2008 Open Source CMS Award Launched

Today, I visited Drupal official site, and found a post that “2008 Open Source CMS Award Launched”, and Drupal encourage all their fans to vote for them.

And I saw the same kinds of post can be found in Joomla.

This Open Source CMS Award is sponsored by packtpub.com, and has been ran for many years. In last year, Drupal wins the Overall Winner award, and Joomla is the Best PHP award. The result looks interesting since Drupal and Joomla are both build on php, how can Drupal is the best of all, but not the best in php? Looks like to me it’s the result of balanced.

But any way, this is a big event for all those contributing a lot to open source world, especially in Content Management area. The winner will deserve those awards.

Which is your preferred CMS, Drupal, Joomla or WordPress? Don’t forget to vote for it now.

ElephantDrive Review - an Affordable & Security Online Storage

What’s ElephantDrive

ElephantDrive is a online storage service provider, founded in mid-2005 by a group of veteran technology and internet entrepreneurs to meet the increasing demand for cheap, reliable, and secure online storage and backup.

ElephantDrive provides simple, secure, and automated online storage services to individuals and small businesses. The company’s software has been recognized in the industry for its game-changing approach to storage management.

What Make it Different

As there are so many online storage service providers, what make ElephantDrive differnt compared with its competitors? I believe below are something need to be noted.

• By combining the power of grid computing infrastructures such as Amazon Web Services’ S3 with proprietary storage optimization technology, ElephantDrive’s service allows users to enjoy the same levels of availability and performance as large corporate enterprises, at a fraction of the cost.
• Provides effective and continuous data protection tools for online backup and PC synchronization, it is the first of a suite of online data management services that will combine to push core computing utility into the cloud, where any web enabled device can store, retrieve, manage, and share any digital asset, from anywhere, at anytime
• A client side software which make it very convenient for you to interact with your online documents

Check it Out 

Need a online storage service, and share your file as you want, check out the service from ElephantDrive, it’s cheap, security, and convenient.

iPower Discount - Free Web Hosting for 6 Months

I just finish my iPower Review, and find iPower is in a new promotion today, which is only 5 days left. In this promotion, you will get free web hosting for 6 months, which lead to only $3.98/month, and what’s more, you can choose to pay month by month at a price at $6.95, this is totally new payment terms from them. And you still get free setup even you pay with monthly terms.

Need a reliable web hosting for your blog or small business, check them out now:

iPower Review - Budget Web Hosting Solution

This blog is hosted in iPower. Since many people ask me to recommend some reliable hostings for their Blog, I would like to share my experience with iPower and explain why it’s a good choice for Blog or Small Business site.

It’s Affordable

This blog use the iPower Pro Plan solution, the regular price for this one is at $7.95/month. This is an average price for a shared small business web hosting solution in the industry. This price is affordable, and it’s less than the cost of a lunch for most of the people. And what’s lucky is that I purchased the service when they were promoting their products, so that I only spent $4.95/month to get it actually. 

By signing up with them, I have received around $80 free marketing credit for Google Adword and Yahoo Search Marketing, which is more than my spending on their service.

It’s Powerful

In its Pro plan, you will be provided with 1500GB disk space, 15000GB monthly transfer. You can host unlimited domains (blog) in it if you want. And your site will be powered with tools like MySQL, php, Perl, Agora Shopping  Cart, and SiteBuilder, etc. You also can get many other web site promotion tools from them, such as Google WebMaster tools, which has been integrated into their control Panel recently.

What’s the beautiful thing of iPower is that their teams are continuously thinking about how to give their customer better service to keep the business relationship. I see many enhancements from them since I used their service. 

It’s Reliable

I haven’t seen any down time for my sites (one blog, and one web site about affiliate network) so far. Looks like their solution is pretty stable. I only have encountered one issue when trying to create a Joomla site, I override the .htaccess file, and cause some priviledge issues, but they help me re-instate my environment and then there is no problem any more. 

Great Customer Support

I am pretty satisfied with their service so far. What iPower attracting me most is their Live Chat support, which allows me to ”chat” with them easily via instant messager and show them the problem I met. Live Chat support is a much have feature for me to sign up a service with a web hosting vendor. Otherwise, you will have to send out an email and sit there waiting for the reply. This doesn’t feel good, as least for me.

Cons of iPower

I have purchased the service from many web hosting companies to try their service so that I know what I should recommend to my customers. And compared with some other hosting companies, there are still some space iPower can improve:

• More free open source scripts.
  Currently, most of web hosting companies will provide their customers with a lot of free open source scripts so that you can get them installed with some simple clicks. But iPower only includes some basic scripts such as WordPress, phpBB, etc. And for the scripts like Joomla, Drupal, you need to pay for the installation if you want them to do it for you. Even the charge is limited, this defintely not the necessary cost for the web site owners. The good thing is that setting up an Drupal or Joomla sites is pretty easy even you do it by yourselves.
• Web Statistics Tool
  iPower does provide a very good web site statitics tool AWStats as free. But there is one issue in iPower AWStats configuration that all the traffic data from different domain are mixed together, if you have more than 1 domain hosted with them, it would be hard for you find out the web statistics for each domain.  
• Non working time support
  iPower live chat support is only available in their working time. For non working time, you have to use the email support system. This is somehow slow, but considering everyone want a work life balanced, this sounds acceptable for me. And this isssu should be able to be resolved by outsourcing this support service to China or India.

Summary

As a responsible company, iPower has served for more than 700, 000 customers so far. It’s experience and technology will guarantee you a reliable environment for your web site. You can visitor iPower to get to know about this company.

Does Amazon Host its Site in Their Own Cloudy Computing Data Center

Today, I read a news that Amazon is down for about 3 hours, which might bring Amazon millions of dollars lost sales. This is interesting. Amazon plans to provide a platform (such as EC2) for web application which is based on its cloudy computing environment, which is supposed to be very stable and fast. Now, the down of Amazon looks like to me is an environement issue, if Amazon cannot make its own site stable, how can it provide a hosting service which can give you a reliable environement.

The only reason to explain this is that its Amazon.com site hasn’t hosted in it’s Cloudy computing data center.

Webex Review - Try Meet Me Now for Free

Founded in 1996, Webex has grown into the worldwide leader in online meeting applications, with 64% market share. More than 3.5 million people use Webex every month to communicate and collaborate online.

You can get a web meeting solution from Webex no matter you are individual, Small&Medium Business companies, or large enterprise. You can hold the web meeting, host a webinars or even doing the remote support by leverage the tools from Webex.

Free Trial period of using Webex is 2 weeks, you can get it by simply providing your email box and billing information. After register, you will need to install a small software to start the web meeting with others.

Right now, Webex is part of Cisco Inc, which will reinforce the leading position of Webex in the industry.

How to Signup

• Input your first name, last name, email address, choose a password, and then click “Try it free” button to move to next step
• You will be asked to input your Billing address and your credit card, you won’t be charged until the trial period (14 days) is expired. And you can cancel the subscription at any time when you want.
• Then, you can download Webex MeetMeNow software, it’s a small software and will allow you to start an Online Conference.

How to Use it

After installing the MeetMeNow, you will see an icon in the taskbar of Windows, as below.

 

 

 

When you double click that icon, it will popup a small form, like:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You can click the “Start Meeting Now” to start a conference. The above form will be changed into form as below, you can send invitation to the attendees by email or paste the join link to instant message. The attendees can join the conference by clicking the join link. Quite convenient!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Once people join the meeting, you can click the “Start Sharing” button (see above form) to share the document, and also you can change the presenter so that the people in the other place can present their document. And you also can allow people to control your PC if necessary. This is quite powerful.

All above are what you need to do to start an online conference, it’s just as simple as you can image.

Webex is also able to integrate with Instant message. Take Windows Live Messager as an exmaple, once you install Webex in your PC, there will be Webex “Start Meeting” button attaching to your chat form, you can start the webex Conference with the people you are talking to at any time.

 

 

Summary

As you can see in above, Webex is quite powerful but easy to use Web conference software. Right now, Webex provide you you will get 14 days as trial period which you won’t be charged a dime. This is good for you to get familiar with it and enjoy this powerful conference tool

Webex has made the signup process quite convenient for you. You can go to Webex, and follow the below steps to use the Meet Me Now immediately.

HostMonster Coupon Code and Review

As one of the leaders in the web hosting industry, HostMonster is famous for providing high quality service to the customers at very reasonable price. Its one-size-fits-all web hosting will give you almost everything you will need to setup a web site, and only charge you a very low price which will be less than the cost of a lunch.

HostMonster has been in the industry for more than 10 years, and win a lot of awards from the top web hosting review sites for their great service. And it’s a shared Linux web hosting service provider.

Top 6 Reasons to User HostMonster

I have used the web hosting service from many web hosting companies, incluidng HostMonster, Lunarpages, IXWebHosting, GoDaddy, and iPowerWeb. And I believe below are some reason make HostMonster to be the exceptional one among all of them.

1. Affordable Web Hosting, all-in-one package

There is only one solution provided by HostMonster.com. This One-Fits-for-All solution will give you everything you will need to host a web site. You can host unlimited domain, use unlimted disk space with unlimited monthly transfer there. Besides those normal features of a web hosting, HostMonster will also preinstall almost all the popular scripts for you, such as WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, etc. It’s eCommerce enabled features also make it a great solution for a small ebusiness web site.

The price from HostMonster is affordable as well, the normal price is $6.95/month, if you use the coupon code in below, you will get a price as low as $4.95/month.

2. It’s reliable

HostMonster is a reliable web hosting. It will guarantee 99.9% uptime, and according to the monitoring data from the 3rd-part web site uptime monitoring companies, the actual data of HostMonster is larger than what it has committed, which is more than 99.95%.

3. Excellent Customer Service

HostMonster is one of the very few companies which you can get the support by Live Chat support, email support, toll free call support, and online knowledge base. And what attracts me most is its Live Chat support which will allow me to chat to them and display to them the problem I have immediately, from my perspective, this is much better than toll free call actually.

4. Fast Connection

The connection from HostMonster is very fast and stable.  All accounts come with an OC-48 backbone connection and customized Apache web server and high-performance Quad Opteron servers with UPS power backups, mirrored storage backups, and a backup generator. The datacenter where your hardware is stored is monitored by a professional security staff 24/7.

5. It’s Recognized

HostMonster can consistently deliver the high quality service to their customers, and this has been recognized by their customers and many web hosting review web site. For example, it has been awarded as the Best Web Hosting service provider in www.webhostingclue.com.

6. It’s Safe

Your web site is safe because of its world-class level security data center. Your data is safe since HostMonster has very good backup plan in place. And your money is in safe as well, HostMonster will give you 30 days money back period, if you don’t satisfy with their service, you can request your money back.

HostMonster Coupon Code

HostMonster coupon is available, which will give you $2 off every month compared with it’s normal price($6.95/month at a 2 years plan), which means you will get $24 discount if you sign up a one year plan with them, or $48 off for a 2 year plan.

Go Hostmonster, and redeem the coupon code now to get the discount price as low as $4.95/month.