Not that long ago we published an article introducing you into cloud hosting. This relatively new, yet powerful and promising technology becomes more widely used in hosting of small and medium online projects day by day. It means that this kind of hosting services gains users trust and requires less technical skills than one might think. Additionally, it makes prospect customers expect further price reduction, which in turn may increase the sales of this product.

If you want to make sure that all your plans regarding your hosting ground get realized, it is vital to do some pre-sales work targeted at finding out as much technical information as possible. Many things about the technology in use are usually available in extended feature list of packages offered by a hosting provider, at their corporate Wiki or FAQ documents. Today we are going to talk about the primary parameter to look after while choosing your cloud host – platform.

Platform for Cloud Shared Hosting

Mentioning small to medium websites was done on purpose, since the owners of such projects form the main layer of shared hosting customers. Being well optimized many websites, even relatively resource intensive ones, can exist on a shared server not requiring any upgrades and without causing any overloads. But what if the account on the server caused minor loads or simply produced load spikes during unexpected visitor rate increase? Virtually it might stay on the same server, if the latter had more resources… or if the account had a fixed limit on each server resource provided. Of course, this would cause slowdowns and even short downtime for the specific account holder, but considering the fact no other server users were affected, no one would ever suspend such an account.

In fact, we really get a shared hosting platform capable of hosting the same or a larger number of users than on a simple shared server and enhanced with dedicated resource distribution – this sounds interesting. Which technology do they use for such solutions? Since it’s a shared hosting platform, you will hardly find any clustered solutions with a lot of physical servers involved. There comes a question, how to create a simpler yet reliable cloud hosting platform, using one physical machine. Composing this review we decided to compare two solutions of such kind.

Standalone Server with CloudLinux OS

If you give a quick look at what the CloudLinux OS is, you will find out that it’s just a CentOS-based build with special patches. The way those patches work, however, truly confirm the “Cloud” prefix in the name of this OS – namely they utilize a kernel level technology enabling per user resource limitation. As a result, no account can use more than the fixed amount of resources assigned. Reminds of the way OpenVZ VPS servers work, doesn’t it? Yes it does, owing to CloudLinux OS all server users are isolated from each other so anytime some of them go down, all the other user accounts stay stable.

Apart from those user-level limitations CloudLinux supports resource-per-application limits adjustment. Thus, if you have several projects hosted under one account, you can distribute the limits, depending on websites priority. Say you’ve got a serious business website that has to be constantly online and you have a corporate blog that may cause load spikes during promos you run or whatsoever. Well, you limit your blog, so next time it’s overloaded it simply goes down on its own letting your business website keep working with no interruptions.

As far as you can see, CloudLinux OS is something that is worth being given a try as a cloud hosting platform. It however has a sole disadvantage that may stop you – your account exists within single environment, so any OS corruption may cause serious downtime or even data loss.

VPS Cloud Hosting

Unlike CloudLinux, VPS Cloud platforms do not provide single environment. Well, the environment you work with is actually single, but in fact it is supported but several VPS servers (VPS nodes). The number of nodes forms the amount of resources available for you. The more nodes you have, the more powerful your platform is… and the more redundant. If your CloudLinux environment goes down, you’ll experience downtime unless the issue is fixed. VPS Cloud never goes down off hand – each node takes care of your environment, restoring all services with minimal downtime, then the nodes that have failed recover and your system gets completely stabilized.

Building cloud on VPS first of all means providing utmost scalability. You can adjust the number of available nodes anytime you need more power, or vice versa – less expenses. Taking to account the initial cost of VPS-based cloud hosting – such scalability can really be considered vital. You may wonder why VPS cloud hosting is so expensive compared to CloudLinux hosting solutions – the reason is hardware. VPS cloud hosting is based on XEN hypervisor technology that implements usage of a more powerful carrier server. Taking into account the fact that each carrier should be able to bear over 20 VPS nodes at minimum – for optimal ROI, the physical machine requires a great shared storage – this involves usage of RAID array solutions with fast (usually SCSI) disks.

What you get for all this – is a completely isolated environment with a way more powerful resource base initially ready for higher loads. Even the lack of root access doesn’t sound like a disadvantage – you can anyway have your environment adjusted, at least with the help of the technical support team of your host.

The Bottomline

Although two platforms look different, you can use both of them for cloud hosting. Can one really call CloudLinux a platform for cloud hosting? Yes, if you need to provide affordable shared hosting with enhanced stability. What is VPS cloud then? It is a solution for more resource intensive projects, but if you are a reseller – you get the same platform as those who choose CloudLinux. Definitely, you are backed by a load of nodes that make your service rock solid but from the point of view of the end user both platforms will look like inexpensive hosting grounds with improved stability and reliability. Thus, if you are looking for a reliable cloud hosting solution – you should check out the platform the service is based on. CloudLinux is going to be cheaper; VPS based cloud hosting may be more expensive, though powerful and redundant, but you can be sure – both services are based on utmost high performance hardware that is monitored and thus secured from failures.

If referring to our personal point of view – Cloud VPS is a more redundant and reliable solution. Taking into account the fact that we at SiteValley.com are looking into starting offering cloud hosting, too – let us announce that having analyzed the given niche we are on our way setting up the first VPS node.

We have already published several articles regarding WordPress. Those were mostly dedicated to the use of this popular blogging script and you might have noticed that while evaluating its capabilities, we mentioned VPS servers as a desired WordPress hosting platform. Although a virtual server is the most recommended hosting solution for a WP blog, it is understandable that many users would like to find a more affordable hosting ground to run their blogs on. Today we are going to reveal the main peculiarities of shared web hosting services use in terms of WordPress blog deployment and deliver some friendly tips.

Part 1: Choosing Your Shared Web Hosting Provider If you are interested in having your WordPress blog hosted on a shared server, you need to make sure your hosting provider is an expert in this business. Since the most popular problem with WP blogs on shared servers is connected with resource usage, you should choose a hosting company, which has the least overcrowded servers. In many cases a WordPress blog works fine within its so-called fair share of server CPU and RAM. However, if the server is overcrowded – for instance due to the overselling strategy applied by the hosting company – you may have your account suspended for being “abusive”, when it is actually not. Thus, if you see that your potential provider offers shared hosting with enormous disk space and bandwidth quotas – be sure, they oversell, so there is a risk of their hosting servers being way too overcrowded.

Look Into Web Hosting With No Fixed Quotas

Being best does not always mean being expensive. Currently there are many hosting providers, offering web hosting with unlimited traffic and even unlimited disk space for a very affordable price. And believe me, what they are doing is not overselling – on the contrary – such providers offer shared web hosting solutions, which do not limit their users on any resources strictly and give enough space – on certain conditions, of course. Those conditions usually imply percentage limits, which are clearly stated in clauses of company’s Terms of Usage or Acceptable Use Policy. Therefore, on the one hand you are getting as much space and resources as you need, while on the other hand your account is safe from being suspended, unless you exceed the set limits.

Use Ready-Made or Preinstalled Solutions

When starting a personal blog, many users do not consider shared hosting as a solution to use. Most of them think they can get a free account at blog hosting service and resolve such issues as domain registration or account management. This is not so, of course. First of all, if you are interested in attracting traffic and expanding your blog – you need to have your own domain and a separate account which would let you manage local settings (PHP settings, MySQL databases, etc). Additionally, having a personal hosting account you can setup email under your domain – that would improve the authority of your site.

For those, who consider account administration a hard and tricky thing – great news will be that since many years ago all shared hosting accounts are managed via user-end control panels, which are usually user friendly and easy to comprehend. Same goes for software management and installation – the majority of web hosting providers offers automated script installers (e.g. Installtron or Fantastico De Luxe) along with their hosting accounts. Those installers are built into a control panel and allow to setup, manage, update and remove any software, initially supported by the host.

Using Installatron or Fantastico web hosting you are not just simplifying the process of script management. When you let the auto installer setup or update your software you are set free from such problems as incorrect script and requests processing, which may cause excessive resource usage and further suspension of your account. Some providers of shared web hosting services offer even more – they sell accounts with already preinstalled software, including preinstalled WP blogs. Such solutions do guarantee you that you are not going to experience any resource usage issues on conditions of moderate resource usage (initial setup with a minimum of plug-ins) and average visitor rate of about 500 users a day (the figure is approximate and may vary depending on server hardware specification, number of accounts hosted, volume of content, etc.).

Part 2: Adjusting Your Account to Be The Best Blog Host

Though a shared server for web hosting may somehow limit your blogging capabilities, there are still options available. On the one hand those options let you tune your blog so that a problem of excessive resource usage would not emerge; on the other hand – the adjustment advice below can help you use all functions of your blog within the strict shared server limits.

Disable The Unnecessary Plug-ins

WordPress plug-ins certainly enhance the work of the blog. Some of them however, are very resource intensive, thus you need to be very careful while using them – especially those which work on principles of recursion or live tracking. Different caching modules and SEO tools may significantly increase the server resource usage rates and cause much inconvenience. Thus, if you are trying some plug-in out, but are not going to use it constantly or within some time period – you can temporarily disable it and lessen the load on the server.

Keep Your Software Updated and Optimized

Both WordPress and its modules are constantly updated by the WordPress developers team. Those updates do not only include security patches but also usually contain fixed code, which means that the newer version is more stable and less resource intensive than the previous one. Apart from this “in-script” optimization, you should also take care of the optimization of your environment; php.ini file adjustment – usually available on any shared server – is what to look into. If you are not sure about doing this on your own, you can always contact a webmaster. Though such solution may seem to be costly, the money you spend once on the optimization will save the money on the upgrade for a longer period of time.

Keep It Clean

The database load issues take place very frequently on shared server. Thus, unused articles drafts and disapproved or spam comments should be moderated, since their storing increases the database size and seriously slowdown the work of your WP blog. Of course you may keep some of those (except for spam, I believe), but you should definitely do some clean up. That shouldn’t be done too often, but monthly auditing of your blog dashboard would significantly assist you with its administration and load management.

Take Care of the Content Size

When you upload some files, you need to make sure they are as compact as possible. This mostly concerns images. You anyway do not post all of them full-size – you use thumbnails instead, therefore it may be reasonable to resize your images before having them actually uploaded to your blog. Such measure does save lots of space in the databases making them easier to process. If the image is not unique – it is recommended to fetch it from a URL.

Conclusions

If you need a budget hosting solution for your personal or small company WordPress blog, it really is advisable to have a look at a shared hosting plan. Despite the limitations, quality shared hosting is going to deliver you a stable affordable ground for your WP software. Since many hosting providers offer WordPress script either along with an autoinstaller or already preinstalled (like Sitevalley.com does), you are going to be set free from many setup and management troubles. Thus, your sole task is to take care of your blog staying updated and optimized during its further use. Those conditions are going to guarantee you an easy and non-problem use of your WordPress software for a long time.

Summertime is coming, finals are over and we have reasons to believe that you may get more free time, which you would like to dedicate to the development of your own web project. In this regard Sitevalley.com is introducing a new coupon code “schoolisout”, which will provide you with a 15% discount on all our shared hosting plans. This is a limited time offer, so make sure you come up with the decision and sing up till June, 30 2010.

The discount is to cover our Newbie hosting, Blog hosting, Forum hosting, All Inclusive and Business Hosting packages. All of them come with a free domain and have no limits on bandwidth.

More details can be learned from our Support Team via a live chat or send an email to sales@sitevalley.com.

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.