Ltooz
Building, Fixing and Improving Stuff...
Your Own Website & Blog Server
This page is dedicated to talk about our hosting service, our blog server system , our experience and our domain.
To choose a right hosting service, we need to know what tool they can provide and how well their support is to their customers. We tried the top 2 listed, Justhost.com & Fatcow.com and the Justhost.com won hands down for us in both customer services and ease to use front panel tools.
Beware of all the "money back for 1,3,6 months" claims, choose the correct one because they will charge for the domain registration for cancellation fees ~ $15-20. Fatcow.com charged me $15.00 for less than 24 hours try out, Justhost would charge $20.
It's depend upon what you want to do with your website, the front panel of the hosting service is quite important. Fatcow.com has limited files extension editing front panel and you can't add new extensions to the list they already have which makes the editing different extension files on the fly impossible or even renaming file with new extensions. Justhost.com lets you to edit any type of files with different types of coding system, we use the utf-8 editor for our vietnamese characters when we need it.
In the first few weeks of getting your domain and server set up, you will need lots of technical support from your hosting service people. The Fatcow.com live chat is extremely slow, the wait time for live chat is about 15-20 minutes, Justhost.com is less than 2 minutes every time (may be Fatcow.com has more customers than Justhost?), it took 1 hour and 10 minutes for me to ask a simple question with Fatcow.com technical people and had no answer, "can I add new file extension to the existing list?". Justhost.com technical people solved problems fast and the live chat is amazing. Now we don't need support any more since we got things set up already. Don't be fooled by live chat with salespeople, the response is extremely quick, which is totally different from the live chat with support. Check this out carefully unless you're an expert of everything and you don't need support. I'm sure being #2 Fatcow.com must be great somehow, but not with our experience.
Getting a domain name for your website. Dot Net is cheaper to register than Dot Com. Since the first one is free, the second & third should be dot.net, we got 2 additional domains registered with 1and1.com for $4.99 a year.
Well, we got our domain name registered with Justhost.com, we have an account, then what? Justhost does provide some templates for setting up a website, but it's extremely confusing and not very easy to use. They're all in PHP format which we (non programmer) know nothing about. After talking to the support people, the public_html directory has a file called index.php which will automatically executed when the domain name is called. We can use a generic index.html to overcome this index.php. We can use Frontpage of Microsoft or a free html editor like Komposer editor to make a main page for your website. We also tried the html editor provided with Justhost.com, it would work fine. All we need is to go to the public_html directory, create a new file, named it index.html, after the file is created, use the html editor to edit, if we want to type special characters, then use utf-8 to edit the index.html file, this is an example with vietnamese fonts.
File uploading: We can never get the web ftp to work correctly with Justhost.com, we only use program coreftp or cpanel upload from Justhost. With good internet connection, they can upload up to 100kps. We found that for file less than 25MB, use the internal upload @ the Cpanel is a lot faster. Zip all the file to 25MB and upload that way.
How about adding a few sub domains. We can register with Justhost for $15.00 a sub domain, or we can register with other online service for lower price. We created a subdomain saungon.net for $5 a year @ 1and1.com. To add a sub domain under justhost cpanel
NUCLEUSCMS
After many trials and errors with a few blog software: joomla, mambo, wordpress, b2evolution... we decided to go with Nucleuscms system. Although it's not well established as others, but to us, it has most of the STUFF we want and it's very easy to customize. The system is basic, there are many skins and plugins to make the website wonderful, but the documentation is not clear and it does take a non-programmer, non-webdesigner, a long time to implement all the nice things for the website. This write up is to document STUFF we've learned while experiencing with this software. We hope this documentation will help people to use this fine Free Content Management System easily & promote it widely.
Alright, if you're setting up this system with justhost.com then just follow what we do, if not, start to install the system from here.
Assuming we're already know how to upload, ftp all the STUFF to our server with justhost.com. At this time, the newest version of Nucleus is V3.50, we tried it, but it has bugs and we installed the V3.41 in our server. The pictures may be from the V3.5, but please download the V3.41 or you can start to use the new V3.50. Justhost has the version V3.3 and it has the full set of language codes. The full version V3.41 & V3.50 do not include all languages, just Engligh. As we tried the English only version, we couldn't use special characters for Vietnamese fonts (utf-8). We backed up the language folder from the V3.3 and added on to the V3.41 language folder. We can use the UTF-8 now.
If you're planning to install many separate nucleus blogs on your server, we recommend to set up a full set of skins and plugins with the installation package.
Next... The Blog Server Nucleuscms.org
