IXWebHosting Review – Reviews and Coupons of IX Web Hosting

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.

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.

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 .

Drupal is free open-source content management system (cms for short) created by Dries Buytaert. It is advanced web software able to create various types of websites, ranging from small personal websites to complex social and corporate web sites. It supports template systems where design is separated from the code. There are severa systems that are supported by Drupal: phptemplate, smarty and others, phptemplate being the most used, and it comes as default in the official installation package which is available for download at drupal.org. There are many free and professional themes available on the Internet, users can also publish their own themes on drupal.org.  Drupal also supports powerful module system (extension system) which extends the functionality of this web software by adding new functions that are not available in the distribution package. You can find free modules at drupal.org/project/modules. Many popular websites use this software as their content management system, even some goverment sites like whitehouse.gov have migrated to Drupal. This is not suprising because drupal is in the top 5 most popular cmss offering great features and security, and a huge community.

Drupal IxWebHosting Review

Drupal can run on IXwebhosting. The installation went smooth and website loadtime is good. One-click installation is available via the quick-apps tool, or if you are advanced user you can install it manually.

Everybody webmaster or internet surfer have heard of Joomla – the content management system. It is free, open-source licensed under GNU General Public License, powered by PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor, web scripting language more info: php.net website) and a database backend (MySQL or other). The primary feature of Joomla content management: text, posts, static pages, media, photos, but Joomla is much more than that. It is portal web software with lots of features like:
* Template manager (easily change the look of your website, there are thousands free and professional templates available on the internet)
* Extension system (extend functionality by add new modules, add features, also many free and professional modules available)
* User Management (create social website with user registration, add, edit users, setup permissions and advanced options)
* Menu menager (create, edit menus, menu blocks and more)
* Web link management (add links to external sites, or internal pages, etc)
* Polss (find what users want)
* Search function
* Internationalization – available in many languages
* Contact Management
* Banner Management (add banners to different parts of your websites, counts impressions, clicks, data on user etc)

and much much more. There are thousands more features available thanks to the module system. You can setup forums, blogs, galleries all within Joomla. Together with Drupal (drupal.org) they are the top two cms in the world. More info on joomla can be found on their official website joomla.org where it can be downloaded.

IX Web Hosting Joomla Review

I tested Joomla and it runs without any problems on IxWebHosting. I installed it with hsphere quick apps tool – one click install of many popular scripts. Here is a screenshot of the website: