Web Design and Development

Restore Manager: the Best cPanel Backup Solution

cPanel is the best and most-used web panel around, but it’s built-in backup feature is somewhat weak and outdated. So it’s no surprise that one of the top search terms related to cPanel is “cpanel backup solutions”.

Many users opt for R1soft, as it’s very powerful – but it’s also expensive and buggy. Worse yet, R1soft has changed owners several times in recent years, and its users have often been ignored or neglected.

All we want is something reliable, with good support and modern features!

As a Linux admin for many years now [Read more]


Web Design and Development

HostGator Alternatives, Part 2: Who to Use and Why

Hostgator eaten by the competitionOnce upon a time, there was a miserly hosting company that was jealous of all the other hosting companies.

He saw that others were better than he was, and would rank higher on “top 10″ lists. He didn’t like that one bit! (Nevermind that the “top 10″ list was fake; that didn’t matter to him!)

Improving his services would have meant spending money, and he wouldn’t stand for that. So one day he came up with a sly plan. If he wouldn’t improve, maybe he could make the others worse!?

So he borrowed some money from friends — he wouldn’t spend his own of course! — and proceeded to buy them all out. One by one they fell, until the majority of the “top 10″ were his. To keep the commoners from knowing what he had done, he kept the old brand names to hide his identity. So when a commoner left a host, odds are that they would “switch hosts” to another of his brands on the top 10 list.

The profit rolled in, and he and his friends were happy as can be, having rigged the system in their favor. And they lived happily ever after — even though nobody else did.

That’s essentially the origin story of Endurance International Group (EIG). [Read more]


Web Design and Development

The Myth of VPS Hosting: Reasons to Avoid It! Part 2

When a person suggests a VPS blindly to others, odds are that they’re also the kind of person that ends up hacked. Do you really want advice from somebody like that? I’d hope not! Do yourself a favor and ignore that person.

Seasoned server admins — folks that use dedicated servers and VPS daily — would never make such a blind suggestion. They know how expensive, how time consuming, and how hard it all is.

Like an adult that pines for the simpler days of childhood, most VPS users pine for the simpler days when they had a smaller and simpler website. But just like being a kid, those days are gone. Yet the sage wisdom is the same — enjoy those days while you can!

Sure, you can attempt to stubbornly forge ahead, and insist that Google is all you need. This editorial was written for other dumber people, right? Well, let’s see how you really know about server admin tasks!

[Read more]


Web Design and Development

The Myth of VPS Hosting: Reasons to Avoid It! Part 1

“Use a VPS!” says somebody on a forum or blog you were reading. That person claims it’s almost as cheap/inexpensive as your current webhost — only $10 per month — but runs better and faster!

“Wow,” you think. “What a deal! I should have been using a VPS long ago.”

In theory, it sounds like a magic cure-all for your shared web hosting problems. But it’s not. Sadly, that advice was terrible.

Not only was it factually flawed — what little it addressed — but it overlooked a huge swath of what’s involved. For you see, running a VPS is basically running your own server. Do you know what all is involved with that? Probably not.

It’s like saying all you need to drive a car is a driver’s license. But what about buying the car? Annual registration fees? Changing the car’s oil? What if the engine light comes on? What if your license is suspended?! Not so easy, eh?

So before you jump headfirst into a bad situation, let’s see if VPS hosting is right for you…

[Read more]


Web Design and Development

VPS Hosting is like a Take-and-Bake Pizza

VPS Hosting vs PizzaAs a person that tries to eat healthy, pizza is something I purposely avoid. Most pizza is greasy, over-filled with salty marinara, and topped with fatty artery-clogging meats. It’s a commodity glop for the masses.

Of course, it doesn’t have to be that way. You can eat pizza without needing a bottle of Rolaids for dessert.

All it requires is a few extra dollars, and a small investment of time. I refer specifically to two options: (1) the popular take-and-bake pizza chains, which serve healthy made-to-order pizzas, or (2) the grocery store, where I can hand select ingredients and make a custom pizza from scratch.

Tonight, as I sit by the dining table with a freshly-baked Mediterranean deLite pizza from Papa Murphy’s, reading some new web-related forum posts on an iPad, I can’t help but to draw a correlation between the two industries web hosting vs. pizza. Just as it is with pizza, a person willing to spend time or funds on quality can avoid mass-made slop hosting. [Read more]