WPWebHost: All Your WordPress Blogs Should Be Hosted By Us

Founded in 2007, WPWebHost had a dream of providing a WordPress only hosting environment that was not only affordable for WP fans, but also provided quality service (a rarity back "in the day"). A year later the company was acquired by Exabytes who provided WPWebHost with the financial resources to keep their dream of affordable WordPress hosting alive, and as they say the rest is history. Fast forward towards today and WPWebHost is one of the largest WordPress only hosting companies outside of the walls of Automattic (who owns WordPress.com), hosting hundreds (if not thousands) of WP blogs of every shape and size. The managers at WPWebHost were kind enough to give me a few weeks to test out their service (under their Freedom Plan), and here are my thoughts after giving their servers for a spin. It Just Makes Cents One complaint I hear about WP only hosting companies is that they are usually much more expensive than your average hosting company (despite the fact that the former's customer service is 100 times better). Believe it or not, WPWebHost plans start at $30/year (via their Rookie plan), which means WordPress bloggers can be blogging upon their own custom domain without having to break the bank. While their lowest tier plan is only recommended for tiny blogs (i.e. personal sites), $30 down should give you a taste of their service before you decide to upgrade to a higher plan. For larger blogs I would recommend their Buddy plan (which starts at $20/month) which gives you 100 GB of space and a 1,000 GB of transfer per month. Would You Like cPanel With That? Just like a traditional host, WPWebHost provides cPanel for their users which means that you have the ability to edit files via FTP, create email accounts (note: the UI is horrible so I'd recommend Google Apps), or even add extra domains. For the super geeks out there, you can also create extra MySQL databases as well as run a CRON job (note: if you don't know what that is, consider yourself normal). WPWebHost also provides a backup service, although truth be told you would be much wiser to use VaultPress or another option instead (trust me on this). Migration And CDN For The Win?! Just like their rivals, WPWebHost will migrate your blog from your current host upon their servers free of charge, and will even go the extra mile for those seeking to leave Google's Blogger. However unlike their rivals WPWebHost will only migrate your content (as in images, videos, text, etc.) and not themes or any plugins, which means that you will need to spend some extra time reinstalling and configuring your blog after you make the big switch. Although WPWebHost does offer CDN services (aka Content Delivery Networks) which can use to help speed up delivery of your site, it appears to be through a reseller instead of home grown. I can not vouch for the CDN offered (as I have not tested their services out), although you can add it to the cost of your plan for an extra monthly fee. Go Social With BuddyPress And PHP Forums From my various conversations with the company they did inform me that WP fans do have the ability to install BuddyPress as well as non-WordPress software like (think php forums). This means that if your blog already has an established forum (powered by bbPress or another alternative), you can migrate and setup your blog without fear of it being axed. However WPWebHost did indicate that their servers are setup specifically for WordPress blogs, and they will only provide support for WordPress related issues (which means you are officially on your own as far as forum support goes). While this option will not appeal to everyone, it does give those of you who are building your own "mini-Facebook's" another reason to leave your standard host for a WP centric one. Where WPWebHost Fails While I did enjoy WPWebHost's features and did not encounter many technical problems (I did have a hiccup setting up), my biggest complaint is with their sales team (via chat) who for the most part did not seem very knowledgeable about WordPress or WPWebHost (plans, features, etc.). I was extremely underwhelmed by this discovery, although their technical team was the complete opposite (very knowledgeable and passionate about WordPress). Another feature about WPWebHost is that unlike many of their rivals they do not provide automatic upgrades for your blog, themes or plugins. Although this will probably be seen as a plus for those of you with highly customized themes, it can create a potential security issue (especially if a critical security patch is sent out. One more thing: While this little fact is immaterial in my honest opinion, lest I receive complaints in my inbox for "not telling" you should know that WPWebHost is located in Malaysia, NOT America. So unless you plan on running an anti-Malaysian blog or plan on burning any religious book, you should find another host (note: as far as the later point goes, many US hosts will shut you down for the latter point). Should I Host With WPWebHost? Aside from the sales chat team, I found WPWebHost to be a reasonable host whose customer service was unparalleled as far as hosting goes. Whenever I had a question the company was usually able to respond with 24 minuets, let alone 24 hours. WPWebHost is also a good option for those of you with multiple blogs, as you can place several blogs under one plan (although its advisable that you choose a higher plan if your site becomes too popular). However if you do choose on hosting with them I would highly recommend probloggers avoid the Rookie and Freedom plans, and instead look at their Buddy and VPS plans instead (as the specs are not that impressive for the former two).

Disqus Embraces 3 Smartphones. Guess Who Got Left Out? After declaring their intentions to release official apps upon the iPhone and Android devices, Disqus has announced that the apps are ready for prime time (provided they survive the tribunal processes save one OS). About month ago, we announced "Disqus Mobile". Since then, we've had a tremendous amount of traffic on with mobile theme, and received several of requests for a way to moderate and keep up with your communities whilst on the go. Being very keen to listen to our community, we've been secretly working on something deep within the Disqus laboratories. Today we're announcing a set of mobile apps on Android, iPhone (iOS), and webOS to help you achieve this. These apps are simple to use, lightweight, and battery efficient. We wanted to be sure you had enough battery life to call Grandma. (Official Disqus Blog) While Palm Pre fans will be thrilled to discover that a company actually considers webOS relevant (as they are still waiting for a WordPress Pre App), Blackberry fans will probably be upset that they were ignored. Disqus seems to be "working on it," although no ETA was given on when RIM might see some love from the company. While Blackberry lovers will have to envy everyone else for awhile, the new iOS and webOS Disqus app will send you alerts (or push notifications) whenever someone comments upon your blog, as well as give you the ability to moderate and search comments. Thanks to Google's open market approach, Android fanboys (and girls) can download the official Disqus app immediately while iPhone lovers can check out DisqusPro until the official Disqus app arrives.

Should Twitter Buy Flickr? A short time ago in a place not so far away (relatively speaking), founder Evan Williams uttered this statement explaining what Twitter is (and why it's distinct from its rivals). Twitter is a real-time information network. (via TechCrunch) Although Twitter is often viewed as one of the first places to visit when breaking news happens around the world, the one thing the company lacks is the ability for users to upload media content directly upon the site (outside of a picture profile or a background image that is). While this limitation has not stopped users from posting images and video via third party services, the inability to upload media directly to Twitter.com may convince new comers that the service is not worth their time (let alone tweet). If Twitter wants to thwart the rise of Tumblr and match Facebook's future growth, they are going to have add media uploads to their road map (and soon). But instead of reinventing the wheel, Twitter might be a wiser alternative to purchase an established media service like Flickr. A Network Worth 5 Billion Images Despite being assimilated by the dying dynasty known as Yahoo!, Flickr still has displayed tremendous growth under the shadow of Facebook. Acquiring them would make it easier for Twitter to catch up to Facebook, the latter who boasts a massive image inventory. It would also give Twitter some much needed expertise when it comes to hosting a totally different type of content (as images are probably much more difficult to host/scale than text). Video Moments Done Right While there are zillions of videos services out there ranging from the mighty YouTube to smaller players like 12seconds, Flickr seems to be one of the few to have mastered the art of capturing a moment. Instead of allowing users to film a 15 minuets saga or 12 seconds of random drama, Flickr contains users to the first 90 seconds, which is perfect in our "ever shortening attention span" that our generation lives in. While Twitter could always expand this to 140 seconds (or 2 minutes and 20 seconds), Flickr's short videos would easily compliment the tweet stream. Privacy For The Win Another advantage of Twitter owning Flickr would be that they could finally provide a way for private tweeters to upload images and video without using a public service. This would also benefit users communicating via direct messages, as it would make it easier to share an image (or video) that may not be suitable for the public (note: as in kid pictures folks! Get your mind out of the gutter!). Even though most of the twitterverse broadcasts their media for the world to see, having a way to communicate media privately might make Twitter more appealing to the masses. Could Twitter Buy Flickr? Despite their parent company giving up on the search war, Flickr is (more or less) a valuable entity in the Yahoo! universe. However everyone has their price and Flickr might be able to flourish underneath Twitter (with users posting up to 90 million times daily) better than Yahoo! who is more or less still unsure of who they are. If Twitter was unable to buy Flickr (due to cost or Yahoo! stubbornness), they should probably acquire yFrog (who specializes in uploading both images and video). While hosting media content upon Twitter would present new challenges for the company, it could also make them more relevant in the future (as Twitter going bankrupt is less likely than a small startup or dying mega-company).

WordPress To Blogger: Our Stats Are Better Than Yours After watching users rave about Blogger Live Stats (which just exited Blogger's beta labs), it looks like Automattic (the creators of WordPress) are firing back by unveiling a redesigned stats dashboard of their own. As you hover over each bar in the chart it changes color and displays a tooltip, giving you more information about the data. If the chart is showing data by day, Saturdays and Sundays have a light gray background to make it easier to see weekly patterns. Under the chart you'll notice a new area, called "fortune cookies," where we'll highlight key stats. During the redesign we went with bar charts because the end of one day and the beginning of another shouldn't be connected. Each day starts at zero and we think bar charts work much better for this type of data. We hope you'll agree once you get used to the change. (Official WordPress Blog) WordPress's stat design is based upon Flot (which was created by Ole Laursen), which allows WP fans to view their analytical data from not only their desktop, but their iPhone and iPads as well. Thus far this new redesign is only available for WP.com users, although Automattic is planning on rolling this out to self hosted fans in the near future (although you can check out the new feature by logging into your WP.com account). While this feature is a dramatic improvement over WordPress's previous stats (which was not very elegant), it's still a close second to Blogger Live Stats which uses maps to help you track where one's visitors are coming from. Either way we will probably see Google and Automattic battle it out over the next coming months (via Blogger and WordPress, respectively) for blog supremacy, which means that in the end users (regardless of preference) will win.