HostMonster Web Hosting Package

In case you had installed WordPress at Hostmonster via Fantastico, be aware the version available is quite outdated (WP 2.6.5). It seems that folks at HM is not updating scripts at Fantastico as often as they do for SimpleScripts.

What to do if your WordPress is installed with Fantastico?

For those who had WordPress installed via Fantatico, the fastest way to keep your WP blog updated is by switching your installation from Fantastico to SimpleScripts. There are several ways to migrate your installation from Fantastico to SimpleScripts and the old methods used to be tedious and very risky.

However things are improved by now as SimpleScripts provide a one-click switching utility at their control page. To start switching, simply login to your Hostmonster cPanel and get to SimpleScripts control page. Click on ‘WordPress’ and scroll down once you reach at the installation page for WordPress. You’ll see a link under the title ‘Convert a Fantastico installation’.

Click in and select the WordPress you wish to convert. Click convert to proceed and everything should be done in seconds. By the time your WordPress installation is converted from Fantastico to SimpleScripts, login back to your WordPress installation page at SimpleScripts for the updates.

The switching process is pretty simple but it takes a few more steps than the usual for a standard WordPress updates. In case you need help, please do not hesitate to post your questions here. I’ll try my best to help.

Hostmonster offers only one hosting plan where all features (including advance e-commerce features, Ruby on Rail, Spam Protection) are included. The hosting company had recently change their hosting price where users get unlimited hosting capacity with just $5.95/mo.

Review Hostmonster hosting package

Wonder what’s in Hostmonster hosting package?

Features	Details
Disk Storage	Unlimited
Site Bandwidth	Unlimited
Free Domain	Yes, lifetime!
Addon Domains	Unlimited
POP3/POP3 Email	Unlimited
.Override .htaccess	Yes
MySQL Databases	100
PostgreSQL Databases	100
Custom Cronjobs	Yes
Spam Assassin Protection	Yes
Fantastico Script Support	Yes
Special Promotion	Cheaper monthly hosting cost, free $50 Yahoo Advertising credit, and $50 Google Adwords credit
Get HostMonster Promotion Now: $6.95 $5.95/mo!

For your convenience, here’re the highlights of Hostmonster hosting plan. If you would like to order them with the promotion price, click here to visit Hostmonster homepage.

Domain names is cheap. In fact, it’s too cheap that many webmasters bought too many of it and have no idea what to do with them. This is explains why I got questions on having multiple domains pointing to one single website.

So, back to the question: Can you have multiple domains pointing to the same website hosted at Hostmonster? The answer is yes, you can have multiple domains point to the same site or even to a same directory on your site.

How to have multiple domains pointing to the same website?

“But how?”, the next question follows.

Well first you have to make sure that all domains are pointing to the appropriate name servers, for example ns1.hostmonster.com and ns2.hostmonster.com for my website here. Allow sufficient time for the DNS to propogate across the Internet.

Next you’ll have to add your domains at Hostmonster – you’ll have two options for this in order to have multiple domain names pointing to the same site. Say abc.com is your main site; and you wish to have your other site, xyz.com, to point to your main site. What you can do it:

1. Redirect using parked domain

A Parked Domain is a domain name that points to the same directory as your main domain. Thus for our case, by adding xyz.com as your parked domain, the website will redirect users to abc.com everytime they come to the parked website.

To add a parked domain, you can login to HostMosnter cPanel, then go to Domain Manager > Parked Domain > Assign Domain > Choose ‘Parked Domain’ option and input all the necessary info. Click ‘Add Domain’ whenever you’re ready.

2. Website Redirect

Another way to redirect your users from xyz.com to abc.com is by setting up a redirect on the sub site. First, add your sub domain, xyz.com, as addon domain in your Hostmonster account. Next you can login to your Hostmonster cPanel account and go to “Redirect”. Key in xyz.com in the first column; and abc.com in the second column as the target of our redirect.

As reference, figure below shows the redirect setup page at Hostmonster. The setup page is actually an easy-installation on your .htaccess file.

You can setup the same operation without its help by modifying a file named ‘.htaccess’ in your server root folder. A simple code like below works the same in redirecting xyz.com to abc.com.

RewriteEngine On
rewritecond %{http_host} ^xyz.com
rewriteRule ^(.*) http://www.abc.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Alternatively, you can use a server side code to setup the redirection. A one line PHP code on top of the index file at xyz.com will work perfect.

<?php
header(“Location: http://abc.com”);
exit;
?>

As mentioned earlier, there are two script library available with Hostmonster services – Fantastico and SimpleScripts. While Fantastico is the better known automated script installer; SimpleScript turned out to be my favorite (just recently) as the installer works extremely simple and fast.

Details on Hostmonster SimpleScripts

As a followup post on my previous SimpleScript related entry, here’s the full list of scripts available in Hostmonster SimpleScripts Library.

With the help of SimpleScripts, installation of all these software is now ultra-easy and you can get it done within seconds!

The php.ini file is an important configuration file of your PHP server. The configuration file is normally not editable to people who open a shared hosting account. However, you can normally see its content with this simple code:

phpinfo();
?>

The settings in php.ini file are very crucial – many website hacks are done by digging loop holes in this file. In case you’re using a custom php.ini file, it’s advised to protect it from being accessed by public.

How you can hide your php.ini file?

To hide your files from the public, all you need to do is to add a simple line in your .htaccess file:

deny from all

Or alternatively, you can redirect the people who’re searching for your php.ini files to 404 error:

RedirectMatch 404 .*php\.ini

Feeling safer by now? You bet!