MODx is an open source Content Management System. The CMS works as a PHP Application Framework that helps users publish/maintain their websites easily. What’s great about MODs is that it empowers developers and advanced users to give as much control as desired to whomever they desire for day-to-day website content maintenance chores.

A few examples of built-by-MODx websites are www.rebirth-festival.nl and www.sumtotalonline.com.

As mentioned in their official website, MODx began in late 2004 out of the desire to have an expendable content management system on which to build standards compliant websites that perform exceptionally well in search engines (Yes indeed it is! When compare with Joomla and Drupal, MODx offer better SEO value).

MODx at Bluehost

Not all hosting companies provide easy installation for MODx as the CMS is not included in Fantastico’s script list. However that’s not the case for Bluehost. One of the best thing I like Bluehost is that they support both SimpleScripts and Fantastico. This offer wider selections for users like me who wish to try out new web applications.

To install MODx, simply sign into your cPanel control panel, go to SimpleScripts, and select MODx from the SimpleScripts index page. It should lead you to a page as above. Click ‘Install Now’ and input a few basic inputs, the whole setup process should be done within minutes.

Bluehost Hosting Price

Special Notes: Bluehost pricing for 24 months package

Notice that however if you follow my promotion link to Bluehost, the pricing for 24 months is $6.95/mo (which is $12/year cheaper than the standard offer).

Anyhow, I wouldn’t stress too much about this as it’s not much different holding your account for 24 or 36 months with a good host. Further more, Bluehost allows pro-rated payback in their refund policy, this means you can signup with the 36 months hosting plan and simply cancel the services whenever you feels like stopping without losing much money.

Such live chat system definitely encourage better communication between Bluehost and clients. Would this create more sales for the hosting company? You tell me!

Two months back I was reporting my problem with Bluehost’s database error. I was told that the database server is down due to routine maintenance but I do not think that’s the reason.

I sent a couple of emails to the customer supports since then and was replied with the same reason – site down because of database server maintenance. The situation is a little frustrating as the support do not tell the truths and let me know what’s happening behind the scene (or maybe because they didn’t know). There were several similar problem experienced by others.

Fortunately, the problem is fixed by now. There’s no more significant down time observed by now and the database connection errors had not occurred for more than a month. I’m glad that this is fixed but I still don’t know what happened for the entire January. I can tolerate with short term poor server performance but I don’t really like the way Bluehost handle their clients when there’s a problem. Their hosting offer – unlimited hosting, unlimited addon domains, free domain name, unlimited database, still looks good to me but their customer support lost my compliments. I guess this is one of those situation where you can’t get great real human services in low price.

Hopefully they’ll notice the issue and rectified things in the support department before it’s too late.

What’s WordPress?

Official definition: WordPress is a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. In layman term, it is a cool blogging platform that’s easy to use and well maintained by professional developers.

WordPress started in 2003 with a single bit of code to enhance the typography of everyday writing. Since then the blogging software has grown to be the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world. There are hundreds of thousands of blogs, including this one you’re reading, are built with WordPress.

My experience with WordPress

Personally, I run tons of blogs and websites using them and yes, I’m a big fans of WP. There are so many reasons why WordPress is so popular. The blogging software is easy to use, SEO friendly, and there are wide selections of plugins and designs available online (build by professional developers and fans). Also, in association with Akismet, WordPress provides the best comment-spam control.

WordPress at Bluehost

At Bluehost, you can auto install WordPress via Fantastico and SimpleScripts. The installation process is very easy and the whole setup can be done in just couple of clicks. Attached below is the WordPress installation page on Bluehost’s SimpleScripts.

A final note about WP is that you must make sure that you are using the latest version of WP. This is crucial as WP, being such popular, often draws attacks from hackers. Using the latest version WP will assure all the security loop holes are fixed. At this time of writing, the latest version of WP is 2.7.1, which is now available at both Fantastico and SimpleScripts.

There were nothing much to write about Bluehost hosting service in February. There are no significant down time for the past one week but I can’t be sure that the database connection errors is settled. I’ll observer the server status and website’s uptime for a little longer before I can draw any conclusion.

Right now in case you wish to learn more about Bluehost hosting, check out: www.bluehost.com.

I didn’t really know the actual down time because I was not tracking closely on the website but it’s confirmed to be more than 3 hours. All three MySQL databases with my Bluehost account *disappeared* (thus the connection error). I wasn’t sure why that was happening but it scares the hell out of me.

Without any delay I emailed Bluehost and yelled for help.

The first the support staff I encountered wasn’t what’s happening but he quickly referred me to the upper level. In his own words – he’s referring me to their company ‘engineer’. The folks at support department was professional and didn’t do much ‘PR talks’. After about an hour of silence from the supports, all three databases were back and ReviewBluehost.com is back to normal.

At first I had the feelings that my databases were accidentally removed but Bluehost refused the possibility of that. I tried to ask for an explanation after everything is fixed but there were not much to be told. MySQL server down was the official explanation for the incident:

Dear Customer,

The databases are not deleted they just wont show up if the MySQL Server goes down because cPanel and your scripts wont be able to connect to them. It should resolve usually with in 5-60 minutes depending on what has to be done.

Thanks
Brandon O.
Level 2 Scripting Specialist
Bluehost.com
866.573.4678

Well if this is true, I hope you are not hosting on the same MySQL server with me coz this means your site/blog could be down at that time as well.

An overview on Bluehost server status shows that the server CPU and hard disk usage are abnormally heavy.

Look closer, the hard disk usage is at a worrying level and what’s worse is the CPU load had exceeded it’s comfort zone.

At this time of writing, red light is shown for the server loads where the numbers are 18.12 (8cpus). This means there are 18.12 processes in queue – which is over 2 times of CPU capacity. I’m sure such high server loads will cause website delay from time to time and it’s really a bad sign for a good host like Bluehost.

I’ll be monitoring the situation more closely for the next few days and hopefully the problem is just short term. I’ll definitely contact Bluehost support in case of necessary and keep you updated on the latest status.

ls : list files/directories in a directory, comparable to dir in windows/dos.
ls -al : shows all files (including ones that start with a period), directories, and details attributes for each file.

cd : change directory · · cd /usr/local/apache : go to /usr/local/apache/ directory
cd ~ : go to your home directory
cd – : go to the last directory you were in
cd .. : go up a directory

cat : print file contents to the screen
cat filename.txt : cat the contents of filename.txt to your screen

tail : like cat, but only reads the end of the file
tail /var/log/messages : see the last 20 (by default) lines of /var/log/messages
tail -f /var/log/messages : watch the file continuously, while it’s being updated
tail -200 /var/log/messages : print the last 200 lines of the file to the screen

more : like cat, but opens the file one screen at a time rather than all at once
more /etc/userdomains : browse through the userdomains file.
hit Space to go to the next page, q to quit

pico : friendly, easy to use file editor
pico /home/burst/public_html/index.html : edit the index page for the user’s website.

vi : another editor, tons of features, harder to use at first than pico
vi /home/burst/public_html/index.html : edit the index page for the user’s website.

grep : looks for patterns in files
grep root /etc/passwd : shows all matches of root in /etc/passwd
grep -v root /etc/passwd : shows all lines that do not match root

touch : create an empty file
touch /home/burst/public_html/404.html : create an empty file called 404.html in the directory /home/burst/public_html/

ln : create’s “links” between files and directories
ln -s /home/username/tmp/webalizer webstats: Now you can display http://www.yourdomain.com/webstats to show your webalizer stats online. You can delete the symlink (webstats) and it will not delete the original stats on the server.

rm : delete a file
rm filename.txt : deletes filename.txt, will more than likely ask if you really want to delete it
rm -f filename.txt : deletes filename.txt, will not ask for confirmation before deleting.
rm -rf tmp/ : recursively deletes the directory tmp, and all files in it, including subdirectories. BE VERY CAREFULL WITH THIS COMMAND!!!

last : shows who logged in and when
last -20 : shows only the last 20 logins
last -20 -a : shows last 20 logins, with the hostname in the last field

w : shows who is currently logged in and where they are logged in from.

netstat : shows all current network connections.
netstat -an : shows all connections to the server, the source and destination ips and ports.
netstat -rn : shows routing table for all ips bound to the server.

top : shows live system processes in a nice table, memory information, uptime and other useful info. This is excellent for managing your system processes, resources and ensure everything is working fine and your server isn’t bogged down.
top then type Shift + M to sort by memory usage or Shift + P to sort by CPU usage

ps: ps is short for process status, which is similar to the top command. It’s used to show currently running processes and their PID.
A process ID is a unique number that identifies a process, with that you can kill or terminate a running program on your server (see kill command).
ps U username : shows processes for a certain user
ps aux : shows all system processes
ps aux –forest : shows all system processes like the above but organizes in a hierarchy that’s very useful!

file : attempts to guess what type of file a file is by looking at it’s content.
file * : prints out a list of all files/directories in a directory

du : shows disk usage.
du -sh : shows a summary, in human-readble form, of total disk space used in the current directory, including subdirectories.
du -sh * : same thing, but for each file and directory. helpful when finding large files taking up space.

wc : word count
wc -l filename.txt : tells how many lines are in filename.txt

cp : copy a file
cp filename filename.backup : copies filename to filename.backup
cp -a /home/burst/new_design/* /home/burst/public_html/ : copies all files, retaining permissions form one directory to another.
find * -type d|xargs -i cp –verbose php.ini {} : copies your php.ini file into all directories recursively.

kill: terminate a system process
kill -9 PID EG: kill -9 431
kill PID EG: kill 10550
Use top or ps ux to get system PIDs (Process IDs)

EG:

PID TTY TIME COMMAND
10550 pts/3 0:01 /bin/csh
10574 pts/4 0:02 /bin/csh
10590 pts/4 0:09 APP

Each line represents one process, with a process being loosely defined as a running instance of a program. The column headed PID (process ID) shows the assigned process numbers of the processes. The heading COMMAND shows the location of the executed process.

Putting commands together
Often you will find you need to use different commands on the same line. Here are some examples. Note that the | character is called a pipe, it takes date from one program and pipes it to another.
> means create a new file, overwriting any content already there.
>> means tp append data to a file, creating a newone if it doesn not already exist.
< send input from a file back into a command.

grep User /usr/local/apache/conf/httpd.conf |more
This will dump all lines that match User from the httpd.conf, then print the results to your screen one page at a time.

last -a > /root/lastlogins.tmp
This will print all the current login history to a file called lastlogins.tmp in /root/

tail -10000 /var/log/exim_mainlog |grep domain.com |more
This will grab the last 10,000 lines from /var/log/exim_mainlog, find all occurances of domain.com (the period represents ‘anything’,
– comment it out with a so it will be interpretted literally), then send it to your screen page by page.

netstat -an |grep :80 |wc -l
Show how many active connections there are to apache (httpd runs on port 80)

mysqladmin processlist |wc -l
Show how many current open connections there are to mysql

mysqldump -u username -p dbname > file.sql
MySQL Dump

tar -zxvf file.tar.gz
UnTAR file

mysql -u username -p database_name Importing MySQL database

which [perl]
Finding path to [perl]

These codes are quoted from Bluehost’s Helpdesk – thus in case you have questions about them, it’s best to refer back to Bluehost technical supports.

Bluehost vs Lunarpages in a glance

To save your time, I had highlighted several key hosting features of Bluehost and Lunarpages below.

From the table, you’ll see that there are indeed not much differences between the two. In fact, pricing is the only differences between Lunarpages and Bluehost (with LP slightly cheaper than BH).

In term of popularity, Bluehost is much welcomed among webmasters. Google Trend (refer to the diagram) shows that Bluehost is growing much faster when compare with Lunarpages.

To my wild guess I think this is due to Bluehost’s quality customer support as well as aggressive web marketing plans.

Guest Article: Comparison between Bluehost and Lunarpages

On top of my personal review, I’m glad to have experienced web writer – Justin Knights to share his view on the topic. Check out his view about Bluehost and Lunarpages in this guest post below.

Comparison Between BlueHost and Lunarpages

There are many hosting providers out there in the market today and 2 companies that are worth mentioning is BlueHost and Lunarpages. Both these companies have been around for quite some time and have a good reputation in the industry. However, which company is the better of the two? Lets us make a comparison to see which company excels in the different categories.

By comparing the packages provided, Lunarpages provides specific packages for blogs, small business or enterprises but BlueHost is not clear in their packages. So, to find out which package suits you if you want to choose BlueHost, you will need to spend s little time to do a research. Lunarpages also provides Window hosting while BlueHost do not. Even though this might not be big matter, it still proves that Lunarpages provide something that BlueHost do not provide.

Next, we take a look at the price for both companies. Lunarpages is the more cost effective choice but Bluehost are much welcomed among webmasters. Bluehost is hosting a lot more domain than Lunarpages at the moment and a check on both companies search popularity will show that Bluehost is way ahead of Lunarpages. From the customer’s point of view, both companies are satisfactory. In fact, many customers have websites hosted by both of these companies. Last but not least, both companies provide user friendly hosting panels. Different users prefer different panels like cpanel, Fantastico. Both companies provide the same stuff.

For a conclusion, the company that you will choose must be an effective business investment. Lunarpages provide more choices and is cheaper; while BlueHost, despite being more popular, offer less hosting choices and are slightly more expensive.

Bluehost vs Lunarpages: Who’s the best?

So who’s the best between Lunarpages and Bluehost? Well it seems that it’s pretty tough to choose between these two hosting companies. In case you’re looking for budget hosting, then Lunarpages is recommended; for those who don’t mind paying a little extra for the pop star, then Bluehost is very much your choice. All in all, both hosting companies are doing very good in their industry. In case you are still unsure with them, I suggest you to try both services yourself as they both offer 30 days free trial period.