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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.

Useful Links

PowWeb Home page
2nd Plan Promo Link

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.

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

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 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.

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 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

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

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 $16.95

Domain 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!

Browsing thru PowWeb forum really teaches me a lot. I’ve discovered that there are different htaccess codes for redirecting multiple domain names. Aside from the one I’ve posted long time ago, here are more complex sample codes posted on the forum that will surely work with any PowWeb website:

Sample 1:

RewriteEngine On
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain_name\.?tld [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.domain_name\.?tld [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/subfolder/
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ subfolder/$1 [L]

Sample 2:

RewriteEngine On
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond s%{HTTPS} ^((s)on|s.*)$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^/*(.+/)?([^.]*[^/])$ http%2://%{HTTP_HOST}/$1$2/ [L,R=301]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain_name\.?tld [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.domain_name\.?tld [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/subfolder/
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ subfolder/$1 [L]

Sample 3:

RewriteEngine On
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^([^\.]+[^/])$ http://%{HTTP_HOST}/$1/ [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)?domain_name\.tld$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/subfolder/
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ subfolder/$1 [L]

These codes seems to be confusing to me, although it resembles the one that I previously use. Aside from this, PowWeb users can also use the Map to Subdirectory Tool for creating multiple websites on the PowWeb server.

Related Articles
Adding A Second Website Using .htaccess
Adding A Second Website Using PowWeb’s ‘Map to Subdirectory Tool’

Useful Links
The PowWeb Home Page

PowWeb Forum Links
.htaccess code examples for an add’l domain
Installing a second domain

Last April, my webhost implemented a new tool that will help its users report any outages on the server. They call it the Service Perception Index. According to the description, it is designed to let customers report slowdowns or non-functional services. Their network operations team monitors customer-reported feedback in real time, and attempts to respond to spikes in reports of poor performance accordingly.

User feedback results can be found on this URL

I’ve taken a snapshot of the feedback results. Here’s how it looks like:

PowWeb Forum Links:
New Feature: Service Perception Index

I just found out that Powweb offers three different webmail programs on their web hosting plans. By default, a customer uses the SquirrelMail as their online email client. However, there is an option to change this default setting. This can be done by going to the OPS‘ Mail Tool Settings page.

One disadvantage of moving to another email client is that the entries on each account’s address book will not be moved. Either the user needs to export and import the addressbook manually from the old to the new webmail program of his choice, or he adds those contacts one by one. Changing the default webmail application affects all the existing email accounts. Fortunately for me, I only have one or two mailboxes on my account. If there are other email users on my website, then they will need to import and export their address book. Worse if they need to re-enter the addresses one by one.

Here are some short description of the web mail programs available on my account:

AtMail
One of the first WebMail products to incorporate a video-mail feature, AtMail is a feature-rich IMAP account e-mail solution that provides a complete and innovative user interface for accessing e-mail resources via Web browser or wireless device.

SquirrelMail (default)
A standards-based WebMail package, written in PHP4 for maximum compatibility across browsers. SquirrelMail has all the functionality you would want from an email client, including strong MIME support, address books, and folder manipulation

Horde
Horde is a comprehensive Internet Messaging Program that offers many of the features available in email clients like Outlook Express. Users can read, send and organize email messages, manage calendars, contacts, tasks and notes.

Related Articles
Unlimited Mailboxes at PowWeb

Useful Links
Atmail Messaging Platform
SquirrelMail - Webmail for Nuts!
The Horde Project
PowWeb Home Page