Cheap, Affordable Web Hosting

Joomla web hosting: Is it suitable for your website or not?

Joomla is a very popular content management system that is popular amongst websites and can usually be automatically installed using Fantastico (Joomla web hosting is available on our web hosting plans) however the question comes often that if this very popular software is what you exactly need.

While Joomla is very expandable and can have a lot of modules to accomplish anything, sometimes it would be considered an overkill, as per example, using Joomla for a blog is usually an overkill unless you have a very advanced blog, however a great alternative for Joomla if you want to create your blog would be WordPress (which can be installed using Fantastico too).

However, if you have a site with a couple of pages but require a forum and other type of scripts where creating a theme for each would take a long time, Joomla is a good option however if you only have a couple of pages without the the need of theming, the best option might just be to stick with plain HTML.

So there are no wrong choices in this case however there are better in cases, if you’re going to use Joomla’s full capacities then it’s suggested however if you’ll be only using part of it, then maybe you’re looking at the wrong script.

Web hosting datacenter proximity, does it matter?

A lot of users who are looking for web hosting usually take the location into matter to add to the complicated equation when looking for a web hosting company however it is not always the most important factor. It’s not completely unimportant but it is important to some point, you would at least want to have the datacenter at least in the same continent.

Of course, you won’t get the best speeds off your web hosting company if you are located in North America, it wouldn’t be the smartest idea to get your web hosting somewhere in southern Asia as it will be very slow & will be crawling for you and most of your clients if they are located in North America.

However, if you do take web hosting in a place such as Montreal, QC which is 5 hours north of New York, NY – The speed will not be that much different if it was actually located in Montreal, QC or New York, NY because the difference between the two is close to nothing at the speeds that the internet runs at.

To conclude, the best idea is to get your web hosting services at a company close to you but not necessarily very close but not necessarily very far that your web site would be very slow.

Web Hosting for Dummies: Transferring your domain name

Step 1: Preparing for your domain transfer
There are a few things that need to be done before initiating a domain transfer, first you will need to login to your current domain registrar and make sure that your domain is unlocked else the domain name transfer will fail, also, the domain name must be registered for more than 60 days. Once the domain name is unlocked, you should make sure that all of your WHOIS information is valid information because they will be needed for the verification when sending your transfer request. After checking all of the above, you may now request your authorization key or EPP transfer code, instructions on how to get this should be provided by your domain registrar.

Step 2: Initiating the domain transfer
Once you have your authorization key or EPP transfer code in hand, you may now go to your new domain name registrar or web hosting company and find the “Transfer a domain name” function, once there, you will be asked for the domain name and afterwards the authorization key or EPP transfer code, make sure you copy-paste both to avoid any writing mistakes. You will also have to pay the fees involved after giving your authorization key or EPP transfer code, all domain name transfers include one year so that means you will get an extra year by transferring your domain name, usually, the price for the domain name transfer is the same price as a registration.

Step 3: Verifying the domain transfer
You should now check the email account placed in the WHOIS information for the coming 24-48 hours, there will be two emails that will be coming, first, it will be your new registrar confirming that you the owner of the domain name would like to transfer that domain name, afterwards, you will receive an email from your old registrar confirming that you would indeed like to release the domain name from their registry. These are the two most crucial steps to do, if you do not agree to transfer the domain in a short time frame, the transfer will automatically be cancelled.

Step 4: Completing & checking the transfer
Once you have agreed to both emails, you should await an email from your new registrar confirming the acquisition of your domain name, make sure that it is indeed in your account at your new registrar and for an extra verification step, make a WHOIS check on the domain name using any of the WHOIS sites on the internet, you can search Google for “WHOIS” and you will find them in the first few results. Put your domain in the field to WHOIS and you should see the name of your new registrar. You have completed transferring your domain name from your old registrar to the new registrar.

Web Hosting for Dummies: What is Web Hosting?!

Web hosting is a pretty vague term because there are plenty of web hosting types out there, ranging from Shared Web Hosting up to Clustered Web Hosting, I will be explaining all of these in this article.

Shared Web Hosting

This probably is the most popular type of web hosting on the internet. Shared web hosting means you and other people share the same server and are hsoted on the same server. Usually, there is a control panel such as cPanel that helps you manage your email and other features such as MySQL. This is the most common type of web hosting purchased by people who run their own small blog or a small business.

Reseller Web Hosting

This type of web hosting is less popular compared to Shared Web Hosting. Reseller web hosting is a special type of account that comes with a special control panel which generally is WHM and the difference is that Reseller Web Hosting gives you the ability to give away shared web hosting. Typically, start up web hosting companies get Reseller web hosting so that they can offer Shared Web Hosting.

Virtual Private Servers

Virtual Private Servers are pretty common for people who have out grown the resources of Shared web hosting but do not want to pay yet the high prices of dedicated servers. Virtual Private Servers are virtual machines located on dedicated servers; it’s like dividing the server into small servers. However; the Virtual Private Servers are not shared, you have your own operating system, your own kernel. It’s a complete dedicated server environment.

Dedicated Servers

Dedicated servers are a bit less popular due to their high prices however they are usually used by very high traffic websites or web hosting companies who would like to have their own servers instead of working on Reseller Web Hosting. Usually the servers are leased with a specific bandwidth allotment and when purchasing, you usually choose the server’s specifications (RAM, HDD, CPU)

Colocation

Colocation is pretty close to Dedicated Servers; however, the colocation provider only does provide you with bandwidth, space & power for your server. You have to purchase your own server and send it to the colocation provider. The colocation provider has nothing to do with your server and generally colocation is not recommended unless it’s a local datacenter because of the high costs of repairs.

Clustered Hosting

This most probably is the least used web hosting solution as it comes at a high price and is for high usage sites. They usually have multiple servers and each server would get a specific role, one server could serve all the HTTP traffic and one would manage all the MySQL traffic. Usually; this is a custom solution and it is not sold as packages on the internet.

This article pretty much sums up all the types of web hosting out there, stick around for more articles about web hosting, make sure to subscribe to this blog!

How to convert/encode files to FLV using FFMPEG & PHP

Need help using specific FFMPEG-PHP functions or some programming help? Let our experienced technicians help you debug your problem for FREE. Sign up today and post at our online community: FFMPEG-PHP Help Forums

Good News: Customers of VEXXHOST Web Hosting can now automatically install PHPmotion and VidiScript instantly from cPanel, they do not need to do any ffmpeg configuration or ffmpeg installation, they simply enter a username and a password and the software will be ready and online in seconds.

So, as I’ve written in an earlier article on how to install FFMPEG on your server, while there are those who probably use a “YouTube Clone” script, there might be those who want to create their own using FFMPEG & PHP. FLV is the most widely used type of codec that runs on most Flash players.

So, let’s get started, there are actually a few steps into converting a file to FLV which are shown below

1. Send the script to FFMPEG-PHP and get it’s info
So, before doing any of this, you should make sure that your file has been uploaded to somewhere and you have the full path to it. (You can’t use what you have in “memory”, so you’ll have to look on how to upload a file, once you got that and have the path of the file, we’ll start our script to invoke FFMPEG-PHP and get the file’s resolution. What we mainly need is the width, height & FPS (frame per second) so that we can tell FFMPEG about. I’ll be using the clock.avi located in every windows system.

We’ll start out our code with getting our variables:

// Set our source file
$srcFile = "/path/to/clock.avi";
$destFile = "/path/to/clock.flv";
$ffmpegPath = "/path/to/ffmpeg";
$flvtool2Path = "/path/to/flvtool2";

// Save our needed variables
$srcWidth = makeMultipleTwo($ffmpegObj->getFrameWidth());
$srcHeight = makeMultipleTwo($ffmpegObj->getFrameHeight());
$srcFPS = $ffmpegObj->getFrameRate();

Also, the width/height has to be multiples of two so I have created a function that makes it a multiple of two:

function makeMultipleTwo ($value)
{
$sType = gettype($value/2);

if($sType == "integer")
{
return $value;
} else {
return ($value-1);
}
}

2. Send the script to FFMPEG for encoding
Here is where the fun starts, executing it and telling FFMPEG where to place it later. Let’s see on how our command will consist and what it will be made of. We’ll see what quality settings we will have to set.

ffmpeg -i video.avi -ar 22050 -ab 32 -f flv -s 320x240 video.flv

That’s generally how to convert a video.avi to video.flv with the audio sampling at 22050 & audio bit rate at 32, with the size 320×240. While I suggest the values above for audio as they are the most compressed, but we’ll use the old audio settings for better quality.

$srcAB = intval($ffmpegObj->getAudioBitRate()/1000);
$srcAR = $ffmpegObj->getAudioSampleRate();

Now we have pretty much most of the values ready for our compression, however, we need to call flvtool2 to get our Meta information. Steps 4 and 5 in the diagram work simultaneously with this one.

What we do is make flvtool2 run at the same time as FFMPEG so we’ll pipe it into the command which means our general command is

ffmpeg -i video.avi -ar 22050 -ab 32 -f flv -s 320x240 video.flv | flvtool2 -U stdin video.flv

Now, we have a kind of complete command, let’s make our final code!

<?php
// Set our source file
$srcFile = "/path/to/clock.avi";
$destFile = "/path/to/clock.flv";
$ffmpegPath = "/path/to/ffmpeg";
$flvtool2Path = "/path/to/flvtool2";
// Create our FFMPEG-PHP class
$ffmpegObj = new ffmpeg_movie($srcFile);
// Save our needed variables
$srcWidth = makeMultipleTwo($ffmpegObj->getFrameWidth());
$srcHeight = makeMultipleTwo($ffmpegObj->getFrameHeight());
$srcFPS = $ffmpegObj->getFrameRate();
$srcAB = intval($ffmpegObj->getAudioBitRate()/1000);
$srcAR = $ffmpegObj->getAudioSampleRate();
// Call our convert using exec()
exec($ffmpegPath . " -i " . $srcFile . " -ar " . $srcAR . " -ab " . $srcAB . " -f flv -s " . $srcWidth . "x" . $srcHeight . " " . $destFile . " | " . $flvtool2Path . " -U stdin " . $destFile);
// Make multiples function
function makeMultipleTwo ($value)
{
$sType = gettype($value/2);
if($sType == "integer")
{
return $value;
} else {
return ($value-1);
}
}
?>