Hostmonster uses the new CPanel evolution XP skin which is very well structured and easy to use. As the name suggests the layout of this skin follows the design of the MS XP user interface. The icons and grouping of certain categories in the CPanel make this a very user friendly CPanel design. Hostmonster users have many queries in the forums but I have rarely seen somebody complain about the layout of the CPanel.
Above you can see what the CPanel Evolution skin looks like. It supports 21 languages, tooltips, startup tips and more.
Go to Hostmonster or read my Hostmonster review first.
Yesterday another member at Bluehost asked me to test their download/site speed by downloading a 15 mb .wma file from his site. The download achieved an average speed of 140 kb/s (kilo byte per second) which is quite fast. My Internet connection is a 6 Mbit DSL line so it may be slower for other users with lower bandwidth deals.
For more info on bluehost’s speed and all other features please read my bluehost review or go to bluehost directly.
Crazy Egg is a revolutionary new web stats software that allows its users to track various aspects of your site and offers a wholly new visualisation of the traffic on your website. Lunarpages customers get a free trial of Crazy eggs web stats. Here is what you can do with crazy egg.
Create a test setup:
Lists – An overview of the all the clicks on your site
Heatmap – Where are your visitors clicking? Take a look at the heatmap.
Overlay – An exact overview of clicks and percentages of total clicks and where they occur on your site.
Blocking – Block your own IP and localhost
Automatic Archiving
RSS and email notifications – you can keep yourself updated about the activity on your site.
In this test version of Crazy Egg you can only track up to 6000 hits and 4 pages. Mind you that there are sites that create more or less hits. Although I don´t know how the tracking of Crazy Egg works exactly, a hit is usually caused by every file that is loaded on your server. I.e. if your page at Lunarpages contains 10 javascripts, and 8 pictures for your site design and another 2 in your page body you will get 20 hits with every page view!
I’m just warning you that you might burn those 6000 hits rather quickly if you have one of those sites. If this is the case I suggest you better get proper tracking of your most important page to get a bigger sample set. Check out my Lunarpages review and take a look at their hosting plans here to see what else you get with this award winning host.
Lunarpages increased the bandwidth and storage on its basic plan. The storage was increased from 250 GB to 350 GB and the bandwidth was increased from 2500 GB to 3500 GB. With these new specs you can really host a big site at Lunarpages.
There´s also good news for business customers as the bandwidth was also increased to 3500 GB. For more details on Lunarpages, it´s plans and technology please read my lunarpages review.
If you want to join the ranks of bloggers you will have to find good blog hosting first. In case you are not a an experienced webmaster already you might want to find a host that allows easy one click script installation of your blog. Most of the blog hosting providers in my web hosting reviews offer this service in the Fantastico script suite. The blog scripts currently included in this installation service are B2Evolution, Nucleus, pMachine Free, and WordPress. By the way, if you haven’t realised already this blog runs on wordpress.
Other important things you need to look for in a blog hosting provider are bandwidth/transfer, uptime, storage and all the other usual goodies like email/webmail, databases, supported scripting languages, .htaccess support etc. Many webhosts I reviewed have very generous bandwidth and storage allowances and unless you run a very popular blog (and I mean very popular) these hosts will meet most blogging newbies requirements.
Today with the abundance of free scripts and designs you can easily become a webmaster with no or very little html knowledge.
Transferring from one web host to another can be quite time consuming. You need to download and upload all files from your old host to your new host. If you have dynamic content you need to import and export all your data. Nowadays some hosting firms offer to make the transfer for you if you sign up with them. Some of the hosts I reviewed are offering to make the transfer for their new customers.
HostICan will buy out your previous contract up to $40 and do the site transfer for you.
Hostgator also offers a free website transfer service.
Lunarpages does not offer to do the transfer for you but they add on up to six months of your previous hosting contract for free!! In addition they offer a 90 days money back guarantee
I guess this allows an IP to connect through your web host´s firewall.
In CPanel go to
Update Billing Info >
Update Now >
Customer Preferences >
MySQL Whitelisted IPs
Enter the IP
Done
Hostgator is one of the fastest growing hosting companies in the industry. They recently announced that they are renting an additional 1700 in their datacenters in Dallas and Houston. You can read more about their data centers in my hostgator review. In the future you can expect to see bandwidth and storage upgrade announcements from Hostgator.
Companies often think of extra ways of assisting their customers and offering services that are useful to them in order to excel. Lunarpages‘ core competence is the running of a successful web hosting business and one of the biggest threats to them and their customers are hacking attack. Popular Php scripts are one of the biggest liabilities in a shared hosting environment as they frequently have many security holes and phpbb for instance is notorious for vulnerabilities.
The only time I ever got hacked in 5 years was through a phpbb security loophole of the standard installation! Lunarpages frequently scans the most popular free scripts for security leaks and warns it´s customers and points them to the necessary updates. The policy of disabling sites who don´t execute the necessary update may seem a bit rigid at first but it ensures the smooth running and safety of all servers at Lunarpages.
Read my Lunarpages review for more details on this host.
404 Page not Found errors will not only annoy your visitors but if you have too many they can also hurt your rankings in the search engines. With AWStats you can see where a 404 error occurs and eliminate it. If you build a custom 404 error page you can inform visitors that they page that they wanted to access doesn´t exist and give them an opportunity to return to the home page.
You need access to the .htaccess file:
In there put this line: ErrorDocument 404 /error.html
You can give this any name you like but really 404.html, notfound.html, error.html would make most sense to indicate through the url what this page is about.
Next create your error.html page with a link, your logo etc. just be creative and you will have a good chance of keeping some of those visitors on your site. If you have a search box you could include that as well and maybe a link to your sitemap. There are usually two philosophies to designing a custom 404 page. One option would be to keep the usual design and just put a 404 message in the middle column for instance. Another would be to have a different page style where you just keep your logo, a centered error message and a link back to the homepage.
Make sure that all links that you use are absolute. I.e. use something like http://www.yoursite.com/articles/index.html instead of just /articles/index.html . As your 404s may sometimes be caused from within the CGI bin or other locations relative urls spell trouble. And you don´t want to provoke 404s from within your 404 page, now do you 
?
All you need to do now is to upload your .htaccess file and your error.html .
The following affordable web hosts provide a .htaccess file which you will need to setup your custom 404 error page:
Bluehost – read about bluehost´s recent upgrade
Hostgator
HostIcan
Hostmonster -read my post “bluehost hostmonster same company” they also upgraded their plan
IPowerweb
Lunarpages
Powweb
Startlogic
More detailed reviews can be found in my cheap web hosting review articles.
The prefix www in web hyperlinks is becoming obsolete but a lot of people still like using it. So in order to avoid a 404 when someone tries to type in a http://yourhomepage.com you will need to setup a redirection to http://www.yourhomepage.com in your .htaccess file. This is the code you will need to enter:
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^yourhomepage.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourhomepage.com/$1 [r=301,nc]
This also ensures that you don´t lose page rank through links pointing to http://yourhomepage.com instead of http://www.yourhomepage.com
Bluehost and Hostmonster are one and the same company as you can tell by their shared mailing address:
1215 N. Research Way, #Q3500
Orem, UT 84097
Both are run by the founder Matt Heaton but Bluehost is a lot bigger than Hostmonster. There has been some discussion on the Bluehost forum regarding the differences between the two. Hostmonster´s plan is about $1 cheaper a month but has pretty much the same features. Hostmonster has unlimited FTP accounts and twice the number of PostgreSQL databases and MySQL databases. In line with Bluehost´s upgrade Hostmonster now also has 300 GB storage and 3000 GB bandwidth. So what´s the difference between the two? Rumour on the Bluehost forum has it that Bluehost runs on better servers and equipment than Hostmonster. That is why some say that Bluehost hosts more sites per server than Hostmonster.
Subsequently here´s a quick overview of the features:
Bluehost:
Linux plan, 300GB storage, 3000 GB transfer, unlimited domains, 1000 FTP accounts, 50 MySQL databases, 50 Postgre SQL databases and more. For all the features and a more in depth description please take a look at my Bluehost review.
Hostmonster:
Linux plan, 300GB storage, 3000 GB transfer, unlimited domains, unlimited FTP accounts, 100 MySQL databases, 100 Postgre SQL databases and more. For all the features and a more in depth description please take a look at my Hostmonster review.
At the end of the day these two are both great hosts so it really is your call whether you go for the cheaper price at Hostmonster or believe the rumour about the better equipment at Bluehost. In any case you´ll end up with an excellent cheap hosting provider.
I can verify that this works for both Bluehost and Hostgator. Excluding your own IP is a necessary step if you don´t want to distort your statistics. Moreover if you use wordpress I found that the different post and admin urls can seriously clutter the AWStats visited pages section which is one of the most important ones in my opinion.
To exclude your url in AWStats locate /tmp/awstats/ and edit the awstats.yoursite.com.conf . In the SkipHosts=”" parameter enter the hosts’ IPs you want to exclude. Finally, chmod 444 awstats.yoursite.com.conf . In Filezilla you can chmod files by right clicking them and going to the file permissions menu. If you´re in doubt you can also chmod your files from within the CPanel files menu.
If you have a dynamic IP you can also use regular expressions to exclude your IP in the SkipHosts=”" parameter. To do this you would have to exclude the first three octets of your IP like this SkipHosts=”REGEX[^123\.123\.123\.]”
This method works at Bluehost and Hostgator and should be very similar at other CPanel hosts that utilize AWstats.
Bluehost recently upgraded its already pretty impressive bandwidth and storage allowances. Storage increased by 50% from 200GB to 300 GB and monthly bandwidth also went up by 50% from 2000GB to 3000GB. What´s more you can now also host unlimited domains on one account!
Read my bluehost review here!