web hosting software and More

News about web hosting software

DreamHost Enters Into Application Hosting

Thu, 07 Feb 2008 11:18:12 +1100

Yesterday on my personal blog, I wrote about WordPress 2.3.3 upgrade due to a security exploit, and one issue I wrote in the comment, is that there are just too many blogs out there installed by Fantastico and alike, that are never updated. They are often targeted by the hackers, employed by blackhat SEO, to inject hidden links into existing blogs. Matt from WordPress agrees:

I think you also have a good point that we need to put pressure on the hosts and Fantastico to take responsibility for the blogs that they set up and stay current with releases.

Then I received DreamHost’s latest newsletter (January 2008), and in section 2 they introduced their new one-click install “easy mode”:

As dumbed-down as we already made our one-click installs, it seems, like politics, there’s always sufficient demand to make it even dumber.

Which is why we now have “easy mode” for our one-click installs, currently available only for WordPress and currently “BETA”:

http://panel.dreamhost.com/?tree=goodies.installer

When you do “easy mode”, you’ll be using a fully-hosted version of WordPress as opposed to getting files installed into your own web space.

This fully-hosted version WILL use your own MySQL database though, which you’ll have full control of. Although you can still pick from over 50 themes and enable some plugins we have installed, you won’t be able to customize the themes or install extra plugins.

However, you also won’t have to worry about managing your installation at all.. we’ll automatically handle all upgrades and it’s now on US to make sure your WordPress blog is always working and fast and correctly configured (so long as you don’t go mucking directly in your database)!

(In fact, “easy” WordPress one-clicks are ALREADY upgraded to 2.3.3!)

You still get the installation at any sub-domain of yours you’d like and of course there are no ads or anything of THAT ilk.

Also, “easy mode” is cool because ALL you do is pick a sub-domain and in less than 17 seconds you’re ready to blog!

Wow! What DreamHost has done is pretty much mimicking WordPress.com, an application hosting service that takes care of everything for its users! The service provider is responsible for updating all the software stack to ensure the service is always up to date and secure. Yes it is a locked-down platform and you cannot modify your theme files nor uploading any plugins (although there are already 50 themes installed), but sometimes you do have to trade flexibility for security.

Moreover, the database will be listed under your DreamHost control panel, and you are free to mysqldump and move it elsewhere later, which is something that you cannot do with WordPress.com. You should probably also host the media files (images, videos, etc) on a different sub-domain inside your DreamHost account, to make later migration easier.

With all that excitement, I went up to my DreamHost account to check it out straight away. Under “Goodies” and “One Click Installs”, you can now find this:

Choose a software (only WordPress is available at the moment), choose a sub-domain and hit “Install for me now!” and the software is installed! A few seconds later, I can already browse to that URL, and what presents in front of me is a standard WordPress installation page where you type in your blog’s name and admin’s email address, and your WordPres blog is up and running in no time.

All too easy.

These are the plugins installed:

• Disable WordPress Core Update


• Disable WordPress Plugin Updates


• Extended Comment Options


• reCAPTCHA


• WP-ShortStat

WordPress runs very fast as well. All blogs created are CNAME’ed to wordpress.dreamhost.com, instead of on the server your websites normally are. They probably run PHP in FastCGI which is why you can’t edit theme files inside WordPress (due to different uid).

$ curl -I http://<my blog>

HTTP/1.1 200 OK

Date: Wed, 06 Feb 2008 23:48:45 GMT

Server: Apache/2.0.61 (Unix) PHP/4.4.7 mod_ssl/2.0.61 OpenSSL/0.9.7e mod_fastcgi/2.4.2 DAV/2 SVN/1.4.2

X-Powered-By: PHP/4.4.8

Vary: Accept-Encoding

Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

Well done DreamHost!

Okay. Time for some disappointment. When I first logged into my shining new quick-installed WordPress blog, scrolled all the way to the bottom of the admin page, and this is what I saw…

WordPress 2.3.2?! WTF?

Update: More issues:

• Instead of WordPress-related websites and services, we have DreamHost blog/support/wiki/etc installed by default on the blogroll.


• Can’t write to .htaccess which means no mod_rewrite, which means no clean URL.

Site Down? Do This Before Contacting Support…

Wed, 16 Apr 2008 10:00:02 +0000
Having issues with random downtime or errors with your web site, but every time you contact hosting support they say:
“Well, all is fine on this end - nothing we can do.”
If you find yourself in these shoes, what you need to do is paint a better picture of the problems when they are happening ...]

There are often odd terms thrown about in the web hosting and web development worlds that just don’t make any sense the the common man on the street.� Phil drops me in an e-mail asking…

Maximizing Your Mindshare (and Wallet Share) in the New World of SaaS

Thu, 01 Mar 2007 15:11:00 -0400

I really like SMBLive CEO Matt Howard's way of looking at software as a service. (Some argue that we should start calling it software enabled service.) Matt says running a business is all about maintaining "5 conversations": with oneself, co-workers, external partners (vendors/contractors/distributors), customers and the general public. So ideally, web apps should facilitate personal productivity,
collaboration, vendor management, CRM and sales/marketing.

Traditionally, hosting providers have focused on helping customers maintain a web presence - which only fulfills 20% of the functionalities Matt describes. So I thought it was pretty awesome when Barbara Branaman mentioned that Concentric is in the process of integrating its new collaboration service with its clustered hosting and email solutions. I said the unified offering should help Concentric increase mindshare. Barbara said also importantly, it will boost wallet share. The goal is to earn a larger slice of more customers' IT budgets.

Barbara will need to keep a close eye on Google, whose Apps Premier cover about half of the 5 conversations. Remember last December's headlines about Microsoft battling Gmail for corporate workers' attention? It seems Redmond faces an even tougher challenge with respect to productivity apps: Ars Technica reported yesterday that Google Docs and Spreadsheet account for a 92% share of unique visitors, and 95% of the amount of time spent. I'm not impressed with Google Pages, but Blogger is pretty popular. I'm sure sooner or later both will be rolled into Google Apps, along with Google Base.

Meanwhile, have you heard about eBay's new partnerships with ERP/CRM provider NetSuite (spotted via Mark Crofton's blog) and popular social network Bebo? And SalesForce is looking to build a "circle of success" around its CRM app; David Berlind says their odds are decent.

Earlier David Snead asked via a comment on an earlier post whether easy interoperability between different vendors' apps will obviate the need for hosting providers to customize services for any audience. Based on Rodney Loges' experience, I think the answer is no.

Rodney (who was instrumental in digitalNATION's $100 million sale to Verio as well as Rackspace's launch of its Intensive service) has transformed his company from a web development firm into a SaaS provider by assembling a suite of best-of-breed content management, web analytics, collaboration, etc, tools for associations and non-profits. Each hand-picked application meets specific requirements that his customers share. I think that's what it takes to win in SaaS/SES - of which hosting is just a small percent. In other words, the key is customer segmentation.

There are often odd terms thrown about in the web hosting and web development worlds that just don’t make any sense the the common man on the street.� Phil drops me in an e-mail asking…

It took great skill and will power to complete this article on web hosting software. We also request you to use your skill and will power to understand this matter.
#











ix web host review
ix web hosting
ix web hosting review
ix web hosting reviews
host gator email