About phpBB

phpBB is an affordable (and yet professional supported) community forum solution. There are thousands of forums have vBulletin as it fits almost any size of online community. Since its creation in 2000, phpBB has become the most widely used Open Source forum solution. Like its predecessors, phpBB 3.0 “Olympus” has an easy to use administration panel and a user friendly installation process, which allows you to have a forum set up in minutes.

Why setup a forum for your website?

As you might already knew, making your site a hub for information is important to win repeating visitors. Setting up a forum also It’s also a highly effective way of improving your service to customers or users of your website.

phpBB at Bluehost

At Bluehost, you can get phpBB via auto installation at Fantastico and SimpleScripts. The version offered at current time of writing is v3.0.4. Check out print screen below – it’s the phpBB installation page at SimpleScripts.

Coppermine is an Image Gallery system. Users get a wide image gallery features including categories and albums, thumbnails and intermediate size pics, search feature, new and random pictures, user management, user comments, e-cards feature, and slideshow viewer.

Example of Coppermine Gallery

The system has been tested to work well on IIS, Apache 1.3.24 onwards to the latest Apache 2, on Linux, UNIX, OSX, and Win32 systems thus you don’t need to worry about software compatible issue.

Download Coppermine to your local computer.

Installing Coppermine at Bluehost

At Bluehost, Coppermine script can be installed easily with both Fantastico and SimpleScripts.

Considering Bluehost coppermine hosting? Bluehost shared hosting $6.95 per month is with cpanel and mysql database, and with unlimited domain hosting, unlimited storage space and unlimited transfer per month. This unlimited hosting plan is very suitable if you want to host your photo gallery website, and not sure of how much traffic you will require.

Bluehost hosting is coppermine script compatible and ready, you can setup coppermine very quickly and easily and then host your own photo gallery website that look like screen capture below.

In Matt Cutt’s words, Canonicalization is…

Canonicalization is the process of picking the best url when there are several choices, and it usually refers to home pages.

For instance, a human will consider these are the same URLs for a website: www.dummywebsite.com, dummywebsite.com, and dummywebsite.com/index.html. Technically, or in search engine’s eyes, there URLs are all different. A web server could return different content for each URL thus these URLs are all indexed separately in Google’s database. Such situation had caused problems to webmasters as Google impose penalty for duplicated content and having the same content showed up on www.dummywebsite.com, dummywebsite.com, and dummywebsite.com/index.html will certainly trigger the ban.

This was a pretty huge issue in the past and it sparks lots of debates and arguments. Websites with both WWW (www.dummywebsite.com) and non-WWW (dummywebsite.com) version get penalized by Google.

Nowadays, the issue can be solved easily with the usage of Google Webmaster Tools (you get to select which version of the website is preferred) or with the usage of rel=”canonical” tags. There are pretty much info covered at Google official guidelines: What is a canonical page? Why specify a canonical page? and I’m not going to drill deep on that.

Avoid canonical issue from your .htaccess file

What I want to discuss here is things to be done at your end to avoid such problem.

The non-WWW and WWW pages can be a huge treat to your website ranking and shouldn’t be taken lightly. Besides stating which version (WWW or non-WWW) to be indexed at Google, you can actually standardized your website URL with a few lines of .htaccess code.

301 Redirect at Bluehost

One good part about Bluehost is that the hosting company allows modification of .htaccess file (a server configuration file located at root folder by default). This makes our life easier when it comes to avoiding Google duplication (or canonical) penalty.

What you can do at your end to avoid this hassle is to 301 redirect your non-WWW web pages to WWW counterparts.

One good thing about hosting with Bluehost is that Bluehost users are allowed to access (create/modify/delete) the .htaccess files at root. Hence, redirecting all non-www web pages to www counterpart is easy.

To do so, simply add the following lines to your ,htaccess file (replace fakesite.com with your website URL):

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.fakesite\.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*) http://www.fakesite.com/$1 [L,R=301]

The codes above will direct all your non-WWW URL to the WWW version thus it will not cause any duplication issue for your website. To test, simply type in the non-www URL of your website to your Internet browser and see your web URL being redirect to the www.

In case you are wondering – yes, Bluehost does allow CGI script usage in their shared hosting account. As long as the scripts are not harmful to the web servers (scripts used for spamming, buggy codes that eat up server resources), Bluehost implement no limitation at all on their users CGI scripts.

Introducing CGI

CGI is the short form of Common Gateway Interface (CGI). It refers to a standard protocol that’s used for connecting external application software with computer servers (more often, a web server).

In most of the time, a CGI folder is created at the root folder of all hosting account. This folder is used to hold executable CGI applications. Essentially, CGI is the interface between a form on a web page and the web server.

A CGI application normally works in real time and is often used to output dynamic web information.

Why use CGI?

What’s good about CGI is that it ensure your program is run from the server side. Unlike usual browser based scripting like Java, JavaScripts, and ActiveX, a program using CGI ensures all users are able to use your program.

In case you wish to learn more about CGI, read Common Gateway Interface at W3.org.

In web hosting, the usages of SSH are mostly meant for providing an encrypted mechanism to log into systems and transfer files – in layman’s term, a secure version of FTP connection.

Is the SSH functions available with Bluehost?

The answer is yes, Bluehost offers SSH function. However this function is not enabled by default. In order to activate shell access, you’ll need to fax or mail a copy of your driver’s license, passport or other photo id to customer service. Alternatively, you can upload the copy via Bluehost cPanel.

You’ll then need to generate or import your SSH keys in order to start using the SSH services. These SSH keys are used at Bluehost for security measure – as the private SSH key must be held to authenticate, it is virtually impossible to brute force. You can Import existing keys, generate new keys, as well as manage/delete keys.

Common SSH command

Listed below are the common command used in SSH/Secure Shell quoted from Bluehost Helpdesk.

ls : list files/directories in a directory, comparable to dir in windows/dos.
ls -al : shows all files (including ones that start with a period), directories, and details attributes for each file.

cd : change directory · · cd /usr/local/apache : go to /usr/local/apache/ directory
cd ~ : go to your home directory
cd – : go to the last directory you were in
cd .. : go up a directory

cat : print file contents to the screen
cat filename.txt : cat the contents of filename.txt to your screen

tail : like cat, but only reads the end of the file
tail /var/log/messages : see the last 20 (by default) lines of /var/log/messages
tail -f /var/log/messages : watch the file continuously, while it’s being updated
tail -200 /var/log/messages : print the last 200 lines of the file to the screen

more : like cat, but opens the file one screen at a time rather than all at once
more /etc/userdomains : browse through the userdomains file.
hit Space to go to the next page, q to quit

pico : friendly, easy to use file editor
pico /home/burst/public_html/index.html : edit the index page for the user’s website.

vi : another editor, tons of features, harder to use at first than pico
vi /home/burst/public_html/index.html : edit the index page for the user’s website.

grep : looks for patterns in files
grep root /etc/passwd : shows all matches of root in /etc/passwd
grep -v root /etc/passwd : shows all lines that do not match root

touch : create an empty file
touch /home/burst/public_html/404.html : create an empty file called 404.html in the directory /home/burst/public_html/

ln : create’s “links” between files and directories
ln -s /home/username/tmp/webalizer webstats: Now you can display http://www.yourdomain.com/webstats to show your webalizer stats online. You can delete the symlink (webstats) and it will not delete the original stats on the server.

rm : delete a file
rm filename.txt : deletes filename.txt, will more than likely ask if you really want to delete it
rm -f filename.txt : deletes filename.txt, will not ask for confirmation before deleting.
rm -rf tmp/ : recursively deletes the directory tmp, and all files in it, including subdirectories. BE VERY CAREFULL WITH THIS COMMAND!!!

last : shows who logged in and when
last -20 : shows only the last 20 logins
last -20 -a : shows last 20 logins, with the hostname in the last field

w : shows who is currently logged in and where they are logged in from.

netstat : shows all current network connections.
netstat -an : shows all connections to the server, the source and destination ips and ports.
netstat -rn : shows routing table for all ips bound to the server.

top : shows live system processes in a nice table, memory information, uptime and other useful info. This is excellent for managing your system processes, resources and ensure everything is working fine and your server isn’t bogged down.
top then type Shift + M to sort by memory usage or Shift + P to sort by CPU usage

ps: ps is short for process status, which is similar to the top command. It’s used to show currently running processes and their PID.
A process ID is a unique number that identifies a process, with that you can kill or terminate a running program on your server (see kill command).
ps U username : shows processes for a certain user
ps aux : shows all system processes
ps aux –forest : shows all system processes like the above but organizes in a hierarchy that’s very useful!

file : attempts to guess what type of file a file is by looking at it’s content.
file * : prints out a list of all files/directories in a directory

du : shows disk usage.
du -sh : shows a summary, in human-readble form, of total disk space used in the current directory, including subdirectories.
du -sh * : same thing, but for each file and directory. helpful when finding large files taking up space.

wc : word count
wc -l filename.txt : tells how many lines are in filename.txt

cp : copy a file
cp filename filename.backup : copies filename to filename.backup
cp -a /home/burst/new_design/* /home/burst/public_html/ : copies all files, retaining permissions form one directory to another.
find * -type d|xargs -i cp –verbose php.ini {} : copies your php.ini file into all directories recursively.

kill: terminate a system process
kill -9 PID EG: kill -9 431
kill PID EG: kill 10550
Use top or ps ux to get system PIDs (Process IDs)

EG:

PID TTY TIME COMMAND
10550 pts/3 0:01 /bin/csh
10574 pts/4 0:02 /bin/csh
10590 pts/4 0:09 APP

Each line represents one process, with a process being loosely defined as a running instance of a program. The column headed PID (process ID) shows the assigned process numbers of the processes. The heading COMMAND shows the location of the executed process.

Putting commands together
Often you will find you need to use different commands on the same line. Here are some examples. Note that the | character is called a pipe, it takes date from one program and pipes it to another.
> means create a new file, overwriting any content already there.
>> means tp append data to a file, creating a newone if it doesn not already exist.
< send input from a file back into a command.

grep User /usr/local/apache/conf/httpd.conf |more
This will dump all lines that match User from the httpd.conf, then print the results to your screen one page at a time.

last -a > /root/lastlogins.tmp
This will print all the current login history to a file called lastlogins.tmp in /root/

tail -10000 /var/log/exim_mainlog |grep domain.com |more
This will grab the last 10,000 lines from /var/log/exim_mainlog, find all occurances of domain.com (the period represents ‘anything’,
– comment it out with a so it will be interpretted literally), then send it to your screen page by page.

netstat -an |grep :80 |wc -l
Show how many active connections there are to apache (httpd runs on port 80)

mysqladmin processlist |wc -l
Show how many current open connections there are to mysql

mysqldump -u username -p dbname > file.sql
MySQL Dump

tar -zxvf file.tar.gz
UnTAR file

mysql -u username -p database_name Importing MySQL database

which [perl]
Finding path to [perl]

However, we do not need multiple hosting for those domains.

Most hosting plan available online enable webmaster to host multiple domain on a same hosting account – Bluehost for example, allows their clients to host unlimited addon domain on one single hosting account.

We’ll see how to add an ‘addon domain’ at Bluehost in this post. But first, we have to be very clear on the difference between an ‘addon domain’ and a ‘subdomain’.

Addon Domain vs Subdomain

What’s an ‘addon domain’?

An ‘addon domain’ is a new domain that’s added on top of your main domain.

For example if you purchase Bluehost hosting package now to host your website abcd.com; abcd.com is your main domain. 6 months later you decided to register another domain name with GoDaddy, say efgh.com, and wanted to host it on the same Bluehost account, then efgh.com is the ‘addon domain’ that’s added on top of abcd.com.

Setting up an ‘addon domain’ will not create you another cPanel (web hosting manager) at Bluehost. However, it will creates a sub directory in your main web hosting directory and the addon domain website will have it’s very own index files as well as cgi bin folder.

What’s a ‘subdomain’?

Quoting from Wikipedia, a subdomain is a domain that is part of a larger domain. For example, “mail.example.com” and “calendar.example.com” are subdomains of the “example.com” domain, which in turn is a subdomain of the “com” top-level domain.

A very important point to keep in mind is that unlike addon domian, subdomains are free of charge at Bluehost. It can be created at will for any domain you already hosted with Bluehost. Like for our previous example, you can create a subdomain named ‘efgh.abcd.com’ without paying any registration or annual maintenance fees.

How to add an “addon domain” at Bluehost?

Go to the ‘Domain’ section and click ‘Addon Domains’ on your Bluehost cPanel page.

Note that you can as well register a new domain name, park a domain, add a subdomain, setup a redirect for your domain on the same section. But for our discussion, we’ll limit the topic within the addon domain.

You’ll be requested to login to Bluehost Domain Manager after that. Once you’re in, you’ll come to a setup page where you’ll need to keyin all the necessary info about your addon domain.

The input fields, like the domain name, the location of your website folder, and so on are pretty basics and I am sure you can handle it without my guidance.

However, one thing to be sure is that you MUST have your domain name server pointing to Bluehost’s server before you adding any addon domain in your hosting account. This is crucial for Bluehost to verify your ownership of the domain and Bluehost will not process your request (of adding an addon domain) without it.

Nowadays not only blogging are popular among individual Internet users.

With the help of cheap web hosting and open source, even forums owned by individual webmaster are getting more and more active.

Topics like computer, entertainment, science, technology, automobile and politics are brought into forum for open discussion among surfers and enthusiasts.

Are you interested in starting your own forum?

Hosting a successful forum is not as hard as it used to be – at least from the technical point of view, it’s very much achievable for individual webmaster to launch and maintain their own forums.

There are a lot of factors which making a forum to be well known and successful but we are here to focus on the key factor, which will be the web hosting.

This is why many web hosting companies were being set up to provide different services to people. It is a bit difficult for us to select which one will be the best in term of cost and features given. Details study and analysis on them are essential for make everything perfect!

Following are some of the key points which maybe helpful for you to make your choice:

Web Space

Web space is the storage capacity provided by web hosting company for you to store data in the internet. When we study on this point, of cause the bigger web space supplied, the more easier and flexible for us to manage and store our data.

Out of so many web hosting companies in the world, there are plenty of suppliers which can offering mass web space with affordable price. Bluehost, for example, provide unlimited hosting capacity (and bandwidth and addon domains) in their shared hosting plan. Such features allow website owners more flexibility in handling their forums.

Free web application software

Your choice with Bluehost allow you to host with adequate MySQL , DBs and phpMyAdmin. Further more, Bluehost latest featured on Simple Scripts allow webmasters to install forum software in just a few clicks. These are useful features as it minimize the technical knowledge requirement for hosting and managing a discussion board.

In fact, I believe that the reason behind forum hosting has turned much popular compare to before is because of the development of these open-sourced forum software.

Here’s a view on the forum scripts available at Bluehost.

Server uptime

It’s basic requirement for a web host to offer reliable hosting server. You do not want your forum member’s connection to the server cut off middle in a heated discussion, don’t you?

There are quite a log of web hosting companies claim that they are offering 99% uptime, but be careful – some of these are nothing more than marketing gimmic and they just can’t deliver such much of uptimeservice.

Server uptime, in fact, is the main reason why am I suggesting Bluehost. In case you followed my previous post about Bluehost server status, you should be aware that Bluehost provide respectable server uptime thru out the years I’m with them.

Support

Almost every web hosting company does come with supports or more know as after sales services. As similar to the point 5, this can checked through forums too.

The better the supports provided the fewer headaches you will face. Thus, you can spend more time to develop your forum.

So is Bluehost recommended for forum hosting?

Well, the straight and direct answer is yes.

Listed above are just some of the opinions which may help you to select a web hosting company – which I would recommend Bluehost based on the listed requirements.

Interested to learn more on what Bluehost has to offer? Check out my detail reviews on Bluehost hosting features.

However, there are plenty of servers at Bluehost and these servers are sometimes, different. It’s either one of these MySQL version running on your host, but never both. You can check the version of your Bluehost account by scrolling down and checking on the left sidebar. For my case, the MySQL version running on my Bluehost account is the 5.0.45-community-log version.

How do you check the MySQL version at your server?

When you login to your Bluehost account, you will notice a sidebar at the left. Scroll down a little and you’ll get a line reads ‘MySQL Version’. That’s where you can check what version of MySQL is running on your web server.

For your references, here’s how I check mine:

At Bluehost, using the backups feature allows you to download (to your computer) a zipped copy of either you entire site (your home directory, databases, email forwarders configuration, email filters configuration) or one of the previously mentioned parts of your site. These are not automatically scheduled backups. Automatically scheduled backups need to be enabled by the server owner / administrator.

Backup at Bluehost: Getting started

Login to your Bluehost hosting account. Scroll down and look for the ‘Backups’ icon under category ‘file’.

Click in ‘Backups’ and you’ll come to a page where you can back up the website of yours, or just the public_html and email filter.

Regardless of how many website you’re hosting at Bluehost, you can get them zip into a file and download it to your local PC – thus making the backup process fast and easy for all websites.

Bluehost already have all the features you need for hosting a forum and I don’t see why, for a startup forum needs the whole server dedicated as its host. Instead, save some money for promotional expenses. You can have unlimited bandwidth and disk storage at Bluehost – so what’re you waiting for? Go flood your website with unlimited traffics.

Okay, back to Bluehost. Bluehost offers forum script like vbulletin or phbb2. Hosting a forum with these scipts is simple. The installation (via Fantastico or Simple Scripts) is almost instant, the forum maintenance can be all done with web application. In fact I used to have a forum running on Bluehost (using vBulletin) and everything goes so well, expect that I can get enough members to make the forum useful.

Installing a forum at Bluehost

So here’s how you can install a forum at your website.

Get to Fantastico or Simple Script based on your own preference. There’re two forum scripts with Fantastico, which is phpBB and SMF; and three forum scripts available with Simple Scripts, which isphpBB, PunBB, and BBPress.

Take phpBB on Fantastico as our example, to select installation for phpbb forum, simply click on the installation link and Fantastico will guide you through the installation process. Fill up a few details like Forum names and URL; the installation process should be completed within seconds.

Simple as that.