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Best PHPFox Hosting

Facebook is currently the largest social networking site and its overal traffic has conquered google's several times. Because of the leading effect, many people start to build their own social network community by following the facebook style. Well, I can't say there will be another successful facebook but it will definitely help lots of people for related business or hobbies. If you're going to develop such web site, we'll introduce one of the best software called PHPFox. We'll also discuss the best PHPFox hosting service for reference.

PHPFox Introduction

PHPFox is a social network software that gives us the ability to create a unique community that includes many of the features found on sites like Facebook and MySpace. It's a pure PHP & Mysql based application which works with all popular web servers. For quick view, here's a short list of the outstanding features with PHPFox

No Encryption – we get all source codes and fully customizable.
We can add apps located on third party server without touching our own server.
Fully mobile device compatible.
Lots of addon modules like blog/forum/video/chat and more!
Ability to sign in our site using Facebook, Twitter, Google, OpenID and more!
Scalability – Memcached technology and mysql replication ready for higher server systems.
Further details & features can be found at this page.

PhpFox Hosting Requirements

From the PHPFox official site, in order to get PHPFox running properly, the server has to be prepared with PHP/Mysql and GD library. PHP memory limit has to be 64M at least. These're basic requirements for running a PHPFox site, if we need to add more features to our site such as video/music etc, we need to have FFmpeg configured or else it will not work.

Any other good software like PHPFox? From this social network hosting article we introduced another App called Facebook Like Script. However, that script is limited for facebook clone and has very limited features comparing to PHPFox. Although we can get it with much less money, it's only good for small community purpose. For further requirements, we should use PHPFox such softwares.

Best PhpFox Hosting Provider

To start with our PHPFox site, a quality shared linux hosting is recommended. We can easily override some system settings via .htaccess and use the leading control panel to setup everything!

Arvixe hosting is absolutely the primary choice for phpfox. Except for their expert support over this app, they will offer FREE installation while it cost people $49 from PHPFox official. Only $4/mo to start with and 20% discount available if we sign up yearly!

Arvixe PHPFox hosting features including:

Unlimited Space / Unlimited Data Transfer
Host up to 6 Domains or go Unlimited!
One FREE domain registration for life
24/7 world-class qualified and experienced support:
Technical support staff with years of in-depth hosting experience!
cpanel Control Panel – Unlimited email, databases and subdomains.
99.9% uptime and 60 day money back guarantee
Fully adheres to all phpfox hosting system requirements

Check arvixe phpfox hosting plan details @ http://www.arvixe.com/

Zimbra Email Solution

If you need enterprise level email hosting solution or you like to configure your own email server, there's a big name we can't ignore – Zimbra. Being one of the first and most successful email softwares, zimbra has been serving hundreds of international groups and offering direct service to individuals widely.

Zimbra overview

VMware Zimbra is an enterprise-class email, calendar and collaboration solution, built for the cloud, both public and private. Zimbra company was acquired by Yahoo in September 2007 then sold to VMware on January 12, 2010. From that time on, zimbra is part of VMware group and named as "VMware Zimbra" as we know of. Zimbra is co-operating with over 200 hundreds of communities in various industries including comcast, it's offering email service to over 9 millions people in the world.

What's included with zimbra?

Zimbra is actually more than a standard email software. The core product Zimbra Collaboration Suite(ZCS) is integrated email and calendar and many other services like file storage/editing, instant message(IM). We can use it to look up flights as well as FedEx packages prety quick. Instead of calling it email software, it performs more like a smart business assistant who's working 24×7. Because of this, Zimbra never failed to compare with any other email products and it's still being improved by the power of VMware.

Here's a short list of the zimbra features

1、inbox, mail&search
2、mashups
3、calendar
4、document collaboration
5、im,task,briefcase
6、zimbra desktop
7、outlook&apple sync
8、zimbra mobile, Zimbra Collaboration Suite

Want to learn more about Zimbra spotlights? Go ahead and check out this VMware page for details.

Zimbra FAQs

What're the requirements for Zimbra installation?
Zimbra does not support BSD at the moment, supported OS including the following: Enterprise edition RedHat, Fedora, SuSE as well as OpenSUSE or Ubuntu (All 64 bit server editions)

How many zimbra editions available?
There're total of three editions available: Network Edition, Open Source Edition, Collaboration

How to purchase zimbra software license?
purchas from VMware official store: https://buy.zimbra.com/
purchase from reseller: http://www.zimbra.com/partners/zimbra_solution_providers.html

How to install zimbra?
You can check out this documentation for detailed instructions. Please note, the installation requires clean server installation, the installation process will auto install/configure Apache, PHP and mysql and all required packages, if you have those installed, you have to remove first.

Who offers zimbra hosting service?

Zimbra is mainly used for enterprise email solution, it's not available for regular shared hosting solution. For service providers, we can check out this page directly http://www.zimbra.com/partners/zimbra_service_providers.html

What're other powerful email systems?

We have introduced some of the most powerful and user friendly email systems from older pages. They're Smartermail (windows), MailEnable (windows), Open xchange (linux), SquirrelMail (linux), Exchange Server (windows). You might hear about many other email programs, however most of them are actually email client instead fully functional email server. All of above names are popular choice on the market, just select the most suitable solution that fulfill your requirements.

zPanel Hosting Control Panel Review

If we're working with a server for web service configurations, a powerful control panel will save time greatly and make the work more professional. However, since a good control panel is always costly solution and it's very complicate to configure a free product, sometimes we have to do everything manually. Today we're going to introduce one of the most simple and powerful free control panel software – zpanel

zPanel Introduction

ZPanel is an open sourced web hosting control panel that can be installed on Microsoft Windows and POSIX (Linux, UNIX and MacOSX) based servers or computers. With zPanel, people can quickly make a server/computer to fully fledged, easy to use and manage web hosting server.

zPanel Control Panel features

zPanel is completely equipted with open source projects such as Apache, Mysql, PHP and Filezilla/Proftpd etc. We can manage domain names, DNS, Email boxes, FTP accounts and Mysql Databases the same way in cpanel or other popular control panels. The latest release zpanelx(10.0.0) is designed with all up to date softwares.

Like all popular control panel solutions, zpanel gives out web API integration for production use purpose. we can customize the product by using various modules to fulfill our actual requirements. Got into problem or need further features? No worries, because the zpanel project is being joined by a large team all over the world, problem fixing or feature improvements can be handled very efficiently.

zPanel compared to other free control panel softwares

zPanel is one of the very few hosting control panel that is developed for both Linux & Windows server. From paid softwares, only Plesk/H-sphere have similar features. For people who like to manage both platforms efficiently without having to learn another software, zPanel is by far the best free choice.

There're many good free hosting control panels on the internet like ISPConfig, Kloxo. They are also very powerful for personal use purpose, however it's little hard for users to get them working as expected since not everybody is so familiar with command line.

The big advantage with zPanel is about the simple installation. No matter with windows or linux, there're just few clicks away to get zPanel running perfectly. Just check out this installation guide to see how simple it is. Unlike any other free control panel that requires complex configurations, zPanel is almost 100% automatic.

What would be the weakness? Yes, zPanel is powerful and user friendly enough but only works with apache web server. That means we can not host other programming languages like asp.net. We can install on windows server but can't take the full advantage of the platform, this makes it hard to be installed on production windows hosting server because IIS would be standard web server for most cases. If they zPanel team could integrate it with IIS and other windows technologies like .net and sql server, it's not a long time for zPanel to be one of the best windows hosting control panel.

Who should use zPanel?

As long as you're good with LAMP you can take the advantage of zPanel. Especially when we deal with unmanaged vps servers, zpanel will help a lot for service configurations. If we're good at programming, we can install zPanel to productions server directly with integration to billing module and offer hosting services to people. zPanel is only limited by our imagination!

Nginx Auto Installer for cPanel

NginX is web server developed by Igor Sysoev. It can be used for HTTP and proxy server for IMAP/POP3/SMTP, NGINX is approved to be the fastest webserver in the world and well known for its high performance and low resource consumption. Many big online Apps like WordPress and Comodo have switched to NginX for best performance.

However, for very a long time we have to install this software on vps/dedicated server only because no better way to integrate nginx to the most popular cpanel. In this article we're going to introduce by far the best nginx installer for cpanel and discuss how to use it correctly.

How to get NGINX working with cPanel?

Actually there's only one popular method to get Nginx working with cpanel. Early times, Blargman posted an auto installer script on this cpanel forum. It's also the first try to integrate Nginx to cpanel server. As we see from this thread, there're thousands of views to the script. Since the installer is created by Blargman and showed on nginxcp.com project website, the nginx admin should be developed by him as well. Just moved from personal hobby to an official project. Although it's announced to offer the installer with no cost, the owner still be able to earn money by offering further support to users, especially to big users like web hosting companies.

Nginx Admin features

The nginx admin is currently the most perfect cpanel plugin that comes with a GUI for nginx management, we can easily set on/off nginx service and make custom configurations etc. From it's official site, the installer comes with following features to help nginx users to reach the maximum performance.

DDOS Protection : Nginx will only pass true http requests and protect against attacks like DDOS attacks.
WHM Plugin : Nginx Admin whm interface will help you to manage your nginx server from your WHM.
GZIP compression : Nginx Admin is compitable with GZIP compression.
cPanel service monitor support: Nginx will be auto restart when you restart apache, So no down time at all.
No WHM apache status issue.
No PHP rewrite issue.
Can manage which domain use Nginx and which domain use Apache via SSH.
FREE – The most attractive feature!

Because nginx admin is an ongoing project, new versions are coming out very quick for bug fixing and new features development.

How does Nginx Admin work on cpanel server?

Nginx will work as a front end reverse proxy of your cPanel server along with apache. Which will increase the performace. That means both Apache and Nginx will be co-existing on your cpanel server, it's not possible yet to set Nginx alone since many other cpanel services rely on apache. With Nginx Admin, we can determine which domain to use nginx or not and switch it to apache, it's great feature when we need to do custom configurations to .htaccess.

What if we don't need cpanel but just a perfect nginx server environment? Thanks to the internet, there's an awsome installer for Nginx called "LNMP", it will install all necessary packs such as Nginx, mysql, php etc with one click. Thanks master4life site for this great resource, there're also many other great articles for server management.

Nginx Admin Official site: http://nginxcp.com
Nginx Admin Support forum: http://nginxcp.com/forums

Top 5 WordPress Mobile Plugins

According to the latest facebook report, the visiting has passed 1 billion mark. In their analytics, around 60% traffic is from mobile devices. What does that mean? It simply implies mobile devices are more and more popular for internet visiting and it's necessary to make our website mobile friendly! Because many websites are wordpress based today, in this article we're going to share with the top wordpress mobile plugins to convert your site mobile friendly in minutes.

WPtouch – Developed by BraveNewCode Inc. WPtouch is a commercial plugin with free version offer. It's primary recommended plugin if you need powerful management over the mobile theme. WPtouch automatically transforms your WordPress website into an application-like theme, complete with ajax loading articles and effects when viewed from the most popular mobile web browsing devices like the iPhone, iPod touch, Android mobile devices, Palm Pre/Pixi and BlackBerry OS6 mobile devices.

WPtouch download page: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wptouch
Author's official site: http://www.bravenewcode.com

WordPress Mobile Pack – It works with almost all wordpress versions and comes with great features. The WordPress Mobile Pack is a complete toolkit to help mobilize your WordPress site and blog. It includes a mobile switcher to select themes based on the type of user that is visiting the site, a selection of mobile themes, extra widgets, device adaptation and a mobile administration panel to allow users to edit the site or write new posts when out.

Download page: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/WordPress-mobile-pack
Author's development page: http://www.assembla.com/spaces/wordpress-mobile-pack

WordPress Uppsite – It's 100% free to get started with Uppsite. Install this plugin to enjoy the easiest, fastest and most advanced way to convert your WordPress site into fully-functional and customizable iPhone, iPad, Android and Windows Phone native applications, as well as a one-of-kind HTML5, native-style mobile web application.

UppSite has set out to bridge the mobile gap for all publishers by providing a dead-simple and fast solution to turn a site into a mobile application, without compromising the quality of the end result.

Download page: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/app-your-wordpress-uppsite
Uppsite official site: http://www.uppsite.com

WordPress Mobile Admin – WordPress Mobile Admin is a fully featured WordPress control panel for mobile. It works on every device – no matter what it's capabilities, so it doesn't matter if you don't have an iPhone or BlackBerry, you can still manage and update your blog whilst you're on the go.

Mobile Admin download page: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-mobile-admin
Author's official site: http://wapple.net

IamMobiled Mobile – It's probably the most simple and easy mobile plugin for wordpress. One click installation includes "Blue Heart" mobile theme and google ads options, just navigate in the same way as computer browsing.

Download page: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/iammobiled-mobile
Author's official site: http://iammobiled.com

Aboves are the currently most popular wordpress mobile plugins, they're approved working properly on lots of blog websites. If you're considering to make a free version of your wordpress site, one of above names will be working perfect with you.

WP-optimize for WordPress Optimization

Is your wordpress more and more slow after some time's running? Do you feel it's a risk to touch the mysql database for any optimzation? Ok, in case you're experiencing such problems with wordpress, we will introduce a optimization plugin to complete the task in quick time – WP-Optimize

What does this plugin do exactly?

Here's the list of the main features, just take a quick look

Remove the WordPress post revisions
Remove the WordPress auto draft posts
Remove all the comments in the spam queue
Remove all the un-approved comments
Apply mysql optimize commands on your database tables without phpMyAdmin.
Display Database table statistics. Shows how much space can be optimzied and how much space has been cleared.
Visible only to the administrators.

The key features of this plugin would be the deletion of revision posts and mysql table optimization. Every time when we revise an article wordpress will auto create a revision of that post and insert into wordpress post table, means if we revise the article 10 times, the actual article size will be 10 times bigger than the original one. That means lots of disk space wasted and reduce the efficiency for daily backup.

When we install/uninstall plugins, some info will still remain in mysql but we're not sure what it is. If we're dealing with different plugins frequently, there'll be lots of junk info in mysql tables and greatly reduce the mysql speed. The wp-optimize provides us an option to auto clean and optimize those tables via a single click!

In case you would like to learn more about wordpress mysql operation, you can visit our previous post "useful wordpress mysql queries" for details

WP-Optimize main screen

Database table report

plugin download page: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-optimize

Category Archives: Open Source App