After the sing up process with ixwebhosting web hosting provider is completed you are sent welcome e-mail with all the information you need to host your website including account username and password and namerservers. Nameservers are in the following format:
nsxxx.ixwebhosting.com
nsxxx.ixwebhosting.com
At least two namserevers are required and need to be changed at your domain name registrar (where you have registered or currently hold your domain name). After you change the name servers typically there is a 24-48 hours propagation before all DNS servers worldwide are updating for the changes.
Nameservers
Nameservers are the used for resolving domain names to IP address. Every host (computer, server or device) that is connected to the Internet needs to have unique IP address at the moment of connecting. So when yo want to open some webpage you enter the web address, and the process of resolving begins. Your computer asks the nameservers of the domain in question and once they are resolved to some IP address the browser connects to that IP address and requests the web page. After it receives the html code it renders it and the page is showed to you.
Ixwebhosting.com have recently changed their home page design. The new home page looks better, everything is well structured and in place. Although the structure is not much changed, only there are few new things added. One thing added is the uptime guarantee of 99.9%. This very good plus for ixwebhosting. Uptime of 99.9% is excellent uptime and your site will be available almost all the time. The prices and other features of hosting plans are not changed. There is current ongoing promotion at ix web hosting – regular price is $6.95 discounted price is $3.95 monthly. So if you are thinking of signing up with ixwebhosting then this is the right time to signup and save money. The promotion may end soon. In case you are not satisfied with the service there is 30 day unconditional money-back guarantee, so if you cancel you will get refund. We have been three months with them and we are very satisfied from the service they offer.
It is good your website to have dedicated IP address because you have unique address on the internet, you can use SSL certificate for your website, and some say that it helps get better search engine rankings. SSL certificate is a very good to have, because it allows you secure access of your visitors to your website. SSL certificates price is from $50/year and above depending on the certificate. You will probably won’t need to buy dedicated IP address on IxWebHosting because all plans come with a number of unique IP addresses. Expert plan comes with 2 dedicated IP addresses, Business Plus comes with 2 IPs, and Unlimited Pro comes with 15 IPs. VPS plans come with two dedicated IP addresses. There lots of other features with these plans for cheap price.
VPS or Virtual Private Servers are Virtually created servers where parent software manages its resources (CPU, RAM, Disk space and other). They are between shared hosting and dedicated servers. The difference between VPS and dedicated is that dedicated servers have more resources available than VPS, but VPS are cheaper and you can install software, custom programs for services, add custom modules, pretty much anything you can do on dedicated you can do on VPS. Most hosts allow root access so you have full control over your VPS. VPS hosting have become very popular in recent years, mostly because on shared environment you are very limited with resources while with VPS you have more freedom and more resources. For example you may want to create your own game server (something you can’t do in shared hosting).
Ixwebhosting VPS hosting
Linux and Windows VPS are available on IX Webhosting. Linux VPS is better and cheaper unless you need some special windows software to be installed on your virtual private server. There are 3 linux plans offered and each plan includes unlimited hosted domains/sites, burstable RAM, 2 dedicated IP addresses, Root/Admin access, Free cPanel/Plesk on selective plans and several operating systems to choose from.
Ix webhosting uptime have been good in February, though other hosts I have an account with are better. Out of 1321 checks only 16 failed, with total of 97.279% uptime for February 2010. The average response time (the time the web server needs to respond) was 0.571 seconds which is excellent. So far, the average uptime since December 2009 is 97.962% which is good. For monitoring the uptime of this review blog which is hosted at ixwebhosting.com, I have an account with serviceuptime.com. The check interval is 30 minutes. Click here to view the current uptime – live link of the monitoring report. Here is also screenshot:
Three months have passed since I signed up with ixwebhosting, and so far they have been great. I have not had any issues whatsoever.
To get the best discount on IXwebhosting follow this secret link and get 20% off of any hosting plan. You do not need to use any ixwebhosting coupon.
In my example below I choose the unlimited plan. You can choose the economy plan or other plan and still get 20% with this link.
The price for one month is: $16.95 (with $30 setup), for three months is $11.95/monthly, 1 year is $8.95/monthly.
You will save this way the most because the monthly price is lower when you go for 3 years annually. The total savings will be $360(regular savings for choosing triennial billing cycle) + $57.24 (secret link) up to $417.24 in total savings!!
Screenshot:
The best ixwebhosting plan is the unlimited pro hosting plan and on this plan you will get the best discount possible. The plan comes with tons of features including 3 Free domain names. This ixwebhosting review blog is hosted by ixwebhosting.
February 24th, 2010
admin
FTP (File Transfer Protocol) sets the standard for transferring (uploading, downloading and other commands) files (text/binary) over the TCP/IP (The Internet as we all know it). To use ftp you will need ftp client and server. The server have access to the files and folders and manipulates them when commands are send from the client. Files or directories may be uploaded, deleted, modified, download from the server. The server can be configured to allow anonymous logins or can be configured to allow only authenticated users (and those users to have special permissions on what files/folders can they have access to, how much bandwidth or storage are they allowed etc, etc). The most popular FTP client is Filezilla – the free FTP solution, is available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X, or you can directly use your browser (firefox supports browsed based FTP) to access your FTP server.
IxWebhostingPad FTP test
Ixwebhosting FTP was excellent. Files and folder transferred fast with no lags or delays. You can have unlimited FTP accounts on Ixwebhosting, you can setup them so they have access to specific folder (domain), which is quite useful if you plan to give your friends access to specific parts of your web site.
February 16th, 2010
admin
PhpBB (short for php Bulletin Board) is forum software for creating online communities. It is free open-source, licensed under GNU GPL license. It offers many features found in paid ones of this kind. Some features are: powerful user/permissions setup with usergroups, moderators, administrators, access control lists, create forums, subforums, internationalization/localization, user registration with captcha validation(optional), bbcode and many others, check the official website: http://www.phpbb.com/about/features/ . Template and extension systems are also one of the features available. PHPBB is built with php (the best web programming language!) and uses mysql database as a storage. Several other database systems are also supported: postgresql, mssql, oracle, firebird, sqlite and others. Since its creation in 2000, it have become the most popular free internet forum software. There is large phpbb community of users, individuals and developers. So if you do not have money to buy software like vbulletin, phpbb or mybb is the choice for your next online community.
I have tested phpbb on Ix Web Hosting, and it runs great. Though I think that for serious website, you will need vbulletin. PHPbb can be installed manually or via the one-click installer control panel tool.
MySQL is free open-source relational database management systems (RDBMS) first created in 1994, licensed under GNU General Public License (only the community edition). It is powerful database server with many features. Databases, inserts, selects can be done with SQL (Structured Query Language). The Free version is the most popular database system on the internet. It is installed on millions of web servers in so called LAMP stack (Linux Apache MySQL PHP). Its popularity have grown in the last years due to the very popular web applications (WordPress – weblog software, Drupal – Content Management System/Script – CMS, Joomla – another also very popular CMS, phpbb – a forum/community software that use MySQL as their backend – for storing user data, settings, permissions, and even binary files. Also very popular corporations and websites use MySQL (e.g Google, Facebook, Wikipedia and many others). Several tools have spawned to ease the adminstration of mysql databases. Such tool is phpmyadmin written in PHP. The latest version of MySQL is 5. Currently the company behind this database system was recently bought by Oracle corporation, a move that some people think that it will hurt its development.
Nowadays almost every web hosting company (if not all) comes with PHP and MySQL in bundle, including IXWebHosting. This wordpress blog is a test and it shows that MySQL and PHP are setup very nice on ix web hosting. Databases can be created via cPanel and users can be added also via cPanel (with permissions setup).
PHP (short for hypertext preprocessor, personal home page tools as named first) is the most popular web scripting programming language for creating dynamic pages. It can be embedded into html code, and preprocessed by the PHP interpreter. PHP often comes in bundle with MySQL (the relational database management system) for storing data. It is extremely flexible, simple language and there are many scripts both free and paid out there. This blog is powered by one of the most popular PHP scripts – wordpress, a weblog (blog) software that is installed on more than 20 million websites, including many popular like engadget.com, mtv news room, smashing magazine and many others.
If you are looking for PHP hosting then you have come to the right place – IX Web Hosting. IXwebhosting supports PHP (the hypertext preprocessor) and MySQL to run your favorite CMS (content management systems like drupal, joomla, wordpress etc.), galleries, weblogs, forums (phpbb, vbulletin etc). Currently the latest version of PHP is installed. You can further customize some settings with PHP.INI if you need to, or are required like the register_globals that must be off for drupal. There are other options that can be changed, more info at http://www.ixwebhosting.com/index.php/v2/pages.faq_php .