We’re definitely not a cPanel fan, yet, you find them bundled in with most of the web hosting packages available on the market. To web hosting providers, cPanel makes their lives easier. It claims to manage all settings under one root, which is by the customer themselves.

cPanel's dashboard

The default view of cPanel's FTP

Is this really what a customer would want? If you find cPanel too complicated, like we do, check out the control panel that comes with our web hosting package.

1.com.my - Dashboard with subtle yet comprehensive design

1.com.my - Each site's directories are defined clearly

How to Use Web Hosting Control Panel?

In a perfect world, your web hosting company might assume that every website consumes the same processing power, but this is not the case. Busy websites with heavy codes can take up more compute cycles. Compute Cycle (CC) provides a better way to measure how busy a website is, apart from its bandwidth and storage. It’s fair to say that those with higher CC’s should be charged more.

“Compute Cycles are a measurement of the processing time that your applications require, attained by calculating CPU processing time and accounting for the disk I/O consumed by your application’s operations”

Our standard web hosting comes with 10,000 CC a month, more than enough for most websites. So far, we’ve only had two customers who’ve exceeded their CCs. Instead of charging them (or penalising them), we work hand in hand with them to look into their site and find out if we can reduce the high CC problem. Since both of them are running busy Blogs, we introduced the WP-Cache, a plugin that serves content from the cache for faster access and reduced CC.

“XXX hosting company in Malaysia offers an unlimited hosting plan that comes with unlimited storage that allows you to host unlimited web sites”

The word ‘unlimited’ is catchy but doesn’t ring true. Many web hosting plans boast about supporting unlimited or certain number of add-on domains. In a nutshell, you can host a number of websites by subscribing only to one hosting package. Such a setup is messy and often turn the server unmanageable or abused.

We limit our hosting package to host only one website for each hosting package subscribed. For example, if our customer wish to setup a new sub-domain (eg, blog.xxx.com), they need to subscribe to a new web hosting package.

One of our friends who had subscribed to our web hosting service to host their Cradle award winning CRM project has subscribed to the additional hosting xxx.coconect.com. Each hosting is RM80 a year, though it doesn’t come with ‘unlimited add-on domain’ we are sure that is a better approach!

“We’d like to continue supporting you as we really like your service,” said one of the founder of Coconect.

Attention WordPress users, this is worth a read. One of our web hosting customers enabled the “all in one SEO pack plugins” in his WordPress account and got this error message:

“Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 491520 bytes)”

Always ready to lend our customers a helping hand, we informed him that he could try to increase the allowed memory size limit via:

1. htaccess e.g. (php_value memory_limit 64M).
2. wp-config.php e.g. (define(‘WP_MEMORY_LIMIT’, ’64MB’);)

Technical jargon aside, there’s a happy ending, and here’s what the customer told us

A kid was looking at the Great Orion Nebula

“Thanks for the quick reply. I have tried the first method and it works like a champ! You’re superb. It also solves the problems that have bugged me for so long. There were some “sub dashboard” at the dashboard that wouldn’t load properly. After I increased the memory limit to 64M, everything just works now. Previously I thought it could be due to the confliction among the plugins. Thank you very much,” said Robin of Astronomy Notes.

You’re very welcome!

Malware injection attack is spreading like wildfire these days, and countless websites have been affected. The attack is done via a compromised FTP, and many believe that the virus can actually “sniff out” FTP passwords and send it back to the hacker. The hacker then uses your FTP password to access your website and add malicious iframe coding to infect other visitors who browse your website.

Malware injection warning sign by Google Chrome

Most web browsers will put up a notice when they’ve detected malware in your website. This prevents other people from unknowingly downloading the malware. If you’d like to check if your website has been infected, use the Website Security Check from Unmask Parasites.

Security report from Unmask Parasites (beta)

You might also like to take the following preventive measures to protect your website from malware:

1. Upgrade your Adobe Reader to the latest version
2. Install anti-virus software like Malwarebytes and Comodo
3. Use SFTP instead of FTP
4. Remove all malicious coding from your website
5. Upgrade to latest WordPress if you have a self-hosted Blog
6. Change your FTP password

For further reading, check out Hidden iframe injection attacks

Jamie’s approach to web design is definitely off of the beaten path. Not only does she use her own name as her website address (jamiesoon.com), but she always replies to your emails in a short but sweet fashion that makes you feel like you’re working with a friend, rather than a company. She’s definitely someone you can trust, and gives you peace of mind.

Jamie has been designing websites since 2001

On her website, you’ll find her impressive portfolio and also interesting travel photos of the places she has explored. You can tell by looking at these that she’s a very passionate person and it definitely makes you feel like you want to work with her. She has also posted some interesting articles such as: ‘Getting the right colours for your design‘, ‘Why making changes is a good thing‘, and ‘Getting a website without spending money‘ – I think people may not understand the joke.

Camping in Gunung Nuang

We’re proud to say that she’s now one of our hosting referrals. We’ve worked with her on many successful migrations, transferring her customers to our new hosting servers. Here’s what she has to say about our services:

“I am glad that I finally found an affordable hosting plan at 1.com.my. The hosting package is perfect for installing a blog and the price makes it more affordable for my clients who are starting small businesses or want to start a personal or non-profit site. It’s cheaper than other hosting plans because the email hosting is a separate package, but it’s no problem because my clients can use their Yahoo or Gmail email accounts. Not only is the price great, I’m impressed with the friendly service, fast response to my enquiries and the effort put in to get the new hosting is up as fast as possible. I highly recommend Pin and his team at 1.com.my!”

Thanks Jamie! It’s been a pleasure working with you too! So, if you’re on the lookout for a web designer/developer, do check out jamiesoon.com.

A perfect gold swing Blog in a perfect theme!

“Ok Pin I like your support I will banking today,” Said Farid!

Farid was skeptical before signing up our web hosting package. Apparently, he is looking for a web host that is WordPress or Blog ready. He has engaged someone to design the theme for this new Blog- A Perfect Gold Swing! Both his hosting and domain name is ready, two hours after he placed the order online. Our team went the extra mile to install the freshly-baked theme. Farid just couldn’t wait to see his new Blog in its perfect, outdoorsy feel! Us too!

“Thanks, of course for your support and also to setup this blog. Thanks. 1.com.my Really have a great team and fast service. TQVM Pin”

Enjoy blogging!

We were given short notice and only, strictly speaking, a weekend to get both web and email hosting done for Premier Wood. Although Premwood products are sold in more than 10 countries, this wasn’t exactly a mega transfer, but our team took the job very seriously nonetheless. In all, there were about 10 mailboxes to be transferred, and the website.

Premwood products are sold to more than 10 countries!

I’ve heard horrible stories from friends who’ve been through such a migration. Some irresponsible hosts would gave them only a login to the hosting control panel, and didn’t care to explain, plan or help set up the new email or website.

We started by retrieving all the important information we need during migration. A migration plan was drafted and sent to our client before the actual migration. Our client just need to sit back and relax. When they have came back to work on Monday, there was no “Monday blues”, as the migration was a complete success. Happy clients = happy us!

While we were working on their project, we noticed that their Contact us form wasn’t working. In fact, it hadn’t been working for a long time. Through it wasn’t in our scope, our migration team fixed that as well. We believe that knowing how to solve problem is more important than pointing fingers.

Example of encoding problem

After days of research done by our team member Weikiat, we have finally found the solution to solve the Unicode problem. Earlier, websites with pages in Unicode encoding such as ‘你好吗’ was messing out. Apparently, this line was not recognised:

<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=UTF-8″ />

For .html files to auto display unicode characters, you have to add following line to htaccess.

AddType application/x-httpd-php .html

Read more here: http://www.besthostratings.com/articles/php-in-html-files.html

Basically, it will treat html file as php, as unicode will display correctly in php files.

We would like to announce that our new PHP5 platform (previously referred to as PHP5 ITK) is ready to be deployed globally. This new PHP5 platform provides suPHP functionality and has been specifically patched to allow common LAMP applications to work without any modifications.

Key Features of the New PHP5 Cluster
- $_SERVER["DOCUMENT_ROOT"] contains expected value
- $_SERVER["REMOTE_ADDR"] contains expected value
- Files owned by user
- Mail functions operate as expected

Upgrading from PHP4 to PHP5
Because the PHP team (http://us.php.net/) announced an official end of life for PHP4 in August of 2008, Mosso | The Rackspace Cloud will no longer be supporting the technology. All existing PHP4 sites will be upgraded to our new PHP5 platform.

Sites currently hosted on our legacy PHP4 cluster and will be migrated to the new PHP5 platform beginning on today.

Sendmail are enabled in our web hosting by default. To use it, please add this line to your .htaccess file (yes, no space after -f):

php_value mail.force_extra_parameters -fREPLACEYOUREMAILHERE

A word to share, you might want to consider using SMTP method than built in Mail() function. SMTP method is more reliable and it was implemented for serious email delivery and can reduce email missing problem. See this review.

How to Send Email from a PHP Script Using SMTP Authentication

We have recently upgraded all our billing and renewal system to get ready with our newly launched web & email hosting reseller program. If you looking for a more reliable reseller program to outsource your web, email hosting and domain name, check this out.

For those who has subscribed to our web hosting services, you will receive a login information to the Hosting Control Panel. Your FTP information is available in the Control Panel, and you can change your FTP password there. If you are not sure how to use the Control Panel, check this guide.

The default FTP address is ftp1.ftptoyoursite.com. Check if you have the server-side filtering options. Enable it with ‘-a’ to allow showing all files with ‘.’ extension in front of file name, such as .htaccess.

Enable server side filtering to show .htaccess

Cloud hosting? That means you don’t have to fight with hardware, ever. Our platform is flexible to provide you with room to space. You can run Windows, Linux, or both too in the same account!

From the first byte served, your site is hosted on advanced clustered technology designed for high-traffic, high-performance websites. When your site grows bigger than what’s included, you pay inexpensive scale pricing for exactly what you use and nothing more.

Our Ready-to-Blog package comes with:

• 12GB Disk Space
• 10GB Monthly Data Transfers
• 1,000 Monthly Compute Cycles
• Unlimited Additional Databases
• Urchin Website Statistic
• Web Based Control Panel
• 24×7 Technical Support
• High Uptime

Are you a Techie? (Yes, the following features are available in one package, no switching required!):

• Linux / Apache / PHP 5.2.0
• Linux / Apache / PHP 4.4.7
• Windows Server 2008 / IIS 7.0
• .NET 2.0, 3.0, 3.5 / ASP 5.6
• Ruby on Rails
• MySQL 4, 5
• MS SQL (Extra Charge)
• CGI/Perl Scripting
• phpMyAdmin 2.11.3
• Raw Logs
• SSL Security (Extra Charge)
• Chroot’d FTP Access on Different Users
• Configure Website Welcome Message
• Scheduled Tasks (Cron Jobs)

Get it now!