What do you look for in a good Drupal hosting service? Do you prefer high levels of bandwidth to cope with the bustling empire of communities you moderate or is functionality such as .htaccess access or is mod rewrite more important in order to enable clean URLs in order to remove the horrible “?=” from URLs more important?
I’ve recently begun to research hosting options that are capable of handling a high number of databases (unlimited preferrably) in order to cope with several Drupal and WordPress installations whilst still leaving room for expansion as well as providing a reseller function and was overwhelmed with the options available at first. A quick search on drupal.org brought me to a list of hosts that was created in 2007 and continues through almost to the present day with endless discussion of various hosts and their features which didn’t seem conclusive either way on any host.
I must admit that is one thing that bugs me about Drupal that some of the documentation leaves a lot to be desired. To me, hosting is a basic requirement and recommendations are commonly requested, but the biggest list is a forum topic which goes on forever it seems. There are other examples where it falls down quite badly, where all it would take is a bit more organisation for the contributors to post documents in a clearer manner for noobs like myself to discover easily.
So, to sum up, does anyone out there have recommendations for a good reseller hosting account capable of handling multiple WordPress and Drupal (as well as Moodle, Ning and various other software items) installations?
With the recent release of Firefox 3, and in response to Sharon’s post I thought it would be a good idea to include a list of what I feel are the best plugins available for Firefox, well according to me anyway.
I couldn’t live without this toolbar in Firefox as it can literally analyse every part of a website from the image details, CSS styling and div order. It has come in immensely handy when developing sites as it clearly outlies the different areas of the site whilst still displaying the site.
What I consider to be one of the best FTP clients available at the moment, it couldn’t be simpler to use. Local files are displayed on the left and the server files displayed on the right, with transfers executed at the click of a button. Connections are created by entering a few simple details provided by your web host and each time that connection is required it requires only a single click. I use this plugin on a daily basis to manage a number of sites and can’t find fault with it.
This is a great timesaver when registering on new forums or websites, as all your personal details are stored within this plugin and entered into the relevant fields at the touch of a button. It saves on having to re-enter the same details time and again on each new website that we register for.
Quite similar to the web development toolbar in that this allows for the display of the web pages structure such as HTML code and style attributes whilst looking at the site. One advantage that it has over the toolbar is that HTML and CSS are displayed simultaneously giving more of an overview of the page as a whole. However, I feel that it contains less features such as image manipulation and outlining capabilities of the web development toolbar.
OK, so not technically a plugin but if you’re like me and like to have your web apps all shiny and nice looking then themes are the best place to go for that! Almost any style can be applied from Mac styles to your favourite sports to retro styles. Easily downloaded and switches you could have hours of fun browsing the different themes available
So I attended the Nlab Social Networking Conference in Leicester on Thursday, and there was some interesting points made by the various speakers. The opening speaker, Steve Clayton made an interesting observation about social objects after the viral campaign surronding the Gears of War advert, which created a discussion about the game through the mashup of the television advert for the product. This type of viral marketing was seen as a bad thing in the past which was thought to damage the brand, but businesses are beginning to realise that it helps to generate interest in the product or service which is being “mashed”, which will help to gain sales through exposure of the object. This is one area where businesses are changing to adapt to the social network philosophy.
Another interesting speaker was Ken Thompson, who discussed learning teamwork skills and techniques from nature where there is often no leader and every member of the group is treated equally and pitches in with their own thoughts and ideas. This I felt was a good analysis of the social networking phenomenon where each individual is treated equally. This is illustrated on internet messageboards and blogs where comments and advice are shared with a community.
Overall a good and some interesting points which made me think.
