Have you ever wanted to change to homepage to Google.com? And you just didn’t know how? Well the folks who created Firebug must be the smartest people around. Sammy decided it was time to revamp the google page. We rather like it now; the guys especially love the Hooters addition.

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SignalUp Enhanced Wifi Capabilities, Intel HD Audio, 15.4 inch widescreen LCD, Pentium 4 and 1GB RAM had me perfectly happy for 4 months… but then…

I booted up; Logged On and started Firefox as per any usual day. I browse to Web Hosting Search, read a bit and suddenly my screen freezes, goes blank, and I hear an almighty “bang” as what I later found to be my PSU and MotherBoard, had – for lack of a better phrase – ‘blown up’. Watch out folks… This had me offline for a week and a half; Not what I expected from Acer, and not exactly safe either.

Oh well, I guess that’ll teach me not to overclock

If you’ve had a similar experience, why not comment it in to me?? I love to hear from y’all

Online payment systems are very popular with web hosting [and domain name registration] companies. Paying online speeds-up the order process for getting a new web hosting account and leading the pack of online wallets is Paypal. Aside Visa and Mastercard credit/debit cards, online wallets like Paypal have become increasingly popular online. What makes Paypal even better is that it can function as a 3rd-party credit card payment processor. Paypal has thus been enabling several Small-Office-Home-Office [SOHO] businesses worldwide to accept payment online.

That said, Paypal is not available in every country and available in some countries on a “Send money only” basis. This makes accepting payment online via Paypal very difficult for online merchants in such countries where Paypal is not fully functional or not available at all. The fact that 2Checkout now includes Paypal as a checkout option empowers millions of online merchants [web hosts included] to accept payment from Paypal’s over 130 million users. Several leading global brands have increasingly been adding Paypal as payment option on their respective websites, in recent times.

According to 2Checkout’s blog post on this issue:

This will allow customers to pay for products and services with the funds in their PayPal account, even if the supplier does not have their own PayPal account and only uses 2Checkout.

The PayPal payment option will be available for all non-recurring orders in the following currencies:

• Australian Dollar (AUD)
• Canadian Dollar (CAD)
• Euro (EUR)
• British Pound (GBP)
• Japanese Yen (JPY)
• U.S. Dollar (USD)

2Checkout is much easier to join and use though they would verify your information if they have any reason to suspect you/your business.

In case you’re a web host helping your clients with e-commerce solutions, the e-commerces scripts under Fantastico (if you’re using CPanel) have modules that allow merchants to accept payment via 2Checkout. CubeCart, OSCommerce and Zen Cart are all available for installation via Fantastico and there are several other equally good e-commerce shopping scripts out there that integrate well with 2Checkout.

Do you run a web hosting business? How do you accept payments online? Has the addition of Paypal to 2Checkout’s checkout process had an positive/negative impact on your web hosting business or online store? Share your thoughts here and now.

They also announced – wait for it – cPanel Web Control Panel for Windows Server 2008! That’s right, you heard me, cPanel for Server 2008. Woah, at last cPInc =)

With 111 days from date to launch of this new Server OS however, we may as well forget about it for a good couple of months, and with limitless price possibilities for Microsoft, for some of us, forever.

A Slashbot job advert seems to suggest that Cpanel is recruiting Windows application developers for this new venture.

Cpanel has been working on this Windows version for some time now. The only difference this time is that they are re-staffing and commiting more time and resources to it. Cpanel is expecting to release the beta version of the product on December 15th 2007 and have the production release available by March 30th 2008.

A press release by Microsoft quotes cPanel CEO J. Nick Koston as saying:

“Microsoft has shown a strong commitment to the hosting industry over the past several years. cPanel’s Windows development team feels that IIS7 offers a robust, high-performance Web server with increased security that the industry will quickly adopt. Microsoft Server 2008 and IIS7 with its modern architecture and support for legacy products was the natural starting point for our expanded product offering.”

The first and most striking impression is the new looks. The entire user interface of Cpanel has been overhauled and its now much more visually-appealing. The icons that link to the main controls have also been re-arranged into more relevant groups and same goes with a new Notice panel that displays on the top left corner of the Cpanel first screen. The Notice panel displays vital warnings about the hosting account in red, and also carries News from the web host or server administrator.

Some controls hitherto placed a few clicks into the panel have been brought to the homepage making such controls more accessible. Even better, cPanel shortcuts have been introduced. These links can be added to your desktop or your browser’s bookmarks toolbar. They are an easy way to access your cPanel.

What makes the several panels better is that they can actually be moved to suit the preference of the user. All a user has to do is drag-and-drop. The overall theme of Cpanel can be changed as well. Thats not new, but whats new are the several other more visually-appealing themes that have been added.

For a new Cpanel user, there are free Video Tutorials that would guide them through all the basics of using Cpanel 11. Similar videos have been made available before now by other companies, for a fee. Not to forget the “Getting Started Wizard”, a 7-page basic guide that takes new Cpanel users through the rudiments of setting-up their new hosting account.

The Cpanel interface loads faster as well. In some cases, processes are carried-out using AJAX thus the entire page needs not be re-loaded, to complete a process. Some back-end processes now run faster as well. Example? SpamAssasin. It now requires less server resources.

These are a few amongst the several CPanel improvements that make an upgrade a must. What has been your experience with using Cpanel 11? Share your thoughts here and now.

In those three years it has seen many improvements over PHP 4. PHP 5 is fast, stable & production-ready and as PHP 6 is on the way, PHP 4 will be discontinued.

The PHP development team hereby announces that support for PHP 4 will continue until the end of this year only. After 2007-12-31 there will be no more releases of PHP 4.4. We will continue to make critical security fixes available on a case-by-case basis until 2008-08-08. Please use the rest of this year to make your application suitable to run on PHP 5.

Already, several web projects using PHP have announced their intention to switch to PHP5 soon. These include: The Symfony, Typo3, phpMyAdmin, Drupal, Propel, and Doctrine project.

With this new announcement, it is expected that many more web hosts will upgrade their Linux server currently using PH4, to PHP5.

PHP5, a successor of PHP4 was launched about 3 years ago but has not witnessed widespread use mostly due to its incompatibility with PHP4. Most scripts and software today are written in PHP4 even though PHP5 comes with vast improvements including better security and improved functionality. The PHP Group has thus been forced to continue offering support to users still on PHP4.

This is about to change though. An organization was formed, exlcusively for that:GoPHP5.org The objective is simple, gather more support for PHP5, and make sure most software required PHP5, by February 5th 2008. In their words:

It is a dangerous cycle, and one that needs to be broken. The PHP developer community has decided that it is indeed now time to move forward, together. Therefore, the listed software projects have all agreed that effective February 5th, 2008, any new feature releases will have a minimum version requirement of at least PHP 5.2.0. Furthermore, the listed web hosts have agreed that effective February 5th, 2008, they will include PHP 5.2 (or a more recent version) in their service offer.

The news this week though, is that some leading PHP software have joined the massive effort to switch to the latest PHP upgrade. The Symfony, Typo3, phpMyAdmin, Drupal, Propel, and Doctrine projects have all announced that their next release after February 5, 2008 will require PHP version 5.2 as part of a coordinated effort at GoPHP5.org, and have issued an open invitation to any other PHP projects and applications, both open source and proprietary, that want to participate in the effort.

According to phpMyAdmin’s project lead, Marc Delisle: “The phpMyAdmin project is very enthusiastic to join the GoPHP5 initiative. We see GoPHP5 as a way both to improve our product’s new versions — not always having to add workarounds to remain PHP4­compatible — and improve the experience of our users — by projecting the correct message about the PHP system itself and its evolution.”

The first-ever version of PHP appeared on 8th June 1995 and as of October 2006, PHP6 is under-development.