Have a problem with upgrade or install?

We can help you upgrade or install WordPress.

Well, looks like you can.

Fantastico makes installing script so simple, does it makes script installation service like us obsolete?

Well, yes and no.

Yes to the extent that simple installation and testing can easily be accomplished with a few clicks of the mouse. In fact, as mention in the previous post, Wordpress installation is already so simple.

No because we provide a customized service. Perhaps your host don’t provide Fantastico. Perhaps you want to install an application not provided by Fantastico. Perhaps there is a unique install situation that requires human decision. We are here to fill that gap. Programs can’t beat experience just yet.

Taking this into account, if your hosting provider has Fantastico and you still require our service to install a script provided by Fantastico, we will install it for you with personal attention for just $10.

Just mention this in the order and we will refund you the difference.

What are the scripts installed? Here is the list (list below is updated as of this post date):

Blogs:

• b2evolution (2.4.5) (website)
• Nucleus (3.32) (website)
• WordPress (2.7.1) (website)

Classifieds:

• Noah’s Classifieds (V8 (3.2.0)) (website)

Portals/CMS:

• Drupal (6.10) (website)
• Geeklog (1.5.1) (website)
• Joomla 1.5 (1.5.10) (website)
• Joomla (1.0.15) (website)
• Mambo Open Source (4.6.5) (website)
• PHP-Nuke (7.9) (website)
• phpWCMS (1.1-RC4 Rev. A) (website)
• phpWebSite (0.10.2) (website)
• Post-Nuke (0.764) (visit site)
• Siteframe (3.2.3) (website)
• Typo3 (4.2.1) (website)
• Xoops (2.3.1) (website)

Customer Support:

• Crafty Syntax Live Help (2.15.0) (website)
• Help Center Live (2.1.7) (website)
• osTicket (1.3.1) (website)
• PerlDesk (4.012.2) (Commercial, needs license) (website)

Discussion Boards:

• phpBB (3.0.4) (website)
• SMF (1.1.7) (website)

E-Commerce:

• CubeCart (3.0.17) (website)
• OS Commerce (2.2 Release Candidate 2a + buySAFE) (website)
• Zen Cart (1.3.8a) (website)

FAQ:

• FAQMasterFlex (1.51) (website)

Hosting Billing:

• AccountLab Plus (2.8 r14) (Commercial, needs license) (website)
• phpCOIN (1.4.4) (website)

Image Galleries:

• 4images Gallery (1.7.6) (website)
• Coppermine Photo Gallery (1.4.20) (website)
• Gallery (2.3) (website)

Mailing List:

• PHPlist (2.10.9) (website)

Polls and Surveys:

• Advanced Poll (2.03) (website)
• LimeSurvey (1.72) (website)
• phpESP (1.8.2) (website)

Project Management:

• PHProjekt (5.2.2) (website)
• dotProject (2.1.2) (website)

Site Builders:

• Soholaunch Pro Edition (4.9.3 r17) (Commercial, needs license) (website)
• Templates Express (website)

Wiki:

• PhpWiki (1.2.11) (website)
• TikiWiki (2.4) (website)

Other Scripts:

• Dew-NewPHPLinks (2.0.1.0b SEF w/Thumbshots) (website)
• Moodle (1.9.4) (website)
• Open-Realty (2.5.6) (website)
• phpAdsNew (2.0.11-pr1) (website)
• PHPauction (3.2) (website)
• phpFormGenerator (2.09c) (website)
• WebCalendar (1.2.0) (website)

Honestly, no one had asked us to install WordPress. That is certainly a testimony that the Famous 5 Minute Installation is living up to their claim.

In fact, since it is so easy we are going to install WordPress for FREE if you just quote FREEWP when you ask for an installation of WordPress. The treat is on us. Just doing our part to promote this great software.

Hats off to the work the WordPress team is doing. If all software is like that, we are out of job. Fortunately for us, many software hasn’t get it yet.

You may ask, what is a flat file based CMS?

Most CMS including CMS Made Simple, Joomla, Drupal use a database (commonly MySQL) to store the content. When a page is requested, the page content is retrieved from the database based on certain parameters, like the page id. This content is then combined with a template to produce a page that is returned to you.

In the case of a flat-file CMS, the page content is stored in a file rather than a database.

There are arguements for and against using a flat-file CMS. While the supporter on each side may have their valid points, it is more important to evaluate you own reasons to use a flat file CMS over a database CMS.

In my recent case, these were the applicable reasons

• Easy to setup and maintain
• Easy to backup and move around
• Save space

Do you need to evaluate and install a flat-file based CMS? Fill us in with some details and we can evaluate with you.

From the experiences of installing, using and testing many difference CMS, we found CMS Made Simple to be simple to use and flexible. As with any system, there are pros and cons. A CMS has to be choosen based on the fit to the task at hand. For a somewhat smaller content site like ours, CMS Made Simple fits perfectly.

With the CMS backend, we can manage the content easier compared to before when we maintain the pages  by directly editing a mix of PHP code and template. We also make use of features like global content block and custom user defined tags for some repetitive content blocks.

In this update we added to each script page a showcase of sites using the same open source script that we can help you install. For example, on the CMS Made Simple page we found 2 sites that was built using CMS Made Simple.

If you have a site that is using these open source scripts and would like to be listed, just follow the simple steps on the page itself.

Hope that you find our update useful. Your feedback and suggestion to make our site even better is most welcomed!

Why yet another web hosting review?
Because

• we are sick of affiliate links, sponsored pages masquerading as review,
• we are tired of copied about-us page pretending to be a review,
• a bunch of user ratings cannot beat actually checking out the service and kicking the tires for ourselves,
• we have criteria that other reviews do not cover

What are our criteria? Why we think they are important?

• Good support – should be timely, knowledgeable and polite.
  We are not expecting the hosting support to ace here, just performance at a reasonably acceptable level. Since we know what we are doing and if hosting company know what they are doing too, there is no need for excessive support anyway.
• Honor their money back and any claims/promises (if any).
  We will be asking our money back and checking out any other gimmicks to see if they live up to their claim.
• SSH access
  Without SSH we are like working with one hand tied behind our back. Typically hosting companies that allows ssh are also more technically competent.
• Allow unlimited domain - at least a large enough number
• Attractive pricing
  We are not looking for the cheapest here. Value for money and generally inline with what others are offering. We think a ideal entry level is a monthly payment of less that $9 (not $9/month if you sign up for 3 years).

This would also be a good exercise for us to get to know more about the hosting offerings out there and also to sharpen our skill.

In closing, we want to take this opportunity to recommend you our current hosting provider RapidVPS. In our opinion, they already ace all our criteria so we will not be doing an actual review about them. We had been using them for close to 2 years now. In full disclosure, you should know we are not related to them in any way except as happy paying customer. Also the link above does earn us a referral, but only if you are happy with their service and stay signed-up (which we think you will). So give it a try.

ps. Any host you would like us to try?

In this post we outline steps that you can take to make sure you purchase the right hosting.

1. Get a Linux server that supports PHP and MySQL
   Most PHP, MySQL runs well on Unix server, Linux is popular operating system but you also have FreeBSD.
2. Check the requirement of the scripts you are going to run
   Almost all scripts will list the requirement somewhere. Sometime they are hidden somewhere under different names, for example
   WordPress: Hosting WordPress
   phpBB: Documentation:Requirements
   CMS Made Simple: User Handbook/Installation/Requirements
3. Ask the web hosting company for a phpinfo output
   Most competent webhost will respond to this. The output looks something like this:
   
4. Ask the webhosting company directly
   Alternative, if you don’t want to deal with the technical mumbo jumbo, ask the hosting company directly.
   We recommend though that you try it yourself. It is a good learning process anyway.

Once you have done the above steps, you need to know what to look for. Let’s take the example from the WordPress requirements.

PHP version
This is displayed right on top, for example 5.2.5. WordPress says it need PHP version 4.2 or greater, so we are good (5.2.5 is greated than 4.2).

MySQL
On the phpinfo output page search for “Client API version” (Ctrl+F on IE and Firefox). Check the number give against WordPress requirement which is MySQL version 4.0 or greater.

Apache mod_rewrite
This is optional but is useful for SEO friendly URL and such. So if you need that, check for it. Do a search on the page for “mod_rewrite“. It should appears under the Apache section.

And you are good to go!

For other scripts, there may be other requirements such as safe_mode, magic_quotes_gpc, gd, iconv, mbstring. Simply do a search on the page for them and see the corresponding details that follows.

Most of the time they have very self-explanatory values like “on”, “off”. Sometime the presence or absence of the word suggest it is there or not.

Just follow these few steps and you can easily determine if you can your script on the host.

If you have question about whether your host can run a script, send us a note we can help you take a look.

Instead of just bookmarking links, we do our best to give each link a comment so that you see a little more details about the script than just a link.

Also collected are web tools and services including those omnipresence Web2.0 services.

So if you are on del.icio.us, add us to your network or recommend some related links to us.