HostMonster Review – Reviews and Coupons of Host Monster Web Hosting

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

PHP

PHP is an interpreted programming language originally designed for creating dynamic web pages. Interpretation is mainly on the server-side (server-side scripting) but can now be used from a command line interface or in creating other types of programs, including GUI applications using Qt or GTK + libraries.

PHP is a recursive acronym that means PHP Hypertext Pre-processor (initially PHP Tools, Personal Home Page Tools). It was originally created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994, but the main implementation of PHP is now produced by The PHP Group and serves as the de facto standard for PHP as not having a formal specification. Published under the PHP License, the Free Software Foundation sees this as free software license.

PHP is an interpreted language widely used general purpose and that is especially suited for Web development and can be embedded into HTML. It generally runs on a web server, taking PHP code as its input and creating web pages as output. It can be deployed on most web servers and on almost every operating system and platform free of charge. PHP is installed in more than 20 million websites. It is also the most popular Apache module among computers using Apache as the web server. The latest version of PHP is 5.3.1 (at the time of writing this post) (for Windows) on 19 November 2009. Popular web applications are built with PHP like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, phpbb, vbulleting, galleries and many others.

HostMonster PHP

Hostmonster have the latest version PHP 5 installed on their servers with latest security patches and optimizations. For further customizing some options a custom PHP.ini is available where you can add your own settings if required for some PHP scripts or PHP applications.

PHP logo:

WordPress

WordPress is a system for management of web content (text and images, and much more with plugins). It is especially appropriate for the establishment and maintenance of a weblog, since it allows to accept any contribution of one or several categories, and automatically generates the corresponding menu items. In parallel, it also allows individual uncategorized pages.

Next, the system, including reader comments with the ability to approve them prior to publication only, as well as a central link management, a management of user roles and rights and the possibility of external plugins, WordPress have been developed towards a fully-fledged content management system.

WordPress is based on the PHP web scripting language and requires a MySQL database. It is free software, licensed under the GNU General Public License. The developers put the open-source software on the site ready for free download. According to the developers, the system places special emphasis on web standards, elegance, user friendliness and ease of customization. WordPress is the official successor of b2 and the system has a growing user and developer community.

Plugins can extended the functionality of word press. All these extensions can be edited using the built-in editor.

In the plugin directory there more than 5000 different free plug-ins. For example there are plugins that allow the use of different login procedures, such as LDAP, OpenID or Shibboleth to connect your own blog with Twitter.

Automattic also offers plugins that provide a connection to the other in-house projects such as the bbPress forum software, or services such as the anti-spam service Akismet.

HostMonster WordPress

You can install WordPress on hostmonster without any problem. The easiest way to do this is with Fantastico cPanel tool. Or you can manually install by first creating mysql database and uploading the wordpress files. Either way you will enjoy good blogging experience on host monster.

MySQL – My Structured Query Language

MySQL is a relational database management system (RDBMS), comprising a client interface characters and a server, both available for both Unix systems like GNU / Linux and Windows, even if it prevails in its use Unix.

Since 1996 supports most of SQL syntax and are expected in the future full compliance with the ANSI standard. It has interfaces for different languages, including an ODBC driver, two drivers and a driver for Java and Mono. NET.

The code of MySQL is developed by the company since 1979 TcX ataconsult now MySQL AB, but it is only since 1996 that is distributed a version that supports SQL, utilizing another product: mSQL.

The code of MySQL, however, is distributed under the GNU GPL as well as with a commercial license. Until version 4.0, a good part of the client code was dismissed with the GNU LGPL and could therefore be used for commercial applications. From version 4.1 onwards, even the client code is distributed under the GNU GPL. Moreover, there is a clause that allows extensive use of MySQL with a wide range of free licenses.

Hostmonster MySQL

Hostmonster have the latest version (version 5 at the time of writing) of MySQL installed on their servers which allows you to install any scripts or software on their servers that requires mysql with the latest database features. You can create new databases in your control panel, add new users and manage your databases with phpmyadmin – an open source tool written in PHP intended to handle the administration of MySQL over the Internet with browser. Hostmonster supports also mysqli the next PHP Api generation functions which bring more speed and features of mysql.