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Looking for a design solution for your website?

When we were doing all the research that goes into creating a new site, I don’t even want to think about the hours we spent going back and forth over different hosting options and site structures.  We were fortunate enough to come by Chris Pearson’s THESIS theme for wordpress and we were blown away.

For starters the THESIS theme is really intuitive and customizable, even if you have only limited knowledge of CSS and HTML you can create a great looking site.  If you’re more advanced, all the better to completely customize the theme and make a site which is second to none.  Right out of the box it is really easy to get your site up and running, just install a few free plugins and you’re ready to go.  It even has a lot of SEO-friendly code built-in, and that never hurts.

With THESIS you can control most of the functionality of the site directly from a control panel interface without having to change any of the actual wordpress code.  You can control the layout, meta/alt image tags, your feed link, fonts and style… all the the use of simple tick boxes and drop-down menus.  You can even install your Google Analytics or Mint tracking code with some handy pre-made fields… very easy.

The creators of THESIS even included a multimedia box where you can put random rotating pictures, advertising, video, or any custom code that you could want.  They even made it easy to decide which ads or picture to run on individual pages, you can have one default setting for the site and override that setting for a specific page if you want to match the multimedia box with the articles/post.

Some major names in the blogging world use THESIS, and you really can’t go wrong to follow their example.  To name a few… there is Chris Brogan, Sugarrae, Copyblogger and the list goes on…

The support offered by the DIYthemes forums is amazing, any design or functionality questions we had were answered within an hour or two after posting to the support forums.  They have built themselves an excellent community of THESIS users, its a real confidence builder to know you that kind of support.

All in all, we highly recommend the THESIS theme from DIYthemes.  If you’re looking for a solution for your site, this theme may be the answer to your prayers.  At the price of $87 for individual license and $164 for the developper option, it’s a steal.  The purchase price allows you not only to use the theme, but also entitles you to all future releases of this continuously evolving theme.

The 1.5 beta version of THESIS has been out for some time, and is scheduled to be released officially sometime this week.

Tagged as: control panel interface, design solution, Thesis, wordpress theme

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SPECIAL OFFER: 20% discount on Just Host 12/24 mth plans. Give Me 20% OFF Just Host!

As you probably know, Virtual Hosting is system whereby many website are hosted on a single server, sometimes even located at a single IP address. For a more comprehensive description of Virtual Hosting, you can check out other posts on the topic here at a GoodHost.org. A PHP Virtual Host is, simply, is one of these partitioned parts of a server that host a domain on which PHP has been installed. What is less simple is understanding exactly what that means.

A PHP Virtual Host employs the PHP, or “Personal Home Page” scripting language to enable a subscribing webmaster to create dynamic web pages. A traditional web page is an HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) document, which is to say it is a static (which signifies unchanging) document that contains links to other, similar pages. For any of the content on such a page to change, the webmaster must manually change the code in the HTML file and upload that file to the server. That’s fine for many purposes, but if everything were done like that the Internet would really only be a collection of books and pamphlets similar to the print industry.

What sets the online medium apart is that it is dominated by sites that engage their audiences by allowing them to interact with the content and get continually updated information. PHP is one of the many scripting languages that make this dynamic quality of the online medium possible. A scripting language derives from the common use of the word “script” which is a document that directs a performance. A movie, for example, is scripted. The characters may appear to interact naturally, but they are filmed performing a predetermined script. A scripting language, similarly, is what allows web developers to plan out the steps performed by a computer before generating the final output, in this case an HTML code which is rendered into what we see as a webpage by an Internet browser.

One of the simplest dynamic features that can be incorporated into a webpage through the use of PHP is a counter. You may have seen web pages that display the number of hits they have received, or received on a given day, and this is achieved by a script that instructs the server to record an event each time the page is accessed. The number you see displayed in a counter is presented through HTML code, but before that code was delivered to your browser, the server processed the information, added “1″ to the number value in reference to the latest request, inserted that number into the final HTML code delivered to your browser.

What makes a script a script rather than a program is that it functions independently of the programs it is accessing, it sets the order in which programs are accessed and input the required data to get the desired results, then performs the next step in the scripted chain of events. Naturally, PHP has many more uses than generating a counter, but the example serves to illustrate how basic such scripts are to the experience we have of the Internet.

There are many other scripting languages out there, such as ASP (Active Server Pages), but PHP has been around for a long time and is popular for its simplicity. A PHP script can be contained in a basic text file, integrated, for example, into the same file containing regular HTML code and it will be processed by any PHP enabled server. A PHP Virtual Host is easy to come by and easy to implement, but it may be something you’ll need to have your webhost install for you.

Tagged as: host, Hosting, hosts, partitions, personal home page, PHP Virtual Host, scripting languages, servers, virtual host, Webhosting

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Ventrilo is a VoIP program. VoIP stand for “Voice over IP,” which is to say it is a voice exchange application that works on top of Internet Protocol. The software works, essentially, by allowing the users of distinct IP addresses to connect to a server which puts them in direct voice contact with other users. Anyone can host a Ventrilo server on their home computer, but there are certain advantages to having a Ventrilo dedicated server.

Voice over IP applications are becoming more and more common. It is, for example, now possible to integrate VoIP programs into regular telecommunications networks. Skype was one on of the first services that popularized the medium. The interface looks much like any of the many other instant messaging applications that are commonly used on the Internet like ICQ, MSN Messenger or Yahoo Messenger. In fact, many of these applications now also allow you to create voice or even video connection so you can keep in touch with your friend over the Internet. The innovation of Skype is that the service allows user to dial regular telephone numbers. Now, VoIP services can be installed in a home that works independently of any home computers and effectively replaces regular telephone services. Ventrilo dedicated servers use the same technology to fulfill a different communication niche.

Whereas VoIP phone accounts and Skype-like systems act more like personal and private communications interfaces, Ventrilo is a platform for geared toward public communication networks. The client interface, for example, is reminiscent of IRC (Internet Relay Chat). You can create channels on a voice server that can be accessed by multiple users at once. The effect is much like a conference call, but anyone can drop in or out of the channel at will. Passwords can be setup to limit users, or channels can be left open to public access.

One of the major uses of Ventrilo, or “vent” as it is often known, is for people to communicate collectively while playing online games. Many games have integrated VoIP functionality, but Ventrilo allows you to easily setup teams prior to joining servers and maintain communications regardless of what happens in game. The program boasts very minimal bandwidth and CPU usage while offering good-quality sound reproduction, making it particularly well suited to complementing in-game communication while not interfering with the computer’s processing power which is required by the game.

For the purpose of a team that plays in a regular, pre-arrange window of time, it is perfectly possible to run the server software needed to operate Ventrilo on a home computer. However, having a host maintain a Ventrilo dedicated server means that all your settings will stay the same each time you need to log in: the same server name, the same target IP address. Further, the communication network doesn’t depend on any one user maintaining the server. Any member of the group can login anytime and find the channel waiting for them, making it easier to arrange impromptu games. Naturally, Ventrilo systems aren’t only useful to gamers. Anyone wanting to enable a remotely accessible, cheap and public forum that allows for voice communication will find the software useful.

Tagged as: dedicated servers, host, Hosting, hosts, internet relay chat, servers, skype, telephone services, Ventrilo Dedicated Server, voice over ip, voice server

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Microsoft Speech Server is the software giant’s contribution to every Science fiction fan’s dream of a computer you can talk to, and which can talk back. Speech recognition has been around for a while in various forms. The ability to control your computer with spoken words is, for example, incorporated into Microsoft’s latest operating system, Vista. It is one of the more functional examples of the technology, but anyone who has used it will no doubt have been frustrated from time to time by misinterpreted commands. The software boasts the ability to adapt itself to individual user’s speech patterns, but it isn’t seamless. Speech Server purports to be much more than speech recognition software: the objective is primarily to allow businesses to develop communications platforms that can act as their first point of contact with clients.

One might also fairly say that Microsoft Speech Server is the organization’s contribution to the continued development of annoying telemarketing.  IRV (Interactive Voice Response) platforms have becoming more and more prevalent. Whether you’re calling to have your phone line installed or trying to find a number from directory services, you are very likely to come into contact with an automated system. You’ll be greeted by a simulated or recorded human voice, and you will be asked for voice input in order to query a database.

The main problems associated with such communications systems is that they have trouble compensating for varying accents or individual peculiarities of speech. For individual computers with known users, the problem can be effectively surmounted by having the user read known command words into a microphone and having the software cue its responses accordingly. For a remotely operated system with multiple users, the challenge is to create a system flexible enough to handles the wide variety of different users.

One of the larger problems that hinders voice response systems is that people are not computers: they don’t always respond the same way, even to the same stimulus, and they make mistakes. Hesitation halfway through a word and a person’s natural tendency to correct themselves in mid speech, can all result in a system’s inability to respond correctly to users. The technology is constantly developing and new algorithms are constantly being devised in an attempt to overcome such difficulties.

Some would question the desirability of such systems. They benefit companies because they reduce the amount of workload that falls on call center agents, allowing them to save on staffing costs. Ostensibly, the voice response system retains enough of a personal touch to make customers feel that been treated with human consideration. However, unless the system is as easier to use than a touch-tone menus or some other kind of user input and IRV isn’t likely to meet all of its objectives. Much research is being put into programs that can help such a systems be more intimately responsive, adapting on the fly to individual users, but one can’t help but wonder if people would rather interact with a machine that doesn’t pretend to be more than it is. If one is a science fiction fan, the horrific example of the Genuine People Personalities from Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy springs immediately to mind.

Still, as the technology continually develops its viability as a genuinely desirable type of system interface becomes more and more conceivable. For anyone interested in adapting the current technology to current business needs, Microsoft Speech Server is worth investigating further.

Tagged as: communications platforms, communications systems, human voice, interactive voice response, microsoft speech, Microsoft Speech Server, servers, speech patterns, speech recognition software, speech server, spoken words, voice input, voice response systems

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We’re newbies out in the website world and came to Hostgator after 7 months of suffering with another host that played disappear with our website more than displayed it.
When we went to Hostgator it was a different world. These guys REALLY know their stuff! They’re awesome and so extremely helpful to this stay-at-home-Mom who needs support. I want to make them all cookies!
I love the respect, honesty, and bending over backwards they have done for me during the move and setting up everything. My website is up and running and I love it! Their list of extra software installations is huge and their Site Studio is really easy to use.
Thanks HostGator! If they wouldn’t melt in the mail, I’d send you brownies!

Source: WHJ - submitted by Flash 66.167.231.25

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I have been with HostGator for about a year and I can say that their
support is outstanding, quick answers with intelligent responses.
Needless to say I have had to contact them on a several occasions and I
have never been kept waiting.

So when the hosting provider of our company website, uh disappeared
(that’s the only way to describe it since we attempted calling them for
weeks) I recommended HostGator to my boss and we went forward.

The techs at HostGator walked me through what to do so as to make our
transition as painless as possible. I would STRONGLY recommend
HostGator to anyone that is setting up a website.

Source: WHJ - submitted by J Dub 72.45.206.124

Tagged as: gator, host, HostGator Customer Review, Hosting, hosts, intelligent responses, provider, transition

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GoDaddy Customer Review

I’m starting with GoDaddy since I’ve been with them the longest. I left AOL and created my first site in 2000. I went with another host first. They were reliable, but they didn’t provide me enough space, so I went with GoDaddy. I thought their first superbowl commercial was hilarious and decided to give them a try in 2005. Their monthly rate was very close to the $2.95 I had been paying for my previous host. I think paying by the year, it averaged about $3.29 a month. Godaddy offered a huge amount of space and bandwidth for that, and I got more email accounts than I would ever use as well.

The best thing I can say about this host is that I have NEVER noticed any downtime with them. I visit my site at least once a day, and it was always up. That is the most important aspect of a host for me, and everyone brags about 99.9% uptime. I can now tell you from experience that not all hosts are being truthful about that percentage, but Godaddy is.

The next thing that is almost as important as uptime is how economical they are. I have quite a few domains with free hosts, which are good for sites that you don’t maintain that much and have little traffic. I’m not made of money, and I make very little from my websites, so I can’t afford more than a few dollars a month in hosting. Godaddy was the cheapest out there in 2005. Not only cheap but reliable. I can’t stress how important those two aspects are, or how hard it is to find both those.

Now the few negatives, and the reasons I left godaddy in the spring of 2008 (which was also one of the biggest mistakes I’ve ever made online). You get 100 email accounts with hosting with a max of 100 MB total for those accounts. So you can either have 100 accounts with 1 MB email storage or 10 accounts with 10 MB storage, but there was no way to change that max of 10 MB per account. I didn’t like that at all, especially with all the free email accounts out there with 1 GB storage. I was paying for hosting and only getting 10 MB for my main email account? I ended up creating a yahoo account that I used more often for the storage. Well, goaddy has now fixed that issue, so we can put all 100 MB to one account if we want to. It’s still too low of an amount, but I can live with it.

I know enough about how the web works to get myself into trouble, but when I set up my first ftp account with godaddy, I had no idea that it would become part of my root path. So anytime there was an error on my forum, my ftp account name would be shown to all my users. I chose my own name when I created it and didn’t like that aspect at all. I emailed godaddy, since I couldn’t change the username in my control panel. They responded that it was impossible to change it. I told them that I might have to leave them if I couldn’t, which I did end up doing. This was probably the main reason I left and it would still bother me that I couldn’t change it. I’m now back with them and was able to create a new username that was more suitable. I don’t know if they still don’t allow you to change your ftp account, but that’s a moot point for me now.

Lastly, I had been doing a cron job for backing up my forum database. Godaddy did some upgrade of their software, and it conflicted with my jobs. It would no longer run, so I complained to support. They blamed me for it somehow and didn’t seem willing to fix the problem. I researched and everything pointed toward Godaddy not upgrading properly, but I couldn’t convince them of this. Well, it turns out that all my subsequent hosts have one problem or another with doing cron job backups, so it was pointless to leave one host for another for this reason. I don’t even do the cron jobs anymore, since it wasn’t worth the frustration. And what good are they if you don’t download them frequently, and your current host suspends you for no good reason? Of course, that is why I have returned to godaddy, but that’s a different review.

Unfortunately, since I left godaddy last year, I lost the special price I was getting. They are a bit more now, but paying for 2 years brings the average price down to $4.50 a month (they get cheaper the more years you pay for at once). $4.50 a month is still lower than most of the hosts out there, and I know I can rely on godaddy for uptime. Again, uptime and price are the most important to me. Yes, they have their faults, but believe me when I tell you, NO host is perfect. You just have to weed through the unprofessional and/or bad ones to find the best choice. Oh, and the third most important thing about a host is that you can trust them. Reliability is very important. You want to know that your account is safe with these people. That they won’t suspend without good reason or treat you like you don’t matter. We are the customers after all. They wouldn’t be needed if not for us, but a few hosts seem to forget that fact. So far godaddy has proven they can be trusted.

Source: WHT - written by Judedl

Tagged as: bandwidth, downtime, email accounts, free email, godaddy, mb storage, money, traffic

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NEC originally stood for the Nippon Electric Company. They have been around in various forms since 1898. The company originally made telephones and telephone switches, which means they’ve been in the communications industry for well over a century, which in itself is a very impressive record. They are a leader in semiconductor technology, optical communication and business class hardware. NEC is now a Global Fortune 500 company, with over 154 000 employees in divisions all over the world, including the NEC Corporation of America. This corporation has been around since 2006 and merges several American operations under one heading and specializes producing the NEC server line as well as visual displays, IP-based voice and data transmission solutions, high-speed optical networking and microwave communications.

At GoodHost, we spend a lot of time talking about running serves, hosting packages and solutions, communications protocols , operating systems and scripting languages: in short, we’re interested in everything that allows you to do anything with a server. It’s possible that we don’t pay enough attention to the serves themselves, in the physical sense. Whether you want to get the hardware together for the purposes of your own hosting operations or enterprise data storage, or you just want to know what kind of technology a host will use to provide you with service, it is worth knowing a little about the hardware involved in the hosting process. NEC servers are only one of many possibilities, but it is a name brand that you will see often enough.

A server is, essentially, and computer that functions to provide a service that can be access by other machines through a network. A personal computer can, in that sense, be used as a server and, in fact, often is. You wouldn’t want to setup a hosting company built on PCs, however. Professional servers are designed from the ground up to be ideal for their specific purposes. The main areas focused on for the purposes of server development is reliability, as units will often be left to operate unattended for extended periods of time. Redundant power supplies, network adapters and storage devices are, therefore, essential components of a good server.

NEC offers several lines of servers made for specific purposes. Their 5800/100 Series is the Enterprise-level product designed to work with Windows Server 2008 and feature the new Itanium process which is brining 64-bit computing into the mainstream.

The Express 5800/320F series specializes in fault tolerance technology, which in eliminating as much downtime as possible from operation. Many components are hot-swappable and the system as a whole boasts the ability to promise 99.999% system uptime.

Other server models include the SIGMABLADE and Rack versions of the company’s main server lines. The major differences between these system models is their physical setup. Blade and Rack servers are different ways of consolidating modular server systems for the purpose of maintaining expanding server farms in limited building space.

The 3800/100 Tower Server series is the companies more modest line of which aims at providing small business with the technology to meet their internal networking needs.

The choice of system will depend largely on how advanced your organization’s computing needs are, but NEC servers, in one form or another, will be right for you whether your purposes are in line with those of a small business or extend to requiring High Power Computing solutions.

Tagged as: enterprise data storage, host, Hosting, nec, nec corporation, nippon electric company, professional servers, scripting languages, servers, transmission solutions

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If you’ve ever wished that you could access another computer remotely, then a terminal server is the answer to that wish. The purpose of such a server is to manage the connections required to make remote operation possible. Terminals, however, require software to function and on that front you can run into some problems. The difficulty arises when you try to license terminal server functions.

Like any other software, server suites are subject to EULAs or End User License Agreement, which means that you can only license terminal servers to be operated by a limited number of users. This can be a problem as, by definition, servers are used for creating multiple connections and, while you will have an idea of the number of users that will make use of a server, your requirement can change over time.

Most server suite packages, however, come with many licensing options, so you should be able to find a configuration that will fit your needs. License packages tend to be more expensive the more clients you want to install on various machines that will, in turn, log onto the server in question. Packages can allow for anywhere from ten to an unlimited number of installations.

Often, it is not desirable to enable remote access for all users. You might want to have everyone in a corporation to have access to the e-mail server, but not everyone will have a reason to have administrator access to such a system. There are, however, exceptions such as the case of mainframe computing or situations where you have high security requirements. Imagine, for example, a company with employees who use laptops to access extremely sensitive information. Each laptop that actually holds the relevant files on their drives represents a separate security risk. In some cases, the liability can be reduced substantially by storing the sensitive files on a remote server and transferring them to the working machine only when necessary. An even higher level of security can be achieved by logging into a server over a VPN (Virtual Private Network) using a computer as what is called a “thin client.” The client-operating machine gives you direct access to the server and all programs, processing and file accesses are handled by the server. All the thin-client does is handle the user interface and display the visual and output from the server. The files and sensitive data never actually leave server. Once the terminal session is closed, the thin-client holds nothing that represents a significant loss if is misplaced or stolen.

There are also cases when operating thin-clients can be an extremely cost-effective alternative to having the same number of high-power machines. In certain usage conditions, a server can handle the operations required by hundreds of thin-client terminals, making configuring and maintaining an organization’s work stations a breeze. In such cased multiple license terminal server packages can be extremely valuable, but you will need to make sure that the amount of money saved on hardware and technical support is offset by the cost of acquiring licenses for the requisite number of thin clients.

Tagged as: high security, License Terminal Server, mail server, remote access, remote server, server suite, servers, software server, terminal servers

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