WordPress 2.2 now available

The newer version of WordPress 2.2 is now available for download here.

Please take the time to get a copy of the software and upgrade your blogs. Thank you!

Add comment May 27th, 2007

Upgrade your blogs to WordPress 2.1.13 & 2.0.10

The new release of WordPress are versions 2.1.13 and 2.0.10.

There are security updates so download your copy now and upgrade your blogs.

Add comment April 4th, 2007

Paid Hosting vs. Free Hosting

Free Hosting

Ten years ago your options for free web hosting were pretty clear cut; there were a few major companies that ran the market and you simply chose between them. Their options and conditions were also pretty clear cut: each one had ads that displayed on your web site, each one severely limited your allocated web space, and each one controlled the content that you were allowed to display on it.

Now, in 2007, the market is much different. Most free web hosting companies still require you to place their ads on your website, though now the ads are far less intrusive and take up much less space. Free hosting companies are now offering much more space (I’ve seen free hosts offering in excess of 100 megabytes of storage) and are giving their users more control over what can be displayed and how it can be accomplished (website, forum, blog, etc.)

There are even companies that will give you free domain names in exchange for advertising space.

Almost all free web space providers also limit your monthly bandwidth (the amount of data that your site can send or receive). If your website becomes popular you may see it taken offline when it exceeds it’s daily or monthly bandwidth allocation. This can be, at the least, incredibly annoying; at the worst it could cost you or your business money (from lost profits are lost sales).

Paid Hosting

Free hosting will always be the same animal: free web space and a sub domain, but you must place their advertisements on your website (and receive none of the profits). For many users it doesn’t really matter. However, if you are trying to create a website for business, profit, or professional use you do not want someone else’s ads on your site, period.

Advertising on the internet has become a big business. In fact, billions of dollars are spent each year on internet marketing. If you have a website that’s hosted by a free provider chances are good that you’ve given them their fair share of that billion dollar pie. Having your own hosting leaves you open to choose what you want to do regarding advertising or monetization.

Essentially, your website can make you money much easier than a site that’s hosted for free can. This is primarily because all of the ads that may appear on your website will be because you chose to put them there. If your website becomes popular this could become a big income- why give that to someone else?

Paid hosting has come down in price quite dramatically. You can now find hosting for $3 a month Host Gator and domain names as low as $8.88. The number of features that that you receive for such a low price are also on the rise.

A few years ago $3 a month might have gotten you 100 megabytes of storage and a few e-mail addresses. Today $3 gets you 500 megabytes or more of storage, hundreds of e-mail addresses, multiple FTP accounts, mySQL databases, and so much more.

Many hosting companies will give you a domain name for free when you purchase a hosting plan through them. This is a low-cost way to create a professional and branded website.

So, which is best?

Well, they’re both good. In fact, as time goes on, they’re only going to get better. However, if you want to have any level of professionalism you are going to want to allocate a few dollars every month to professional and reliable web hosting- the number of benefits are simply too numerous to pass up.

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Add comment April 4th, 2007

2nd World Pyro Olympics 2006 / 2007

plogHost is an official sponsor of the 2nd World Pyro Olympics 2006/2007. We’ve been hosting the website of the Pyro Olympics since its inception and it has been one of the busiest sites during the holidays.

More stories here:

• World Pyro Olympics Photo Gallery
• 2nd World Pyro Olympics 2006 - 2007
• World Pyro Olympics on Travel Blog
• Free World Pyro Olympics 2007 Tickets
• We’re giving away free World Pyro Olympics tickets
• World Pyro Olympics Pictures

Add comment January 4th, 2007

How do I disable Directory Browsing?

To disable directory browsing you can use a htaccess file. Open up a text editor (e.g. Notepad) and put the following line in it:

[code:1]
Options -Indexes

[/code:1]

Now select Save As… from the menu and select ‘All files’ in the Save as type bit before typing a filename. For the filename then type ‘.htaccess’ (without quote marks and remember the dot at the start).

Next simply upload this to your [b]public_html[/b] directory and the browsing of directories on your account will be disabled.

Add comment October 7th, 2006

Settings for your Email Client

The following settings should be used for your email clients. This includes MS Outlook, Outlook Express, Opera, Thunderbird, etc.

1. Default Email Account

Each hosting account has a pop3 email account setup automatically by default on creation. This email account is in the format of username@domain.com and the settings to use in your email program (eg Microsoft Outlook) are as follows:

Incoming mail(POP3): mail.domain.com
Outgoing mail (SMTP): mail.domain.com
Account name: main account username
Password: main account password

In the above settings, your username and password can be found in your welcome email. Also, replace ‘domain.com’ with your actual domain name.

2. Additional Email Accounts

If you have the option of more than one email account with your package you may setup additional email accounts from your cPanel. The settings to use in your email program when accessing these are slightly different and are shown below:

Incoming mail(POP3): mail.domain.com
Outgoing mail (SMTP): mail.domain.com
Account name: email@domain.com
Password: email account password

You should substitute ‘domain.com’ with your actual domain name. ‘email@domain.com’ should be substituted with the full email address you have setup and the password should be the password you entered when setting up the additional account (not your main hosting account password).

Add comment July 23rd, 2006

Quarterly Generator Test

We got this announcement from one of our upstream providers:

———–
As a part of our quarterly facilities testing and inspection, we will be conducting a full-load generator test at our DLLSTX4 datacenter on Wednesday, July 26th, 2006, from 0800hrs to 1100hrs CDT.

This test is necessary in order to continue providing you with our high availability offerings, and will require a cut over of power from the utility grid to the generators for the duration of the test. We do not anticipate any downtime for our customers during this maintenance window; however, this email is to serve as notification of the test being performed. To ensure that our NOC Engineers are able to address any problems that might be encountered (in the highly unlikely event that your server suffers a power interruption), please make sure that you have updated your server passwords in Orbit.

Again, we want to reiterate that we do not anticipate any downtime as a result of this maintenance. Thank you for your cooperation with us during this generator test, and please feel free to let us know if you have any questions.

Add comment July 20th, 2006

Gallery2 Setup Requirements

If you are installing Gallery2 for the first time and you are gettings errors such as:

Error
Error (ERROR_PLATFORM_FAILURE) :

* in modules/core/classes/GalleryTemplate.class at line 270 (gallerycoreapi::error)
* in modules/core/classes/GalleryTemplate.class at line 200 (gallerytemplate::_initcompiledtemplatedir)
* in main.php at line 418 (gallerytemplate::fetch)
* in main.php at line 87
* in main.php at line 80

This error is usually due to wrong folder permissons to your g2data. Submit a support ticket to have this folder CHMODed to 777 to fix the issue.

Add comment July 1st, 2006

Problems with Windows Server

In the last 48 to 72 hours, we’ve been having connectivity and uptime problems with the Windows servers here and we’ve tried hard to find the cause and fix them asap.

Apparently, Plesk released a very insecure version and the installation of this version was compromised before a patch was released and updated it. There were malicious files that were intended to be used as a backdoors has caused a lot of problems with the server and which made services to be restarted, only to fail again and again. This caused the server to repeatedly reboot or crash.

We ahve made changes in the protocols for the Windows so that this incident will not happen again.

Our sincerest apologies.

Add comment June 10th, 2006

WordPress 2.0.3 Released

The latest in the stable 2.0 series, 2.0.3, is now available for download at WordPress.org.

This is a bug fix and security release, and is recommended for all WordPress users. In addition to an issue that was raised on Bugtraq a few days ago, we’ve also backported a number of security enhancements from 2.1 to further enhance and protect your blog.

This release includes:

* Small performance enhancements
* Movable Type / Typepad importer fix
* Enclosure (podcasting) fix
* The aforementioned security enhancements (nonces)

We’d like to encourage everyone to upgrade their blogs to the latest version.

You can download a copy of WordPress here.

Add comment June 10th, 2006