The CaymanHost Web Hosting Directory

Installing Wordpress On Your Bluehost Account

The following video illustrates how to install Wordpress on a BlueHost account. Bluehost are a Wordpress friendly hosting company and a large number of bloggers who use WP claim them to be a great choice for hosting your Wordpress blogs.

You can read more about Bluehost and check out the reviews or submit your own at the BlueHost customer reviews page here on the site.

Sign up for a Bluehost web hosting account and follow this video step by step to learn how to install Wordpress blog software using their hosting control panel.

Installing Worpdress is the easy part and if you want to know how to beat 90% of other Worpdress bloggers in the SEO stakes we recommend Wordpress SEO Secrets

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Another Wordpress video tutorial that explains how to add a “back to top” link on any post or page. Depending on your Wordpress theme this can be an extremely useful aid to navigation for your visitors, especially on long pages or lists – maybe an FAQ page for example.

The video explains exactly how to achieve a back to top navigation link using two different methods.

The tutorial is considered advanced because it requires use of text editing software and FTP software to download and add HTML code to the header.php file in a WordPress theme. Once you add the HTML code to the header.php file, you can use the Code editing window in the WordPress Dashboard to insert a “Back to Top” link on any page or post. Both methods work well although the advanced type is the more efficient of the two.

Learn All You Need To Know About Wordpress And More At The Wordpress Classroom – Click Here For Details

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Having recently posted a video on how to host a website or blog on your own PC we thought it would be a good idea to follow up with an explanation of how to take an existing Wordpress blog and copy it to a local server on your computer.

This can be extremely useful if you want to test and tweak certain things without risking untold damage to a live blog as anything you do on a local server can easily be undone or even deleted completely. By having either a copy of your existing blog or just a Wordpress installation for testing purposes you can safely play around in your own Wordpress sandbox to your heart’s content and change themes, test plugins, alter code and generally learn a great deal without any risk. It also gives you one more backup of your valuable content which is no bad side effect!

Highly recommended for anyone who wants to learn more about Wordpress or indeed any other program. Setting up a local server is pretty straightforward even for the non techie and will definitely give you the confidence to experiment and learn more about a whole range of things like PHPMyAdmin and MySQL databases and getting the best from your software of choice.

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If you’re unlucky enough to still be hosting with someone who does not provide Fantastico along with cpanel this video may be of interest to you and explains how to download and install Wordpress manually on your domain.

Watching it made me realize how much simpler Fantastico makes it for customers to install a whole range of scripts including most of the well known CMS platforms including Wordpress, drupal, Joomla, Mambo etc. and also a whole range of other scripts including forums, help desks, classifieds, shopping carts, mailing lists, wikis, polls and more.

elliottmediagroup.com I show you how to install Wordpress, the great blogging platform, on your webhost.

Before you follow the steps shown in this video do make sure that you don’t already have Fantastico -- if you do you will find a smiley face icon in your cpanel named Fantastico or Fantastico Deluxe. Some hosts offer alternative automatic installation tools for common scripts but Fantastico is the most well known.

If you go for cheap hosting this is often one area where cost cutting takes place but even reasonably priced shared hosting nowadays often includes Fantastico, even if the number of scripts might be more limited. It may be something you want to ask before buying a hosting package -- does your cpanel come with Fantastico or any auto script installation service?

For example, hosting with MK Hosting & Marketing Services you will get Fantastico Deluxe with all the following scripts ready to be installed with a few mouse clicks:

Blogs:
b2evolution
Nucleus
WordPress

Classifieds:
Noahs Classifieds

Content Management:
drupal
Geeklog
Joomla 1.5
Joomla
Mambo
PHP-Nuke
phpWCMS
phpWebSite
Siteframe
TYPO3
Xoops
Zikula

Customer Relationship:
Crafty Syntax Live Help
Help Center Live
osTicket
PerlDesk
PHP Support Tickets
Support Logic Helpdesk
Support Services Manager

Discussion Boards:
phpBB
SMF

E-Commerce:
CubeCart
OS Commerce
Zen Cart

F.A.Q.:
FAQMasterFlex

Hosting Billing:
AccountLab Plus
phpCOIN

Image Galleries:
4Images Gallery
Coppermine Photo Gallery
Gallery

Mailing Lists:
PHPlist

Polls and Surveys:
Advanced Poll
LimeSurvey
phpESP

Project Management:
dotProject
PHProjekt

Site Builders:
Soholaunch Pro Edition
Templates Express

Wiki:
TikiWiki CMS/Groupware
PhpWiki

Other Scripts:
Dew-NewPHPLinks
Moodle
Open-Realty
OpenX
PHPauction
phpFormGenerator
WebCalendar

As you can see, Fantastico not only makes installation a breeze but also offers you a good deal of choices and ideas for your websites. If you still have to do things manually however, this video explains how.

By way of contrast the following video shows exactly how Fantastico automates the process and enables anyone to install Wordpress (and many other scripts) within a couple of minutes tops.

As the video author says, WordPress is proud of what they call a 5 Minute install. Here is a true 1 minute installation with a cpanel Web Host. Only someone with experience could do it the manual way in 5 minutes but anyone can keep it under two minutes this way!

(For more information on Roboform as mentioned in the video you can download Roboform free here.

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Following on from my recent posts regarding the free web hosting experiment I recently conducted, I went information gathering for other people’s experiences and, as I have always suspected, there is a lot of bad news out there.

The aim of this post is to prevent you from making an expensive mistake with the false economy of free hosting for your websites or blogs. It is probably the most common mistake made by new webmasters and online entrepreneurs when they think about building their first web page.

There are thousands and thousands of people out there who are considering setting up a website for the first time and anyone who has learned the process from scratch, knows that it is not altogether simple. Having said that, the technology available in 2009 does make it far easier than it was back in the ealry 90’s when I first started out, coding my first webpages using Notepad while at home recovering from an operation.

The results of those early attempts were, I have to admit, pretty horrible, but the web was a very different place back then and my first site was just one of many horrible sites to be found on the internet. It was a hobby site and I hosted it using the space allocated by my ISP, which was a pretty common offering back before the days of broadband and high speed internet. Of course, when I changed my ISP, the site, in all it’s clip art glory was, to all intents and purposes, dead. Probably a good thing, but those early efforts were a hugely valuable learning experience.

I think those days were the last time I ever used a free hosting solution until the recent failed experiment with another company claiming to provide the equivalent of a paid service for nothing.

If you are serious about running a website, particularly with business overtones, good web hosting is essential. This is hardly news to you I’m sure and you’ve probably read it a hundred times already if you are researching how to start your own online business. The reason for this is that it is absolutely true and until you are ready to accept this, you will remain stalled at the starting gate.

Take a look at this video from Lisa, an experienced affiliate marketer at  2 Create a Website where she explains why free hosting of any kind is really not the way to go for anyone thinking of going into business online.

I think that sums up pretty well my own views on free hosting. It simply isn’t worth the potential price you may end up paying in terms of lost revenue and time. (as for her comments on building a site, don’t let that phase you too much. Building a dynamic site on a platform like Wordpress is really simple, even if you start from a base of zero knowledge. Sure you will learn a lot as you go along, but nowadays you can learn as you go, tweaking your sites as your knowledge grows). You don’t need to invest money in expensive web authoring programs.

Here is another great video showing you just how simple it is to do a simple Wordpress installation using cpanel and Fantastico. When looking for hosting, I strongly recommend you find a provider who gives you both of these features, particularly if you are just starting out.

The cost of setting up a website nowadays is really minimal. For those starting out there are shared hosting plans available for less than five dollars a month -- that’s less than $60 per annum. Add the price of a domain name and you’re good to go. Way less than $100 for a year.

If you are hoping to earn money from any online venture, this is the starting point. Buy yourself a domain name and a hosting account. The rest of your journey will then be that much easier.

I know that there will be contrary views and that some people will tell you that there is no need to invest money in a fledgling website and doubtless there are users out there who have used and are still using free services quite happily but until the axe drops on all their hard work, as it so often can when relying on “free” services, they will remain unconvinced. If you want to own your own business, you really do need to own your data and your work, and with free services that just isn’t going to happen and you risk losing everything you have worked for at the whim of a person or company outside of your control. That is the harsh bottom line.

If you’re not sure about buying a domain name or finding a hosting provider, stay and have a look around our site, where you will find answers to most of your questions or concerns. You will find hosting deals ranging from the cheapest shared options all the way up to dedicated server providers costing hundreds of dollars per month, so there is something here for every level of user.

TCH

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Free hosting is always a contentious issue as this post will clearly illustrate.  Recent experiences with a free hosting company clearly illustrate why there are so many tales of why you should think very carefully before considering it as one of your options.  In this post I am dealing with only one free hosting company and am not inferring that they are all the same. However, I strongly recommend that you avoid 000WebHost.com like the plague. 000Webhosting.com are not to be trusted with your websites and are not worth your time as an affiliate. This is free hosting that you will pay a high price for.

Sometimes I get things wrong and this post has come about for that exact reason. Free web hosting with 000.Webhost.com can very possibly cause you nothing but problems, particularly if you complain or refuse to upgrade to a paid hosting account.

A short while ago I wrote a post entitled “Free Hosting With MySQL PHP Cpanel and Fantastico” where I explained how you could set up a Wordpress blog on a free hosting service, either with your own domain or a subdomain provided by 000Webhosting.com. (The post is still live but all links to the company have been removed).

I expressed the view that this would be a far better option than using the free Wordpress.com service, largely because you would have far greater control over what you could display on your site. Wordpress.com does not allow any kind of affiliate marketing content, nor do they permit things like javascript (for security reasons) and it was my contention (and still is) that this is too restrictive for anyone trying to monetize a Wordpress blog.

However, having put my “money” where my mouth is I now admit to having made a rather horrible recommendation. As part of the example I set up a WP blog on the free host and was reasonably impressed with what you got for your free membership. However, time has proved that all in the free hosting garden (certainly in this particular one) is very far from rosy.

I set up monitoring of the site with a free service and very soon noticed rather frequent emails in my inbox notifying me that the site was on error. Sometimes the notification that the site was back up came quite quickly, but others, the downtime was quite extended (hours or even days rather than minutes). Having returned home to Cayman, I decided to do a little more work on the blog as it seemed a shame to waste it. I had even secured the first advertising revenue on the site so I figured that I should pursue its development.

At around the same time the monthly downtime report landed in my inbox. Horror of horrors, 116 hours of it at the tail end of February. Sure enough, I was unable to connect to wp-admin and when I tried to view the site all I got was timeouts, except on one occasion when I got the header and sidebar but no content. As I had made no changes to the blog for about 2 months I was puzzled.

(Click For Full Size Image)

(Click For Full Size Image)

I decided to put the support desk to the test at this point and explained the problem. My conversations with them have been documented through email and screenshots, because here is where things get a little nasty. In their favor, they responded very quickly, but the positives ended there.

The first response was that they could access my site fine and suggested clearing cache, restarting my internet connection (!!)  and if that didn’t work, to try connecting through a proxy server. Not very helpful, particularly to the non technical who probably wouldn’t even know what a proxy is. I did try proxies in both the US and Europe to no avail and without too much surprise.

They then suggested that I use the “fix file permissions” in my cpanel. OK, I tried it, even though the problem was obviously with the server and not my site. It made no difference. The other piece of advice was to use the “cancel/delete account function and recreate the same account again”!! What???

By now I realized I was just getting stock emails from a menu of stock emails being punted out by a non tech support person.  The next one was a killer, advising me that they could not help me with setting up my website and stating “we focus on getting our servers up and running”. Erm, yeah, right. To add insult to injury they then try to upsell me on a paid hosting account. Great marketing tactic (not).

I am sarcastic when I reply, I admit it. I point out that the problem is with their server, not with my site. I tell them that a monitoring service confirms this and that I am not asking for help with my website which was fine and has had no changes made to it in weeks in any case.

In response I am told that they cannot give me a resolution to my ticket as it would take too much administration time. Yep, that’s what they said before trying to sell me a paid hosting plan again. This last mail was badly written by someone for whom English was certainly not a first language. They apologized and thanked me for my understanding. WTF?

I shot back a rather heated email saying that I didn’t understand at all and suggesting that the free service was nothing more than a loss leader (one that they couldn’t even run properly at that)  as a prelude to selling someone a hosting plan. Who in their right mind would pay after seeing these clowns in action I wondered aloud.  They respond…

“The server is working fine, there is problem with your site only. I’m afraid but we do not provide any assistance building website”

Nice. Irrelevant, but really nice. I put it to them that they had said there was no problem with my site and yet now, in a complete reversal they say that there is! I’m laughing now because these people are clueless and obviously assume that their customers, free or otherwise, are clueless too.

I Googled the subdomain in question and sure enough, could not connect to a single site. I told them this and accused them of incompetence if not downright lying. It was, I pointed out, hardly the way to do business or win hearts and minds. I get another totally useless response – “we have opened your site and it shows a blank page, have you tried connecting via proxy?” I want to suggest where they put their fixation with proxies but restrain myself. I’ve had my “fun” but am hugely relieved I don’t rely on 000Webhost.com to provide my real hosting.

Finally they tell me that their data center is blocking access from some countries and that they are looking into it! Blocking access from Nigeria I could understand, but the U.S. and UK? Hardly a believable excuse methinks. Then, they close the ticket, just like that. I’m amazed and no, the site is still not accessible even after another 48 hours. I can’t access my admin area, so I can’t even begin to try and figure out what they screwed up.

I asked my followers in Twitter to try and access the site yesterday – unsurprisingly everyone who tried came up empty. The server was down and connecting to the site from any ISP in any country was impossible.

This morning I received a notification that the site has come off error after over 159 hours of downtime!! Unfortunately the reason for this soon became apparent when I tried to visit my site – redirected to a page saying that the site does not exist. I try to log in to my cpanel to receive the message that “this account has been closed. Please read our terms and conditions”. Now I’m pretty p****d because I failed to notice the section in those terms that specified “do not complain, or, if you do, pay us some money and all will be OK. If we fail to resolve your problem and you continue to request any kind of service we will close your account and delete all your files without having to give any reason whatsoever”. Silly me.

So, I log into my affiliate account and sure enough it is marked as “canceled_abuse”. I have seen many of these inside my affiliate area so here is the next warning to would be affiliates for 000webhosting.com. Don’t bother. You are extremely unlikely to make enough sales to reach their $100 minimum payout because the bottom line is that they really are not interested in providing free hosting and, it would seem,  will find reasons to cancel accounts if they cannot convert free customers to paying ones but I concede that could just be me taking a cynical view. Having said that, reports of sharp business practices are scattered all over the web from disgruntled affiliates if you care to look.

Click To Enlarge Image

By supporting and promoting their services I feel cheated in a multitude of ways. If you are doing the same, or are thinking about participating in their affiliate program, I would urge you to think again. Tarnishing your reputation obviously does not concern them and tarnishing it is a very real possibility. I am deeply apologetic to those I have referred to the services of 000Webhosting.com because it was a bad recommendation. Luckily my site was really only an experiment just to put the service to the test and initially things looked hopeful. Imagine, however ,if it was your site and something you were serious about. You could lose hours and hours, days, of your valuable time, lose money and damage your online reputation by dealing with such a company. It does not matter what kind of site you are running, 000Webhosting.com have clearly demonstrated in this case that they do not offer reliability, service or customer care in any meaningful way.

So, take this as a lesson. Do not rely on 000WebHost.com to provide any kind of reliable service or support. In short, they suck and, in my opinion, the free service is nothing more than a lure to convert users into paying customers by any means necessary. Anyone who gives these people money in the face of such overwhelming evidence of their incompetence would be very foolish indeed, in my humble opinion. Take a look at their terms where they basically say “we can cancel your account at any time for ANY reason”. This should have been a big red flag at the outset and I admit to not paying it the attention I should have.

As one commenter on the original post said, never entrust anything remotely mission critical to a free hosting provider. I made the same recommendation but now, after such a fiasco, I wouldn’t recommend you host anything but a kid’s party with them (the clowns are entertaining). Even a personal website or blog would be hard pushed to survive such terrible uptime and lack of knowledgeable support. It’s a lesson learned and I apologize again to anyone who signed up to the service through my recommendation.

My recommendation to anyone using their services is to back up all your files and find a reliable hosting company to transfer your site to as soon as possible. That’s how strongly I feel about this kind of thing.

Below are the screenshots of my dealings with 000Webhost.com “support”. You can judge for yourself. Click on an image to view full size.

Needless to say I have cancelled my affiliate account and forfeited all earned commissions earned to date. All links to the company will now be redirected or removed from this domain.

Do not be fooled by stories of how great the service is. This review offers genuine proof of what you can expect and is backed with hard evidence. Incidentally, the site in question was a blog on the very innocuous subject of the Cayman Islands and any suggestion that it fell foul of their usage policies in any way shape or form would be false.

The web is becoming littered with disgruntled users and affiliates  regarding 000Webhosting, so don’t just take my word for it. As time passes, I guarantee that these will outnumber those talking the company up.

Luckily, my experiment was purely that, but hopefully this will prevent some potential customers from making what could be a costly mistake.

TCH

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With the first stable release of Wordpress 2.7 or, wordpress 2.7 Coltrane to give it its correct title, there has been a flurry of posting around the blogosphere and the usual avalanche of questions and answers. If you are a blogger and you’ve managed to miss out on the fact that Wordpress 2.7 represents some significant changes over all previous versions you might want to check your pulse, but then read on to find out what all the buzz is about.

I normally proceed with caution each time a new WP version hits the streets to let them iron out the inevitable bugs and to give the plugin authors time to catch up, but this time I decided to forge ahead, upgrading another blog before this one just to see how it went.

The good news is that it went pretty smoothly so I moved on to The CaymanHost without too much trepidation and set the Wordpress Automatic Upgrade plugin in motion. I’m pleased to say that aside from a few minor glitches and irritations the upgrade went well here too, but there are one or two plugins that don’t want to play with 2.7 and have thrown their rattles out of their prams. More of that in a bit.

Rather than regurgitate all the details of the changes in the look and feel of Wordpress 2.7 from an admin point of view I will refer you to K-InTheHouse’s excellent and comprehensive post entitled “Top Wordpress 2.7 Tips, Hacks, Plugins & Resources” where you will find plenty of very useful links and information.

For a quick peek at the new backend admin interface and some of the new features I’ve included a pretty detailed video below to demonstrate how it all works. Personally I’m finding it does take a little while to find your way around after having got so used to the Wordpress backend of old.

So, as you can see, there have been a lot of changes compared to the normally slow development of Wordpress, this latest incarnation represents some major differences from the Wordpress you know and love.

As far as plugins go, you might want to heed the advice given in the above video regarding a test installation on a subdomain and check the list of compatible plugins listed in K-InTheHouse’s aforementioned post.  I forged ahead and I’m pleased to say that the majority of my plugins worked fine although I did have to deactivate and reactivate a couple of them to get them functioning.

Notable exceptions, at least for me are a couple of RSS plugins, including the excellent MultiFeedSnap so you will probably notice a couple of feeds missing from my sidebars for a while. The other plugin that refuses to work is Max Banner Ads from MaxBlogPress, but I’m sure they will soon fix those issues. Until then I shall have to do without it.

The following plugins are all in use and working fine although at least one will effectively be made redundant due the new capabilities of 2.7 Coltrane.

Akismet | aLinks (site down/ no longer being developed?) |AllInOne SEO Pack | Blog Mechanics Keyword Link | CoComment Enhancer | DoFollow | FeedBurner Feedsmith | Feed Footer | Google XML Sitemaps | Got Banners | Insights | KB Advanced RSS Widget | Maintenance Mode | MaxBlogPress Favicon | MaxBlogPress Stripe Ad | My Ad Manager | My Page Order | No Self Pings | Peter’s Custom Anti Spam | Psychic Search | Redirection | Share This | Simple Tags | Simple Trackback Validation | Smart Youtube | StatPress Reloaded | Subscribe Me | Subscribe To Comments | Twit This | What Would Seth Godin Do | WP Automatic Upgrade | Wordpress Link Directory | WP-Affiliate

Sez Who and Bumpzee have both been kicked into touch as a result of two much conflict with other plugins or slow load times. This was done prior to the upgrade. SezWho are working on my issues so it may make a return at some point in the future.

Once I get used to the navigation I’m sure I’ll be a happy bunny, but until then it has slowed me down a little As Wordpress 2.7 Coltrane includes an automatic upgrade feature, tedious WP updates will hopefully be a thing of the past. The king is dead, long live the king.

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I posted a while back about this free hosting service and have been promoting it around the web albeit on a fairly casual basis. Looking at my statistics it struck me that despite a good number of signups for the service, there was a terrible attrition rate when it came to drop outs.

Before reading any further, we suggest you click below:

(Please see our IMPORTANT update here for explanations as to why you should be extremely careful with this website. Our recommendation is to avoid at all costs. Serious allegations appearing on the web which should not be ignored).

WARNING – DO NOT USE THIS SERVICE – google THEIR NAME + “SCAM” DO NOT GIVE YOUR INFORMATION ON ANY SITE THAT HAS NO PRIVACY POLICY OR TO ANY SITE THAT MAY COMPROMISE YOUR PERSONAL DETAILS. AFFILIATES – YOU WILL NOT BE PAID FOR SIGNUPS. PLEASE DO YOUR HOMEWORK.

As an affiliate marketer I’m always intrigued to know why these things happen. In this instance I had not used the service myself and just promoted it because I figured there are probably hundreds of thousands of people out there who would like some free web hosting with no ads and with all of the features of a paid service, or at least a good number of them. When the company notified me that they were including Fantastico in the free package I thought it would do even better.

Although I didn’t focus a huge amount of promotional effort the signups did start to flow in so I was initially very pleased, but when more than half of the people I had referred simply let their accounts become inactive I gave the matter some more thought. I had recently written a post over at my internet marketing blog about promoting free products and services and why it was not always a sure thing, so my natural curiosity got the better of me and I decided to sign up for the free hosting service myself, as an experiment.

I didn’t want to buy a domain – I wanted to experience a totally no cost solution as I imagine most people attracted to the service would want too, and, judging by my affiliate stats, that is indeed the case.

I wondered if people were dropping out because the service didn’t do what it claimed, or because it was basically useless. So how did I get on?

Well, signup was very quick and painless and once inside I did a quick exploration to see how things stacked up against my own hosting provider. They did of course fall way short of what I get from my host, but to be fair, this was all free and I have to say I was quite impressed by what was on offer.

Here are a couple of shots of the cpanel interface (click on them to enlarge)

Anyone familiar with cpanel will be know this kind of view, and will see that it is a pretty standard hosting control panel with all the features you would expect. Knowing it is from a free provider however, might surprise many people.

So, having had an initial nose around I logged into Fantastico to see what scripts were on offer. I wanted to set up a Wordpress blog for performance testing purposes and was pleased to see that the blogging software was all present and correct (albeit a very slightly outdated version). Happy with that, I can also confirm that the company includes Joomla, drupal, PHPBB, Coppermine, Simple Machines (forum), PHP Website and B2Evolution (blogging) software. OK. it’s not a huge list as you would expect to see from a paid host nowadays, but it’s free, remember.

The web stats on offer is a bit lame but with all the free analytics software around nowadays, who really needs it? All I would say is that to get server stats you would need to install a visitor counter on your pages and I can’t be bothered with that!

For the techies here are a quick few facts. The server runs PHP 5.2, and MySQL 5.0.51-community on Apache version 2.2.10 (Unix). You will get 5 MySQL databases and a claimed 100GB of bandwidth every month and 1500 Mb of disk space. It’s too early for me to talk about downtime and hardware issues but there were some complaints in the members forum area – no great surprise there, you will find the moaners at any hosting company, even the free ones (Update – it would seem that complaints are very often justified and not tolerated by 000Webhost.com who will happily delete your account if they take exception to anything you might say – literally)

Getting back to my experiment, I installed Wordpress using Fantastico and all went without a hitch. I hunted down a free template to suit my needs, grabbed all the plugins (a lot) that I wanted and started work on the blog. I have to say that there were very few hitches or issues encountered with the hosting. I used a good number of plugins and none of them failed due to server issues. I did have a couple of problems but these were code related as opposed to being caused by server settings. All in all the installation and set up of a totally new Wordpress blog went very well. I had to change a few CHMOD settings here and there to enable me to edit theme files but the FTP interface in cpanel was cool and easy to use and for everything else I used FireFTP anyway.

After setting up my site there was some brief downtime due to the fact that your account needs to go through an approval process to weed out the abusers who always come along to free sites unfortunately. It’s good to know that the company weeds out the bad apples as you don’t want to be associated with a sub domain that earns itself a reputation for spamming or other illegal or dubious activity. The site was not down for very long at all in any case.

The only issues I’ve noticed are occasional MySQL quirks and sometimes when posting to the blog an error screen. This is odd because on checking the Wordpress control panel the post has been put into the unpublished drafts. Those glitches aside, so far so good.

My questions remained unanswered though. Why did so many new users of the service drop out without ever using it? As far as I can tell it’s a bargain at the price. Why use Wordpress.com when you can host your own blog and have complete control over content with a free host like this? If you are looking for free hosting, I’d seriously consider giving these guys a go, particularly if you are just setting up a non business related site. For serious business users I wouldn’t ever recommend free hosting, but who knows, maybe one of these days there will be a service good enough even for business users. This free hosting has already moved the goalposts in the traditional “free” web hosting marketplace.

Since writing this piece our experience with this company went rapidly downhill and we would not recommend them at all. Get a free web hosting account with cpanel PHP MySQL & Fantastico at your own risk. 000Webhost are not to be trusted with your data.

Footnote: The blog created in this experiment was once found at http://caymanislands.net76.net but since the company’s abrupt deletion of my files and account it has gone the way of all living things.

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Wordpress and Twitter users will be interested to know that a new Plugin called Tweet My Blog has recently been made available for free, although users will be required to opt-in to a list in order to download their free copy.

If you are using Twitter already, you will appreciate the integration of your Wordpress Blog which will enable you to automatically send a Tweet each time you make a new post without the need to do it manually.

I’ve just installed the plugin which is a simple task and should take less than a couple of minutes for most users.

To get your copy of the plugin, just click on the cover image below.

Remember – You can FOLLOW ME ON TWITTER Here

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I finally got around to updating to the latest version of Wordpress and it was reasonably painless. I know I’ve left it a rather long time but experience has shown me that it’s often a good idea to wait a while until some of the inevitable bugs get ironed out.

I’ve always relied on the Wordpress Automatic Updates plugin in the past and it served me well again this time around. After the update and being greeted with the admin interface changes it took me an hour or so to get familiar with the new layout, but Wordpress have definitely introduced some very helpful new ideas.

The first thing I noticed was the notifications in the plug ins menu advising of new versions, along with an extremely useful auto update feature. This wouldn’t work for me, but the problem had already been encountered by many others so finding the solution was quick and easy (another benefit of not upgrading to soon). Disabling the automatic updates plugin allowed me to quickly update all the items with a few mouse clicks – I like that!

The next problem was that none of my pages were accessible aside from the main index! I was getting nothing but redirect errors. Luckily for me a quick search in the Wordpress forums led me to an easy to implement solution. It’s all to do with those canonical URL’s and the fix was a case of installing the “Disable Canonical URL Redirection ” plugin which took a couple of minutes. I’m not sure if I should leave that as a permanent fix or not, but it works and solves the immediate problem.

Aside from those issues, the upgrade went very well and I breathed a sigh of relief. I lost one plugin that was not compatible with the new WP version and is not going to be developed further.

In all, I like the new admin interface, I love the auto update feature for plugins and think that overall, the new WP has introduced some great improvements.

I have also added a new feature for commenters in the form of SezWho so that now in conjunction with dofollow, comments are given even further benefit to those who contribute.

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