Joomla! is an award-winning Content Management System (CMS) that will help you build websites and other powerful online applications. Best of all, Joomla! is an open source solution that is freely available to everybody. Joomla! is used all over the world to power everything from simple, personal homepages to complex corporate web applications. Joomla! can be used to easily manage every aspect of your website, from adding content and images to updating a product catalog or taking online reservations.

Joomla web hosting
All of vexxhost’s web hosting plans are equipped with Fantastico which allows you to use vexxhost for Joomla hosting, the advantage of our web hosting plans versus other web hosting plans is that you can install Joomla by simply locating the Fantastico button in your web hosting control panel and selecting “Joomla” on the left side of the page, the instructions are very easy and simple to follow on that page and you should be up and running within minutes.

cPanel web hosting or other web hosting

1. Make sure that your web hosting company supports Joomla
   Frequently, people go through all the other steps to be stopped at a step eventually because they forgot to make sure that their web hosting company supports the requirements of Joomla. It would be best to verify with your web hosting company if they support the following requirements:
   http://help.joomla.org/content/view/1938/310/
2. Download the Joomla software package
   You should download the Joomla script by visiting the following link: http://joomlacode.org/gf/project/joomla/frs/?action=FrsReleaseBrowse&frs_package_id=3587 — Joomla is available for no charge weather you are using it for personal or business usage. You should pick the latest version and preferably the zip file.
3. Extract the downloaded file and upload it to your web hosting account
   Once you have downloaded the ZIP file, you should extract it on your computer using a utility, if you have Windows XP or newer, you should be able to open the ZIP file directly, if not, you can simply download a utility such as WinZIP, WinRAR and extract the archive with it
4. Create a database for Joomla usage
   One of Joomla’s new features is a support for a wide range of database software; the most common database software used on shared web hosting services is MySQL. If you are not using cPanel for your web hosting, you should check with your control panel manual. You should login to your control panel and click on “MySQL databases”, when the page is loaded, enter the name of your new Joomla database in the “new database” text box and click on the “create database” button. You should see a message that says that your database has been created. Take a note of that database name.
5. Create a database user for Joomla
   The following steps are for cPanel only, if you have a different control panel, you should instruct your control panel manual. While still in your control panel main page, click on “MySQL databases”. Scroll down to the “New user” section and enter a username & a password in their respective fields, take note of that username and password as you’ll need them later and press the “Create user” button, you should get a message that confirms it by says the username was created successfully.
6. Give permissions to the created user to the database
   The following steps are for cPanel only, if you have a different control panel, you should instruct your control panel manual. While still in your control panel main page, click on “MySQL databases”. Go to the “Add user to database” section and select the user that you have created in step 5 and select the database that you have created in step 4 and press the “submit” button, you should get a page with all the MySQL privilages, you should select the “ALL PRIVILEGES” which should automatically select all of the other checkboxes, after doing that, click on “Make Changes” to commit the database assignment and you should get a confirmation that the user has been assigned to the database.
7. Complete the Joomla installation
   To complete the installation, you should visit your website to the directory where you uploaded your Joomla files at and the installation wizard provided by Joomla should be there, the rest of the installation process should be seamless from there when you will be asked to enter database information, you should enter the username/password/database name that you noted earlier, you might also need to change the CHMOD some directories so that should be done using FTP.
8. Delete the install directory
   Once you’re done installing everything and your forum is done and ready, you should delete the “install” directory as it is a big potential security risk that isn’t worth taking.

phpBB3 (codenamed “Olympus”) is an open source online discussion (forum) software which is available free of charge for both personal & enterprise use with the GPL license. phpBB 3 includes a new set of features, updates to old features and security measures from the previous version of phpBB. There is a page demonstrating the changes between both on the phpBB 3 website

phpBB 3 web hosting
All of vexxhost’s web hosting plans are equipped with Fantastico which allows you to use vexxhost for phpBB hosting, the advantage of our web hosting plans versus other web hosting plans is that you can install phpBB by simply locating the Fantastico button in your web hosting control panel and selecting “phpBB” on the left side of the page, the instructions are very easy and simple to follow on that page and you should be up and running within minutes.

cPanel web hosting or other web hosting

1. Make sure that your web hosting company supports phpBB
   Frequently, people go through all the other steps to be stopped at a step eventually because they forgot to make sure that their web hosting company supports the requirements of phpBB 3. It would be best to verify with your web hosting company if they support the following requirements.
2. Download the phpBB 3 software package
   You should download the phpBB 3 script by visiting the following link — phpBB 3 is available for no charge weather you are using it for personal or business usage. You should pick the “Full package” as we will be installing phpBB 3 from scratch.
3. Extract the downloaded file and upload it to your web hosting account
   Once you have downloaded the ZIP file, you should extract it on your computer using a utility, if you have Windows XP or newer, you should be able to open the ZIP file directly, if not, you can simply download a utility such as WinZIP, WinRAR and extract the archive with it. Once you have extracted the files from the ZIP file, you should upload the content of your phpBB3 directory into your website (to the directory where you’d like).
4. Create a database for phpBB 3 usage
   One of phpBB 3’s new features is a support for a wide range of database software; the most common database software used on shared web hosting services is MySQL. If you are not using cPanel for your web hosting, you should check with your control panel manual. You should login to your control panel and click on “MySQL databases”, when the page is loaded, enter the name of your new phpBB 3 database in the “new database” text box and click on the “create database” button. You should see a message that says that your database has been created. Take a note of that database name.
5. Create a database user for phpBB 3
   The following steps are for cPanel only, if you have a different control panel, you should instruct your control panel manual. While still in your control panel main page, click on “MySQL databases”. Scroll down to the “New user” section and enter a username & a password in their respective fields, take note of that username and password as you’ll need them later and press the “Create user” button, you should get a message that confirms it by says the username was created successfully.
6. Give permissions to the created user to the database
   The following steps are for cPanel only, if you have a different control panel, you should instruct your control panel manual. While still in your control panel main page, click on “MySQL databases”. Go to the “Add user to database” section and select the user that you have created in step 5 and select the database that you have created in step 4 and press the “submit” button, you should get a page with all the MySQL privilages, you should select the “ALL PRIVILEGES” which should automatically select all of the other checkboxes, after doing that, click on “Make Changes” to commit the database assignment and you should get a confirmation that the user has been assigned to the database.
7. Complete the phpBB 3 installation
   To complete the installation, you should visit your website to the directory where you uploaded your phpBB 3 files at and the installation wizard provided by phpBB 3 should be there, the rest of the installation process should be seamless from there when you will be asked to enter database information, you should select “MySQL” and enter the username/password/database name that you noted earlier, you might also need to change the CHMOD some directories so that should be done using FTP.
8. Delete the install directory
   Once you’re done installing everything and your forum is done and ready, you should delete the “install” directory as it is a big potential security risk that isn’t worth taking.

Wordpress is one of the class leading blogs and the one of the most used from personal to enterprise size blogs, proved stability by hosting popular blogs for even automotive manufacturers, most of the people enjoy the facility of the administrator control panel however the installation process behind it is slighty complicated however it depends on what type of hosting do you have.

VEXXHOST WordPress hosting
All of our plans include Fantastico, so instead of going through this whole document in the pain of installing WordPress it, all you need to do is enter Fantastico from your control panel in cPanel, click on “WordPress”, insert the path you want it installed, the username and password for the administrator panel and you’re ready and good to go

Other web hosting platforms

• Head to the WordPress website page http://wordpress.org/download/ and click on “Download”, it should download a zip file that you will place somewhere on your hard disk and unzip it, you’ll have a bunch of folders and files starting with wp
• Upload the extracted folderto your account, you should usually check with your provider’s control panel as there are different ways to login via FTP, we cannot go in detail about every single control panel out there however asking your support staff should help you. A free and good FTP client is SmartFTP at http://smartftp.com
• Create a new clean MySQL database, again this is something that is control panel specific, the procedure is very different from control panel to control panel however in cPanel, it is the easiest to be done using a Wizard, more information and a video tutorial is included here, http://www.cpanel.net/media/tutorials/mysqlwizard.htm — Make sure you get a MySQL username, password and database name to continue our installation.
• Rename the wp-config-sample.php to wp-config.php and replace the fields for it to appear something like the following
  define('DB_NAME', 'putyourdbnamehere'); // The name of the database
define('DB_USER', 'usernamehere'); // Your MySQL username
define('DB_PASSWORD', 'yourpasswordhere'); // ...and password
  Most of the time, you will not need to modify your DB_HOST unless your hosts tell you too, after uploading the renamed wp-config.php file into the main root directory of your hosting, simply go to http://yourdomain.com/dir/wp-admin/install.php where dir is the directory you uploaded WordPress to, if you uploaded it to the root directory of your account, then simply go to http://yourdomain.com/wp-admin/install.php and following the instructions.

That’s basically it for installing WordPress on your web hosting, as you can see the method is a lot easier when using Fantastico with our web hosting platform, happy blogging!