig

Inmotion Hosting is top recommended vbulletin hosting provider for business solutions, Inmotion hosting servers are fully vbulletin compatible with multi class hosting plans. In addition to award winning technical support and 99.9% uptime, InMotion Hosting's exclusive Max Speed Zone technology helps load your vbulletin site fast by connecting to most nearby data center service.

Since 2001, Inmotion Hosting has been offering the business class shared hosting, VPS hosting and dedicated servers to world wide users. They proudly offer no overselling space and follow the rules strictly. You will continue with the fast loading till you no longer need to be hosted. Their uptime and speed is certified by almost every community. In case you're not satisfied with their service, you can get full refund in the first 90 days then pro rate refund after that period. All their efforts make the hosting worry free!

The inmotion hosting vbulletin plan provides $24 discount for yearly registration and if you sign up today you can get 50% discount over launch and pro plans by following this inmotion hosting coupon page!

Best Affordable Vbulletin Hosting – Arvixe

Arvixe provides special support for vBulletin forum. Including free vBulletin installer, powerful servers for great forum performance, high quality customer service and numerous hosting features! Arvixe combines specific vBulletin knowledge with profound hosting expertise for a true vBulletin hosting solution!

The arvixe hosting servers are especially optimized to ensure the best vBulletin performance plus the following advantages.

• Customized server setup
• 24/7 live server monitoring
• Unlimited web space & bandwidth
• Free domain and website transfer
• Free extensive vBulletin tutorial
• Free e-commerce and SEO packs

Beside general server level support to vbulletin software, what makes arvixe outstanding is their super affordable service. $4/mo for initial registration and the longer contract we choose the better price we get. For each class hosting solutions we get some kind of promotion either on price or server features.

Why they're the best vbulletin hosting service?

Both Inmotion and arvixe are certified vbullein hosting providers from side by side comparison over other hosting. They're rated the best hosting provider for Vbulletin compatibility, customer satisfiction and tech support.

• Plan features – They both offer unlimited disk space and bandwidth for vbulletin hosting plans. Since a forum site will always consume lots of disk space and data transfer, this feature is pretty essential. Plus, vbulletin can be auto installed via their service by softaculous in cpanel control panel.
• Uptime and tech support – Their hosting servers are all setup by newest hardware production and leading network backbones. Plus, they both offer at least 30 days full money back guarantee  for testing purpose. It's 100% risk free to use their hosting. Meanwhile, their hosting servers are extremely optimized for vbulletin software and backend by 24×7 live tech support. No matter if it's lunch time or sleeping periods you can get a support in seconds via chat, ticket or phone support!
• Industry reputation – Both Inmotion hosting and arvixe have been running hosting business for over 10 years. If you search the customer reviews you would find most are positive and rare to see unhappy clients. It's pretty rare on this competitive market that're shared by thousands of groups.

More about Vbulletin

Vbulletin is approved the best commercial forum sotware choice and supported by a solid team on official site. Because all vbulletin source codes are encypted via sophisticated technologies, the best security is guaranteed on your forum. Generally, you can get following advantages by using vbulletin

Security – If you want to launch a forum site with advanced security level, Vbulletin is your correct choice. The vbulletin core is hard coded and enhanced your forum site security from a new level.

SEO – Vbulletin site has seo friendly url configurations via .htaccess rules. If you want to promote your forum site and make it popular in that field, Vbulletin is definitely the number once choice.

Support – Being Vbulletin register clients, you get full and free tech supports from their official site. Besides, you can also seek for help from every all other vbulletin communities.

Blog integration – Vbulletin is not only setup for forum purpose but also integrated blog system for individuals. Means by installing vbulletin you also get a blog system, you can write your personal blogs without using another platform for best management!

The software is provided in two options – standard software package and hosted package. With standard software, we install and host the site completely by our own. For hosted package, we purchase the software and vbulletin team install it directly on their cloud platform, we pay monthly fee for this service. Though it's a little expensive, it's quite helpful in case you do not have IT department and don't want to handle the technical stuff by yourself.

phpBB Introduction

phpbb, A completely free plat-forum bulletin board software solution. Since its creation in 2000, phpBB has become the most widely used Open Source forum platform. phpbb software users  vary from personal to large community website owners from different businesses. While the software is dedicated forum solution, advanced users can easily add it to existing website to create a discussion board.

In order to host phpBB script, your hosting server needs to have following requirements fulfilled:

• Must be configured for PHP support and suPHP is best.
• Installed with one of the following database engines: FireBird, MySQL, MS SQL Server, PostgreSQL, SQLite, or even Oracle.
• Installed with one of the following web servers: IIS, Apache, Litespeed or Nginx

As we see, above requirements are pretty basic for all leading hosting providers and actually most of them provide more than what phpBB required. Although phpBB works with most server systems, we highly recommend LAMP environment for low costs and high performance.

Best phpBB hosting – Arvixe

Arvixe is on top recommendation for reliable phpbb hosting service. The arvixe hosting server is extremely optimized for phpbb scripting with unlimited disk space and data transfer support. Only $4/mo and official 20% discount for yearly deal!

What really makes arvixe phpbb hosting outstanding is their 60 days money back guarantee plus professional phpbb development support. There're multiple class plans to grow up in case users need higher hosting solutions, there're VPS, Dedicated server and cloud hosting choice to support your requirement side by side. While the arvixe hosting is 100% risk free, they offer around the clock tech support via live chat, ticket and toll free calls.

Best phpBB Hosting – Webhostinghub

WHUB is best choice for secured phpbb forum hosting, the webhostinghub server php installation is based suPHP which is advanced setup for code protection. In this way, the script is executed by specific php users instead the same system user. Website will not offered each other on same server. Because this setup requires higher server specs, not too many providers offer it.

Further more, Webhostinghub is running the fastest web server from the industry! Managed by Inmotion group via maz speed zone networking, Website will be called at the most nearby datacenter to generate the fastest loading speed. They're proud to offer 100% satisfication guarantee and up to 90 days full money back guarantee to keep your business with them!

Either arvixe or webhostinghub, the both company plans are setup with following unbeatable advantages to support a successful phpbb site:

1. Unlimited disk and bandwidth – They both provide this on RAID 10 disk space and advanced data center backbones. Either their server production or bandwidth provider, the hardware resources are more than enough to support a successful hosting business. Because a forum always eat a lot of resources, we got multiple upgrade solutions to ensure the best performance.

2. Friendly control panel – They both provide standard cpanel control panel with phpbb auto installer. Either website domain, files or database, you can manage everything professionally and easily. We can easily track website usage with no technical setup.

3. Uptime and support – They both guarantee 99% server uptime by advanced hardware setup. Either server production or data center backboness are all from the best of the country. Their people provide 24*7 tech support in multiple ways such as website chat, email and ticket etc. Their tech team also created lots of tutorial guidance on how to use the software.

There're lots of other leading features for the two providers, you might want to check and try out with your specific requirements. They're leading choice for most phpbb forum websites and highly recommended for small to medium size forum hosting purpose.

More about phpBB

Free – phpbb is completely free software which can be deployed to personal website and any other websites without license consideration. Before and after phpbb, there're many forum solutions which requires registration with a fee.

Open source – phpbb is open source project and supported by a large scale communities world wide.

Users – With no doubt, phpbb is absolutely the NO.1 most popular forum software and mostly used on the internet forum solutions.

Secure – I think the only security you should concern is from your actual webserver where your phpbb forum locates at. phpbb always update any security leak from their newsletter and keep your forum site in safe.

Support – Powered by a large scale communities all over the world, you can find every solution to your phpbb site.

There's another forum script called Vbulletin which is very similar to phpbb, however, the codes are encrypted and used for commercial purpose. Many people always compare the two softwares and not sure how to choose. The only difference is about license and support. While Vbulletin is commercial release with official tech support, phpBB is completely open source project with a large development community.

If you manage a huge business and require professional tech support from software vendor, Vbulletin is perfect choice because you don't want to bug the problems by yourself. If you're developer or running a medium size board, phpBB is good enough because you don't have to pay anything.

CubeCart Overview

CubeCart is a fully featured ecommerce shopping cart solution used by over a million store owners around the world. CubeCart shopping cart software is developed via PHP and Mysql by Devellion Ltd. Early releases are encoded and licensed under the cubecart support team. Later on, they put all releases under GPL3.0 license and the project is turned into open source. The big difference comparing to any other open source shopping cart solution is the team provides paid support, though there's big community for developers & users.

Best Cubecart Hosting

Cubecart requires PHP and Mysql and Apache mod_rewrite module to work with, it's supported by most hosting server setup. From its official recommendation and editorial evaluation of cubecart hosting plan features, performance and support availability, Arvixe is awarded the best cubecart hosting provider for editorial choice. Arvixe cubecart hosting provides following unbeatable features:

• Unlimited space & bandwidth
• FREE domain registration for life
• 24/7 live tech support
• cpanel Control Panel
• Cubecart one click auto installer
• 99.9% uptime and 60 day money back guarantee

Arvixe provides one click free cubeCart installation on cubecart optimized hosting servers with development support,

Performance – Arvixe cubecart hosting servers are fully optimized for cubecart for both hosting and development purpose. Their people are working with cubecart directly to configure the service and make sure the software can be working perfect.

Support – The arvixe tech people are actually developers in this project and be able to handle different level support requests. Unlike the official support people who are only available during business hours, the arvixe support is working around the clock on every support channels. Means we can get a person to work with whenever we run into problems.

Why CubeCart?

Cubecart is one of the best shopping cart that's designed for secure stores. Being a light weight software, cubecart is powering lots of personal and medium size stores. If you're not sure if it's good choice for your business, just take a look about following features

Lots of templates – Cubecart comes with a great amount  templates and it's easy to modify the look and feel of your store to match your company's branding, the template is complete HTML system so it's quite easy to customize.

Lots of Modules – There're many third party communities or companies who is dedicated with cubecart module development, no matter if it's commercial or non-commercial, you always find the solution to enable some expected functions.

Secure software – Cubecart is provided for free but has all codes encoded and secured your shopping cart at most degree.

payment gateway and currency exchange – Your store clients always have alternate checkouts such as paypal, google checkout etc. Cubecart also enabled currency exchange function, it will auto calculate the actual amount based on the local currency.

• Cubecart official site
• Cubecart demo
• Cubecart support forum

What we need aware about Cubecart?

Cubecart is great shopping cart solution but we have to be awared of some special points in using it. For early version cubecart, the source codes are encrypted. Though we can use it for free, if there is upgrade available, you have to pay in order to remove the copyright messages. Now cubecart is an open sourced project and available for free, but the official team does not provide guaranteed free support. Instead, they charge monthly fee for real supports.