Get Wordpress hosting for $6.95 a month and even better use our coupon code:HALFOFF to get 6 months free! Chihosting.com

What are some new features of wordpress 2.8 ?

Easier use of widgets and themes

Faster then ever before

Updated API for you plugin programmers

Over 180 New reason to install 2.8 today check out the updates and features at wordpress.org

Wordpress is the leading open source php program for your blog. Template prices start from absoultely free to a designer cost. Its easy to use and gets more intuitive as the community says what they like and don’t like about the product. If you need a blog for your website wordpress is the way to go.

Chihosting.com is offering 6 months any of its shared hosting packages with the coupon code: HALFOFF Their packages start off at $4.95 a month. Chihosting.com has been in business since 2001 and has recently relaunched its website with a new look and new offerings. Check them out today for a great deal. Chihosting.com

We want to hear your bad joomla hosting story. Bad customer service overloaded service ? One of our partners is building a new Joomla Hosting Offering and we want to know. How can they make it the best. In my experience Joomla modules overload the server. As a customer you want to use the features that are standard. I understand that. What is the best way to ensure that your site is stable and not overloading the server ? Have you talked to a hosting company that has good Joomla service ? Why was it good service, was it good or GREAT! service ? When you call tech support do they even know the most popular modules or common support issues ?

I know from experience what Joomla Hosting Users expectations are from the calls I have taken over the years. This is your communities opportunity to influence how Joomla Hosting should be. Look forward to your questions  and comments.

When looking for a home for your wordpress blog you want to make the right decision the first time. This comes to anyone looking for a cheap web hosting company but one of the complaints I hear the most is about having to move a blog and domain registration from host to host when they realize that the hosting company is not a great fit for them. The top two companies i recommend are ANhosting.com and Mariehosting.com Anhosting.com specializes in small business hosting and their prices have been the lowest in the industry for years. Their admins and even level 1 staff have a wide range of knowledge when it comes to wordpress hosting. the majority of their customers are small business who utilize the servers to sell their business ideas, brand identity and blogs. As small business companies get use to the idea of blogging and realize that this is the best way to get traffic from search engines wordpress becomes a more popular solution. It is easy to install through tools such as fantastico, which is included in most cpanel hosting companies control panel. Anhosting is one such company that utilizes fantastico’s ability to install popular scripts and keep them up to date. This allows the cusotmer a great experience in installing and keeping their wordpress script up-to-date.

Mariehosting.com is a niche market hosting company that has just started out their customers are also mainly only wordpress customers as they are looking to provide additional services for wordpress bloggers besides just hosting. My sources there have told me that they have some great wordpress tools in store for the very near future. Including automatic wordpress backup from the control panel. Currently customers through cpanel have to manually backup their files and databases for the whole cpanel account, or retrieve the backup from hosting companies at a price or convenience. Most hosting companies do not guarantee backups as things do happen and by time a customer needs a backup it may be related to the issue at hand.

You should backup your wordpress template themes, plugins, php customizations and databases at minimum. these things can be done by hand through an FTP program and mysql tools. You may also do these through the control panel but this will backup your entire account, takes longer and can be a big file to download. I recommend you log into ftp and retrieve a backup anytime you make changes to yrou theme and create a mysql backup at least every three months. I ask my customers “How much data are you willing to lose”, “If you made a post today and you lost everything except that one post you wouldn’t be extremely upset,” “But, if you lose three years of data you would be very upset.” Most of my customers are happy to log into their account through cpanel and creating a mysql backup every three months and backing up their theme templates and plugins when they add new features or make changes. Int he worst case scenario you would install a new instance of wordpress, upload your template files and plugins, import your database and could be up and running in the amount of time those tasks take. Don’t forget to reactivate your original theme.

When choosing a cheap web hosting provider it is important to ask them about how often they provide backups, how much it costs to restore a backup, how long it takes to restore a backup. I recommend createing yoru own backups on a regular basis do not depend on someone elses backup and servers as you may lose data, or have to wait a long time to get yrou data restored.

A friend of mine has been running SEO services for a few years now. He has just launched a new site  SEO services. Since I have lost my Google PR from changing server types, windows to linux (it’s not a myth). I was PR 4 Right before I switched and less than a month I lost all my hard work. I decided what can I lose by finally hiring to do my SEO for me ? Nothing in fact I’ll gain some time. I just switched from a windows to a mac and I have to say the SEO software I accustomed to on  PC is just not available on the mac at this time. Time to do my own PHP code (again). Anyways, I degress. I hired http://toprankedsitestoday.com/ to do my SEO services this week after one of my other sites hit number one on google in around 7 days! It was almost too good to be ttue. If your site has content and is W3C complaint contact them today. Their prices wont last long as more and more customers realize the value of great seo.

Want to know who should have hired his services ? ToysRUs pays $5m for toys domain. After they bought the domain they reported lost traffic and creditibility with google for transferring the domain to a new registrar. Toys.com looses google ranking.

Solarblu.net moved to number one for cheap wordpress themes after hiring thier services. After spending years reciprical trading with no avail they have since shut down thier link trading and re-focused and more traditional SEO through thier services. This in tandem with updating thier site to follow strict W3c Standards, adding a wordpress theme store, new articles and tips will help them be successful in this down economy. Solarblu.net offers unique wordpress themes for around $150 a theme and premade themes for around $45 a theme. Thier new premade theme store will be online April 1st.

In other news Singlehop.com just hired Dan Salcedo the new Communications Manager. This up and coming dedicated server company started in 2008already has a google PR value of 6 and is tough competition for other dedicated server companies. Give them a call today and tell them we sent you. Check out their new service SingleHop.mobi Beta launch!- SingleHop on your iPhone

More web hosting news coming soon.

today we are going to discuss webhosting signup and domain registration fraud. I know this is a scarey topic only divulged behind closed doors,  five floors below the company in a dungeon protected by knightsof the roundtable. hosting companies know that it exists, they have programs and departments dedicated to fighting fraudcand preventing it before it happens. it costs all parties involved time and money.

but, what about the lone reseller? big companies have the resources and experience to look at an order and say “that’s fraud” or turn away potential customers because they do not want to take on the potential risks.

even paypal and merchant systems such as authorize.net are not exactly up to speed. most reseller billing systems attempt to determine if an order is fraudelent before you process the order.

in my experience here is the best advice I can give you. get a merchant account that used authorize.net as the gateway. pay the extra fees (if any) for “fraud detection services”. run all new orders through maxmind. this system compares the credit card addresses given for orders against the ip address (from authorize.net transaction log) and gives you a score. it also can determine if an ip us going through a proxy. you can get a freelance programmer to create a way to review these accounts. ubersmith has these functions built right in, you just need a maxmind and authorize.net account.

paypal unfortunately does not provide ip addresses to vendors.
solutions? only allow customers who have previosly paid with credit cards and reviews to pay you with paypal in the future. turn on review filters at paypal.com Only accept payments from verified payal accounts. track ips in your order forms and manually review through maxmind. once again ubersmith already includes these functionalities.

chargebacks for fraudulent activity will hurt you in many ways. first you will spend too much time and money responding and fighting chargebacks as opposed to starting off with the right tools to begin with. you could lose your merchant account and not me able to process any credit card payments. every chargeback could incur a chargeback processing fee.

when fighting a chargeback you typically will suspend a hosting a billing account. you would rather spend your time talking to a customer who didn’t understand the terms of service or charge than someone wondering how you got thief credit card information.

web hosting guru asks:
as a reseller what are done if the biggest challanges you have faced ?

I installed this free wordpress theme for my customer. it looked great but needs a few modifications. I noticed in the footer template there was a long string of text. I knew that was from a php ecryption package and decided to I investigate further. the creator of the template had encoded the footer links. why? to make sure the link to thier website was still in tact. anytime someone installed his template he would automatically get a link back to his website. he took this one step further by including the div and a few other CSS tags into his php encoding. if you remove the full section of code the template no longer functions properly. Great idea!

how can you do the same thing ? first I reconend you make a copy of your project. one of the most popular ways to decrypt the code on the server is through ioncube. this software is usually installed as part of a cpanel and fantastico installation. the package to encode is a little pricey.

why would you want to encode your files? there a couple of great reasons besides the one describe above. if your doing freelance it would make your customers come back to you for modifications. secure your passwords and other sensitive code. while this is not the best practice as it could be reverse engineered it is a better security practice than leaving your information in the open for anyone to use.

value added software.
did you spend hundreds of hours programming against a vendors Api with little to no documentation? did you create a script the accomplished a much needed bussiness process? do you have employees who have acces but not much knowledge about programming?

webhosting guru asks:
what popular software that you pay to license, needs better Api documentation?

Wow first I have to say us 2008 was a big year for me. my company got bought out by a company in the I’m and my job has progressed more in the last eight months than the last four years combined.

I learned a lot about ICANN, directi, and php programming. hostingcon in Chicago really set the tone for projects until the end of the year.
I increased my network on linkedin.com, refocused our helpdesk website and worked on some challenging projects.

I’d like to hear from you!
how has the economy affected you as a freelance webdesigner ?

we are seeking writers with original content for the following topics:
php and mysql programming tips
wordpress 101 - recommended plugins, tips and theme design pointers.
web hosting guru - everything webhosting from customer service experiences to how to install popular scripts.
webmaster corner - tips and information for those new to managing thief sites reseller club - tips, tools and recomsations on how to suceed in the hosting and domain reseller business

how do you start ?
first you must be a registered user then send me a message and let me know how you would like to contribute.