Catn Hosting

Adding your SSH key to your vCluster

Joe Gardiner — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 15:53:36 +0000

SSH (Secure Shell) is a way of controlling your vCluster through a terminal command prompt. This offers great control to the user, but requires you to authenticate your SSH key with the vCluster system.

To allow your computer to connect to your vCluster through a secure shell environment, it is necessary to add your SSH key in the vCluster settings section of the CatN control panel.

We need to copy our SSH key into the text box provided, so lets lookup your SSH key.

The process is different depending on your Operating System. Below is the guide for Mac OSX and Linux shells, browse down for the Windows guide.

Getting your SSH Key – Mac OSX

First we need to open a terminal. In your mac spotlight bar, type in “Terminal”, select the first option, called… Terminal!

In the terminal screen type: “ssh-add”.

This will add your SSH key to the SSH keyring. Now we’re going to check the key has been added correctly and display it in the terminal so you can copy it into the vCluster page.

Now you need to type: “ssh-add -L” (make sure it is a capitalised letter L). This will display your SSH key. Note: I have deleted some parts o my key for security reasons.

Now select and copy (Apple key + C) the entire key, and open up your vCluster settings page in the CatN control panel.

Click into the SSH key text box and paste your key (Apple key + V).

Now your key is in the box, select “Update Keys” to add your SSH key to the vCluster.

You can now SSH in a terminal to browse your vCluster.

Getting your SSH Key – Windows

In Windows a couple of light weight applications are required, as the windows command prompt does not support ssh natively.

Head to http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html which is the download page for a program called PuTTY. You want the installer that cntains everything apart from PuTTYtel. Note: At the time of writing there is only one installer available for download.

Run the file once it’s finished downloading and install the program.

Look in your start menu and run “PuTTYgen”. This will generate your public and private ssh keys that you can then add to the CatN control panel.

Select the “Generate” option in the actions menu, and follow the instruction to move your mouse over the empty space. These random movements will generate a unique numerical key. Move the mouse until the progress bar is full.

When complete your public key will be displayed. Select the entire key, and copy it onto your clipboard (Ctrl + C).

Naviagte to the CatN Control Panel, and to the settings section of your vCluster. Select “Add New Key” and paste the clipboard into the new empty text box. When complete select, “Update Keys”.

Now we’re going to setup the PuTTY terminal. Bring up the PuTTYgen window again, and enter a password to lock your key in the “Key passphrase” text boxes.

Select “Save public key”, and choose a location on your computer to save this file. You may find it useful to create a PuTTY folder in your My Documents. Now select “Save private key”, and again, choose a location to save this file on your computer.

Now open the folder you save the two keys in, and you should see “sshprivatekey” and “sshpublickey” saved.

Double click the “sshprivatekey” icon (monitor with a hat on!), enter your password, and you can now see the icon running in the system tray.

Right click on this icon and select “New Session”, from the pop up menu.

In the PuTTY configuration window enter the hostname from the Control Panel settings panel, e.g. access1.c1.catn.com, and select “Open”.

Type your username after “Login as:”. Note: this will be the same as your vCluster name.

If successful you will be running the terminal as [username@access1 ~]$

Installing phpBB on your vCluster

Joe Gardiner — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 15:23:52 +0000

You can What you will need:

All the information from you vCluster Details page and Database Settings page. This inlcudes: access server, public IP, database server, username, database name (the same as your username), and your database password. For quick reference during the phpBB install, you may find it useful to copy these details into a text file.

The newest version of phpBB, available to download from phpbb.com.

A file extractor that is compatible with the .zip format. OSX and Windows handle this format natively.

An FTP program. You can use a program like FileZilla, or if you use Firefox web browser, there is an FTP add on available called Fire FTP. If your not sure which client to use have a look at this article.

A text editor. Notepad or Text Edit will both be fine.

A web browser. We like Firefox.

The official phpBB install guide is available here.

Getting Started

Unzip your downloaded phpBB install to a folder on your desktop. Installing phpBB is relatively simple so we’re going to proceed directly to the upload stage.

Uploading

Navigate to the vCluster settings page on the CatN Control Panel, and make sure you enter a password for Access (FTP, SFTP, SSH).

Fire up your FTP Client (I shall be using File Zilla in this tutorial) and take a look at the main screen.

Remember the settings we copied into a text file? We’re going to use them now.

In the “Host” field, copy in Access Server name. eg. access1.c1.catn.com.

In the “Username” field, enter your username.

In the “Password” field, enter the password you have just created on the Settings Page of the Control Panel.

Leave the “Port” field blank, as FileZilla will use the default port: 21.

Once all the information is entered, click “Quick Connect”

If successful you will now be able to see a navigation panel showing the folder tree of your vCluster. Navigate to “sites/username/vhosts”, right click in this open directory and select “create directory”.

In the Create Directory dialogue enter “phpbb.username.vc.catn.com”. Then, inside this new directory create another directory named “http”. To learn more about our vhosting and multiple domains click here.

Open up the phpBB folder you extracted to your Desktop and select the entire contents, (Ctrl-A on Windows, Apple Key-A in OSX), and drag them into the newly created http folder open in FileZilla.

You will see a progress bar as the files are copied into the directory.

If successful the folder “sites/username/vhosts/phpbb.username.vc.catn.com/http” will now contain the phpBB directory files you have just uploaded.

Installing phpBB

Now we’re now going to install phpBB using your web browser. Fire it up and navigate to phpbb.username.vc.catn.com. You will be directed to this page:

Click on the “Install” tab to begin the installation process. When you proceed to the next step, after viewing the basic system requirements, you can see a list of the installation requirements, including the databases vCluster supports. phpBB is 100% compatible with our system so you can select “Start Install” to continue.

In the next screen we will enter the database details that we copied from the Database Settings section of the CatN Control Panel.

You can leave the first field, “Database Type” on its default value, “MySQL with MySQLi extenstion”.

In the “Database server hostname or DSN” field enter the name of your database server, for example, xserve1.dc.fubra.net.

Leave the next field, “Database server port” empty, as our database servers operate on standard ports.

In the “Database Name” field, enter the name you copied into the text file. (Note: this will be the same as your username and vCluster name.)

In the “Database Username” field, enter your username. Again, this will be the same as your vCluster name.

In the “Database Password” field, enter the password you copied into a text file. You can change your password in the Database Setting section of the CatN Control Panel.

In the “Prefix for tables in database” field leave the default, “phpbb_”.

Select next step, if you have been successful, the phpbb install will display this message. Select proceed to next step.

In the “Administrator Settings” screen enter your username and password for the admin account, as well as the email address you wish to receive alerts to. Once you have entered this information proceed to the next step.

You will be displayed with another success screen, click to continue. The configuration file will then be written, and if successful you will be notified. Again, click to continue.

The next screen with advanced settings are dependant ont he user and their current resources. Enter your email and SMTP settings if this resource is available to you. If not, leave the default settings. In the “Server URL Settings” section, the only option you should change is the Cookie Secure option, and this, only if you have purchased an SSL certificate for your domain. If not, leave this to the default setting, “disabled”.

Once you have completed this page click “proceed to next step”.

The database tables will then be created. If all the information was entered correctly you will receive this message. Proceed to the next step.

The final stage will give an overview of your complete installation. You can now select the “Login” button to enter your new phpBB dashboard.

Congratulations on your successful install!

Multiple domains on your vCluster

Joe Gardiner — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 14:50:25 +0000

Your vCluster can be used to host multiple domains if you subscribe to the Standard package. This guide will show you how…

What you will need…

An FTP client, we like FileZilla. It is cross platform and free!

A text editor. Notepad or TextEdit will both be fine.

A web browser. We like Firefox.

A text file with all the access settings from your vCluster page. This will include the access server address (e.g. access1.c1.catn.com), your private IP, your access username, (same as your vCluster name) and your access password, (this can be changed in the settings screen). Note: For security reasons, you should delete this text file after use.

Getting Started…

The first step is to connect to the access server and create a directory for the new domain. In this tutorial I will be using FileZilla. Fire up your FTP client, and have a look at the connection input boxes. We are going to enter the required server information that we copied into the text file at the start of this tutorial.

In the “Host” field enter the access server name. In the example you can see I have used “access1.c1.catn.com”.

In the “Username” field enter the username you copied. (This will be the same as your vCluster name).

In the “Password” field enter the password you copied in. You can change this password at anytime through the Database Settings section of the Control Panel.

You can leave the “Port” field empty, as FileZilla will use the default, 21.

Once you’ve completed the fields click Quick Connect to connect to the server.

Once FileZilla connects to the access server, the folder tree will be displayed.

We will be creating our domain directory inside the vhosts folder. The full path you need to navigate to is: /sites/vclustername/vhosts .

Create a new dirctory inside the vhosts folder by right clicking on vhosts, and selecting “Create Directory”

In order for the new sub-domain to be recognised by the DNS, the folder name much match your main vCluster domain with the addition of the new sub-domain. For example, my main vCluster domain is joegardiner.vc.catn.com, so in order to successfully create a new sub-domain I will name the directory test.joegardiner.vc.catn.com. This naming convention is vital in order to successfully create multiple domains on your vCluster.

Do this now for your new sub-domain. For the purposes of this tutorial I will create a new domain called “test.joegardiner.vc.catn.com”.

This newly created sub-domain can now have any php app, framework, or CMS uploaded to it. See my other help guides for installing various CMS’s.

Finally in order to enable dynamic content on this new sub-domain, we need to create a “.craccess” file. On you local machine, start up your preferred text editor, and copy and paste the code from below into a new page.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !\.(gif|jpe?g|png|css|js|ico)$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://YOUR PRIVATE IP/$1 [P,L]

Replace the text “YOUR PRIVATE IP”, with the private IP address given on the vCluster settings page of the CatN Control Panel.

Save this file as “.craccess”, somewhere you can reach it easily, like your Desktop. We need to upload this file to the route of your sub-domain.In order to do this we need to enable viewing hidden files in FileZilla. This is a simple fix, in version 3.x click on server, then select “Force showing hidden files”.

Now using FileZilla we can find the newly created .craccess file and drag it across into the sub-domain root we created.

Once the file is uploaded make sure that the text editor you used hasn’t added any file extensions to the .craccess file you created, such as .txt or .rtf. If they did, simply right click on the file and select rename to remove the extension.

Congratulations, you have successfuly created a new domain on your CatN vCluster.

Installing Drupal on your vCluster

Joe Gardiner — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 09:26:04 +0000

What you will need:

All the information from you vCluster Details page and Database Settings page. This inlcudes: access server, public IP, database server, username, database name (the same as your username), and your database password. For quick reference during the Drupal install, you may find it useful to copy these details into a text file.

The newest version of Drupal, available to download from drupal.org

A file extractor that is compatible with the .zip format. OSX and Windows handle this format natively.

A text editor. Notepad or Text Edit will both be fine.

A web browser. We like Firefox.

The official Drupal install guide is available here.

Getting Started

Unzip your downloaded Drupal install to a folder on your desktop. We are now going to copy the “default.settings.php” file and change permissions. This step is vital for a successful Drupal install.

MacOSX and Linux Terminal

Open a terminal. You can either type terminal in your finder/search bar, or look in application -> Utilities in OSX.

Type: “cd desktop/drupal-6.15/sites/default” note: the Drupal directory name will change with different versions.

Check you have the correct files in the default directory by typing “ls”. You should have “default.settings.php” displayed.

Now we’re going to make a copy of the “default.settings.php” file and rename it. We need both files for the install to be successful.

Type: “cp default.settings.php settings.php” Now type “ls” to display the new settings.php file along side default.settings.php.

Finally we need to change the permissions on the file to give access to the Drupal installer. This is one simple command.

Type: “chmod a+w settings.php”

That’s it! You can close your terminal.

Windows OS Command Prompt

Open a Windows command prompt by typing “cmd” in your search bar.

Type: “cd desktop/drupal-6.15/sites/default” note: the Drupal directory name will change with different versions.

Check you have the correct files in the default directory by typing “dir”. You should have “default.settings.php” displayed.

Now we’re going to make a copy of the “default.settings.php” file and rename it. We need both files for the install to be successful.

Type: “COPY default.settings.php settings.php” Now type “ls” to display the new settings.php file along side default.settings.php.

Finally we need to change the permissions on the file to give access to the Drupal installer. Navigate to the desktop/drupal-6.15/sites/default folder through Windows explorer. Right click on the settings.php file and select the “Security” tab. Select “Edit” and choose the Full Control check box under the SYSTEM permissions list.

That’s it, you can close this window.

Uploading

Navigate to the vCluster settings page on the CatN Control Panel, and make sure you enter a password for Access (FTP, SFTP, SSH).

Fire up your FTP Client (I shall be using File Zilla in this tutorial) and take a look at the main screen.

Remember the settings we copied into a text file? We’re going to use them now.

In the “Host” field, copy in Access Server name. eg. access1.c1.catn.com.

In the “Username” field, enter your username.

In the “Password” field, enter the password you have just created on the Settings Page of the Control Panel.

Leave the “Port” field blank, as FileZilla will use the default port: 21.

Once all the information is entered, click “Quick Connect”

In the Create Directory dialogue enter “drupal.username.vc.catn.com”. Then, inside this new directory create another directory named “http”. To learn more about our vhosting and multiple domains click here.

Open up the Drupal folder you extracted to your Desktop and select the entire contents, (Ctrl-A on Windows, Apple Key-A in OSX), and drag them into the newly created http folder open in FileZilla.

You will see a progress bar as the files are copied into the directory.

If successful the folder “sites/username/vhosts/drupal.username.vc.catn.com/http” will now contain the Drupal directory files you have just uploaded.

Installing Drupal

Now we’re now going to install Drupal using your web browser. Fire it up and navigate to drupal.username.vc.catn.com.

Drupal will take you through the installation procedure starting here:

Choose your language to continue. On the next screen we’re going to enter our database information.

Leave the default “mysqli” option checked.

In the “Database Name:” field enter your database name. Note: your username and database name will always be the same.

In the “Username:” field enter your username.

In the “Password:”field, enter the password you copied from the Database Settings section of the control panel.

Now we’re going to change the advanced options, so click on the drop down menu arrow.

The “Database Host:” field requires the name of your database server. Again, this can be found on the Database Settings section of the control panel and will resemble this: “xserve1.dc.fubra.net”

You can leave the “Database Port” field blank.

I recommend adding a table prefix for the Drupal database, especially if you are using multiple domains and different CMS’s, so lets enter “drupal_” as our prefix.

Once you have entered all this information select “Save and Continue” to move on.

If you were successful you will be directed to the “Configure Site” page.

Now enter your site name, and the email address you wish to receive alerts to. Unlike other CMS’s you can choose a unique username for the administrator account, instead of the default, however, unless you are completing this install for someone else to administer, it is often simpler to use “admin” as the administrator username. Once you have decided on a name, enter the other personal information, and select your time zone.

Once you have entered all the information, select “Save and Continue”, and if successful will be directed to this screen:

Click the link to go to your new sites administrator section. You will automatically be logged in as the admin account. Success, you have completed your install of Drupal.

Installing Joomla! on your vCluster

Joe Gardiner — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 13:57:18 +0000

What you will need:

All the information from you vCluster Details page and Database Settings page. This inlcudes: access server, public IP, database server, username, database name (the same as your username), and your database password. For quick reference during the Joomla! install, you may find it useful to copy these details into a text file.

The newest version of Joomla!, available to download from joomla.org

A file extractor that is compatible with the .zip format. OSX and Windows handle this format natively.

A text editor. Notepad or Text Edit will both be fine.

A web browser. We like Firefox.

The official Joomla! install guide can be found here

Getting Started

Unzip your downloaded Joomla! install to a folder on your desktop.

Navigate to the vCluster settings page on the CatN Control Panel, and make sure you enter a password for Access (FTP, SFTP, SSH).

Fire up your FTP Client (I shall be using File Zilla in this tutorial) and take a look at the main screen.

Remember the settings we copied into a text file? We’re going to use them now.

In the “Host” field, copy in Access Server name. eg. access1.c1.catn.com.

In the “Username” field, enter your username.

In the “Password” field, enter the password you have just created on the Settings Page of the Control Panel.

Leave the “Port” field blank, as FileZilla will use the default port: 21.

Once all the information is entered, click “Quick Connect”

In the Create Directory dialogue enter “joomla.username.vc.catn.com”. Then, inside this new directory create another directory named “http”. To learn more about our vhosting and multiple domains click here.

Open up the Joomla! folder you extracted to your Desktop and select the entire contents, (Ctrl-A on Windows, Apple Key-A in OSX), and drag them into the newly created http folder open in FileZilla.

You will see a progress bar as the files are copied into the directory.

If successful the folder “sites/username/vhosts/joomla.username.vc.catn.com/http” will now contain the Joomla! directory files you have just uploaded.

Installing Joomla!

Now we’re now going to install Joomla! using your web browser. Fire it up and navigate to the name of the Joomla! directory you created. e.g. joomla.username.vc.catn.com

Joomla! will take you through the installation procedure starting here:

Select your language and click “next”.

In the next screen you can see that vCluster satisfies all the install requirements. Click “next” to continue.

Review the GNU license and if you agree, click “next”.

Now we are going to enter the database details details you copied into a text file at the start of this guide.

In the “Host Name” field enter the name of the database host. e.g. xserve1.dc.fubra.net

In the “Username” field enter your username. (This will be exactly the same as your vCluster name).

In the “Password” field enter your database password.

In the “Database Name” field enter the name of your database. This will also be the same as your vCluster name, and username.

Click on the “Advanced Settings” drop down tab. In the “Table Prefix” field enter: “joomla_”

Once all these details are entered, click “next” to continue.

In the next screen leave the default setting of “No” for Enable FTP File system Layer.

Click “Next” to continue.

Fill in the main configuration fields; Site Names, Email address, Password. If you are a new Joomla user, it if strongly recommended that you install the Default Sample Data. This will include default themes and posts, to popular a sample site, helping you understand the structure of a Joomla! web site.

Once you have completed this screen you will be directed to the final installation screen with this text:

PLEASE REMEMBER TO COMPLETELY
REMOVE THE INSTALLATION DIRECTORY.
You will not be able to proceed beyond this point until the installation directory has been removed. This is a security feature of Joomla!.

Open up File Zilla again, (If you closed it down, look back through the guide to reconnect and navigate to the Joomla! directory), and navigate to /sites/username/vhosts/joomla.username.vc.catn.com/http. In this directory you will be able to see the files you copied onto the vCluster at the start of the guide. Find the directory named “installation”, right click on it, and select delete.

You must delete the “installation” directory before you can click on the admin button and navigate to the Joomla! control panel.

After selecting “Admin”, enter the username “admin”, and the password you entered during the install.

Installing Wordpress on your vCluster

Joe Gardiner — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 17:00:12 +0000

What you will need:

All the information from you vCluster Details page and Database Settings page. This inlcudes: access server, public IP, database server, username, database name (the same as your username), and your database password. For quick reference during the Wordpress install, you may find it useful to copy these details into a text file.

The newest version of Wordpress, available to download from wordpress.org

A file extractor that is compatible with the .zip format. OSX and Windows handle this format natively.

A text editor. Notepad or Text Edit will both be fine.

A web browser. We like Firefox.

The official Wordpress install guide can be found here.

Getting Started

Unzip your downloaded Wordpress install to a folder on your desktop.

Open the newly unzipped Wordpress folder, locate the file called “wp-config-sample.php”, and rename it to “wp-config.php”.

Open the newly named “wp-config.php” in you text editor and locate the MySQL Settings section.

After the ‘DB_NAME’ field, enter your username exactly as it appears in the Database Settings page, as this is the same as your database name.

After the ‘DB_USER’ field, enter your username.

After the ‘DB_PASSWORD’ field, enter your Database password. Note: This is different to your Access password, and can be changed in the Database Settings screen.

After the ‘DB_HOST’ field, enter the server name in the Database Settings screen. eg. xserve1.dc.fubra.net.

You can ignore the two remaining fields, (‘DB_CHARSET’ & ‘DB_COLLATE’).

Save and close the completed “wp-config.php”.

Uploading

Navigate to the vCluster settings page on the CatN Control Panel, and make sure you enter a password for Access (FTP, SFTP, SSH).

Fire up your FTP Client (I shall be using File Zilla in this tutorial) and take a look at the main screen.

Remember the settings we copied into a text file? We’re going to use them now.

In the “Host” field, copy in Access Server name. eg. access1.c1.catn.com.

In the “Username” field, enter your username.

In the “Password” field, enter the password you have just created on the Settings Page of the Control Panel.

Leave the “Port” field blank, as FileZilla will use the default port: 21.

Once all the information is entered, click “Quick Connect”

In the Create Directory dialogue enter “wp.username.vc.catn.com”. Then, inside this new directory create another directory named “http”. To learn more about our vhosting and multiple domains click here.

Open up the Wordpress folder you extracted to your Desktop and select the entire contents, (Ctrl-A on Windows, Apple Key-A in OSX), and drag them into the newly created http folder open in FileZilla.

You will see a progress bar as the files are copied into the directory.

If successful the folder “sites/username/vhosts/wp.username.vc.catn.com/http” will now contain the Wordpress directory files you have just uploaded.

Installing WP

Now we’re now going to install Wordpress using your web browser. Fire it up and navigate to the Directory name we just created: wp.username.vc.catn.com with the addition of “/wp-admin/install.php” eg. wp.username.vc.catn.com/wp-admin/install.php

Wordpress will take you through the installation procedure starting here:

Enter the relevant information and proceed. On the next screen, make a note or copy the admin password that has been generated, as you will require this to enter the Wordpress Dashboard.

Click “Login”, and enter the username as “admin” and the password you have copied from the previous screen.

Success! You will now have access to the Wordpress Dashboard and have completed the install. Note: we and Wordpress recommend changing your password to something you will remember immediately!

Hosting: Your options

Joe Gardiner — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 13:26:06 +0000

Choosing hosting is more than just choosing the company that offers the best features for you. Hosting products can vary drastically based on the infastructure the company offers, and some companies offer more than one type of hosting setup.

At CatN we think we’ve found the perfect solution, balancing performance with security, but lets look at the other options so you can see why our solution is so good!

Free Hosting

Free hosting is normally used by web hosting companies to introduce their product to the market, so resources offered to the user are normally small, leading this type of hosting to only really be used by small sites with low traffic. In almost 100% of cases, free hosting services will use virtual server hosting, with tough restrictions on data transfer allowance and storage. Free hosting services will often halt all traffic to your site with no warning if you exceed these allowances.

Shared Hosting

Virtual Hosting

Virtual hosting is the most common form of hosting offered by providers. It is very cost effective as each customer has their own small section or partition on the server, meaning the cost of running one server could be spread across 100 websites. Multiple host names for the same web server are used so that each partition can be viewed as if it were an individual server.

Vhosting is popular due to the low cost endured by the company providing the service, however, Vhosting is not easily or cheaply scalable, and executing scripts in a php environment is insecure.

Clustered Hosting

A type of hosting that spreads the web site across numerous “nodes” or servers, spreading the computation load, traffic, and eliminating the risk of single points of failure. Clustered hosting is useful when bearing the load of traffic spikes as long as resources are available across the cluster. Clustered hosting is extremely easy to scale, by simply adding more nodes to a network the cluster resources grow, increasing performance.

Clustered infrastructures can be costly to implement and maintain due to the larger quantity of servers required, restraining the growth of clustered hosting products available. However, with clever network design these costs can be reduced, and new services are being released, especially by the larger hosting companies.

Dedicated Hosting

A single server in a datacentre that will pre-agreed specifications and will only host the one customers website. A dedicated server can have anything installed on it, and will offer greater performance than a standard shared hosting product. However dedicated servers are much more expensive than shared hosting, and are not easily scalable, as once greater is performance is needed by the customer, the only solution is upgrading to a more powerful server.

Our Solution

Our vCluster provides the perfect solution between performance and security with a private, horizontal partition on our web hosting cluster. It is easily scaled, and with load balancing across a two tiered approach (static and dynamic content delivery), we also provide excellent performance. We have developed a unique solution to the security issues when executing php scripts on shared hosting, by restricting blah blah (See: Securing mod_php without the Vesectomy). Combining our hostig product with super fast MySQL SSD’s, CatN vCluster provides the most powerful solution for all your hosting needs.

Wordpress VIP hosting for the rest of us…

Joe Gardiner — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 14:22:53 +0000

As you may have read, TechCrunch, a blog focused on profiling and reviewing internet products, was hacked a couple of weeks ago. They were using Rackspace’s hosting service, but if you run a traceroute on the TechCrunch domain you’ll see that it’s now pointing to wordpress.com. Even more of a giveaway, they have changed the hosting tag in the footer of their site, so it now says, “Powered by WordPress.com VIP“.

Make that Change?

It’s easy to understand why a web site like TechCrunch would have knee jerk reaction to their site being compromised and change host. They’re a large company who have been operating since 2005, have built a large following, and have expanded into Japan as well as focusing on specific parts of the internet market, such as mobile, hardware, and new startups.

But why change to Wordpress VIP?

Wordpress VIP

Wordpress.com VIP hosting is aimed at businesses with a high profile, or new start ups that have gained the interest of wordpress.com. They consider you a good candidate for VIP hosting if your receiving around 1 million views of your blog a month. They host your site across 1000 servers in three different data centres, and offer the obligatory 24/7 support, as well as hourly backups and various other generic features, (spam protection, site map, etc…)

The description of this hosting product actually says, “Because of the nature of this program it is not open to the public”, and they’re not joking; prices start at $500 per blog per month with an initial start up fee of $1,500 per blog, and that’s for non-dedicated hosting!

Note: this service is on invite only, wordpress.com sign you up at their discretion.

Clearly, this type of package is not for everybody, so at CatN we’ve created a service to compete with wordpress.com but at a much more reasonable price.

Why CatN VIP?

CatN VIP Wordpress hosting really is for everybody. Our product is suitable for a personal blogger, a new startup or an established Wordpress site, due to our flexible pricing structure and easy horizontal scalability. Everyone pays for the base package at £25 per month, giving 100 GB data transfer allowance, and over use is charged on a per GB basis, so you only ever pay for what you use. If a customer is regularly going over their allowance then we’ll contact them directly to arrange a more suitable package, aiming to keep their costs down.

The same goes for our support. Every customer receives 24×7x365 on site engineer support to deal with platform problems that may occur. We also offer a premium support package which can be arranged on request, (support@catn.com), and will be priced and planned to suit the size of the users requirements, again, ensuring the customer is only paying for what they really need. Our support package is for anyone who needs help or peace of mind running their Wordpress site, and can be built for absolute beginners needing a helping hand, or corporate users wishing to improve site performance.

We don’t use a hybrid grid system to host your site. We have developed a secure mod_php system that is more secure than the standard php shared hosting setup. Our lead techie, Mark Sutton, has gone into great depth about our secured system, have a look at his blog post here for more information.

Most importantly, when you receive spikes in traffic after you blog has been linked on digg, or stumble upon, etc, we guarantee to still be serving requests under a 20th of a second.

Why Wordpress is the most popular CMS…

Joe Gardiner — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 17:23:41 +0000

Is Wordpress the best blog/content management system available? We think so, and in 2009 the Open Source CMS Awards thought so too! Lets have a look at what makes Wordpress so popular.

According to Technorati’s most 100 visited blogs and CMS wire’s research, and Pingdom’s recent review of the blogging market, Wordpress blogs claim at least a 27% market share. If the wordpress.com hosted blogs are to be included, that figure could be as high as 36%.

Considering there are at least 5 main competitors (Typepad, Blogsmith, Movable Type, Gawker, Drupal) it is reasonable to claim that Wordpress is the most popular blog/CMS platform around. Granted, Wordpress is a blog platform first, but it’s CMS capabilities have come along in leaps and bounds over the years and the upcoming version 3.0 is likely to go even further.

From Community to Ecosystem

So how did Wordpress get here? Being open source certainly helped a lot. Both Wordpress and the next most popular platform, Movable Type, have certainly gained exposure through being open source.

The open source model can be a fast way to build a community – that is users and developers communicating their experience with the product and release guides, plugins and themes. At some point though, the community reaches a critical mass where it becomes an ecosystem. This is the point where community members start to build their own commercial products around the platform. At this point a product can consider itself established.

Wordpress has certainly made this transition, which has allowed it to edge in front of the competition. Just look at the huge number of plugins and themes available, both free and commercial.

Ease of Installation

With Wordpress, installation is extremely easy! All that is needed is a MySQL database and FTP login. From there the process is a case of submitting a simple form. Some web hosts even offer an automated tool such as Fantastico, through cPanel or some similar product. The ease of installation is one of the many reasons Wordpress is so popular, and if further support is needed there’s some excellent documentation available at the Wordpress Codex.

There’s a plugin for that!

Wordpress has a huge number of plugins available, and almost all of them are free. At the point of writing, wordpress.org lists 8,211 plugins available for download, so this is the best place to start looking.

As with installing Wordpress itself, installing plugins and widgets couldn’t be much simpler. Simply upload the plugin to the right place, and enable it via the control panel. Widgets can be dragged and dropped into place.

If you are a developer, Wordpress makes it easy to write your own plugins too. Plugins are written in the PHP scripting language, and integrate easily using the Wordpress Plugin API. Again, the Wordpress Codex is an excellent resource for plugin authors, and gives a list of programming do’s and don’ts!

Themes

For many, look and feel is probably one of the highest priorities when starting a blog, and it’s here that Wordpress really comes into it’s own. There are even more themes available than plugins, and again, many of them are free.

Some of the better theme sites are: Theme Forest, Woo themes, and Theme Lab.

Themes can be used straight out of the box, or used as a starting point and customised it to suit your individual requirements. The template files are laid out clearly, easy to read and modular, so can easily mixed and matched. The “Wordpress loop” gives the power to further customise individual pages by changing headers footers, or main content pages depending on external factors such as category or title of the post.

Many businesses have capitalised on the ease of theming a Wordpress blog, and have combined their styling with various plugins to create excellent, dynamic web sites, that are steps ahead of the classic blog style you may expect. Here are a few of my favourite examples:

Dashboard

The Wordpress dashboard is extremely simple to use. Designs can be updated easily and as regularly as you want, without having to update any of your content itself. The dashboard enables multiple users to be added to the site, with roles ranging from Administrator to Editor and Reviewer. This enables blog operators to keep tight controls over what individual users are able to do on the blog.

The post and page creation options are excellent, and highly accessible with visual and html editing views, and single-click page previews. Newly added content can be saved as draft, or awaiting review, and once completed tagged and categorised for organisation within the site.

The dashboard also offers excellent media management, with gallery views for your media and built-in editing tools. All this gives power to the less technical user, who no longer has to wrestle with image editing software. Uploading media makes use of a built-in wizard, and offers preview options before importing into a post.

Comments are easily handled, and through the settings panel, a default response can be set. Rules for allowing comments are customisable to require approval or blocked all together. Integration with the Gravatar service improves the appearance of visitor comments further.

Conclusion

The popularity of any blog/CMS platform can be measured not only by the number of domains, but by the community and ecosystem surrounding it. This is where Wordpress really stands out from the crowd.

Most developers will pick one platform and stick to it in the absense of a compelling reason to change, and the ever growing Wordpress community is evidence of that. With more users and blogs, bugs can be found and resolved very quickly.

The size of community that Wordpress enjoys is to be envied by any upcoming product and this is without a doubt the secret to Wordpress’s long term success. In short Wordpress has a formula that works and is so far ahead that this is unlikely to change in the near future.

In 2010 the Wordpress developers will be working towards a major milestone – the release of version 3.0. Although the feature list is not set in stone yet, the main improvements are said to be greater focus on Wordpress as a CMS system and the integration of multi-site functionality currently provided by Wordpress-MU. In short, Wordpress is a force to contend with.

Speculations on the Facebook PHP Rumours…

Mark Sutton — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 11:28:07 +0000

Rumours abound this weekend, and as usual in such matters, details are thin on the ground. Did that meeting really happen? And who is this lonesome coder supposedly re-writing PHP for the last two years? Is it a new runtime or a compiler? Someone knows, and for sure something is afoot, but what is it?

Most of the chatter out there on the Interwebs suggests ‘either’ a re-write of the runtime ‘or’ a compiler. But reading between the lines of this interview with an anonymous FBer, the announcement sounds likely to be ‘both’.

HyperPHP, or HPHP appears to provide a way to “compile” your PHP scripts. Well, I can see why that would make PHP run faster and maybe fix some of PHPs design-level weaknesses, but that’s only part of the picture. How do you then connect this compiled script back to your webserver? I refer you back to my last blog – CGI offers poor performance and FastCGI can be brittle and nasty to work with.

Which leaves two probables – either they’ve created a new mod_php for Apache, or in true Facebook style they’ve gone and hooked it up with a more modern, even driven, non blocking, c100k-busting daddy of a web server. Imagine that.

It won’t be a drop in replacement though, and it’s unlikely to make a scratch in mod_php’s existing install base. But it might just be interesting enough to draw some of the Ruby and Python strays back into the fold.

As for that meeting, it’s my guess that Facebook want to call it PHP-something, and for that they’ll need permission from the PHP developers. We’ll know more tomorrow.

So lets wait and see what the announcement brings… We’ll certainly be taking it for a spin, whatever it turns out to be, and reporting back here in due course.