web hosting

Tips to Apply to Free Hosting

If you have been considering a free web hosting service for your website needs, you may want to think twice and prepare yourself to deal with pop-ups, pop-unders, third-party banner advertisements and other annoying elements.  You also have to keep in mind that common features such as PHP programming, MySQL databases, CGI scripts and FTP access may not be available.

You can embark upon a mission to look for a quality free web hosting service with no advertisements and useful features, but you will likely return disappointed once your search has concluded.  While you can never really expect any guarantees when it comes to free hosting, knowing what to expect will better assure that you do not end up with a terrible service.

Understand How Free Hosting Works

There are more than enough free web hosting providers to go around.  Unfortunately, most of them force you to place advertisements on your site or only provide you with the free service for a limited time.  Some do set you up with a quality service in exchange for carrying banners while others leave you to run your site on slow and insufficient servers.  In some cases, these servers fail to respond at all, leaving you with a website that is essentially useless.  So, if the service is impractical, how do free hosting companies make enough money to survive?

More and more, we are seeing free web hosts keeping themselves afloat by persuading their customers to sign up for paid hosting plans.  If they can provide a good service, this actually turns out to be a fair deal.  Premium hosting services are very affordable these days so purchasing service with a company you trust could prove to be worth your while.   The major downside is that even when upgrading to a paid service, your package could still end up lacking features that are commonly found on the professional hosting market.  For example, you just might have to pay extra for items such as FrontPage extensions and FTP support.  So even when you purchase service from a free web host, you still have to make sure you are getting your money’s worth.

Secure Your Web Presence

Should you find yourself in a situation where you must rely on a free web hosting service because of financial restrictions, there are a few things you can do to protect your website and identity.  First, you can register yourself a domain name with a reputable company such as GoDaddy or Yahoo.  Domain names are pretty cheap these days and only cost about $10 to $12 per year.  Before registering the name, look out for domain features such as a control panel and URL forwarding.  This will provide you with the ability to redirect your domain and change the destination to where ever you prefer.  So if your free web host folds and goes out of business or things simply are not working out, you can point the name somewhere else and move your website right along with it.

Five Reasons to Choose Unix Hosting

Though Red Hat Linux and Microsoft Windows are currently prevalent on the market, Unix is making a comeback as a viable web hosting solution.  The platform offers all the power and stability of Linux at a price that is often considerably cheaper than Windows.  Many web hosting operations are currently run on Unix-based systems that range from Mac OS X to FreeBSD.  While these platforms are great alternatives, this article will give you five reasons why Unix itself makes a great choice for your hosting needs.

1.) Tried and Tested

Unix is arguably the most dependable operating system for the network server and web hosting environment.  The platform has thrived for more than 30 years and has been tightly integrated with the internet since its inception.  Although other systems have received worthy improvements over the years, Unix is a time-tested platform, offering the power and flexibility needed to meet a wide range of hosting needs.

2.) Unrivaled Stability and Security

During its tenor in the hosting industry, Unix has proven to be notably faster than other operating systems.  It also has a reputation for having the ability to create the most secure hosting environment imaginable.  These qualities have made it a mainstay in the world of corporate business and e-commerce.  Perhaps the greatest benefit Unix offers is its high level of stability and performance.  Unrivaled processing power and a rock-solid core makes it an ideal choice for simple web pages and complex applications alike.

3.) Unmatched Reliability

While Microsoft Windows offers a graphical icon-based interface for added simplicity, Unix has no GUI at all.  This dramatically reduces overhead and allows the system to dedicate the full power of the hardware to quickly and efficiently serve web pages when they are requested.  Even in a shared hosting environment, Unix is virtually impervious to server crashes or any types of faults caused by administrative errors dues to its user-level permission structure.  When used as a platform, it can help create a fault-tolerant web server with the ability to prevent potentially damaging processes, thus enabling your website to continuously run smoothly.

4.) Extremely Compatible

Being a veteran server operating system, the Unix platform is largely supported by software developers and vendors.  The software integrates seamlessly with Apache, PHP, Perl, MySQL and other web technologies commonly used with Linux.  It also offers full support for Microsoft FrontPage, a web design and management tool that was once only available in Windows-based hosting plans.  Thanks to compatibility enhancements, FrontPage can now run flawless on both Windows and Unix servers alike.

5.) Affordable and Easy to Use

Several have the misconception that Unix is an open-source operating system.  This is not true.  In fact, its source code is under license with numerous vendors and much of the core remains proprietary.  However, Unix hosting still tends to be affordable because of its integration with free and low-cost open-source products.  And while naturally a more complex system, this platform is just as user-friendly in the typical shared hosting environment as Windows or Linux.  Therefore,  it does not matter if you are an inexperienced webmaster or a novice, Unix hosting can offer all the power or simplicity you need to succeed with a website.

SaasS Content Management with Clickability

Previously known as cmPublish, the Clickability Platform is a CMS with a different approach on content management.  Developed by CMS provider Clickability, this platform is delivered on an on-demand basis, as well as full service with the company’s “Innovation as a Service” solution.  Aside from content management, the Clickability Platform also offers analytics, email campaign, web 2.0 and advertising among other functionality.  While there is obviously far more to the Clickability Platform than content management, this is indeed the focal point of the package.

Core Technologies

Though a licensed commercial product, Clickability Platform is based on powerful open-source technologies such as PHP, MySQL and Java.  It utilizes Apache as its web server and Velocity for the templating system.  Even though you have to pay for a license, the leveraging of various popular open-source tools makes Clickability Platform a cost effective CMS product.

Clickability Content

The main content entity in the Clickability environment is the item.  Authors have the ability to create content items by selecting various types of content from the navigation pane.  This CMS gives you a number of different content items out of the box, including jobs, blogs, press releases, case studies and FAQs.  Furthermore, custom content types can be created as well.   The templating system is a major part of the process as it allows you to actually get the content on your web pages.  These templates can be tailored to display numerous types of content in different sections of a single page.  While this feature caters to beginners, Clickability Platform also has something for developers with advanced creation environments and other customizing assets such as stylesheets.

Additional Features

Clickability Platform certainly isn’t short on features.  The package bundles streamlined content management capabilities alongside a host of SEO tools, Web 2.0, capabilities and the following list of features:

Newsletters – Publishers can create a newsletter of content and automatically distribute it to subscribers.  They can also manage mailing lists and have the ability to provide subscribers with double opt-in capabilities.

Advertising - Adverting functionality is tightly integrated into the Clickability Platform.  This allows administrators to create and maintain campaigns as well as all the details that go along with them.  Because ads are considered content pieces, they have targets that provide administrators with a way to track and keep up with the history of their performance.

cmSideKick – Clickability Platform allows you to run your website in the browser and the intuitive cmSideKick in a second frame.  cmSideKick is a utility that enables you to perform deep analyzation of statistics, allowing you to view your site in the administrator mode or selective views to modify certain areas.  This is one tool that you are likely to put to great use in the Clickability environment.

Conclusion

Clickability has come a long way since its days as cmPublish.  However, it has managed to maintain all the basics of content management and received some nice upgrades to compliment the emerging technologies and web trends.  Clickability Platform is definitely a enterprise CMS solution and can help to satisfy the needs of businesses of all sizes.

Database-Driven Sites with FrontPage

Many website owners are faced with the challenge of keeping their sites fresh with updated content.  Maintaining a frequently updated site is critical these days as it keeps your visitors intrigued and also appeals to the search engines.  This means that you are likely to rank higher and therefore, generate more quality traffic.  An easy and efficient way to overcome this challenge is to create a database-driven website.

Databases and Website Content

Database-driven sites are powerful because they offer the ability to easily generate fresh, updated content.  For most developers, this is enabled by the combination of PHP and MySQL.  Unfortunately, these technologies can be very complex and will definitely take some time learning.  Thankfully, a FrontPage web hosting solution can empower you to create a database-driven and use it with virtually any database, including MS SQL, Access, Oracle or the open-source MySQL.

Making a Database Connection with FrontPage

To make a database full of information that will be displayed on the website you created with FrontPage, all you have to do is connect it to the data you want it to show.  A database connection is merely a function that allows your page to connect with a database via server-side scripting.  While this could be performed with PHP and MySQL, doing it with FrontPage is much easier.  This is because FrontPage lets you create a template that will modify the content by communicating with the database and automatically creating a new page without any additional coding.

Before getting to the template, the first thing you need to do is manually create a database in an application such as Microsoft SQL Server, Access, Excel or Oracle.  The database may contain customer messages or just about any other content you want inserted on the pages of your website.  After creating the database, set up the template where you want the information to be displayed.   The advantage of having a template in FrontPage is that it gives you the ability to change the content of your page by importing new content from a database without needing to re-code the page itself.  As long as you connect the page to the new content in the database, it will be generated on the server-side whenever your visitors view the page.

To import content, simply choose “File” from the “Tool” bar and open the “Import” menu.  After browsing for the file you want to import, select “Yes” when asked if you to create a connection for it.  That’s basically it.  FrontPage offers a great way to make sure your pages are frequently updated and appealing to your visitors with fresh content.

Summary

You will have to do a little more to truly customize your database-driven site, but FrontPage hosting is so user-friendly, that nearly every task you want to perform is simplified through a wizard or tutorial that goes along with it.  Because FrontPage is such a forgiving tool, even if you do make mistakes, detecting and correcting the problem will be a piece of cake.

Power Your Store with Open-Source Shopping Carts

If you want to sell your own products or services online, then you will need a shopping cart program to facilitate those sales.  The number of available shopping carts is tremendous and even better, some of the best software is of an open-source variety and totally free to use.  Here are some of the most common open-source shopping carts you may encounter on the market.

PrestaShop

PrestaShop is a comprehensive, professional-grade shopping cart that is easy to use and setup.  The software offers a fully featured back-end interface to maintain your inventory, orders, shipping options and customers in real-time.  It is also highly customizable as you can incorporate your own modules.  PrestaShop keeps security in mind but securely transmitting customer payments directly to your bank account.

Magneto

Magneto is a robust e-commerce solution that offers unparalleled flexibility and control.  This software is so well designed and functional that you would never think it came from an open-source project.  Unlike other shopping carts, this one gives you clean URLs and SEO-friendliness right out the box, bypassing the need to make additional configurations.  Magneto has a scalable architecture and seamless integrate with various third-party applications.  Additionally, it gives you the benefit of both community and professional technical support.

CubeCart

CubeCart is one of the most popular shopping carts around.  Although it is free to download and use, you are forced to leave the developer’s copyright notice in your footer.  That disadvantage aside, CubeCart offers a plethora of features with support for most of the major gateways and shipping options.  The software comes with decent support from an active community that regularly contribute plugins to the cart.

Agora

Written in the Perl programming language and driven by a MySQL database, Agora is another popular choice for open-source shopping carts.  Very customizable, it features a built-in CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) manager that lets you control the look of the shopping cart as well as setup options ranging from a simple template-based storefront to more complex visual designs.  Agora supports unlimited products, a wealth of shipping and payment options, up to four tax zones at once and much more.

Zen Cart

Zen Cart is a user-friendly shopping cart that caters to beginners.  This is one software that actually focuses on the shoppers and store owners opposed to developers.  Zen Cart is easy to use and supports multiple shipping and payment options.  It also allows you to easily provide discounts and coupons to your customers.

osCommerce

The wide variety of features in osCommerce enables you to set up an online store fairly quickly.  It supports multiple currencies and also lets your customers print their invoices directly from the order screen.  osCommerce gets the backing of a superb community who provide ongoing support and make contributions to the project.

These are just some of your choices for open-source shopping carts.  Rest assured, there are many more to choose from.  While you can probably pay for something better, numerous users are doing just fine running their store with these free versions.