HostMonster Review – Reviews and Coupons of Host Monster Web Hosting

FTP (File Transfer Protocol) is one of the oldest protocols for exchanging data over the Internet. For FTP a client and FTP server is need so data(files, folders) can be exchanged. It is the most popular way of exchanging files, but not the most secure way. FTPS (FTP Secure) for much better security for data transfer. With FTP you can upload and download files, create folders, delete , and if the client/server supports you can change permissions of files/directories. Popular FTP client is Filezilla (available for Linux, Windows and Mac computers). Modern browser (like Mozilla Firefox) do have FTP support, and you can access FTP servers by adding ftp:// prefix, followed by the server address, user name and password if required in the address bar.

Hostmonster FTP

With Hostmonster you can have unlimited FTP accounts on single account. Multiple connections when transferring files are allowed, for faster upload/download. FTP accounts can be created with cPanel control panel, where you can also setup permissions for the account and quotas (how much transfer can be made, how much storage is allowed and other). There you can also setup anonymous FTP access. If you do not want to use FTP, you can always use the File Manager for uploading/downloadin files.

Ruby on Rails (ROR) is an application framework for the Ruby programming language for creating websites. Uses the Model-View-Controller (MVS) platform for programming. It is less popular than PHP and other web programming languages like Perl, ASP or other, but many popular web sites use Ruby: twitter, whitepages.com, github and others. Rails needs webserver (Apache httpd) and module. Database management systems like MySQL is also supported by Ruby On Rails.

Hostmonster Ruby On Rails

Hostmonster supports ROR on their servers, but you need to configure your account before you can execute Rails application on your hostmonster account. First you need to enable SSH access on your account, setup folders and configure .htaccess to give requests to the ROR parser. It is not hard to setup if you are Rails developer, but for the average user it might be difficult if the user lacks linux knowledge. The complete step-by-step guide can be found here:

http://helpdesk.hostmonster.com/index.php/kb/article/207.

Fantastico de luxe is one of the features most web hosting providers offers. Fantastico is commercial addon to cPanel control panel that allows you to easily install popular open-source web applications: WordPress (blogs), Drupal – Content Management system (CMS), Joomla – CMS, galleries, forums (phpbb, mybb), shopping carts like zencart or oscommerce and many other popular web scripts. Now it is the most popular one-click installer. When you install a script via fantastico everything is automatically setup so you can immediately begin using your website. Databases, tables, default settings, user name, passwords are automatically setup. Other than installation, any support is not provided by Fantastico for the scripts. Developers do not recommend installing via Fantastico De Luxe because the latest version of the software is not always available on this one-click installer. Manual installation may be time-consuming and hard for some people but you know that the latest version is installed with all bugs and features available. Hostmonster do not offer Fantastico to its customers but simplescripts. Simple scripts works pretty much the same way Fantastico does and supports many popular web applications. Installation of scripts is very simple.

Host Monster hosting company offers only one web hosting plan. This plan offers many features, some you might never need but it is always good know them. Almost any type of website can be hosted on Hostmonster account, including personal websites/blogs, corporate or social websites. The powerful Linux Apache MySQL PHP hosting platform gives you much flexibility. Linux operating system is fast, secure and stable system for  servers, because it is open-source, vulnerabilities are quickly discovered and fixed. Apache is the most popular open-source webserver. And MySQL a database system and PHP (web programming language) the most popular systems for creating websites with scripts like wordpress (blogs), drupal, joomla, galleries, phpbb (forums), shopping carts (zen cart, oscommerce etc) for ecommerce sites and others. You won’t run into problems like not enough space of bandwidth, because hostmonster offers unlimited space, bandwidth and you can host unlimited number of websites. You also get a free domain name with optional domain privacy, cpanel control panel to manage sites, FTP, cron jobs, shell access (ssh), site stats, perl, streaming audio/video and much much more. Click here for the complete list of features. Though many companies offer more hosting plans hostmonster offers everything in one hosting plan for the price of $6.95 monthly, $5.95 with the current promotion.

Drupal is popular free open-source content management system written in PHP (HyperText Preprocessor) distributed under the GNU General Public License . With Drupal you can make almost any type of website, whether it would be a blog, forum, social networking, news site, gallery, or a simple website. The standard version is drupal core which have many features like extension system which allows you to install modules which add new functions to drupal or upgrade existing ones. Theme system, with it you can easily change the look of your web site. A powerful user management system with user permissions. Admins can create, edit users or visitors can register themselves. E-mail validation must be done if required by admins. Other nice feautere is the ability to create custom content types and add custom fields. Other standard modules included in core are contacts, search and others. Check all the features on the official site : http://drupal.org. It is very popular CMS, many popular sites are powered by Drupal, corporate sites, political sites (e.g whitehouse.gov), fan sites (e.g michaeljackson.com) and many others. Drupal is my favorite CMS. Because it requires PHP to be installed and at least one of the supported database management systems(mysql, others supported too) you need to find good PHP Web Hosting company. Hostmonster is good choice for your next drupal host, because besides besides PHP and MySQL and many other features it also supports custom PHP.INI that allow you to change some options like register_globals to off (required for drupal to be installed).

PhpMyAdmin is php software database management script for MySQL relational database system, a web interface for managing MySQL DB. It can create new databases (if permissions are granted for this), create/edit/delete tables, add/edit/delete fields fields, rows, manage users, execute SQL queries, importe/export data to csv (comma separated values), SQL queries, XML format and various other formats, so you can later restore the on another server, and much more. phpMyAdmin have large community of contributors and users and is available in 54 languages (at the time of writing this article). It is a must tool for every webmaster, because it simplifies the management of databases. The official website is http://www.phpmyadmin.net/ where you can also download the official distribution package, find documentation, themes and various help links. The latest version (at the time of writing this) is 3.2.5.

Hostmonster PhpMyAdmin Review

Hostmonster have cPanel control panel and phpmyadmin is integrated into it. You can access it directly via cPanel, but you can also install it manually if you prefer but you would not need to do this because it is already integrated and available for use.

Cron is scheduler in Linux and Unix like systems. It allows you to set events (actions, programs to be run) at specific time intervals like 1, 15, 30 or custom set intervals that can be in hours, days, months or years. You may use cron jobs to setup automatic tasks that you need like automatic cleaning of files (cache), backing up files, directories, databases too if it’s setup correctly, or other tasks. The cron settings are setup in special file called the crontab which on most linux system is located at /etc/crontab . For beginners it would be very difficult to manually set any type of cron job mainly because of the cron syntax which is difficult. Luckily Hostmonster cPanel control panel offers a cron job tool that simplifies the process of setting up cron jobs. You can either setup with a wizard (standard) or manually (advanced) if you are experienced linux user. You can setup an email to where the output of the cron will be sent. Setting up jobs at intervals less than 5 minutes is not recommended because it can take much resources depending on the task that is performed. I use cron jobs on my personal computer at home to schedule backups. Backups are important because you never know what may happen.

Screenshot of the cPanel tool:

Hostmonster nameservers are:
ns1.hostmonster.com
ns2.hostmonster.com

Do you know what happens when you type google.com in your website? The web browser uses the domain name system to find the server that have your website. Here is where the nameservers are needed. They give the IP address (unique number that every computer connected to the internet must have in order to communicate with each other connected device) of the web server where the browser connects and ask for the website. The server gives back the html code back to the browser where it is rendered and displayed. There is much more processes happening underneath. You need the above two servers (primary and secondary) you need to add them at your domain registrar in order your site to work. After you update the nameservers at your dns registrar clear the dns cache (google for solution) and wait a few hours in order the changes to propagate.

Joomla! is CMS (content management system) one of the most popular CMSs in the world, PHP script that allows you to dinamically add content (text, images and other media, static pages, blog posts) with an easy admin interface. But joomla is much more than that, it is web portal with many features including:

* User Management (create, edit users, setup permissions, roles, groups etc.)
* Media Manager (for managing media files, folders, mime types)
* Language Manager (Joomla is available in many languages with UTF-8 encoding)
* Banner Management (management of banners, hits, client profiles, impressions etc)
* Contact Management
* Polls
* Search
* Syndication (RSS) and News Management
* Template management (there are thousands of free and professional templates)
* Extension system (there are many modules available for Joomla, allowing you to create complex websites with many features)

Joomla requires PHP (the web scripting language) and at least a database like MySQL in order to be installed. Hostmonster supports both php and mysql, so running Joomla would not be problem at all. If you want to further customize settings you can do this via .htaccess or via php.ini. You can install Joomla with Fantastico one-click installer or manually.

PHP.INI

PHP.ini is a file that contains settings to customize behavior of PHP interpreter or other related settings. HostMonster supports custom PHP.INI. For example register_globals can be turned on or off. Register_globals is an options that tells whether or not to register the contents of the Post, Cookie, Get and other variables be automatically registered as global variables. For example the url http://www.hostmonsterreviewme.com/?p=1 will automatically declare $p as global variable with value 1. This can be dangerous because an attacker can put anything he wants and possible bypass authentication. Some scripts like drupal require register_globals to be turned off in order to be installed. Other directives(settings, options) that are supported:

* log_errors
* error_log
* register_globals
* session.save_path
* upload_tmp_dir
* memory_limit
* upload_max_filesize
* post_max_size
* display_errors and display_startup_errors