PowWeb: We’ve Updated InstallCentral, Our Free Application Center
January 29th, 2009
PowWeb has just upgraded its very own Install Central according to this announcement:
InstallCentral has a new look and feel! Instead of listing every application on a single page, forcing you to scroll to find what you’re looking for, our new design uses a tabbed interface that presents applications by category, i.e., blogs, content management systems, forums, photo galleries, etc. We hope this new design makes it easier navigate the application center >>
WHY ARE THERE FEWER APPLICATIONS AVAILABLE?
We discontinued many of the applications because they are no longer competitive in their field, the vendor is no longer making updates to the software, or they haven’t been popular amongst PowWeb customers. In an effort to bring customers the best, most competitive offerings, we have put forth a “best-of-breed” suite of applications, which will continue to be maintained regularly by our staff.
WHAT HAPPENS TO MY EXISTING APPLICATIONS?
The changes to InstallCentral have no effect on your live Web site. Applications that were installed previously, and have now been discontinued, remain accessible to customers who have already installed them, via the “My Apps” tab in InstallCentral; however, we will not be making any additional upgrades available.
QUESTIONS?
We’re always looking to improve your hosting experience and are very excited about this revamp of InstallCentral. If you have any questions or concerns about the new interface, please log into your Support Console and submit a new request to our online ticketing system. Otherwise, go ahead — try out the new interface and add more functionality to your site by installing a blog or photo gallery or one of dozens of applications available to you for free >>
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PowWeb has gone Unlimited!
October 26th, 2008
PowWeb hosting now offers unlimited disk space, bandwidth and mailboxes. An for a limited time, they are now offering their One Plan for only $3.88 a month! Click here to learn more..
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Improving MySQL Performance at PowWeb
October 10th, 2008
I got this announcement regarding the atest MYSQL changes at PowWeb
We are constantly working to improve MySQL performance on our shared hosting platform, and we wanted to let you know about some of our latest initiatives, as well as steps you can take to make sure your database applications are secure.
CUSTOMIZED HOST NAMES
When modifying your code in the future, please be sure to use yourusername.powwebmysql.com as your hostname.
We are in the process of updating the code of all customers to use this customized configuration. (Rest assured, this hostname cannot be accessed from an outside source; it’s only routable from inside our network — even a DNS lookup won’t find it.)
You may recall that we began customizing MySQL hostnames last year to include your username instead of the server name:
yourusername.powwebmysql.com
Configuring hostnames in this way provides a degree of flexibility if the resources of certain MySQL servers exceed capacity, translating into better performance for your databases.
MySQL QUERIES: 50,000 PER HOUR
To ensure optimum MySQL performance for all our customers, we are limiting the number of queries per login to 50,000 per hour and the duration of individual queries to 60 seconds.
This should not be an issue for the vast majority of customers — in fact, most customers will experience improved performance as a result of this measure. However, if you do suspect that you’re exceeding the query limit, log into your MySQL Management Tool, and if you’re over the limit, you’ll see a notice with more info.
We apologize for any inconvenience; however, on a shared hosting platform, there are practical limits to the amount of resources we can dedicate to individual customers. If this becomes an issue for you, you may be able to reduce the number of queries you are running by using application-level caching, combining queries or taking advantage of nested queries wherever you can.
CHECK YOUR APPLICATIONS: DON’T GET SPAMMED OR ABUSED
Be sure to closely monitor your applications — don’t let them get spammed or abused! These tips will help keep you protected, as well as keep our MySQL servers running at peak performance:
* Check your bulletin boards, forums, blogs, etc., for spammers. Fake posts and comments compromise the integrity of your site and slow down database performance.
* Turn off Guest or Anonymous posting to these applications.
* Require registration, and registration confirmation. Spammers can use programs to automatically sign up accounts on your site and start posting bad content; requiring registration confirmation can reduce this risk.
* Keep your code up to date. New releases of applications often include built-in spam protection and can greatly reduce the number of queries and amount of bandwidth you use.
* Turn off unused applications. Just because you don’t link to an application anymore doesn’t mean it’s not getting traffic.
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PowWeb 2nd Plan Offer is Back!
April 14th, 2008
PowWeb’s limited 2nd Plan offer is back! Any customer who has an existing account with PowWeb can signup for a second account and enjoy the 39% discount!
The condition is ofcourse, you should have an existing account with PowWeb. Anyone who wants to avail the promo should first login to their current account. Basically, the 2nd plan offer promo makes their regular one plan account $3 cheaper. Regular monthly price is computed $7.77.
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Major PowWeb CGI and Unix Permissions Changes
January 10th, 2008
PowWeb has just announced a major changes in its platform, particularly on its CGI and Unix permission settings. The announcement is as follows:
As a reminder, our hosting platform includes pools of servers for each of our services: machines that are dedicated to–and optimized for–specific applications (such as e-mail, CGI, e-commerce, etc.). This type of architecture allows us to customize each machine to the service it performs, which means more density per box, and ultimately, faster and more reliable services.
As part of our ongoing efforts to improve CGI performance, we’ve begun the process of updating our CGI servers, blending our existing pooled architecture with some of the more traditional methods of Unix Web hosting.
HOW DOES THIS BENEFIT ME?
Our new configuration will produce the following benefits:
Faster fulfillment: Once you enable CGI for your account, you’ll be able to use it right away.
Better performance: CGI servers will run faster, which means so will your pages and scripts.
Quicker Issue Resolution: Should something happen to one of our CGI servers, we’ll be able to troubleshoot and resolve the issue more quickly.
WHEN WILL THIS HAPPEN?
We plan to implement the new configuration in the near future, and we’ll send an e-mail message to customers that use CGI once everything is in place. (So if you use CGI, keep your eyes on your Inbox!)
WHAT DO I NEED TO DO?
The short answer is “nothing.” You should not need to update any paths, and your scripts should continue to function as they do now. Still, there *are* some changes you should be aware of:
The new configuration adopts the more traditional (numeric) method of handling Unix file/directory permissions, and as a result, we’ve set permissions for customers’ home directories to be 750. With this permissions setting, your scripts should continue to run as they always have, and it ensures that others won’t have “write” access to your files.
Please note: If you change your home directory permissions settings to something other than 750, you may be unintentionally giving others access to change or update your files. There are certain permissions settings that could potentially constitute a security risk (examples include 666 or 777). To protect all of our customers, scripts will not execute if permissions are changed to certain settings (such as 666 or 777).
One final note: If you use the /tmp directory for temporary files, you will no longer be able to do so. You can, of course, place temporary files anywhere you’d like within your home directory.
Well, perhaps these changes will not affect much of my current setup but this would serve as good reference in the future.
Useful Links
The PowWeb Site
PowWeb Announcements
CGI Improvements and Unix Permissions Changes
Compress / Uncompress Files with Archive Gateway
December 2nd, 2007
The PowWeb OPS is packed with useful tools created for a an efficient website management. One of these tool is the Archive Gateway which lets users to compress and uncompress files directly on the server without using SSH or shell commands.
There are two main purpose of this tool. One is to uncompress or unarchive a compressed file. The other one is to compress or archive a certain file or directory. Archive gateway can process .gz, .tar, .tar.gz, .zip and .Z files. The tool can be accessed directly from the main page of the OPS.
For uncompression of files, one has to select the compressed file that he wants to unarchive from a drop-down menu. Archive Gateway automatically scans your account for any compressed file. It will then list all the compressed files into a dropdown menu where users can select the particular file that he wants to unarchive. There will be an option which let users to uncompress the file into a certain path or directory.
For compressing files, users will have to enter the path and filename of the file that they want to compress. There will be an option to retain original old file or to replace it with the new compressed file. There are two compression algorithms available, first one is GNU Gzip, the other one is the Unix compress.
For compressing a certain folder or directory, a user will have to select the folder that needs to be archived. Resulting compressed file suffix must be either .tar or .zip. This file can then be easily downloaded either using the File Manager or thru FTP.
There is also another useful compression tool that can be easily accessed on the File Manager. This will let users to compress selected files or folders without archiving the parent folder. This means that if you want compress certain files into your “htdocs” directory, you will not have to compress the entire htdocs directory or move the files to be archived into a separate directory for archiving. You just need to select the files and folders and then click on the “Archive as zip” button on the File Manager. The selected files and folders will now be archived into a zip file and saved into your home folder. The resulting file will be on a “username.zip” format where username is your control panel username.
Useful Links
The PowWeb Site
Archive Gateway
File Manager
PowWeb’s New Tool: Domain Pointing Manager
November 15th, 2007
PowWeb has just added another powerful tool into its Control Panel, they call it the Domain Pointing Manager. A notice was sent to customers describing how the tool should work:
To make it easier for you to manage your domains, we've launched a Domain Pointing Manager tool. In addition to consolidating several of our existing domain management tools, the new tool also provides increased functionality.
You can now manage the following tools from one central location, instead of having to access them separately:
Add Registered Domain to Account
Domain to Subdirectory Mapping
Domain Redirects/Stealth Redirects
Plus, we've made it easier for you to point each of your domains hosted at PowWeb to one of four locations:
Your home directory (the main directory of your hosting account)
A subdirectory of your site (i.e., www.yourdomain.com/subdirectory)
Another URL (different from your hosting account)
"Domain parking" (resolve to a placeholder while you develop your site)
We've also added domain-pointing icons to DomainCentral, so you can see at a glance where each of your domains is pointing.
One thing that was made clear by this latest development, PowWeb’s paid service, the Map to Subdirectory Tool, can already be rendered as useless. This means that we no longer have to purchase (or renew) this mapping tool since the new Domain Pointing tool technically does the same thing as what this mapping tool does.
Other exciting features of this new tool is, it can do a stealth redirect to an external URL. It can also enable a Domain park system which was previously not available on PowWeb’s control panel.
This new tool will surely make PowWeb one of the best hosting company on the face of the Earth. Thank you, PowWeb!
Useful Links
Domain Pointing Manager
Map To Subdirectory Bundle
PowWeb Announcements
New Tool: Domain Pointing Managers
PowWeb WP Themes
September 15th, 2007
PowWeb Official Blog’s main contributor, Joshua, announced way back June some new themes for bloggers using WordPress. The themes, which were created by a software company commissioned by PowWeb, is available even for non-PowWeb users! The “swanky” themes, as described by Josh can also be downloaded for free.
Useful Links
The PowWeb Home Page
The Official PowWeb Blog
PowWeb Forum Links
Launched: PowWeb WordPress Themes
Launched: Run Job Now tool
September 3rd, 2007
Last July, PowWeb launched a new feature on their Control Panel, specifically on the CRON or scheduled jobs section. The new tool could be useless for PowWeb’s orfinary customers but it could save a lot of time and effort for advanced users.
The new tool is called “Run Job Now” and can be accessed from the Scheduled Jobs section of the OPS. It helps users to test their script or cron jobs functionality without waiting for the “job” to be processed automatically by the server. Since all cron jobs are scheduled, users will not be able to determine the results rightaway. They would have to wait for the nearest schedule, mostly every hour or every 30 minutes, before they would know the outcome of the cron job. The new “Run Job” tool will help help the users to test the cron’s functionality without waiting for its scheduled run time.
Useful Links
The PowWeb Control Panel
PowWeb Forum Links
Launched: Run Job Now tool
PowWeb Now Supports New Top Level Domains!
August 29th, 2007
Registering domain names with my PowWeb account gets better everyday. Before, country tlds such as .cn, .de or .eu are not supported on my account. Last May, Powweb added more tlds which would help international users register their domain name with their account. There’s no need to contact a local domain registrars anymore and of course, registration fees can be processed by just using a single account.
Here are the complete list of New TLDs supported by PowWeb as posted by Joshua on the PowWeb Forum:
.at is available. 1 Year $16.95
.be is available. 1 Year $16.95
.biz is available. 1 Year $15.002 Years $30.003 Years $45.00
.ca is available. 1 Year $16.95
.cc is available. 1 Year $34.95
.ch is available. 1 Year $34.95
.cn is available. 1 Year $16.95
.co.uk is available. 2 Years $16.95 Better than GoDaddy
.com is available. 1 Year $15.002 Years $30.003 Years $45.00
.de is available. 1 Year $16.95
.eu is available. 1 Year $16.95
.info is available. 1 Year $15.002 Years $30.003 Years $45.00
.mobi is available. 2 Years $34.95
.net is available. 1 Year $15.002 Years $30.003 Years $45.00
.org is available. 1 Year $15.002 Years $30.003 Years $45.00
.org.uk is available. 2 Years $16.95
.tv is available. 1 Year $34.95 Better than GoDaddy
.us is available. 1 Year $16.95Domain Privacy is available for $8.99 for the following domains:
.biz
.cc
.com
.info
.net
.org
.tv
Registration fees vary depending on the type of tlds. Hoping to register one of these in the future!
Useful Links
The PowWeb Home Page
PowWeb Forum Links
Domain Registration - Now supporting more TLD’s!
