A week ago Ubuntu Mini Remix announced their new release of Ubuntu 10.10 livecd.  That’s the fourth release of Ubuntu with minimal software set delivered by UMR, who seem to think different of this operating system. Those who consider Ubuntu to be an OS-in-a-box will be surprised by simplicity of its minimized installation medium. But will they actually like it?

We would have never intended to discuss that if we hadn’t installed an Ubuntu-based VPS recently. We at Sitevalley.com do not receive such orders frequently – installing Ubuntu on the server requires many tweaks and disables the use of automating control panels, such as DirectAdmin or cPanel, which means more manual technical work for the customer. Generally, Ubuntu is not actually a true server distro – this OS is known as a perfect desktop solution – however, if the user is good at a certain OS specifically, it’s reasonable to let them work with it…

This very question of reasonability has actually fired up a discussion on whether Ubuntu Mini is going to be in demand. The ideas below are summary of this discussion that we are going to share with you.

The Idea of UMR

If you take a look at the current Ubuntu community and the way they work – you will see that the “OS-in-a-box” idea was developed into generation of multiple releases with a wide range of tweaks and customizations that are called derivatives. Apart from releases for servers and desktops (as well as different desktop managers) Ubuntu now offers specially optimized versions for Cloud computing, netbooks, Christians and Muslims and different activities (e.g. for multimedia creation or education). There are many more derivatives, you can find here, but even those above make think that Ubuntu has covered all possible spheres of users’ origin (there are many fully localized versions), interests and activities. This in turn emerges a question – what else may one need?

No matter what may be needed, there’s another question to rise – do you really need all those preinstalled applications? And here appears UMR as an argument for a negative response. So, if it’s a “No” and you don’t need any of those preinstalled solutions – you are ready to get acquainted with Ubuntu Mini. But what is this OS actually like?

Before UMR many people who needed simplified distros used to refer to more experienced Ubuntu users and enthusiasts who created LiveCDs for them. Some even used server installation media or burned their own installation CDs. Releases, provided by Ubuntu Mini are close to Ubuntu Desktop, they are, however not overstuffed with software and applications one may not need and thus are more flexible and customizable. It is obvious that the main idea of the UMR project is simplicity – this derivative is for everyone who likes Ubuntu and wants to run it their way and with no pain in their necks.

Who Is Going to Use UMR

Such releases as Ubnutu Mini are usually called geeky. We are not sure you’ll find many Ubuntu users, who’d like to switch to something self-compiled that may corrupt due to incompatibilities or after an unsuccessful update or something like that. A Mini may however interest those, who deal with old or peculiar hardware or need to run some specific software or a fixed set of applications. UMR product can also be used for creation of a custom Ubuntu build – you may boot a Mini, install all the needed software and customize it and then burn it back to another CD/DVD to keep it near at hand – this solution works perfect if you need to setup a specifically configured OS on several machines or simply want to avoid headaches, brought by OS reinstallation.

This flexibility is something to pay attention to and the fact that Ubuntu Mini is still Ubuntu may really make UMR very popular. Not many Ubuntu users would like to switch to other distros just to get a flexible customizable OS. Although such distros as Gentoo, Fedora or Debian – a distro, Ubuntu has actually derived from – may be perfectly used for both desktops and servers, Ubuntu still remains the simplest OS.

Conclusion

If you need a Linux distro which is easy to install and operate and which is customizable enough to compile it in the very way you need – you should have a look at Ubuntu Mini. If you find Gentoo or Debian complicated to work with but require the same simplicity of the installation medium – you should give UMR a try. Finally, if you are new to Linux and want to get acquainted with it quickly and with manual efforts for better understanding – go to Ubuntu Mini Remix website and download it.

If you have some interesting facts about Ubuntu to share or want to take part in the discussion of UMR usability, feel free to join us on Facebook.

You must remember us publishing a comparative review on WHMCS and WHMAP billing software. Well, if you do, you might be interested in reading this one, since today we are going to check out a few panels more. The very idea of this review is to compare several different billing scripts that may be helpful while starting your own hosting business. No matter whether you are going to resell hosting or run an independent hosting company, you will definitely need a billing system to manage your customers. Our former review was aimed at highlighting the main advantages of the two most popular scripts – WHM Auto Pilot and WHM Complete Solution – for resellers, since those are commonly used by many hosts and provided to their partners. This review is going to reveal the peculiarities of several more billing panels, which are quite competitive but less popular.

OVERVIEW

While picking three other panels to compare with WHMCS and WHMAP we first of all kept rating, usability and functionality in mind. Thus, we are going to compare WHMAP, WHMCS, Parallels Plesk Billing, AWBS (Advanced Webhosting Billing System) and ClientExec. Before we start providing the details and revealing peculiarities, let us deliver some general information on each script.

WHM AutoPilot (WHMAP) was initially designed for use with cPanel/WHM hosting control panel. Being cPanel hosting oriented, this billing software became very popular since it was easy to comprehend and integrate and supported entire cPanel functionality. Though WHMAP has never been developed to support multiple control panels, currently it can also be integrated into Parallels Plesk Control Panel, which popularity gained a significant increase lately.

WHMAP Admin/Client View

WHM Complete Solution (WHMCS) – unlike WHMAP, this billing software covers a wide range of features, allowing its user to use one system for many purposes. Founded in 2005 (3 years later after WHMAP was introduced) and designed for cPanel/WHM integration, WHMCS project continued developing and by now supports several control panels and domain registrars to handle all hosting related operations.

WHMCS Admin/Client View

Parallels Plesk Billing is a relatively new product that burst into software market after Parallels, Inc. acquired ModernGigabyte, LLC in January 2008. The initial product was called ModernBill and was rather popular. Rebranding of ModernBill did not just touch the name and the outlook of this billing script – Parallels’ developers got it completely optimized and enriched the functionality of the former ModernBill system.

Parallels Plesk Billing Admin/Client View

Advanced Webhosting Billing System (AWBS) has been officially released in April, 2005. Some hosting gurus may remember it under the name of DRAMS, which first release was let out in January, 2004 and became a nice competitive alternative to ModernBill, launched in late 2001.

AWBS Admin/Client View

ClientExec is a billing system introduced in 2003. This one was developed with maximum convenience in mind, since ClientExec project began as a hosting company in 1996 and its founders knew for sure, what hosts and their clients want. Currently this software offers one of the most feature rich systems for hosting business management.

ClientExec Admin/Client View

BILLING SYSTEMS COMPARISON

Before we start comparing those five scripts, it is fair enough to mention, that the range of supported features makes each billing system unique and hard to evaluate equally. Additionally, the choice of a billing system depends on the user’s needs and hosting server configuration. Thus, we are going to provide such details as supported options and features, integration options, installation requirements and license details. This review is absolutely independent so the main goal we set is to reveal as many peculiarities of each system as possible to let our readers choose on their own. Well, here we go.

FEATURES

In order not to waste time on listing default “pure billing” features each system has, let us name them upfront. Those are:

• Automated account creation;
• Account status management (upgrades, suspension/unsuspension);
• Admin/client-end record management (including new orders issuing/placement)
• System notifications delivery;
• Support of multiple orders under one record;
• Multiple billing cycles support;
• Packages and discounts management;
• Fraud screening tools;
• Website and control panel redirection.

When you study features offered by WHMAP, you can see that it is entirely tuned-up for hosting services provision. Apart from the general functionality AutoPilot offers:

• Google E-commerce Tracking;
• Gateway throttling;
• “Free” domain option.

Those options show that the client management gets totally simplified for the hosting business owner. Provision of “free” products (not only domains), for instance, has always been a pain in the neck for administrators, since it required a creation of “zero” invoice which implied needless updates – you had to clear a $0.00 invoice each time it is supposed to become due for renewal. WHMAP team got this resolved.

WHMCS developers did really aim at creation of a complete solution, which was supposed to cover not only the billing aspect, but also the entire client management side. Well, they succeeded:

• “Free” product option;
• Integrated ticket system;
• Knowledgebase with downloadable content;
• Announcements;
• System and support messages view;
• Selective notification tool.

Omitting the first option, all the other ones make WHMCS a rocking out competitor that may draw some AutoPilot users away. Those, who are keen on complete automation and rational information use, may find WHMCS way more convenient for their business. The system does not only allow to send announcements, but also publish them on the website as news. All notifications are tracked, so you can always check what system and ticket messages were sent to your client. Additionally, one of the numerous loadable addons, this script has allows to deliver newsletters – this may come in handy for a socially active user-friendly host.

Parallels Plesk Billing script is something you have to get acquainted with first. It looks like the simplest billing system at first glance and their website does not even say it supports some outstanding features, but when you get a closer look… The first and the most fair remark is that you need to be a Parallels control panel user to feel all the advantages of that billing system. Another remark is about the business, you are going to run – the thing is that Plesk product can be used for ISP billing, too. Therefore, if you are an associate of your local ISP and you wish to use your platforms for web hosting – you can handle all your clients – both the Internet users and website owners using one powerful script.

AWBS feature list may look similar to the one of WHMCS:

• “Free” products;
• Integrated helpdesk and knowledgebase;
• Contact form and contact form submission management.

However, there are some other features, this billing system may be proud of:

• Full tax support (VAT and tax inclusive pricing);
• SEO package sales.

The two latter options are very interesting. Many hosting services used to include different addons to their packages – free domains and SSL certificates have always been the most popular products that come along with the hosting package. Now there is one more “free” product – SEO package. It may include Google Adwords credits or vouchers and is often offered with business hosting and e-commerce hosting packages.

ClientExec billing system is said to be one of the most rigid WHMCS competitors. Its developers did all their best to make ClientExec look an “even more complete” solution. Apart from the built-in ticket system, it has an optimized intranet solution. Let’s take a closer look at what they offer:

• partial payments;
• taxes (VAT included);
• “powerful helpdesk” (routing rules, escalation and knowledgebase);
• email parser (creation of tickets from email messages);
• representatives’ status and file exchange;
• staff-to-staff chat, file exchange.

The two last but not least features is what we meant by intranet solution. If your team members are located in different offices or even countries, such online tool with a common database is going to make communication and team management a lot easier. The other features seem to allow ClientExec users carry out billing and customer support tasks in a better way, than any other billing software with integrated helpdesk.

INTEGRATION OPTIONS

While reviewing the features, offered by those five billing systems, we talked about helpdesk and other modules integration much. The main feature of such software, however, is its own ability to be integrated into a bigger system. Let us see, which hosting control panels, domain registrars and payment gateways those scripts support.

CONTROL PANELS

WHMAP – Made with native cPanel/WHM support in mind, AutoPilot developers made only one extension step – added Plesk hosting panel integration option. Although this software is developer-friendly and WHMAP support team appreciates 3rd party modules, control panels are their weak point.

WHMCS also started as a cPanel-oriented system. By now it supports numerous control panels. Those are:

cPanel/WHM

DirectAdmin

Plesk

Helm (v.3 and v.4)

Ensim

InterWorx

DotNetPanel

Lxadmin

Virtualmin Pro

Additionally, you can get a loadable module for any control panel you wish.

Parallels Plesk Billing has a wider range of supported control panels, since it’s a modular product. Thus, the question of compatibility is resolved via installation of a needed module:

cPanel/WHM

DirectAdmin

Virtuozzo

Mod-ModernBill

HSphere

Ensim (+EnsimUnify)

Plesk (both for Linux and Windows)

Plesk Expand

FreeRadius

InterWorx

Cortex

Hostopia

eNom (eNomHost and eNom Exchange)

Helm

AWBS – another modular product – has probably the biggest number of supported panels. Apart from those below, you can have a module for any other control panel, since AWBS comes with a DevKit – a tool for 3rd party modules developers.

Cast Control

Centovacast

Cloudmin

CPanel/WHM (version 11+)

DirectAdmin

DotNetPanel 2.x

Enom’s Hosting

Ensim (Linux only)

Plesk (Windows and Linux)

Helm Windows (v3.2.3+)

Hostopia

HurricaneHost

Hypervm

InterWorx (v1.8.1+)

ISP Manager

Lxadmin (Kloxo)

Solus VM

TCAdmin

Teamspeak (v2.x and v3.x)

VDS Manager

Virtualmin Pro Edition

WhmPHPNew!

WHMSonic

Zervex ServerCP

As far as you can see, AWBS supports not only hosting control panels, but virtual and dedicated server management panels as well.

ClientExec. This billing system also supports many panels and also owing to plug-in integration. So far there are the following plug-ins available:

cPanel/WHM

Plesk

DirectAdmin

TCAdmin

HyperVM

Teamspeak (+Teamspeak 3)

License Defender

ISPManager

InterWorx-CP

Teamspeak

WHMSonic

DOMAIN REGISTRARS

WHMAP. Another thing this system is poor in is support of domain registrars. Enom and OpenSRS are the only ones that are supported by default. All the others registrars’ API keys can be submitted for consideration to AutoPilot support. Otherwise, you can create another task for your developer, but regardless of the steps you make – all of them take much time.

WHMCS is the one that simply dominates the niche with 21 registrars supported:

Enom

ResellerClub/DirectI

Nominet

OpenSRS

ResellOne

OnlineNIC

PlanetDomain

DistributeIT

TPPInternet

RegisterFly

StarGate

NameCheap

NetEarthOne

12Register

Register.com

IPMirror

DotDNS

WebNIC

InternetBS

NetRegistry

Bizcn

Parallels Plesk Billing does not have any registrars modules preinstalled. There is, however, a list of modules available for manual installation:

Distributeit

Dotster

Enom

Eurodns

Internetx

Ispproxy

Namecheap

Nominet

Opensrs

Registercom

ResellOne

AWBS also has a nice feature list:

Dot TK DomainShare

Enom.com

Hexonet/Ispapi

Internet.bs

IRRP.Net/ispproxy.com

NetEarth One

Nokta TK

Nominet EPP

Onlinenic

OpenSRS.net

Reg.ru

RegisterFly.com

Resellerclub (LogicBox systems)

Resell One

Generic Module

And again, the DevKit is provided for additional modules creation.

ClientExec may seem to be not that rich in this option, but is definitely supporting a wide range of the most popular registrars:

Directi Enom

OpenSRS

PlanetDomain

ResellOne

OnlineNIC

Realtime Register

PAYMENT GATEWAYS

One of the vital usability aspects for a billing system is gateway support. And that’s where the WHMAP product does not fall behind:

Authorize.NET

LinkPoint.com

USAePay

BluePay

CyberSource

PayLane

PSiGate

CDGCommerce

PayPal

2Checkout INS

Google Checkout

BluePay

CyberSource

eWay

eGold

2Checkout Standard

StormPay

NoChex

CyberSource

WHMCS dominates the niche also with 60 gateways:

PayPal

2Checkout

Google Checkout

Quantum Gateway Vault

Authorize.net

BluePay

ProtX/SagePay

WorldPay FuturePay/Invisible

Payflow Pro

Website Payments Pro

AlertPay

AsiaPay

Bank Transfer

BidPay

Boleto

Camtech

CashU

CCAvenue

Chronopay

E-Gold

E-path

eProcessingNetwork

eWay

F2B

Fasthosts

Finans Bank

Garanti Bank

Gate2Shop

iDeal

InternetSecure

IP Pay

Liberty Reserve

LinkPoint

Mail In Payment

Merchant Partners

Moneris

Moneybookers

Navigate

Netbilling

NoChex

NTPNow

Offline Credit Card

OpenECHO

Optimal Payments

Pagseguro

PayJunction

Paymate AU/NZ

Payment Express

Paymex

Pay Offline

Payson

PlanetAuthorize

SagePay VSPForm

PSiGate

SecPay

SecurePay

StormPay

Trust Commerce

USAePay

WorldPay

Parallels Plesk Billing offers a not that wide range of gateways, but many of them are alternate:

LinkPoint

Velocity Pay

InternetSecure

WorldPay

Quantum

BluePay

eWay

Authorize.net

Moneris

PayFlowPro

PayPal

PSIGate

ProTX

Echo Inc.

SecurePay US

SecurePay

AWBS takes the second place with its 35 gateways (and a DevKit for custom modules, of course):

2Checkout

Alert Pay

Authorizenet (AIM)

Bluepay

BRPay (Pagseguro)

Cajamar

Cardia

CCAvenue

CDGCommerce

Chronopay

Echo

EFT Secure

E-Gold

Eprocessing Network

Eway

Google Checkout

Innovative Gateway

LinkPoint

Firepay

Moneybookers

MultiSafepay

Netbilling

NoChex

Pagamento Digital

Paypal (Paypal Pro & Paypal IPN)

Paypal Payflow Pro

Paysystems

Planetauthorize

ProTX (Sagepay)

PSIGate

Stormpay

Webmoney

Worldpay (+Worldpay Invisible)

Verus

Manual CC Processing

ClientExec offers plug-ins for the most popular gateways. Additionally, they provide four offline plug-ins that may be helpful for remote billing operators. The full list can be seen below:

PayPal & PayPal Pro

Google Checkout

Authorize.Net

BluePay

CCAvenue

ChronoPay

Quantum Gateway

e-gold

Internet Secure

World Pay

StormPay

PsiGate

Protx

eWay

Money Bookers

2Checkout

eProcessingNetwork

LinkPoint

Check (offline plugin)

Money Order (offline plugin)

Bank Transfer (offline plugin)

Credit Card (offline plugin)

INSTALLATION REQUIREMENTS

All five panels are actually similar in their system requirements. Their general requirements are OS Linux (some systems can run on Windows-based servers, too), PHP and MySQL database support. More details on each panel can be found below.

WHMAP

• UNIX / Linux Operation System
• Zend Optimizer v3.x (or higher)
• PHP Version 4.4.x or newer (including PHP v5.1.x)
• cURL with SSL Support
• Mcrypt
• MySQL Version 4.0.22 or higher (including MySQL 5x)

WHMCS

• Windows or Linux OS
• PHP Version 5.x or later
• MySQL Version 4.1.x or later (Strict Mode Disabled)
• Curl Support (with SSL)
• GD Image Library
• Ioncube Loaders

Parallels Plesk Billing

• Windows or Linux OS
• Apache (for Linux and FreeBSD).
• IIS (for Windows), running PHP in CGI/FastCGI mode (ISAPI is not supported)
• PHP 5.1.6 or higher. (curl, gd, mysql, openssl, pcre, pdo, xml, zlib modules required)
• MySQL 4.0.11 or higher.
• Zend Optimizer 3.3.3+ or IonCube Loaders 3.1.32 +

AWBS

• Linux/FreeBSD/Windows2003
• PHP v5.0.x and 5.3.x
• MySQL Database Server v4.x-5.x
• Apache or IIS5/6 Web Server
• Curl + SSL v7.10 or better (php compiled Curl required)
• Ability to setup CRON jobs or scheduled tasks
• Ability to setup password protected directories. (.htaccess)
• Secure site (optional)(no cross domain secure URLs)
• Compiled GD with freetype support needed for human verification system and reports.
• Compiled MB String with Mbregex.

ClientExec

• OS Linux
• MySQL 4.1x and up
• PHP from 5.2 and up
• GD integration with PHP for report graphs support
• ionCube loader or Zend
• mcrypt for credit card transactions using your own cc
• cURL with ssl integration for some control panel plugins and credit card transactions

LICENSE DETAILS

Now, when we are almost done with all features comparison, it’s high time to reveal the details of licensing and pricing. Each billing system, except for Parallels, offers two types of licenses – Lease and Owned ones – Plesk Billing can be only leased. Apart from this, their licenses differ by accounts limit.

WHMAP is the one that has no limits (except for their “Free Version” with limited support and 10 accounts allowed). The pricing for the others is as follows:

• Version 2.x (Leased) – $14.95/mo (unlimited support)
• Version 3.x (Leased) – $19.95/mo (unlimited support)
• Version 3.x (Owned) – $199.95 (one-time; requires semi-annual support renewal for $19.95/mo)
• Promo Version 3.x (Owned) Lifetime – $99.95 (one-time; unlimited lifetime support)

WHMCS are not that generous and apply additional fee for the brandable version of their product:

• Monthly Lease $15.95/mo
• Monthly Lease (No Branding) $18.95/mo
• Owned License $249.95 (one-time)
• Owned License (No Branding) $324.95 (one-time)

Parallels Plesk Billing has a stricter licensing strategy – they neither provide unlimited accounts, nor include support into license price:

• Parallels Plesk Billing for 50 Accounts – $24.95/mo
• Parallels Plesk Billing for 1000 Accounts – $49.99/mo

If purchased along with Plesk control panel with unlimited domains (with initial cost of $70.00/mo), you can get both products for a lower price – $107.99/mo.

AWBS product is offered for a reasonable price; additionally they have a nice discount system:

• AWBS Hosting Edition $169.00 (one-time)
• AWBS Leased License $17.95/mo
• AWBS Additional License $149.00 (one-time; for current AWBS/DRAMS Plus owners)
• AWBS Leased License – Annual Term $203.40/yr

ClientExec licenses come with different support options. Additionally they have a so-called “Refugee Offer” that gives a 25% discount on any license if the user switches from another billing panel. Their initial prices are:

• Leased License $15.95/mo
• Owned License $199.99 (one-time)

Summary

If you want to start your own reseller business, you need to have the client management and billing aspect secured. Thus, you are going to need a billing system that allows you to automate as many processes as possible. On the other hand, you will definitely want this solution to be not costly, especially if you are only starting your hosting business. Thus, depending on your needs, server capabilities (vital, if you are a reseller) and budget, you may choose one of the following options:

WHMAP is the simplest and cheapest solution with minimal functionality; maybe the best option for a reseller.

WHMCS – full-featured system for a reasonable price. Not resource intensive and fitting to almost any type of hosting servers to run it. Supports 3rd party loadable modules.

Parallels Plesk Billing – rich in billing features, but reasonable for use only with Parallels Plesk hosting control panel. The only system it takes over is WHMAP… if you don’t check their pricing.

AWBS – a nice WHMCS alternative available at a lower cost. Allows modules customization.

ClientExec – a feature-rich system with outstanding support and project management options. Another cheaper WHMCS alternative.

We hope you find this article useful and it will help you with making your choice. If you have your own opinion to share or would like to rate those panels in the way, you like – feel free to join the discussion at our Facebook.

Blogging for Promotion. Image Source: flickr.com

Nowadays any serious company aimed at constant growth and concerned with its reputation is being actively promoted in social media. B2C relations and behavior models have changed, so now the companies do not just inform their users – they communicate with them, expecting feedbacks, alternatives, suggestions, etc. Those relations become more and more bilateral; therefore it is very important to work out a social media strategy.

First of all, a company should use social media as a mean of communication with its customers. It is very important, since the more customers share their ideas and suggestions, the better the service will be. Another point is inter-customer communication which is important for community building. Finally, building brand advocates around a company will definitely attract those, who may become customers later.

Social media strategy usually involves constant and active communication with customers within social networks. Twitter and Facebook are the most popular ones. Another means are newsletter delivery and launch of the corporate forum on community building purposes. Additionally, if a company sells some goods, the social media marketers may create a dedicated YouTube channel to release videos with their products commercials, tests and how-to’s, etc.

Today we are going to talk specifically about blogging as a means of social media promotion.

Start your own blog

Start Your Own Blog. Image Source: kimandscotts.wordpress.com

A corporate blog is one of the most powerful communication channels. Such blogs are used in order to create some buzz around the company. Those blogs gather and share information related to business they are doing and serves as a company newsfeed. Corporate blogs may be not very strict and official as we are all human and their authors are trying to tell that, posting some funny articles or releasing reports from the latest party. This works quite well for relationship building. However, the main objective of the corporate blogger is to make the blog interesting and attractive for business people. Interesting ideas are supposed to improve brand loyalty and bring in new customers or partners.

Thus, if your company has its website, you need to have a blog started under it. Share your news and ideas, post your views and receive comments to them – all this will increase the interest in your project. In order to speak and to be heard, and to gain interest of not only your current customers but also of the occasional visitors, you need to get blogging software and install it. The most recommended free blogging software is WordPress, as it has plenty of useful options and can be enhanced with numerous plug-ins. You can get WordPress installation here.

Take Care of the Content

Once you set up your own blog, you need to fill it with content and constantly update it. The thing you need to keep in mind is that the content needs to be of good quality, so it is better to publish a limited number of unique well-written posts, rather than posting low-quality content in bulk. A blog mostly needs to be updated by a social media person; however, the involvement of the entire team of the project would be very useful, as far as different people have expertise in different fields and some knowledge to share. As mentioned above, a blog shouldn’t be too official, so apart from publishing company news and reviews, press-releases and research reports you may also put some fun into it.

Have Your Blog Linked

Get it Linked! Image Source: flickr.com

If you want your blog to bring more traffic and more people, interested in your services or products, you need to obtain external links. Those can bring customers to your website or your Twitter or Facebook corporate account, whatever – but they need to work. Inter-linking – provision of internal links is essential, too. Say, someone finds a certain article from your blog on Google. He or she follows it, but once they finish with reading, they usually don’t browse along the entire blog – no “Home” or “Older Entries” clicks are made, so the page per visit rate stays at “1”. You may improve this situation by linking some of the keywords to other articles on the topic, you have published.

Guest Blogging

Guest Blogging. Image Source: flickr.com

Having a corporate blog helps to forward its visitors to your company site. Of course, you will ask how to get traffic to your blog! Here is the solution – you need to find some blogs, accepting guest posts and which content would be relevant to your service and business you run. Then you can start posting articles there and getting them back-linked to your blog or to your website directly. Those posts help you establishing yourself as an expert in a certain niche and a guest blog owner get quality content to his or her blog for free. Of course, those posts should be quality as well, so it is advisable to get familiarized with post submission conditions and accepted topics at every certain website. If you want your blog to become popular – mark guest blogging as another objective in your social media marketing plan.

Summary

Blogging becomes more and more popular. A well-organized, frequently updated blog with wide targeted audience can become a very powerful social media tool. Whatever your company deals with, you should anyway have something to say – so say it! Be active and self-confident and make the others feel, you are. Share your experience, thoughts, and ideas and see people leaving comments on the matter, discussing them and involving other people into it. This is the way social media marketing works.

WordPress is a perfect blogging script, which has become very popular due to its user-friendliness. Many people, however, do not use it in any other way than for a blog or a newsfeed. We made another research on WP and found out that this software can be used for a number of other purposes. The websites below are built on the WordPress platform and enhanced with customized themes and plugins. This is an independent research, the websites are not strictly classified – we have picked those, which were built using WP in the most unusual way.

Build a Review Site

Let’s say you are interested in cinema, music or videos. You are likely to have your own opinion on all that. And most probably, you are intended to share your views and build a community around it. In this case you might take a look at http://typographica.org/ site owners. They deal with typographic design and make reviews of different fonts and type books. The way the website is built allows everyone to register with the site and gain Author or Contributor privileges for posting.

Build a Personal Website

If you want to have a personal website, but Facebook or Live Journal is not enough for you – build a WordPress-based website to share your ideas, thoughts and latest achievements in a newsfeed way. Such solution would fit those who are connected with art, sports or some social activities. One of the websites to look at is http://www.jefffinley.org – a personal site of a designer and artist, who partially deals with Internet marketing.

Place your Portfolio

If you are a designer or photographer or anyone else, who does their job well and has something to share, you should pick a portfolio to represent your best works. Many people install some gallery script in such cases, but WordPress can cope with this task just as good. If you look at http://lonnroth.info you will understand that a gallery has nothing to do with a well-built portfolio website.

Build a Gallery

When talking about galleries, we can’t neglect the fact that depending on the goal and the way you would like to have your content represented, even an online gallery may be created without using a gallery script. Taking http://cssremix.com as an example we clearly see, that a WordPress-based gallery is ways better, as it allows to lay out more image thumbnails, linked to real websites.

Open an Online Store

If you are running a small online business, a sophisticated and therefore expensive e-commerce software may not be needed for you, at least for now. That is where you can use WordPress to reach your goal. With WordPress enhanced with some of the E-commerce plug-ins you can run a website to sell your goods from. Here is the nice example of such a website: http://www.carmats.com.

Additional information and sources

WordPress community keeps growing. There are more and more plugins, themes and extensions released. Both developers and end users are much interested in making WP a tool, which would become one of the easiest sitebuilders known. The websites reviewed above are not all we found, but they are the ones, which drew our attention most, since we ourselves deal with both WordPress hosting and hosting of E-commerce and Gallery websites. This research lets us understand that a single script, if flavored with enthusiasm can do more, than usually expected. If you are interested in what else WordPress can do, have a look at http://www.webdesignerwall.com/trends/30-untypical-wordpress-sites/ and http://www.ndesign-studio.com/blog/best-wordpress-sites. Additionally, you can always follow updates on official WP site: http://wordpress.org/showcase/.

We hope, you remember us posting an article, where two hosting control panels – cPanel and DirectAdmin were brought face to face. Well, if you do, you may find it interesting to learn the peculiarities of automatic script installers provided by those panels – Fantastico DeLuxe and Installatron.

Nowadays there is no need in downloading the source code of the needed software or web application to have it setup on the server. Compilations, failed installations and post-setup debugging are not needed anymore – everyone uses webhosting script installers now, saving time and becoming able to build their sites off-hand.

Needless to say, a professionally coded powerful script can make any website look way more attractive. Additional options and tools, offered by the scripts, help small business websites grow into big projects, and personal websites – grow into a community with a large number of visitors. It is really hard to believe that all this can be done with just a couple of clicks.

Let us take a closer look at both cPanel Fantastico and Installatron tools, provided with DirectAdmin hosting.

Fantastico DeLuxe

Fantastico installer is a really quick tool. It stores only one version of the needed software – the latest; sets up the database and its user on the fly and is fast about the update or removal of scripts. Choosing a cPanel host, you should keep in mind that Fantastico is an addon, which means that not all hosting companies can provide it along with their packages.

Before we proceed with detailed description and comparison of both tools, please check the categories and scripts that are offered by Fantastico DeLuxe on their official website.

Installatron Applications Installer

If you need a detailed description of what and when is happening on your server, Installatron is definitely the right choice for you. This software reports any step it is going to make and although it takes more time for script installation/removal to be carried out, such option may be useful, especially for newbies.

Installatron scripts can be checked out at their developers’ webpage. Meanwhile we will move on and compare both installers in action.

Fantastico vs Installatron

As you might have already noticed, both tools provide almost same scripts. If categorizing, those scripts may be distinguished as blogs, forums, content management systems (CMS), galleries, and e-commerce tools. Such groups are sorted in both installers to the left with right side left for software features description.

Fantastico General View

Installatron General View

As you can see, Installatron provides more details, than Fantastico – not only does it provide technical information about the product, but also shows related links. This love for details can also be seen in group script listing – this is something Fantastico does not have:

Installatron Group Listing Feature

This, of course, doesn’t grant Installatron an “Epic Win”. Sure, it is convenient for comparison of different tools of the same type, but most users already know exactly what they want to install by the time they start installation.

Let’s say we know what we are going to install and passed all the steps using both installers. Installation with Fantastico is a prompt 3-step action.

1 – You make a click to start new installation:

Step 1 of Script Installation Over Fantastico

2 – You choose the directory for the installation; provide access and administrator’s data.

Step 2 of Script Installation Over Fantastico

3 – You finish the installation. Database and user are setup automatically.

Step 3 of Script Installation Over Fantastico

Final installation message – and you can follow the URL to login to your administrative area right from Fantastico:

Fantastico Installation Summary

Installatron seems to be having more questions to ask you.

Starting Script Installation Over Installatron

Beside choosing the installation directory and providing access data in two different steps, you will need to choose the software version (not a bad idea actually, if your server has some restrictions or outdated software), the database creation way (automatic/manual) and… agree with the license.

Installatron: Choosing Installation Directory

Installatron: Choosing Version, Accepting License, Selecting Database Management Type

Installatron: Providing Access Data

Installatron: Finalizing Script Installation

Once the script is setup, Installatron provides installation summary the same way Fantastico does.

Installatron Installation Summary

You can view existing installation in both tools, but Installatron allows you to make it easier than Fantastico, whose developers moved the needed button to the very bottom.

Installatron Existing Installation View

Fantastico Existing Installation View

To Summarize

If you haven’t chosen your control panel yet, this comparative article might help you to make the right choice. It is obvious, that Fantastico is designed for those, who know what to do and how to do it. Such users use installers just to speed up their work – after that they do everything on their own.

Installatron users may feel more comfortable, as there’s more care taken of them both during software setup and after it – more tips, more support options which is very useful. An experienced user, however, may consider it a time waste, especially if administering dozens of account, which require a separate script to be installed under each addon or subdomain.

To make the long story short we may say that both script installers are going to be a perfect addon to your control panel. If you are an administrator of a multi-account (domain) infrastructure – you should definitely consider Fantastico. If you are planning to run your personal website or a small business project – Installatron is more likely to fit your needs.

If you are sure what you are going to host and already know the platform you would like to host it on, you may have a look at our shared hosting plans at SiteValley.com. We offer 4 specialized packages: Blog Hosting with WordPress preinstalled, Forum Hosting with phpBB at your disposal, Gallery Hosting with Coppermine ready for use and E-commerce Hosting with OsCommerce on a board.

When uploading a personal or a business website via FTP or administering it through server-side software – sitebuilders, scripts, etc. – many people immediately check out the changes on the Web. Those, who are interested not only in the outlook of the web page, but also need some technical details (e.g. page size, page elements source and the time taken for loading), are recommended to tune-up their browsers with a Site Admin Kit from Sitevalley. It is our personal research, ran on the latest version of Mozilla Firefox with useful Firefox add ons, we picked for you.

Why So Slow? Checking Loading Speed With YSlow Firefox Addon

This question is usually asked by the site owners to their webmasters, who in turn ask the same question to their host’s support team. However, it is not always due to a hosting company not taking care of the server load or connectivity, it may also be a local ISP issue or… a resource intensity of the website, which requires more time to get loaded. Such sites usually include blogs and forums with a big number of posts and galleries with pictures. So, if you want to find out which end exactly the slowdown is taking place at, you may want to use the following addon:

YSlow Addon Loading Speed Report

YSlow addon is a small useful tool, which uses Yahoo!’s Smush.it service and is one of the top rated addons. It is installed on the right in the status bar and once being run, traces all the pages you load, providing the page size and telling the time it took to load.

What Is Stuffed There? Discovering Site Objects With AdBlock Plus Addon

The screen shot above shows, that the tested site is rather resource intensive, so no wonder it takes that much time to load. However, who said it cannot be optimized.

AdBlock Plus Addon Launch

For the administrator to do that, he or she will definitely need to know what exactly requires optimization. But do you to take a closer look?

If you are an active Internet surfer, who hates pop-up windows and different adverts, you might already have AdBlock Plus addon installed – AdBlock Plus download is available at the hyperlink above. If you are wondering, how an advert-blocking tool can help with website administration – have a look at the screen shot below:

AdBlock Plus Addon Pane

As far as you can see, a click on “Open blockable items” brings out a pane, where all web page elements are listed and sorted by type. Such way of displaying makes analysis a lot easier, though in fact it’s the same information, available in the Page Source View. After this analysis you understand, that there are too many pictures, for example, so you either remove some of them or compress them – here’s the simplest optimization way.

Have It Debugged With FireBug! How To Use FireBug Addon For Firefox

Optimization is not only about page size cutting. Sometimes the scripts, applied on the web page create much load and cause slowdown due to their misconfiguration. In order to have this resolved, the above mentioned addons are not going to be sufficient. Here is where some more serious means are needed.

Using a FireBug addon for your Mozilla Firefox browser you are getting enabled to not only analyze the page content, but also to debug and edit it. Firebug addon download may require YSlow to be installed for complete functionality. When you access your site, just click on the icon of a bug on the very right of your browser’s status bar and you will get a pane with several tabs:

FireBug Addon Console Tab

The “Console” tab is usually blank. However, in case there are any errors in the code, all of them are traced and displayed. Then there goes “HTML” tab, which allows to see the structure of the site:

FireBug Addon HTML Tab

There are dropdowns available to see the hierarchy. The right-side split provides the detailed code. Another tab gives a Cascade Style Sheet (CSS) layout:

FireBug Addon CSS Tab

“Script” is the next tab. It reveals all the scripts, executed on the website:

FireBug Addon Script Tab

Another useful tab is for Document Object Model (DOM). As you can see, it gives an outlet of all the objects, used on the website:

FireBug Addon DOM Tab

The last but not least tab (not taking into account YSlow, which is also available and which we have already got acquainted with) is “Net”:

FireBug Addon Net Tab

This one gives a full picture of the page loading process. It decomposes the page into minimal object (CSS, images, etc.) and counts their size and time, taken by any of them to get loaded. It really is very important for optimization analysis, as it allows to spot the most problem objects.

Stay alert!

If you are a Virtual or a Dedicated server user or even just a user of simple shared hosting, whose host has a public-available server status checking system, you may need to have another Firefox addon installed – Nagios Checker. After Nagios Checker download you will need to have it adjusted, this will require the details of the server, where Nagios software is installed.

Nagios Addon Minimized

Nagios addon gathers the information on service alerts from the Nagios server and displays them in the status bar:

In case of alerts it starts blinking with yellow or red (depending on the threat) and when you highlight it with the mouse it gives a full sheet:

Nagios Addon Alert Prompt

A click on the warning will bring you to the full Nagios web interface.

Time to Reload.

Let’s say you have finally optimized your website. You save the changes, reload the page and then see something is missing. You make another change, save it, reload the page again… this may last too long to bear.

Perhaps now, having installed a ReloadEvery addon you will save more time. After ReloadEvery addon download and installation it will be available on a right mouse button click:

Enabling ReloadEvery Addon

This Firefox addon will let you set the needed reload time interval and apply it to the needed tab or all tabs. In order avoid Firefox overload, reload settings are not saved and should be applied any time you launch your browser.

Summing up

The addons above are supposed to help you a lot with administration of your web site. Those tools are easy to install and rather user friendly. Being well developed, they do not overload the browser and their design does not obscure the working area. We picked this Top 5 using our own administrative experience and experience of our customers, whom some of those tools were suggested. In case you know another useful addon, which might be helpful for site administrators, feel free to share your ideas.

Website management is mostly connected with content update. If a site was not made through a built-in site builder or by means of some script – the upload of updated content must be performed manually. Of course, control panels have file managers, which let a user upload/download the content through it. However, the speed is significantly lower; the interruptions of transfer are more likely to occur and actions on multiple files and folders are not always easy to carry out. What makes a really good alternative to data transfer over web (http transfer) is the use of FTP.

What is FTP

FTP (File Transfer Protocol) – is a network protocol used for copying data over the Internet. File transfer has a client-server architecture, where the server is a remote machine with FTP-server installed and available on its default port (21). In order to check the availability of FTP at your host, you may use the following command:

telnet %hostname% 21

The hostname may be either your domain name, or the name of your hosting server or its IP. Once you run the command, you will get a response of this kind:

220———- Welcome to Pure-FTPd [TLS] ———-
220-You are user number 2 of 50 allowed.
220-Local time is now 02:35. Server port: 21.
220-This is a private system – No anonymous login
220 You will be disconnected after 15 minutes of inactivity.

This tells you about the name of the FTP server installed and its settings – connection and timeout limits, authentication type. Since anonymous logins are not usually allowed, password authentication should be passed. Credentials for FTP-access are either same as for control panel or those, set during creation of a separate FTP-account under control panel. So, in order to connect to the server via FTP you should have a hostname, a port, a username, a password… and an FTP-client.

How FTP-clients Work

FTP-client is user-end software with interface, similar to the one of a file manager. This interface allows connecting to the server and operating with files with the help of mouse clicks, rather than shell commands. The transfer process is on-screen, so you can trace all the changes. Although the way FTP-clients work is same for all of them, each client has its own peculiarities, which may become decisive when considering the choice of FTP software.

Probably the most popular client in our review is FileZilla – an open source product, easily available for download. Beside this (rather important) benefit, FileZilla client is famous for its multi-platform support, as it can be installed on any OS.

Two other “Filezilla alternatives” – FlashFXP and SmartFTP – can be run on Windows only. Those clients are licensed, but both are available for a 30-days trial period, in full version. Although it may sound unfair to compare open source software to commercial one, this article is to help you choose exactly what you need, and to find out if a product is worth being purchased, before you actually add it to your shopping cart.

General view

When you launch FileZilla or FlashFXP, you see a standard file-manager-like window, vertically divided into two boxes – for a local and remote site. This makes file transfer process a lot easier, as you may simply drag and drop files from one box to another.

FileZilla General View

FlashFXP General View

Both clients have a quick connect option. But if FlashFXP requests login details through a separate box, FileZilla is really quick at it.

FlashFXP QuickConnect Window

First run of SmartFTP looks a bit different. When you start it for the first time, you are greeted with a welcome screen, which offers you options of further actions. A box below allows to set transfer queues, trace upload/download speed and manage multiple files upload.

First Run Greeting of SmartFTP Client

If you then open a local browser, you will be surprised to see a new tab opened. This multiple tab feature of SmartFTP is perfect for those, who have several accounts on the same or different servers to manage. Resellers and freelancing web-designers know what it is like, so no wonder many of them choose SmartFTP.

Opening Local Site in SmartFTP Client

So, you now have a local browser open. Let’s open a remote one, to get a full picture.

Establishing FTP Connection in SmartFTP Client

Once you provide all the needed login credentials, another separated tab will appear – now you have the same split screen as in other clients.

Local and Remote Sites Split Screen in SmartFTP Client

Additional Settings and Peculiarities: FileZilla vs FlashFXP and SmartFTP

When it comes to FTP transfers, all software looks much alike. Most FTP-clients, however, are not limited to that option. FlashFXP, for instance, also allows to carry out server-to-server transfers via FXP (File eXchange Protocol). Such transfers are direct and therefore faster, as the traffic is not processed through your local machine.

Server-to-server Transfer via FlashFXP

SmartFTP copes with it as well.

Server-to-server Transfer via SmartFTP

Though FileZilla can hardly boast of having this feature, all the other options, such as Filezilla SFTP (Secure FTP over SSH) access, Active/Passive mode switching, connection and upload/download speed limitation are available in it as well as in any other client reviewed there.

Establishing SFTP Connection via FileZilla

FileZilla Settings

FileZilla settings have a detailed multi-branch structure. Settings of SmartFTP and FlashFXP look less complicated. Besides, FlashFXP does not require any special settings for SFTP – you’ll just need to set SSH port in the same quick connect window – the protocol is recognized automatically.

Establishing SFTP Connection via SmartFTP

SmartFTP Settings

FlashFXP Settings

Summing the things up

It may be not that easy to choose an FTP-client to manage a website with. However, there are always options left, as you are able to remove current software and install the new one. We hope this article has clarified many things about FTP-clients and especially the use of each of them. FileZilla, for instance, would perfectly fit those, who need simple open source solution or have something different from Microsoft Windows installed on their local machines. FlashFXP is designed for those, who need kind of a more professional solution at a reasonable price. SmartFTP is for real computer geeks and hosting gurus; though it’s the costliest software – it’s really worth it.

Starting Your Own Reseller Business

Hosting reselling is one of the popular ways of running business on the Internet. One does not need to have many administration skills to run it, as the majority of serious tasks can be carried out with several clicks in the control panel. If a reseller sings up for a shared reseller hosting package, there is almost nothing for him to do, but creating his own packages and assigning newly setup resold accounts to them, as all the care of the server is taken by the host’s technical team. If a reseller is more seriously intended and would like to provide hosting for other resellers or hosts over a hundred of accounts or simply feels inconvenient due to the restrictions, set by his hosting provider, a VPS is a recommended platform to use. Although a Virtual Private Server may require more time and experience for administration, use of the control panel means should make it easier. If you are only starting your reselling business, it is essential to make a right choice of the hosting platform.

Billing Software Guarantees Efficient Management

No matter whether it is a simple shared reseller account or a VPS, whether you host ten or hundred accounts – you are to manage your business efficiently. User creation, invoice issuing, notification delivery and performance of other routine tasks should be automated. Otherwise you will spend more time on a drill, than on some creative work, like promotion of your project or development of your business strategy. When talking about automation we actually mean use of a billing software. Such software is installed on the server and gets bound with the server control panel.

Billing Integration Scheme

All actions performed through the billing system take immediate effect on the server. This occurs due to the execution of control panel scripts for account creation, suspension, etc, which are run from the software end.

Let us have a closer look at how it works. Your new client signs up for your services online. All those steps he or she goes through are connected with the database of your billing software, which in turn is connected with your control panel. As the steps are passed, the package is defined and the corresponding invoice is created. The last step is a redirection to the payment gateway to compete the transaction. If the payment is processed successfully, the invoice gets automatically cleared and the account is setup on the server. After that a so-called “Welcome Email” with all account details is sent to the new user. The database, both the user and the administrator share, contains all the account and client’s billing information, which can be modified from both ends. Access to the database is granted through the web-interface – admin and client area.

Bringing WHMAP and WHMCS face to face

Currently there are two most popular billing systems, widely used by resellers: WHM AutoPilot (WHMAP) and WHM Complete Solution (WHMCS). The product names derive from WHM – Web Host Manager – administrative interface of cPanel control panel. While WHMAP is compatible with cPanel only (and Plesk, if you choose the V3 release), WHMCS offers a wider range of supported control panels, namely: cPanel/WHM, DirectAdmin, Plesk, LXAdmin and several more.

WHMAP gained its popularity largely to the widespread use of cPanel. Although it has never been affiliated with cPanel/WHM, the hosting companies, which provide cPanel reseller hosting, usually offer free WHMAP licenses to their clients. AutoPilot product was released in 2002 and keeps being developed.

WHM Complete Solution is a more recent piece of billing software. It was started in 2005 as a narrowly specialized cPanel-oriented project. WHMCS developers soon felt a demand of other webhosts, which provided different control panels and made their software modular.

Regardless of the control panel, both systems get perfectly integrated to the website and completely meet users’ requirements.

Let us compare them to get a full picture of what they are like.

Admin View

When you log in as an administrator, you are greeted with recent news and quick summary on invoice and order activity.

3 Basic Tabs of WHMAP Dashboard

WHMCS Dashboard

From this quick view, you may find WHMCS more convenient, as you do not need to hop around the tabs. The search option of WHMAP, however, seems to be way more efficient, as it allows using multi-filtering.

The sidebar of WHMCS looks more informative, than the one of WHMAP, as it only contains the list of additional modules used, but when you access other tabs (i.e. Products, Clients, Billing, etc.) you will find a sidebar of AutoPilot rather useful.

WHMAP Sidebar

Tabs in WHMCS offer more options and are actually more convenient to use, as before you click any, you may get a dropdown list of actions available on the page you are going to enter:

WHMCS Menus

As you might have noticed, WHM Complete Solution has a built-in support system. On the one hand, this lets you manage all accounts and provide support for the owners more effectively, as all the client information is always by your side. On the other hand, such a combo makes a question of security more critical. If WHMAP, for instance, performs only outgoing email delivery, WHMCS may become a target of hackers’ attack through an unauthorized request, sent from a mailbox which is present in the user database or via an incoming email with some attachment, which may contain password stealing malicious code or whatsoever.

Client View

From the client’s side both billing systems do not differ much. Both allow to:

• change personal and billing details;
• view current orders and all correspondent information on them;
• view existing and clear pending invoices;
• check account information and directly access its control panel;
• find out the latest news and check recent announcements;
• submit a new order under the same record.

AutoPilot Client Interface Dashboard

Updating Client Details in AutoPilot

Accessing Control Panel Through AutoPilot

Additionally, WHMCS provides an option to view all the emails – automated system messages and support requests – sent from the company’s domain to the client. Support system is also accessible from there.

WHM Complete Solution Dashboard

Client Details Update in WHMCS

Control Panel Access through WHMCS

Summary

To sum up we may say, that WHM Complete Solution provides more management options, than WHM AutoPilotWHMAP does. The latter, however, is better optimized for work with cPanel-based servers and seems to be more secure. Whatever the conclusions you might have made after reading this article, it is always better to try everything on your own – to browse through the interface, to make a couple of clicks to see how the things work. Both products offer a demo and free trial license: WHMCS for 15 Days.

In case, you are interested in becoming a reseller, we encourage you to check VPS packages at Sitevalley to start your own hosting business.

]]> http://svhostingblog.com/reviews/whmap-and-whmcs-billing-software-comparison/feed/ 6 http://svhostingblog.com/reviews/cpanel-and-directadmin-hosting-control-panels-comparison/ http://svhostingblog.com/reviews/cpanel-and-directadmin-hosting-control-panels-comparison/#comments Fri, 19 Mar 2010 20:04:53 +0000 Smirnovi4 http://svhostingblog.com/?p=533 Tweet

Web hosting control panel is a set of tools and interfaces designated to maintain and monitor a hosting account. On shared and reseller hosting plans such panels are installed and configured by a provider company. Depending on the type of VPS and Dedicated server, control panel software can be either pre-installed or be absent at all. The main advantage of using a control panel is the ability to control your account via a comfortable web based graphical user interface, which, in turn, means that you do not need to possess any knowledge of OS specific console commands to maintain your hosting. Control panels features normally include (but are not limited to):

• Viewing server logs
• Monitoring quotas usage (e.g. disc space, bandwidth, mail accounts, ftp accounts etc.)
• Working with e-mails (creation, modification, termination and checking of e-mail accounts, modification of MX records, autoresponders, forwarders and many more)
• Managing FTP accounts
• Managing domains, addon domains, subdomains and parked domains.
• Managing databases
• Collecting and viewing web statistics (e.g. visitors, pageviews etc.)
• Working with files of the hosting account (using a web based file manager)

A fast and feature rich webhosting control panel can significantly increase both productivity and quality of any online business or project. Webmasters obtain impressive management tools for performing most crucial administrative procedures for every day account operations with the help of it. In absence of an efficient hosting control panel every webmaster and user would need an extensive internet and OS administration training in order to effectively use their hosting accounts. There are many control panels these days (you can find a list of 4 famous ones at http://webhostingrating.com/articles/2009/12/4-most-influential-control-panels/ ), but not all of them are as popular and widely used as cPanel and Direct Admin. This is mostly due to the unique set of features and capabilities included in the latter two. Although cPanel has a Windows platform version as of today, both cPanel and DirectAdmin are normally regarded as Unix OS designated.

Webhosting cPanel software

cPanel is considered to be the most popular control panel. This is the first name that will likely occur when talking about “control panels”. Apart from being very famous, it is also a rather complex piece of software. Webhosting cPanel has conquered such a huge part of today’s panels market that its main advantage appears to be its own popularity. Since there are so many users operating cPanel, the amount of online tutorials, guides, community discussions and solutions to various issues is humongous. Another outstanding point about it is it’s abundance of expandable features. Anything that can be done with hosting is either directly implemented into cPanel already or can be added as addon. On the other hand, the complexity of this panel creates limitations on the minimal system requirements. Low server hardware parameters and lack of appropriate configuration can cause significant slow downs and even restarts of the panel itself.

Direct admin control panel

While cPanel is known to be one of the most sophisticated and feature rich panels, DirectAdmin is known for its extreme user friendliness and simplicity. The well written C/C++ code of DirectAdmin makes it one of the fastest and least resource hungry panels. This panel includes most necessary features sufficient for efficient and comfortable account management. It is thought to have fewer bugs and is regarded more stable than cPanel due to a finer code and shorter list of functions. Direct admin is most often used as a control panel for shared solutions due its lower cost and higher stability.

cPanel vs DirectAdmin

Let’s take a look at regular user interfaces of both panels:

cPanel Control Panel Home Menu

Direct Admin Control Panel Home Menu

From the above screenshots you can see that the amount of information presented in home menu of cPanel is larger than that of a DirectAdmin. A newbie user may get confused by all the unknown buttons and sections, but things are not as complicated in cPanel as it may seem from the first look. All actions are divided into corresponding sections, making searching for menus easy. These menus are:

• Preferences
• Mail
• Files
• Logs
• Security
• Domains
• Databases
• Software/Services
• Advanced

There sections can be collapsed and expanded in order to free up space in your cPanel. One of the inconveniences is a large amount of menus a user has to go through in order to find the button he needs. For faster locating of options there is a handy search bar integrated at the top of left sidebar in cPanel.

Direct Admin power user interface is split into three main sections: “Your account”, “E-mail management” and “Advanced Features”. Most of the basic account management features such as domain setup, FTP management, MySQL management, File Manager and other are located in the “Your Account” section. This eases up the search and implementation of changes for a user. All the e-mail related activities are done in the corresponding “E-Mail Management” section. This is the only place a normal user would have to go to in order to apply changes to his/her email configuration when using Direct admin web host control panel. The more advanced tasks, such as configuring cron jobs, apache handlers or installing applications using a 1-click installer are located in the “Advanced Features” sections.

Lower level menus such as FTP account setup for example look very similar in both control panels:

Lower level menus structure comparison (cPanel and Direct Admin)

Both hosting control panels have PHPMyAdmin for advanced database management, as well as one click installers and online website builders as additional addons.

There are numerous discussions about the speed advantage of DirectAdmin over cPanel (see http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=852355 for example), but it is quite hard to determine just how much faster Direct Admin truly is. This is so because such a conclusion can be drawn only from testing results performed under equal conditions on similar production servers with real clients.

Bottom Line

Overall we can conclude that cPanel features list is larger than that of the Directadmin. Almost any hosting related task can be performed using cPanel’s GUI. On the other hand, some advanced administration actions can be done only via a console in DirectAdmin. cPanel is an older control panel, which, in result, is more widely used and supported by community. This means it’s easier to find free tutorials, recommendations, fixes and free community support for cPanel.

As far as Directadmin is concerned: it is written in a cleaner code due to the fewer features implemented in it. This makes it less demanding for resources and faster in functioning. The GUI of Directadmin is more suitable for beginner and medium level users. Nevertheless, all features crucial for hosting account management are present and can be easily accessed through Directadmin. A distinctive property of this panel is its relatively low price: some Directadmin licenses cost twice less than those of cPanel.

On all shared plans at Sitevalley.com we provide preinstalled and preconfigured DirectAdmin web hosting panel. This ensures significant speed increase as compared with cPanel and impressive reliability for all users on the shared servers. At the same time, we also provide cPanel webhosting control panel on our VPS servers for full control and monitoring of your account with us. We also offer DirectAdmin control panel on our Dedicated Server plans for free.

In this post I would like to share some of the great WordPress plugins available today free of charge. As you probably know, there are thousands of plugins available today. It can be a tough goal to select the ones that not only perform the required actions, but also are stable and secure. In order to provide you with some kind of a starting point I have conducted a search for essential WordPress plugins. This is a sort of a recommendation review aimed at introducing available capabilities and helping you choose what suits you best.

I tried to introduce some order into the numerous plugins functionality descriptions and came up with the following purpose classification matrix:

Plugin purpose classification matrix

I placed the useful plugins into groups according to this matrix. So let’s take a closer look…

Back-end oriented plugins

Tasks implemented by back-end oriented plugins

These tools are aimed at making management of your WordPress as pleasant and easy as possible (the descriptions were taken from the official plugin pages at wordpress.org). These plugins help you do the boring operations quickly and in bulk quantities.

HeadSpace2 SEO – HeadSpace2 is an all-in-one meta-data manager that allows you to fine-tune the SEO potential of your blog. Visit the HeadSpace page for a video demonstration.

WP-DBManager – Allows you to optimize, repair , backup, restore database, as well as to delete backup database, drop/empty tables and run selected queries. Supports automatic scheduling of backing up and optimizing of database.

TinyMCE Advanced – This plugin adds 15 plugins to TinyMCE (the WordPress WhatYouSeeIsWhatYouGet editor): Advanced HR, Advanced Image, Advanced Link, Context Menu, Emotions (Smilies), Date and Time, IESpell, Layer, Nonbreaking, Print, Search and Replace, Style, Table, Visual Characters and XHTML Extras. All of the above add a huge amount of functionality to the process of writing and editing your posts.

Ozh’ Admin Drop Down Menu – Allows you to view the second level menus by simply hovering over them with a mouse. Rationalizers  and power users will love it : all admin links are available in a neat horizontal CSS driven drop down menu. No need to click on “Manage” then “Pages” to edit pages, you can navigate between any administration pages with just a single action.

Maintenance Mode Plugin – Adds a splash page to your blog which lets visitors know your blog is down for maintenance. Logged in administrators get full access to the blog including the front-end. Visitors will see a message like “Maintenance Mode – SITE is currently undergoing scheduled maintenance. Please try back in 60 minutes. Sorry for the inconvenience.”

Theme Test Drive – This plugin allows you to safely test drive any theme on your blog as administrator, while visitors still use the default one. It happens completely transparent and they will not even notice you run a different theme for yourself. Best part is you can even set the testing theme options (if it has them) in the Admin panel while you are testing the theme.

Front-end oriented plugins

Tasks implemented through plugins for front-end customization

Helping your readers enjoy the stuff they see and do on your blog can eventually not only drive the old visitors back to check out more new posts, but also attract new ones. Makes the communication process useful and comfortable by correctly adjusting the commenting options and eliminating spam from your blog, which can lead to community establishment on your website. The plugins listed below can help you do these things:

WP Greet Box – This plugin lets you show a different greeting message to your new visitors depending on their referrer url. For example, when a Digg user clicks through from Digg, they will see a message reminding them to digg your post if they like it. Another example, when a visitor clicks through from Twitter, they will see a message suggesting them to twit the post and follow you on Twitter. You can also set a default greeting message for new visitors (not matching any referrer URLs) suggesting them to subscribe to your RSS feed. Having these targeted suggestions will help your blog increase exposure, loyal readership, and reader interaction.

WordPress Thread Comment – This Plugin is an enhancement for WordPress’s comment function. It enables users to reply to an existing comment, and the discussion will be displayed threaded or nested. This helps keeping the comments organized and transparent to all participants, taking the communication on your blog to the next level.

Top Commentators Widget – As the name suggests itself, this widget allows you to display your top commentators in the sitebar. Adapted from Show Top Commentators plugin at Personal Financial Advice, this widget is easier to manage via the control form (no need to edit the PHP file); additional options are also available to make it more flexible. Read the FAQ section on how to customize it and take a look at the screen shot to see the control form for customizing the Top Commentators Widget.

Akismet –This one checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not and lets you review the spam it catches under your blog’s “Comments” admin screen.

WP-reCAPTCHA – is an anti-spam method originating from Carnegie Mellon University which uses CAPTCHAs in a genius way. Instead of randomly generating useless characters, which irritate your visitors, and risking the possibility that spammers will eventually write sophisticated spam bots which use OCR libraries to read the characters, reCAPTCHA uses a different approach. While the world is in the process of digitizing books, sometimes certain words cannot be read. reCAPTCHA uses a combination of these words, further distorts them, and then constructs a CAPTCHA image. After a certain percentage of users solve the ‘unknown’ word the same way it is assumed that it is the correct spelling of the word. This helps digitize books, giving users a reason to solve reCAPTCHA forms. Because the industry level scanners and OCR software which are used to digitize the books can’t read the words with which the CAPTCHAs are constructed, it is safe to assume that in-house spam-bot OCR techniques will not be able to bypass the CAPTCHA either.

NextGEN Gallery – This is a fully integrated Image Gallery plugin for WordPress with a Flash slideshow option. This plugin incorporates really good design with simple and easy administration back-end. Using this plugin you can effectively manage multiple photos, galleries and albums.

cbnet Different Posts Per Page – This plugin will allow you to modify the number of posts shown on your homepage, archive (category, date, author, etc.), search pages and feeds. You can even set the order of posts by ascending or descending order. Also, you can set different number of posts for specific category.

Visitors oriented plugins

Tasks implemented through plugins for managing visitors related functions

This section is dedicated to the list of plugins that have to do with the visitors directly. Language tools and Advertising tools are aimed at impacting the customer. Statistics plugin is aimed at counting the number of visitors and perform other web metrics related tasks. So here is the list:

Global Translator – amazing plugin that automatically translates your blog into the following 41 different languages: Italian, Korean, Chinese (Simplified), Portuguese, English, German, French, Spanish, Japanese, Arabic, Russian, Greek, Dutch, Bulgarian, Czech, Croatian, Danish, Finnish, Hindi, Polish, Romanian, Swedish, Norwegian, Catalan, Filipino, Hebrew, Indonesian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Ukrainian, Vietnamese, Albanian, Estonian, Galician,Maltese,Thai,Turkish,Hungarian. The number of available translations will depend on your blog language and the translation engine you choose to use. Of course the quality of such translation will not be perfect, but it will still let many people out there at least get tthe idea of what you are writing about.

Ultimate Google Analytics – Plugin to add Google Analytics JavaScript to each page on your web blog without making any changes to your template. The plugin can also adds tracking to outbound links, downloads from your own site and mailto: links. The plugin is highly configurable. Read trough the list of features below to get a feeling of what this plugin can do. You can enable and disable all features individually, although the default configuration will suffice for 90% of the users.

Advertising Manager – This plugin will manage and rotate your Google Adsense and other ads on your WordPress blog. It automatically recognises many ad networks including Google Adsense, AdBrite, Adify, AdGridWork, Adpinion, Adroll, Chitika, Commission Junction, CrispAds, OpenX, ShoppingAds, Yahoo!PN, and WidgetBucks. Unsupported ad networks can be used as well.

Outside resources oriented plugins

Integration with outside resources

The set of the following tools is intended to provide simple integration with the most popular social networks. The idea is to simplify the procedure of interconnecting the information provided on your twitter, Facebook and WP website. Why manually tell your Twitter followers about your post when this can be done automatically each time you post something new!

Sociable – This is a great promotion tool. Sociable plugin automatically adds links to your favorite social bookmarking sites on your posts, pages and in your RSS feed. You can choose from 99 different social bookmarking sites!

Simple Facebook Connect – Simple Facebook Connect is a series of plugins that let you add any sort of Facebook connect functionality you like to a WordPress blog. This lets you have an integrated site without a lot of coding, and still letting you customize it exactly the way you’d like to. First, you activate and set up the base plugin, which makes your site have basic Facebook Connect functionality. Then, each of the add-on plugins will let you add small pieces of specific Facebook-related functionality, one by one.

Twitter Tools – This is a plugin that creates a complete integration between your WordPress blog and your Twitter account.

General recommendations

I would recommend installing and trying all of these plugins. Even if the plugin doesn’t meet your exact requirements, you can always continue the search. Here are a few plugin related posts you can check out for more plugins:

• http://line25.com/articles/15-essential-wordpress-plugins-for-aspiring-designers
• http://www.quickonlinetips.com/archives/2007/12/best-wordpress-plugins-for-power-blogging/
• http://www.tricksdaddy.com/2009/05/top-11-comment-plugins-to-make-your-wordpress-blog-more-user-friendly.html
• http://www.smashingapps.com/2009/01/17/17-really-useful-wordpress-plugins-that-probably-are-essential.html

Also, please keep in mind that it is highly recommended to install only those plugins that are listed at the WordPress official plugin directory. Plugins coming from elsewhere may pose security and stability threats to your WP. And of course, always remember to backup prior to performing significant changes to your WP site.

If you do not yet have a WordPress hosting account yet, you might want to check out affordable, yet extremely flexible plan at Sitevalley.com. The plan comes with pre-installed WP so that you can start blogging without any installation complications.

Good luck with experimenting.