In case you are new to website hosting, you’ll first need to understand what are the types of hosting services available online.

In general, you’ll see ‘shared web hosting’, ‘reseller web hosting’, ‘dedicated web hosting’, as well as ‘virtual private servers’ (VPS) in most hosting providers’ offers.

Shared Web Hosting

Shared hosting is the most common hosting ever used by individual webmasters and bloggers. A website on a shared hosting is hosted on a server that’s shared along with many other websites. Users pay a small amount of rental fees (hosting fees) to the server owners (shared hosting providers) and get to use the hardware owned by the providers. Such type of web hosting is always the cheapest and most practical for light weight websites.

Hostmonster, for example, is a shared hosting provider.

Dedicated Web Hosting

A dedicated hosting refers to the kind of server that’s used by one single website. You can either buy your own hardware (servers, network switch, etc) or rent an entire server from a web hosting company for dedicated web hosting. All computing powers and resources on a dedicated server are used by one website, this enables the website to work faster and more stable. It’s also worth noting that dedicated hosting is more secure when compare to shared hosting.

Hostmonster do not offers any dedicated hosting plan at the moment. In case you are looking for one, I suggest you to go with Hostgator as they are cheap, reliable, and have been operating for quite a while in dedicated hosting business. In brief, here are the pricing details for Hostgator dedicated hosting.

To learn more, visit Hostgator online.

Reseller Web Hosting

Reseller hosting refers to web hosting companies that allow you to resell their hosting capacity. Generally, reseller hosting allows you create your own brand name and run your own hosting business by reselling what’s the company had been offering. A reseller hosting customers get, for example, 1,000GB storage and 1,000,000GB bandwidth for a certain price. These hosting capacity is then divided into smaller part and offered to the other end users – say 100GB disk storage with 10,000GB bandwidth.

Reseller hosting service is the perfect hosting plan for those who are looking forward to start their very own hosting company. It allows you to start small without the cost of computer hardware.

Virtual Private Servers (VPS)

Virtual Private Server works like a virtual dedicated servers, where users get their own dedicated machine that’s sharing the same physical server with other websites. A VPS is the type of hosting that stands in between of dedicated and shared hosting. Websites running on VPS gets to run on its own operating system and is much stable than a shared hosting. Although it’s sharing the same resources with other VPS account, the private server can be boot and reboot independently.

According to ICANN regulation, all registered domains must be equipped with reachable contact information such as owners’ address and phone numbers. This reveals your personal information to informed web surfers when they go lookup on your whois information.

Hiding whois info at Hostmonster

To hide this whois information, here’s what you can do:

First, login to your cPanel with your domain name and account password. Look for the tab labeled as “Domain Manager” under “Domains” section.

Click in and look for a tab labeled as “Privacy”. The tab should be located at the bottom right of your page. Enable privacy option for your selected domain and it will set the whois information to Hostmonster instead of yours.

Simple? You bet. However, note that this function is only available for domain name that’s registered with Hostmonster. If your domain registration is done with a third party registrant (GoDaddy for example) then you can’t enable this function.

I am sure most web developers heard much about Ruby on Rails. In fact, everyone seems raving about this web tools as it helps web development to be done easier and faster.

Introduction: Ruby on Rails

So what’s exactly is Ruby on Rails? To understand Ruby on Rails, you’ll need to understand what’s Ruby and what’s Rails (yes, they are two separated things).

Folks, meet Ruby

Ruby, just Ruby by itself, is a programming language, just like PHP or Perl. Although many Ruby programmers believe that the language’s syntax has better efficiency; Ruby is, according to the officials, a programming language that somewhat resembles a cross between Perl and Python.*

*Ref: http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/StartAtTheBeginning

Rails meet Ruby

Rails, on the other hand, is a web application framework that’s written in Ruby. Rails, or Ruby on Rails, is the basic support structure for Ruby language, where reusable components and code that can be used throughout the main application. In other words, everything in Rails is based around the Ruby programming language. While there are quite some other frameworks available for Ruby programmers but Ruby on Rails is so far the one that’s widely used.

Why Ruby on Rails?

I am not going to explain the advantages of Rails on Ruby in details as it involved way too many technical aspects. This is, after all, not a programming blog and I’m not a programming expert at all.

In short, Ruby on Rails works better in term of speed and efficiency. The language/platform embraces test-driven development, works with lesser software, and cuts down the needs of long winded configuration files. As Tim O’Reilly, Founder of O’Reilly Media described it: “ Ruby on Rails is a powerful web applications that formerly might have taken weeks or months to develop can be produced in a matter of days.”

At the time of writing, Twitter and YellowPages are the two most well-known websites that’re running on Rails.

Can you use Ruby on Rails at Hostmonster hosting?

The answer is yes. Customers are allowed to run Ruby on Rails in their Hostmonster hosting account.

More over, you can manage your Ruby on Rails application from the HM control panels. Rails applications run just like any other application at Hostmonster. It’s worth noting, however, that you will need to populate it with your code, configure the start/stop of the application, as well as redirect incoming traffic to the specific port that’s being used.

Where can I learn more about Ruby on Rails?

• Rolling with Ruby on Rails
• Rolling with Ruby on Rails, Part 2
• Four Days on Rails (PDF)
• Really Getting Started in Rails
• Tutorial in Ruby on Rails
• Fast-track your Web apps with Ruby on Rails
• Getting Your Feet Wet With Ruby on Rails
• How to make a todo list program with Rails
• Ajax on Rails
• Many to Many Tutorial for Rails (PDF)

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.

Well it’s been quite some while I have reveal about Hostmonster server status. Truth is that I’m busy working on some other hosting review websites; but I’m not keeping my eyes close. Anyway, back to our question…

How’s Hostmonster server doing?

I have no problem with Hostmonster hosting service so far. The server I’m on is stable, responsive, and I rarely have to contact the support for helps. However what worries me is that the hard drive usage on my server had been increasing sharply. If you look closely to the diagram, you’ll see the usage of disk2 is over 90% – which is extremely high.

While the heavy usage has not affected any operation of my websites, the data signals that there might be an (serious) overselling issue with the company. Let’s hope this trend won’t be lasting long and hopefully folks at Hostmonster are dealing with the problem by now. I’ll keep you guys posted on the latest server status.