ValueVPS Blog

For more than 6 years, Fantastico has been a big part of our shared web hosting business.  While the software has been a great help to our users in installing scripts with a click of the mouse, the software has also been lacking (for a very long time) regular updates to the packages that it installs.  Wordpress, one of the most popular installs for many of our clients, has been one of the biggest let downs of Fantastico along with other scripts in that the makers of the softwares make critical updates but Fantastico fails to compile the exploits ina timely manner.  For the few month ValueVPS has been installing Softaculous to aid our clients with installations on VPS and Dedicated Servers but we’ve held off on our Shared Hosting servers in the hopes that Fantastico would get their act together.  It’s now clear they will not.  Bye Bye Fantastico!

So what’s the big deal between the two automated script installation tools?  The biggest difference is the constant updates provided by Softaculous for the scripts that they install.  The most noticeable difference for any of our clients however will be that instead of choosing 48 different scripts, they now have access to 144 different scripts and that list just keeps growing!

What does it mean to our users who already have scripts installed using Fantastico?  Basically those already installed scripts will continue to operate without a problem.  There’s no need to remove them when we launch the new software either.  Softaculous will import the settings from Fantastico and will help update without any issues.  The only thing that will change is that now instead of clicking on the “smiling blue face” for Fantastico, they’ll have a different icon to click.

We’ve been waiting for almost 5 years for Fantastico to release their “coming soon” Version 3.0 software, and as you know, when you say that something is coming soon, then it means SOON, not 5 years!  With that in mind, the additional scripts, the ability to install some of our own scripts, the 1 step install, gzip compression, the ability for users to RATE and REVIEW scripts, DEMO scripts and the lower price that we’ll end up paying for better software, the choice really makes itself for us!  It’s time to cut our 6 year relationship with Fantastico and work with Softaculous.

A couple of the most popular scripts that are included in Softaculous are; Wordpress, Magento eCommerce, Joomla, Drupal, Mambo, Website Baker, Open Blog, Wordpress MU, Typeo3, phpBB, SMF, Coppermine, Gallery, 4images, MediaWiki, PhpWiki, Noahs Classifies, PHPads, phpScheduleIt, phpList, poMMo, ccMail, LimeSurvey, LittlePoll, dotProject, PHProjekt, SugarCRM, PrestaShop, OpenCart, osCommerce, WHMCS, CubeCart, phpBook, Advanced Guestbook, Crafty Syntax Live Chat, phpSuport, Open Web Manager, iQDesk, Podcast Generator, ClipBucket, Open-Realty, Elgg, CodeIgniter and many many more.

ValueVPS has become a NOC partner with Softaculous which means that we are able to provide the script to our VPS and dedicated server customers too.

We hope everyone enjoys Softaculous and it’s abundance of scripts available.

Since moving away from RapidSwitch in Maidenhead our customers have noticed that our network has become rock solid.  At ValueVPS HQ we tend to monitor just about everything but I’d never really used that information to see how we are doing when it comes to uptime.  We have utilised the services of www.pingdom.com for quite some time now so I thought I would share some stats with the world wide web.  We started monitoring the ValueVPS.co.uk services in Newcastle on 21st November 2009 and started moving clients to the facility in January 2010 once extensive network testing had finished.  Since that time we have consistently exceeded our SLA with an uptime of 99.995% for the period 01/01/2010 to 31/05/2010.  During this 5 month period there were two outages of 5 minutes, once to swap from a faulty PDU to a spare, and once to swap back to the replacement new PDU.  Below is a snapshot of our network uptime from January 2010 right up to today:

January 1st 2010 to June 19th 2010

Only 10 minutes of outage in almost 6 months (and that wasn’t even network outage, that was all down to a faulty PDU!)

ValueVPS is proud to announce it has partnered with software developer SmarterTools Inc. to help businesses communicate, measure, and support their day-to-day business operations.

Under the partnership terms, new ValueVPS clients purchasing any Windows-based virtual server or dedicated server will receive a SmarterTools software bundle at no additional cost. Valued at $800 (£560), the bundle includes the latest versions of the SmarterMail mail server, SmarterStats Web log analytics and SEO software, and SmarterTrack customer service software.

“The SmarterTools software bundle not only provides great value, but also offers functionality that we have been struggling to achieve with other products. We are certain that the newly added bundle will further improve our offerings and allow us to provide even better service to our clients,” said David Austen, director of ValueVPS.

SmarterMail is a full-featured Windows mail server with a fully scalable infrastructure, unparalleled stability, and advanced collaboration features. SmarterTrack is a powerful help desk application built for tracking, managing, and reporting on customer service and communications, including sales and support issues. SmarterStats is a detailed Web log analytics and SEO software that allows companies to identify Web trends and analyze statistics to run their online businesses at maximum efficiency.

“SmarterTools is pleased to partner with ValueVPS” said Jeff Hardy, vice president of business operations for SmarterTools. “ValueVPS has committed to providing quality Web hosting, and we are proud that they trust our products to deliver value to their Windows hosting customers”.

For more information, visit www.valuevps.co.uk

About SmarterTools:

Founded in 2003, SmarterTools Inc. is an information technology management software company based in Phoenix, Arizona. SmarterTools develops a Windows mail server, customer service software, and Web log analytics and SEO software that help companies communicate, measure, and support their worldwide business operations. Additional information about SmarterTools Inc. and the SmarterTools product line is available at www.smartertools.com.

About ValueVPS:

ValueVPS is located in the North-East of England; specialising in providing professional hosting and network solutions. ValueVPS’s plans are designed to tailor to specific needs – from personal use/small businesses to sophisticated E-commerce sites with higher requirements for bandwidth and disk space. For more information about the company, please visit http://www.valuevps.co.uk.

Arab nations are leading a “historic” charge to make the world wide web live up to its name.  Net regulator Icann has switched on a system that allows full web addresses that contain no Latin characters.  Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are the first countries to have so-called “country codes” written in Arabic scripts.  The move is the first step to allow web addresses in many scripts including Chinese, Thai and Tamil.

More than 20 countries have requested approval for international domains from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann).  It said the new domains were “available for use now” although it admitted there was still some work to do before they worked correctly for everyone. However, it said these were “mostly formalities”. Read the rest of this entry »

Having a blog for your business or personal website is all about keeping your visitors up-to-date with what’s going on with you or your business. But there’s more than just that.

Having a blog is also great for search engine optimisation (SEO). Software like WordPress is brilliant at getting your blog posts into the search engines such as Google and Yahoo which is great for attracting new visitors. Read the rest of this entry »

With Ubuntu 10.4, codenamed Lucid Lynx, Ubuntu will change its look completely. Everything will be brand new; the logo, the user interface, and the color scheme (no more brown). It’s set to be released on April 29, less than a month away.

We are very curious to see if this makeover will give Ubuntu a boost in popularity. It’s already the most popular desktop Linux distribution, but will this new look, this new branding, make it easier for Ubuntu to cast its net even wider and grow the Linux user base as a whole? Read the rest of this entry »

Twitter is probably the fastest growing of all of the social networking websites on the internet. Due to huge celebrity influences from the likes of Stephen Fry and Jonathan Ross, the sites popularity has gone through the roof and hordes of people visit the website every day. Unsurprisingly, this has meant that business now want a slice of this huge user base and want to eke as much profit out of using Twitter as they possibly can. Read the rest of this entry »