It’s been a month since our team has taken part in a friendly corporate quest aimed at team building. Finally, we got our pictures and can now share the details of this awesome event. If you think, that IT-guys are too geeky to participate in active outdoor activities – you are far away from being right. Check out how it was.

THE QUEST

The event has taken place at a beautiful recreation facility in Eastern Europe. Forest, beach and sparkling river water, what else do you need to make your day? Well, a bunch of interesting tasks and puzzles that require agility and creative and logical thinking I guess. Believe me your favorite team has those skills!

Awesome riverside view

Beauty of the East European forest

THE TASKS

There were twenty main tasks and three bonus levels. Depending on the complexity they could bring us one to four gold pieces. The team that got more gold pieces in the end was the winner. Useless to name all the puzzles and even more useless to try recalling each . There were, however some that are definitely worth mentioning.

Speaking Cards

Do you like playing poker on Sundays? If you do, you might be confused having seen your card deck randomly pinned up to trees around the forest with some strange numbers on each card. It may be confusing really, unless you know the rules and the goal. They were to find all the numbered cards and gather another deck we were given in the very order, the numbers on those pinned cards stated. Gathering the deck in the correct order enabled us to read the keyword, written on the side of the deck – ANGEL.

Speaking Cards... Telling nothing yet

But Our Rocking Out Customer Support Super Star Svetlana always knows what to do

Tangled Footprint

Another “woody” task we had to accomplish required much agility and attention. The quest organizers were tough while creating this one. They tangled a string around several trees with letters attached to it and we had to start from the first knot and pick all the letters. Having reached the final knot we got a riddle: “when you need it you throw it away, when you don’t you pick it up”. If you know the answer, feel free to send it to us in a tweet @sitevalley

Tangled footprints going untangled

Parting of the Ways

This was another interesting task. Moving to the next spot, out of the blue we came around a tree with direction signs. According to the legend they pointed at different countries and showed their direction. The task was to find the hidden country located respectively to those on the signs. Generally such puzzles require good knowledge in geography and orientation skills. The 21^st century, however, made the thinks easier. Owing to Google Maps and built-in GPS in our cells it took us only five minutes to get the right answer – CZECH REPUBLIC.

Parting of the ways

A Picture from The Past

After an hour of running around the forest we got back to the camp territory and took a task to find a building depicted in the photo that came along with the instructions. Unlike the real building, the one on the photo had some distinctions. The photo was divided into squares indexed with unique letters, so each distinction meant one letter. The task was to find those distinctive squares and gather up a word of those letters… And we made it! The word was HEART.

The picture of the building

And the building itself

Forgotten Melodies

This was the one personally I liked best. If you like music, old school plates and remember some lessons in Physics, you might have liked it, too. In a nutshell, they gave us a plate with the names of the song and artist erased so we had to guess who it was. But how to play a music plate with no gram? Well, they gave us a needle a pen and a sheet of paper so we only needed to recall some knowledge in Physics and play it. If you wonder how it worked – we twisted the paper in a cone and pierced it with a needle to get a vibrating pipe (like a membrane). Then, rotating the plate on the pen we managed to reproduce the sound. Though it was unclear and interrupting – I guess, you’ll agree that it’s hard to rotate the barely fixed plate and keep the needle on the same lane – we got whose composition it was – Vladimir Vysotsky’s.

Aerospace engineers can assemble hand-made grams Meet Sergey S. (on the very right) - our PPC Marketer with Master's degree in aerospace engineering

RESULTS

Since all SiteValley.com team members got split up and played in different teams it’s quite hard to give some firm results. Neither of us played in the team that won, but the fun we got was priceless and meant much more for us. Three teams we played in got 42 to 45 gold pieces, while the winners made it with 47 pieces. There were no losers, no matter that someone had only 40 gold pieces at the finish

Counting gold pieces. They were not real, of course, but the fun and the pleasure we got were

If you liked the article and would like to see some more photos, visit our Facebook page to check out our new album, dedicated to this event.

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.

Using web hosting services normally presumes storing content located on a remote server that is available online 24x7x365, which means that such a hosting server is powered and connected to the Internet constantly. A very important notion in web hosting technology is uptime. Wikipedia defines it in the following way: “Hosting uptime refers to the percentage of time the host is accessible via the internet“, therefore, if a customer is paying for hosting services, it is crucial for him to expect and receive the maximum uptime values. Although hosting companies do apply various monitoring techniques to track server’s state at any given moment of time, no technology is perfect and thus it is important to perform your own independent uptime monitoring, which may come in handy in emergency situations. So how do you measure uptime values correctly? Should you expect a 100% uptime? What web site monitoring tools are available to a regular user? These questions are not as simple as they appear at a first glance. Information in this article will be useful to those interested in understanding and monitoring uptime of an account or server.

Who should pay attention to web host uptime?

To begin with, let’s find out why we should be interested in having maximum uptime. Importance of this parameter greatly depends on the goals assigned to your hosting account or server. Users with personal blogs, forums or regular web pages do not worry as much as people doing e-commerce, managing blog for marketing purposes, providing advertising services with your content, using hosting services as communication system for business, sending customers to affiliate programs, etc., as for the latter type of hosting customers the server downtime impacts their income either directly or indirectly. In case your profit, reputation or status depends on the availability of your content, it is a very good idea to perform uptime tracking.

Nature of server uptime

As it has been stated above, server uptime is its availability on the Internet, but the server is not a solid entity that simply appears on the internet as an object. There are always various services running on a web host. They ensure presence and correct presentation of data on the network. Major services handled by *nix (here *nix goes out for UNIX, Linux and FreeBSD driven servers) servers today are:

• Apache server (responsible for http, php, cgi etc.);
• MySQL server (responsible for work with MySQL databases);
• Mail server (responsible for e-mail services: POP, IMAP, SMTP);
• FTP server (responsible for FTP connections and transfers);
• SSH server (responsible for SSH jail/full shell connectivity);
• DNS server (handles domain name related operations and settings).

To use each of these services, you need to be connected to each one of them. If you are browsing through your website, you are likely using only Apache server (i.e. http). At this point you can already think of this process as the simplest http uptime check (by sending connection requests and receiving results from a server). If you are checking emails with a mail client, such as Mozilla Thunderbird or Microsoft Outlook, you are interacting directly with the mail server. When uploading new content using FTP client, you are only communicating with the FTP server. As you can see, in a variety of cases operations performed by a user at one given point in time include either one or few services simultaneously. Imagine a situation when you can successfully receive mail messages, but at the same time nothing (normally “nothing” is considered to be a certain kind of error, 401 for example) is displayed when you are viewing your web site via browser (i.e. a downtime situation takes place). This often means that Apache server is experiencing problems (as html pages are normally processed by the http service).

When we are considering availability, we should keep in mind that server downtime can be either full or partial. It is normal for a hosting company to guarantee a 99,9% uptime figures, as the underlying value  normally assumes percentage of time a web server is not spending in full downtime state. As any other devices, servers can and do get broken for various reasons. In many cases it is very hard to predict when exactly and why a server can fail. What is more important is whether a hosting company is capable of fixing the issue in time and with minimal impact on the customers. We at Sitevalley.com spend a lot of resources on server monitoring and always have a backup plan in case something goes wrong. We use special network monitoring software to constantly track status of our servers. Our network’s multiple redundant backbone connectivity links all of our Datacenters, using multiple high capacity lines. These Datacenters are maximum security, carrier-class facilities with fault tolerant power systems. All of them have state of the art IP architecture aimed at reliable delivery of your content 24x7x365.

Web site monitoring tools

After having defined uptime meaning and importance, let’s take a look at monitoring tools available for hosting users. We immediately can divide these checking utilities into two primary groups:

• free;
• paid.

The paid solutions mostly include the web based services that perform monitoring of web sites from numerous locations across the Globe. The technology behind such utilities is as follows: a certain number of interconnected servers with installed monitoring software send various requests (http, MySQL and DNS) to monitored locations. Based on the responses they receive, using special algorithms, they make conclusions about the current state of the location (i.e. a web site). Consequently, these results are stored and pictured as graphs with time dependence. Users utilizing such tools can be notified about critical states of their web sites via e-mails, instant messengers, SMS messages and so forth. The testing results posted at labnol.org will be very useful for those looking for a good paid server monitoring solutions. Main advantages of the paid uptime checking solutions are:

• consistency of results;
• higher accuracy due to numerous locations the testing is conducted from;
• high response speed;
• variety of notification methods;
• service quality;
• independence from your own computer and ISP;

The main drawback is price, of course.

Free website monitoring services are normally divided into the following three classes:

• standalone server applications (need to be installed on a web server);
• free monitoring services analogous to the paid ones;
• standalone desktop software.

Free monitoring web based services use the same technology as paid services, but they offer lower response times and lower accuracy of results. The latter is due to the fact that such services normally use less monitoring points (i.e. locations) across the Globe to perform checks. There are exceptions, of course, one of which being a GIGRIB service, offered by the Pingdom Company (a very popular and effective monitoring services provider). GIGRIB uses its own customers as monitoring sources (this statement refers to the PCs of the customers). Such approach provides a very high accuracy due to high number of users.

Standalone server applications require installation on a separate hardware server. This type of solutions is widely used by webhosting companies to perform in house network monitoring. At the same time, standalone desktop applications are the worst and least efficient choices for users. These uptime monitoring techniques are very limited by the local ISP’s service quality. If the ISP servers go down, then your webhost will appear as unavailable for the applications relying on the local network. Such alerts may lead to false evaluation of your host’s service quality. You can find several lists of popular services from all presented categories in the following articles:

• Monitor Website Up / Downtime: 30+ Free Web Services and Tools
• 13 Website Monitoring Tools To Help Prevent Downtime
• Top 10 free website uptime monitoring services

Conclusions

Web site uptime monitoring is crucial for those users, whose income directly depends on the availability of their content. Uptime figures themselves are a very complex notion, dependent on various parameters, and when evaluating them, one should always keep in mind diversity of the conditions that influence these values. It is important to understand, that there are various types of uptime guarantees used by hosting companies. These guarantees very often assume the partial uptime figures. Monitoring availability of your own hosting account or server is quite important. Timely detection and reaction to the downtimes may help you save money and reputation. The descriptions and links given in the article will help those seeking proper uptime control utilities find them. This should consequently lead to higher income and ratings of web resources.

]]> http://svhostingblog.com/technology/web-host-uptime-monitoring-purpose-and-tools/feed/ 9 http://svhostingblog.com/reviews/boosting-up-blog-capabilities-with-essential-wordpress-plugins/ http://svhostingblog.com/reviews/boosting-up-blog-capabilities-with-essential-wordpress-plugins/#comments Mon, 08 Feb 2010 15:47:03 +0000 Smirnovi4 http://svhostingblog.com/?p=446 Tweet

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.

Thinking of starting a small online shop business is pretty inspiring. Once you figure what to sell and who to sell it to, where to host the shop, which script to use, once you come up with the domain name – you are done with the big strategy. But then inevitably you get to a point when you ask yourself questions: “How to make it all work from the technical side? How to install all you need and configure it?”

Installing new scripts may look scary for a beginner. Getting all the databases set up and configured, defining all the folders, uploading installation binaries and so on can become painful if you have never done this before. But what if you are not even sure if the script is worth installing it the hard way? The answer is simple – you don’t have to install most popular scripts manually with us, we have taken care of it for you. We have prepared a special application called Installatron that lets you install a number of scripts by making few clicks during literally 7-8 minutes.

What if you have never ever installed anything on a webhost at all? The answer is even simpler – here is a quick start to installing e-commerce applications using our Installtron.

Sitevalley ‘E-commerce’ hosting package comes with pre-installed osCommerce Shopping Cart, but in case you’re not satisfied with osCommerce we also offer quick and easy installations of CubeCart and PhpShop via Installtron (please check a special overview of these shopping carts which should help you make a decision).

So what is Installtron? It is a very friendly and powerful installation tool that lets you perform predefined installation in a mode of a wizard, which looks very similar to a regular installation wizard of a PC.

This guide will be handy not only for the owners of the ‘E-commerce’, but also for the owners of the ‘All Inclusive’ or any other plan, as the installation of any application through the Installatron has the same simple and user friendly scheme. While this guide covers the installation steps of CubeCart, the procedure for PhpShop or osCommerce or any other type of application (CMS Joomla for example), will be very similar…

Step 1: opening Installtron

First of all you need to log into the Direct Admin control panel of your account and open Installtron. Normally you would use either http://yourdomain.com:2222 or http://yourserverIP:2222, where ‘yourdomain.com’ is your main domain name and ‘yourserverIP’ is the IP address of the server you are hosted on.

After you have logged into you Direct Admin control Panel, you need to click the ‘Installatron Script Installer’ button located in the ‘Advanced Features’ section as shown on the screenshot.

Step 2: Choosing the cart you want to install

After the appropriate application (in our case it is a shopping cart CubeCart) is chosen you will be see some information, which includes some common properties, including application name, current version, cost, size, developer and community links, version history.

This guide aims at the fresh new installation so we will describe the ‘Install application’ option shown in the left screen-shot below. Of course you may also import the existing install, but the procedure for it isn’t described here. After clicking the “Install this application” button, you will see the install wizard welcome screen. Just click next to continue.

Step 3: Reviewing application’s info and starting the installation

After the appropriate application (in our case it is a shopping cart CubeCart) is chosen you will be see some information, which includes some common properties, including application name, current version, cost, size, developer and community links, version history.

This guide aims at the fresh new installation so we will describe the ‘Install application’ option shown in the left screen-shot below. Of course you may also import the existing install, but the procedure for it isn’t described here. After clicking the “Install this application” button, you will see the install wizard welcome screen. Just click next to continue.

Step 4: Defining install location

Now we will define the install location of the application inside your account. The first field you need to customize is the ‘domain’ one. This field defines the way CubeCart is accessed from the Internet, and also it defines the way the path to the CubeCart folder is defined from the server side.

In our example a sub domain was used. This is suitable if you have a general web site that and a store is just a section of it. In the screenshot below the domain is specified as http://cubecart.kazus.xxx/, which tells the Installatron that the CubeCart is to be associated with the mentioned sub domain. After the installation is done, we will be able to see the cart by typing http://cubecart.kazus.xxx/ in our browser.

Next field is ‘Path’. It defines the folder in which the CubeCart will be installed. Now, this needs some more detailed explanation. We have chosen the subdomain for the ‘domain’ field, which means that we have already created the folder ‘cubecart’ inside of the /public_html directory of our account when we were creating the sub domain. The fact that we have chosen the sub domain also means that the root folder for the installation is /public_html/cubecart/ by default. So if the field ‘Path’ is left blank the CubeCart application will be installed in the /public_html/cubecart/ folder. If the ‘Path’ field is left blank we will be able to see the shop by using the http://cubecart.kazus.xxx/ in the browser. By the way, the very same procedure applies to a regular domain like kazus.xxx: if you want to access the store by using the link http://kazus.xxx just leave the ‘Path’ blank.

Sometimes it is required to change the default path to something else. In the screenshot below we have specified path as ‘cubecart’. This means that the CubeCart will not be installed into the root folder of the sub domain cubecart.kazus.xxx, instead the folder ‘cubecart’ will be created inside of the root folder and the application will be installed into that folder. As it has already been mentioned, the root folder for the sub domain is /public_html/cubecart/, plus we have asked the Installtron to create the folder ‘cubecart’ inside of the root folder. As result we get the following folder for the installation of the application: /public_html/cubecart/cubecart. The store in such variation is to be accessed from the Internet by the following link: http://cubecart.kazus.xxx/cubecart/.

So go ahead and decide which domain you would like the CubeCart to be associated with, specify the domain in the ‘Domain’ field, and if you want the CubeCart to be opened by the simplest link to the domain (i.e. http://domain.com), just leave the path filed empty, otherwise specify the folder which the CubeCart should be put into in the ‘Path’ field.

Step 5: Choosing the version to be installed and accepting the license

After the install location is defined, we need to choose the version we want to be installed. Generally, we would want the latest version available for two main reasons:

• Latest version are the most secure ones
• Latest version usually support the widest range of features

The Installatron will automatically prompt you with the latest version, so just press ‘Next’ as shown in the left screen-shot below.

The next phase is reading and accepting the license. Make sure you are familiar with the license and agree to follow everything the agreement assumes. After done reading press ‘I Accept’ as it is shown in the right screen-shot below.

step 6: Databases and personalization

Here we move on to configuring the work with databases. To make the install as easy as possible you need to choose the automatic management of the databases in Installtron. Just choose the automatic option from the drop-down menu as shown in the left screenshot. If you wish to configure the data bases yourself then you are to choose the corresponding option from the same menu.

After you are done with the database management choice and pressed ‘next‘, you will be prompted to fill in the personal information for the CubeCart installation. This information will be used to create the default account, but of course it can be modified after the installation. You will be able to make necessary changes from the software administration area. Fill in the desired information and continue.

Step 7: Installation itself

Well guess what?! We are almost done. All the info has been prepared and defined for the Installtron to successfully perform the installation. Just click ‘Submit’ and wait for about 5 minutes.

You should get windows similar to the ones shown in the screenshots below.

Step 8: Post installation information

Well done so far! You have successfully installed the application. Now you can view the report of the installation. This report holds all the information about the installation, including all the important logging information and links. You don’t even have to save all this information as this window will be available any anytime from your Direct Admin control panel. You can open the Installtron any time and check all the necessary info about the installed application.

After you’re done either memorizing the info or writing it down in a notebook, you can proceed to using the software.

Step 9: Uninstalling, backing up and upgrading the installation

Sometimes you would want to introduce some changes to the installed application. The changes and operations that can be performed as easy as the setup itself using the Installtron are:

• Uninstall
• Backup
• Upgrade

These operations can be performed directly from the Installtron. All you need to do is launch the Installtron and then go to ‘My Applications’ tab, choose the desired action for the appropriate application as shown in the screenshot below.

Summary

So far these are the simplest guidelines to install the desired applications using the Installtron that we have prepared for you. These applications can also be installed manually. The instructions for manual installation can be found at the developer’s pages.

This guide can be used for installation of any application available in Installtron.

Hopefully Installatron will make your hosting experience with us as pleasant as it can possibly be.