Sidenote: What is Fantastico?

Fantastico is an automatic script installer which automates the installation and maintenance of common web scripts such as forums, blogs, CMS scripts, and web gallery. Fantastico helps a lot (especially for the non-technical person) as it eliminates the tons tedious jobs involved in web scripts uploading, installation, and basic setups. The installer also helps with server configurations. For example, files/folders permission will be configured automitcally and necessary server configuration files such as .htaccess will be modified accordingly.

The answer is NO.

Surprised? As a smart consumer, you should know that all unlimited hosting offers are actually limited. While storage capacity and bandwidth offered are unlimited, hosting companies often set limits in CPU processing power or number of files. Yes, it’s true that hosting companies are able to offer as much as hosting power their users want under normal circumstances; unlimited hosting offer in reality, however, is more like a marketing gimmick that’s used to attract shopper’s eyeballs. You might want to read further on the truth about unlimited hosting offer here but what we’ll discuss in this post is the file storage limitation in Hostgator account.

Inodes limitation in Hostgator

Yes, Hostgator limits number of files you can store in their hosting account. Or more accurately, Hostgator sets limits in inodes.

What’s inodes?

Inodes the data structure on a traditional Unix-style file system such as UFS. An inode stores basic information about a regular file, directory, or other file system object. In brief, inode is the count of files created or uploaded to a server. At the time of writing, the inodes quota in my Hostgator account is 250,000 – this means that I can only upload or create, by maximum, 250,000 files in my unlimited hosting account.

I feel cheated! They said they are offering unlimited hosting!

Don’t be. Folks at Hostgator had never hide anything about these fact about inodes quota and the inode usages are showed clearly in every account’s cPanel front page. Hostgator, in fact, is the very few hosting companies that is such transparent towards their shoppers.

Bluehost and Hostmonster mentioned about account suspension for overused CPU quota (but not inodes!) and Lunarpages talked about inodes count on their wikipage but nothing specific are mentioned. Not to say that these other hosting companies are bad, but at least you can see that unlimited hosting packages by others are not ‘unlimited’ after all.

So if inodes limitation is not cheating then what does inodes has to do with me?

Basically nothing – unless you plan to run your site on a buggy database scripts or use your Hostgator account for spamming purpose. 250,000 inodes indeed, is a huge number and it’s pretty hard to fill up the quota. I runs 5 websites on my Hostgator account and yet I used less than 3% of the inodes quota given.

3%!

So please, don’t misunderstand that I’m writing this blog post to complain Hostgator. Instead, I’m trying to make you stay informed with what you’re buying. Hostgator, is still, very much recommended and I introduce them to my friends and families every time I was asked.

Hostgator upgraded their Business Hosting Plan

According to official news released, the toll free service is connected via VoIP with the support of Houston-based VOIP Company, VOIPo. It doesn’t cost anything for Hostgator Business Plan users for the number. Further more, the free number comes with 100 minutes of free usage per calendar month. That’s $4.9/mo call time credit for a $12.95 hosting plans.

What I think about this?

In my opinion, this is amazing. As mentioned by Hostgator marketing directior, Chad Bean’s:

“It’s no mystery that having a toll-free number on your website can drastically improve conversion rates and further establish trust with your site’s visitors. By providing toll-free numbers for free, we’re adding another service to our growing roster of free add-ons and helping to give our web hosting customers the competitive edge in the increasingly competitive hosting market,” says Chad Bean, HostGator Marketing Director.

A toll free number offer is extremely attractive as it’s very valuable for business owners.

This latest deal definitely keep Hosgator one step ahead their competitors. They are, in fact, setting a new industry standard with this offer and I’m sure it will cause certain level of panic to other web hosting providers. Will other companies like Bluehost and Lunarpages follow this trend? I can’t be sure.

Quick view on Hostgator’s cPanel Theme

Hostgator’s new ticketing system

First, the control interface of customer support is different now. The designs look cleaner and it’s more user-friendly. More over, you’ll notice a friendly message from Brent (founder of Hostgator) regarding on the upgrades. This change will inject better automation and increase efficiency of the customer support team.

What’s more behind this is that the upgrading of ticket system is just a part of Hostgator’s latest project named ‘Gator’, where the system will evolve into an integrated billing, affiliate, chat, and ticket system. According to Brent, Hostgator’s old system needs upgrade desperately. The system, lack of modern IT automation, is using ModernBill for billing, Kayako for tickets, LivePerson for chat, and a hacked up version of ultimate for affiliates.

The new system on the other hand will improve a lot in term of customer-support interaction (such as customers can rate all HostGator responses), spam detecting, as well as employees management at Hostgator’s end. According to Brent, when everything has been completed it will result in millions a year in savings and at least a 30% increase to staff productivity.

It’s no wonder that the folks at Hostgator seems excited with this change and saying that ‘Freedom is coming’. Hopefully the price will not increase when the productivity leveled up.

In a quick glance, here’s the overview of Hostgator hosting plans.

* Hostgator upgraded its hosting plan in late October.

“Does it matter what forum software I use for my site, what won’t Hostgator accept?”

I saw the question not long ago at Hostgator support forum and was very surprise that to learn that there’s certain hosting companies are limiting software usage on their shared hosting servers. I guess these guys are just too afraid that the custom software might eats up all their limited server memory huh?

Well, back to the question, as a user, you can actually install all sort of forum software into your hosting account.

It’s, of course, prohibited if you’re planning to install trojans/viruses into the server but most web applications are acceptable at Hostgator. In our case here, the user wanted to use MyBB for his/her forum and that’s totally fine with Hostgator.

On top of the issue, I actually noticed some other things at Hostgator.

Here’s a screen cap on the dialouge.

Noticed how fast the question got a response at Hostgator forum? It’s 2 minutes away, and you got your question answered! That’s the fastest response I ever seen – and this shows how active is Hostgator forum.

Why does this matter to you?

An active forum matters a lot because this means there’s help whenever you need it.

Imagine that you are stucked or you’re having problem with your web host, you do not want the problem hang halfway there for days! With an active forum around the community, Hostgator customers are sharing their knowledge and helping each other.

But not Hostgator.

Dedicated or shared hosting, Hostgator offers full control of .htaccess files to their clients as long as the hosting server is not running on Windows/NT (the file doesn’t work on Windows).

What does a .htaccess file do?

.htaccess files are used in many ways but mainly for personalized error pages, password protection, and website URL redirects.

One of the in-famous usage of .htaccess files is to switch website’s URL between http://www. and http:// (the www and the non www). The function was desperately needed because Google was confused with http://www.example.com and http://example.com as two different pages – they were rating these two URLs with different page rank and for some, it causes serious duplication penalty (as both URL is directed to the index file).

How to rewrite http:// to http://www. with .htaccess?

Well, here’re some simple examples what can .htaccess file does.

Rewrite URL from http:// to http://www

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example\.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [R=permanent,L]

Manage apache handler

AddHandler server-parsed .html
AddHandler server-parsed .htm

To handle a 301 redirect

Redirect 301 /trashpage.html http://www.example.com/redirectpage.htm