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Introduction & review of popular open source applications such as wordpress, joomla, drupal, dotnetnuke and open cart etc. We also do comparison of similar apps and recommend the right choice for different web application purpose.

WordPress vs Joomla vs Drupal

wordpress vs joomla vs drupal

WordPress, Joomla and Drupal are three of the best and most popular Blog/CMS softwares on the internet. There're various comparison of the three softwares due to their popularity. In this article we'll provide our own opinions about the three Apps by years working experience with them.

Background, Review and Comparison

Before we make the comparison, let's give it a quick review of the history and statistics of wordpress, joomla and drupal. Let's start with wordpress.

Why wordpress? – It's definitely the hottest solution for bloggers. over 90% top level domain blogs are wordpress based on the globe. WordPress was released when more and more people be able to purchase some MBs server space and host their own websites/blogs.

Wordpress started as blog software, but the usage is growing rapidly and more and more communities joined it's development. The result is more and more plugins/themes added to download area. For it's light weight design and powerful plugin/theme support. WordPress is used on more and more websites and working more than a blog software but content management system.

What's good of Joomla? – Joomla is absolutely the best CMS software which can be handled by start users and developers. You can easily manage the site layout by editing the source files from backend. all joomla functions are centralized from admin and you can navigate easily.

Best of the best for joomla is there're thousands of free and commercial components to support your projects, if you're going to launch a community site or shopping mall, joomla has side by side support to get your website running perfectly. Another important thing is joomla has perfect SEO structure to rank your website high. Their official site and support community has the highest page rank (PR9).

Who should use Drupal? – Drupal should be the most powerful CMS among the three softwares. Actually Drupal is released more developers friendly from either the package structure of code design. You have to make a lot of customization in order to put up a production site.

For a start user, you may find it little hard to understand how to get started with drupal since it has almost everything get ready. Although you have to learn a bit more in order to use drupal, there're thousands of successful famous sites are drupal based. Drupal is also mostly used for website backend admin.

Wordpress vs Joomla vs Drupal

Let's first take a look about the usage over the 3 softwares

wordpress vs joomla vs drupal

From above introduction for wordpress, joomla and drupal you should found that wordpress is still the most ideal choice for blog site purpose, if you need to put up a small CMS application, wordpress is still be able to handle. Joomla is completely deisgned for Content Management System (CMS). If you have a lot of products to show up, it's better to use joomla other than wordpress. Especially when you're dealing with ecommerce solutions, joomla is almost the MUST. As for drupal, as long as you're familiar with coding and some programming skills, it's highly recommended since it will bring up a secure and well formed website. Generally speaking, if you need to use drupal, you have to get a developer to work with or you have to learn a bit by yourself.

Conclusion: WordPress is still most recommended for blogging, Joomla is best choice if you're going to launch a big website with lots of products. If you like to customize and manage the application side by side by yourself, drupal is the ideal choice. Normally, you're a learned developer if drupal is your favorite.

Best Web Hosting for wordpress, joomla and drupal

After you got the final choice from the website softwares, you will start the journey to find a suitable web hosting provider. To shorten your search and comparison, we recommend the following hosting providers with our dedicated experience with their services.

Arvixe – Arvixe hosting (both asp.net hosting and Linux hosting) are 100% compatible with wordpress, joomla and drupal. you get free domain name and one the longest money back guarantee – 60 days! You can also save 30% by using our most promotional arvixe coupon.

WebhostingHub – The top web hosting provider with fast web server and low price hosting solutions. Their powerful hosting server and datacenters are leading in hosting industry. With standard cpanel hosting and up to 90 days money back guarantee, you can feel worry free to deal with their service. Sign up today for $1.95/mo for the first 3 months! http://www.webhostinghub.com

WordPress Hosting Comparison 2011

wordpress hosting comparison

Wordpress Hosting Review

Wordpress is already the most popular blog software, it's also used more and more for other website developing for it's user friendly design and large community support. If you're looking for a qualify wordpress hosting provider, you found the right place. Here I'd like to evaluate what a good wordpress hosting provider should do among all other web hosting competitors.

TOP WordPress Hosting Providers

For wordpress tech requirements, there're many web hosting providers provide basic support for wordpress and many of them will work properly with your different website requirements. Let's check out the top 10 list by lots of review websites.

 

WordPress Brand Hosting Features Price Rating
arvixe Bandwidth: Unlimited
Disk Space: Unlimited 		$2.8 Rating: A+
top wordpress hosting - Webhostinghub Bandwidth: Unlimited
Disk Space: Unlimited 		$1.95 Rating: A+
top wordpress hosting - ipage Bandwidth: Unlimited
Disk Space: Unlimited 		$1.99 Rating: A+
Top wordpress hosting -hostgator Bandwidth: Unlimited
Disk Space: Unlimited 		$3.96 Rating: A+
inmotion hosting Bandwidth: Unlimited
Disk Space: Unlimited 		$5.95 Rating: A
ix web hosting Bandwidth: Unlimited
Disk Space: Unlimited 		$3.95 Rating: A+
top wordpress hosting - bluehost Bandwidth: Unlimited
Disk Space: Unlimited 		$3.95 Rating: A
fatcow hosting Bandwidth: Unlimited
Disk Space: Unlimited 		$3.15 Rating: A+
top wordpress hosting - greengeeks Bandwidth: Unlimited
Disk Space: Unlimited 		$4.95 Rating: A
JustHost Web Hosting Services
　 		Bandwidth: Unlimited
Disk Space: Unlimited 		$2.95 Rating: A

All of them are wordpress supported hosting brands and all of them are highly recommended by many communities. But who's actually doing the best? Well, that really depends your wordpress site requirements. Here I'm going to introduce the best brands with real experience.

Hostgator – Hostgator is 100% wordpress hosting compatible with standard cpanel support. you have full access to wordpress source after auto installation by auto installer. Hostgator is recognized honest and reliable web hosting provider with powerful protection. Hostgator provides multiple hosting solutions from shared to dedicated server plans. If you're ready to sign up hostgator, make sure to claim this hostgator coupon.

Arvixe – Arvixe is one of our most recommended wordpress hosting with affordable hosting price. Arvixe is our golden hosting sponsor and we host WHP on their server at the moment. Arvixe is also rated the best web hosting support by us for their fast response and helpful assistance. Arvixe support wordpress hosting via both windows and linux platforms and you can save 30% by using our arvixe coupon.

Ipage – By far the cheapest wordpress hosting provider for only $1.99/mo with all service unlimited. Ipage is powering over 1 million world wide websites for personal, small to medium size business. If you want to launch a small personal blog site based wordpress software, ipage is absolutely your best choice today!

Inmotion & Webhostinghub – The fastest web servers with up to 90 days full money back guarantee. If you're not satisfied with their service during that period and cancel account with full in return! Plus, their services are very few of the leading hosts who don't oversell the space. Learn more about Inmotion hosting speed

Who to use from the list? Ok, after compared the hosting features on their website we can easily got the answer – Arvixe. Why? Regardless any other factors, we need quality service with reasonable price. Too expensive or too cheap is always not good sign. Among those web hosting providers, arvixe is absolutely outstanding with affordable hosting plans and reliable hosting server. Arvixe offers side by side support to lead a successful wordpress site. Find more about arvixe on their official site>>

What makes up a good wordpress hosting?

A good wordpress hosting must have the following minimum features included:

1. Must be fully wordpress compatible, that means the wordpress site should be running without any problem as well as the wordpress site configurations such as site update, wordpress plugin and theme installation etc.

2. There must be an up-to-date free auto installer script available in hosting control panel. Auto installer script will save you a lot of time on the package uploading/downloading as well as other hosting side problems. the most featured partner should be cpanel + fantastico.

3. The server up time must be 99% at least

4. There must be 24 x 7 live technical support

5. Price must be under $5/mon and a reasonable money back guarantee period.

WordPress vs B2evolution

wordpress vs b2evolution

Wordpress & B2evolution Reviews

WordPress – an outstanding and opensourced blog software with user friendly design. With years development, wordpress is more than a blog but a CMS solution for any website setup, more and more people are dedicated for wordpress skin & plugin development for life earning. Even more, over 12% of the world's top 100,0000 websites are wordpress based. Hundreds of plugins are available for wordpress site creation and optimization, no matter if you want to launch a personal blog or enterprise website, wordpress can be always used as the backend.

B2evolution  – One of the oldest blog systems written in php mysql. It provides all necessary functions for blog platform. Simple installation is applied for single site and multi-blog purpose. The b2evolution provides very clean admin panel and a WYSIWYG editor for people to post more professionally.

Wordpress vs B2evolution

wordpress and b2evolution, which is better? Well, it's hard to say which is better depends your skills. Personally I prefer to wordpress, here're main comparisons between them:

  • Site structure – Needless to say, wordpress is more clear and simple, you can judge from the file names directly to determine what it's used for and edit it directly to reflect changes on your website. B2evolution is more complex for start user and has a larger package size. you have to spend more time to learn from.
  • Backend Admin – WordPress has only few links on admin panel including all functions to manage your wordpress site, the drag and drop "widget" helps you customize your site layout in few seconds and looks quite professional. By install a new plugin, you have a search box to get the right plugin names and install everything by "one click". B2evolution performs not so excellent from above features and actually you have to learn some documentations before using it.
  • Website URLs – This is referring to the "permalinks" setting, a good website URL is more SEO friendly (static URL), from wordpress admin panel you can determine what kind of permalinks to show up on your website without having to learn the complicated technical stuff, it will auto generate .htaccess rules and place it to your website root.
  • User friendly – From all above explanation and comparison, wordpress is definitely more user friendly. Especially to start users, you don't have to deal with the technical stuff but just by applying new themes and plugins to putup a professional blog site. You can always customize your wordpress site without any negative effect to your main website.
  • Development resource – WordPress wins. WordPress is developed by thousands of team and personal programmers. There're tons of free themes/plugins from both wordpress official directory or third party sites. Thus we can easily find a good solution to meet our website requirement. But b2evolution only provide limited theme/plugin resource and not supported by so many communities.

Conclusion: No matter if you're newbie or experienced webmaster, wordpress is your primary choice for blog setup. WordPress is also ideal option if you're going to put up enterprise website by using a nice theme.

Best WordPress Hosting

Wordpress has no special requirements to hosting server but only php mysql. For fast and secure wordpress hosting, we highly recommend arvixe.com to host your wordpress site. You may also find some other good ones but only god can tell if they're acquired by someone or not.

Arvixe is famous name in the industry and pretty care customer feedbacks. Arvixe is outstanding for cheap and prefessional hosting services. Arvixe wordpress hosting comes with following core features

  • Unlimited space and bandwidth
  • Free domain registration and multiple domains hosting
  • Standard cpanel hosting with unlimited mysql database
  • 24 x 7 preffesional customer support
  • Only $4/mon with up to 60 days money back guarantee!

Visit Arvixe.com for wordpress hosting plan details

More about Blog

Blog is the most popular stuff on the internet, it's also the most efficient method for people's interaction. For website newbie, blog is also the best platform to putup a website quickly and make posts. In this article we'll discuss the most popular blog softwares and help find which one is the best.

Generally speaking, most blog websites are php mysql based applications, this is because it works under the most affordable hosting environment – Linux. Both the linux system and the blog software itself are mainly open sourced and free, this greatly reduced the fee for webmaster to launch a website. If you're going to host a blog site, wordpress is highly suggested choice.

Best PhpNuke Web Hosting

best phpnuke web hosting

PHP-Nuke Introduction

What's phpnuke? PHP-Nuke is a web-based automated news publishing and content management system(CMS) based on PHP and MySQL. It's the best web application for quick news publish.

PHP-Nuke also offers a very high number of features not present on other systems and each new release will add much more new and cool features.

Some core features of phpnuke

PHP-Nuke is a content management system allowing webmasters to create community-based portals (websites), allowing users and editors to post news items (user-submitted news items are selected by editors) or other types of articles.

Modules can be added to the PHP-Nuke system allowing additional features such as an Internet forum, Calendar, News Feed, FAQ's , Private Messaging and others. The site is maintained through an administration interface.

PHP-Nuke resources:

  • phpnuke official site: http://phpnuke.org
  • download phpnuke: http://downloads.phpnuke.org
  • phpnuke themes: http://phpnuke-downloads.com

What's the hosting requirement of phpnuke?

PHP-Nuke can be running on the following Operation systems

  • Linux
  • Any Unix flavor
  • OS/2
  • Any Windows flavor
  • MacOS
  • FreeBSD

Best phpnuke Web Hosting

Since phpnuke only requires php and mysql to work with. 99% web hosting service providers should support phpnuke without any problem. We higly recommend the best LAMP environment for both performance and cost consideration. After reviewed 100+ phpnuke supported hosting service, following list is highly recommended:

best phpnuke hosting - webhostinghubWebhostingHub – Fast and affordable phpnuke web hosting service for only $4.99/mo. They're currently promoting their service for only $1.95/mo for the first 3 months. WebhostingHub is your primary consideration for phpnuke website because they offer free domain and unlimited database support plus advance php code protection via suPHP. Hesitate about webhostinghub hosting? Don't worry, since they're providing up to 90 days full money back guarantee, you can feel 100% safe to pay with them!

Go to www.Webhostinghub.com for phpnuke hosting plan details

Arvixe – For fast, secure and reliable phpNuke Hosting, look no further than Arvixe. Arvixe phpnuke hosting plan provides everything you need, including a free automated installation of phpNuke. For only $4/mo you get full access to all phpnuke features.

PhpNuke is a simple support for all arvixe hosting plans, the server setup is more than engough for basic phpnuke requirements. What most important is their people are available all over the country to offer real 24*7 support. Unless your requirement will bring server security chanllenge, they will try to satisfy each client as much as they can.

PHPNuke vs Joomla

Both phpnuke and Joomla are leading choice for content management but which is better choice? The answer is joomla. Joomla is almost recognized the standard choice for CMS software for today's web development. Based it's great modules/plugins and templates, you can easily get a professional site in quick time. You can also use joomla for further development to fulfill your needs.

phpnuke was perfect in the past because very few competitors at that time. Although it's still powering lots of great sites, it's not recommended for today's website developing needs. We highly suggest using Joomla for CMS purpose. They update frequently for bug fixes as well as lots of templates to choose from. Besides, there're lot of support resource for this software to help with any kind problem fixing.

Best FFmpeg Web Hosting

best ffmpeg web hosting

FFmpeg Brief Introduction

FFmpeg is a complete, cross-platform solution to record, convert and stream audio and video. It includes libavcodec – the leading audio/video codec library. FFmpeg is a MUST for streaming video & audio for video sharing applications. The popular Video sharing site youtube is ffmpeg tech based.

FFmpeg Hosting allows you to stream media and share video with youtube video sharing scripts. For ffmpeg hosting support, it requires hosting server to have PHP installation with php ffmpeg enabled.

Best FFmpeg Web Hosting

By editorial evaluation and years' experience with multiple hosting providers, the best ffmpeg web hosting award goes to Arvixe. Arvixe hosting is 100% compatible with ffmpeg scripting and offers side by side hosting support. Best of the best is up to 60 days money back guarantee for worry free purchase! you don't need worry about anything not working fine, you simply request money back if things go wrong.

Arvixe FFmpeg hosting core features

  • Unlimited Space / Unlimite Data Transfer
  • Multiple Websites Hosted
  • FREE Domain Registration for Life
  • 24/7 tech support for your ffmpeg application
  • cPanel auto installer over 150 application scripts
  • 99.9% uptime and 60 day money back guarantee
  • 100% Satisfaction Guarantee
  • Starts from $4.00/Month

Best FFmpeg hosting

Arvixe FFmpeg Hosting configuration

  • FFmpeg
  • FFmpeg-PHP
  • Mplayer + Mencoder
  • flv2tool + GD Library
  • Libogg + Libvorbis
  • LAME MP3 Encoder

Being the best developer friendly hosting provider, arvixe is trying to satisfy each web master as much as they can. Their people setup the hosting server via maximum available hardware resources to make sure not overloaded. What most important is their support people are everywhere from United States and truely available 24*7 to accept customer support requests.

Visit www.Arvixe.com for official plan details

More about FFmpeg

FFmpeg project is made of several components:

  1. ffmpeg is a command line tool to convert one video file format to another.
  2. ffserver is an HTTP and RTSP multimedia streaming server for live broadcasts.
  3. ffplay is a simple media player based on SDL and on the FFmpeg libraries.
  4. ffprobe is a command line tool to show media information.
  5. libavcodec is a library containing all the FFmpeg audio/video encoders and decoders. Most codecs were developed from scratch to ensure best performance and high code reusability.
  6. libavformat is a library containing demuxers and muxers for audio/video container formats.
  7. libavutil is a helper library containing routines common to different parts of FFmpeg. This library includes adler32, crc, md5, sha1, lzo decompressor, Base64 encoder/decoder, des encrypter/decrypter, rc4 encrypter/decrypter and aes encrypter/decrypter.
  8. libpostproc is a library containing video postprocessing routines.
  9. libswscale is a library containing video image scaling and colorspace/pixelformat conversion routines.
  10. libavfilter is the substitute for vhook which allows the video/audio to be modified or examined between the decoder and the encoder.

More about FFmpeg Web Hosting

FFmpeg hosting is a kind of streaming hosting, it mostly refers to a php module from php installation, it gives you the ability to create and run online video sharing websites. FFmpeg hosting requires high performance hosting servers to handle the heavy loading. For such case, ffmpeg is disabled by many hosting providers under a shared hosting plan. If you do find some ffmpeg supported hosting, there're lots of restrictions in using their service because most of them are not willing to support this technology. Once you need to contact support for further setup they will redirect you to higher hosting plans like VPS.

Arvixe is rated the best with ffmpeg support over lots of popular video sharing scripts such as WordPress – Joomla – vShare – Clip-Share – Rayzz and over 10 popular applications. Choosing arvixe for your ffmpeg script means fast and success!

Best Nginx Web Hosting

best nginx web hosting

Nginx Brief Introduction

Nginx is a HTTP and reverse proxy server, as well as a mail proxy server. Nginx is an Russia project which is originally designed for the 3rd busiest website in Russia – RamblerMedia.com. It has been running for more than five years on many other heavily loaded websites on the globe.

There's very few web hosts announced to use nginx for web server solution since it's not yet officially integrated into the most popular control panel softwares. However, many IT or web hosting companies are powered by nginx from backend for loading balance and security related setup. Nginx and Apache are golden partner for high performance and secure web server configuration.

Nginx official site: http://nginx.org

Best Nginx Hosting

There's no standard nginx web hosting plan under a hosting environment. What you really should look for is a good vps or dedicated server hosting provider. For easy and fast nginx service, A2hosting is the best choice by editorial reviews and experience. The company provides quick nginx setup for live production server purpose with strong tech support. No matter if you just want to use for development or business purpose, The a2 server can support your web requirements side by side.

a2 nginx hosting plan

The a2 company provides a installer for nginx quick setup. Customers don't have to deal with manual operation and worry about any misconfiguration. The a2 installer be able to configure lots of services automatically including control panel service such as ispConfig and zpanel etc.

Besides this unbeatable feature, a2 hosting provides very scalable server solutions to meet with your different hosting requirements. Your server specs can be upgraded/downgraded easily with no data loss. The VPS provides multi choice for server OS, DC locations and other crucial server setups.

Why Nginx Hosting?

Being one of the most reputable web server softwares, Nginx is well known for many sides comparison among competitors.

  1. Light weight – Nginx has pretty small size like the most popular web server software apache. Besides the small size, nginx is very user friendly with the configurations, it has less configuration files and all other stuff.
  2. High performance – Nginx is developed to deal with heavy traffic websites that consume lots of server resources. When you got a such site, nginx is simply the only choice comparing to all other solutions.
  3. Stable – Nginx is approved to be stable and reliable web server after several years' live server deployment. With loading balance support as well as proxy support, you can keep your server in healthy state professinoally. Especially when you're running an busy E-commerce website, such features will keep your business always online!
  4. Open source – Nginx is open sourced and compatible with most modern OS including windows and linux. Downloads/docs are all available from official sites in multiple languages.

From a survey, Nginx is used by over 25% of the top 10,000 busiest sites, including Netflix, Facebook, Groupon, LivingSocial, TechCrunch, Dropbox and WordPress, as well as by over 12% of the entire Internet web sites population. They're either used directly for web server solution or load balancer.

If you're considering to use nginx, there's a good installation guidance for CentOS server. Check out this rackspace page for details.

What would be the weakness of Nginx?

The only disadvantage with nginx is it's still not deployed into the most popular hosting control panel such as cpanel thus it's still mainly running on vps and dedicated server. If you like to get nginx running under cpanel or such you will have to debug yourself, there's no official support available yet. I think this is why nginx still not accepted by most hosting providers.

There's a cpanel plugin for Nginx called "nginxcp" which is dedicated for nginx and cpanel integration. From user experience, it's approved to work perfect but there's still some work to be done in order to have it running on hosting server.