Hosting

Cheap UK web hosting

Cheap UK web hosting

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Domain name suggestions

So, you’ve decided you want to have your own web site – either for a personal blog, interest site, or some business venture (or whatever else) and now you need to decide on the domain name that you want. Unfortunately, there’s quite a lot of other people that have had exactly the same idea and there’s increasing competition for the best web names out there. 

Even if you’ve decided on a really cool name, it may already have been taken by someone else that has launched their own web site – or could have been secured by a cyber-squatter, who’s going to try and charge an exorbitant amount to allow you to take it…. so, what’s the alternative?

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Kindle ebook news server using Calibre

Amazon Kindle 3GI’ve been reading around the topic and I’m still struggling to understand just how to install Calibre on my web server. I want to be able to run Calibre 24/7 on my server so that I can serve up news according to my pre-determined schedule, as opposed to using the process described in my other post: Automated free news for Kindle using Calibre.

However, I have come across three resources that I think might help.

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Can the Free Web Site model work?

I’ve been thinking about this for a while now… and I’m wondering whether the Free Web Site model can really work. It was an advert in today’s Crain’s Manchester that got me thinking. It was an all-inclusive single price package for web site design, logo design and SEO work – all for the bargain price of £999. In my opinion, that seems a little steep…

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Dynamic image resizing in WordPress

Some of the WordPress themes I’ve trialled include a dynamic image re-size option, which initially sounded quite good. However, after trying for hours to get the thing to work and searching countless other forums and WordPress guides, I still couldn’t get it to work.

That was, until, I stumbled across a web site (http://ravidreams.com/2009/10/wordpress-automatic-thumbnail-issue-with-hostgator/) that specifically covered by problem – and it wasn’t anything to do with my directory permissions either. It was a bandwidth protection measure from my host, Hostgator!

Anyway, following the instructions on the site (copied and pasted below, for ease) – resolved the issue nice and quickly… and now I have a fully functioning, image resizing WordPress installation!

Here’s what to do:

1. Login to your Hostgator control panel and contact Live Chat Support.
2. Ask the support technician to white list your thumbnail generation file for mod_security . You will need to give your file name and path.  The file name mostly will be timthumb.php or thumb.php. You can find this file inside the WordPress theme folder. An example file path wp-content/themes/theme_name/thumb.php

This is apparently a known issue with Hostgator’s WordPress hosting and all their technicians should recognize your request.

This problem will be solved by them in minutes.

Hosting – who do I recommend?

Without doubt, my best experience of a reliable, low-cost, feature packed hosting company has to be Host Gator.

Yes, they’re US based, but so what? Apart from the billing process being prone to currency fluctuations, they’re just ultra reliable and very helpful if you ever have any problems.

I’ve used them for plenty of years and plan on staying with them too.

More to write on these in subsequent posts too… such as setting up databases, installing web applications and general configuration, tips and my experiences.