WordPress plugins – the good, the bad and the ugly!
WordPress is a very powerful and mature platform. Even though it started life as a blog system, today thousands of customers use it to power their entire website – many on our managed Cloud VPS service which is an ideal wordpress hosting option (even if we do say so ourselves!).
Plugins play an essential part in increasing the flexibility of the system to do exactly what you need. As one of the success stories of open source software, one of the great things about WordPress is that anybody can write a plugin. So there are already thousands of plugins already written – there’s a good chance somebody already wrote the plugin you’re looking for.
But, as I said – literally anybody can write a plugin. You don’t need to be a great software developer, you don’t even need to pay any attention to the OWASP top ten web application security risks; anybody with any level of coding expertise and skill can write a plugin.
So there are thousands of pre-written plugins to choose from, to give your WordPress powered site the extra functionality or feature that you crave – what could possibly go wrong?
Which PHP mode? Apache vs CGI vs FastCGI
There are multiple ways to execute PHP scripts on a web server. We’re often asked about the difference between these modes, so here it is!
We offer the three most common PHP handlers across our Linux Cloud Hosting range:
- Apache module
- CGI
- FastCGI
Each of these has its own advantages and disadvantages.
Benefits of tried & tested software versions
We’re often asked by customers why we’re running an old version of PHP or MySQL on our Cloud VPS services as they’re worried that they may be insecure or outdated, but rest assured this couldn’t be further from the truth!
We use extremely stable versions of enterprise software with many benefits over the latest available releases to ensure your web services are always available (and give you the option to change this if you wish!).
New features in Plesk Mobile Server Manager 1.2
As we have a growing number of users using Plesk Mobile Server Manager we wanted to update you regarding some new features added in the latest update for Apple IOS devices.
New Plesk mobile manager features
- View Plesk Admin Server error logs and access logs
- View current traffic usage for web (HTTP), FTP and inbound email (POP3/IMAP) & outbound email (SMTP)
- Notifications can be sent to you about server events, even if the application is not running on your device
- Improved user experience for VPS customers
- Improved user interface and embedded panel view for iPad
UK Java Cloud Hosting – deploy a scalable app in minutes
We’re pleased to say that Jelastic, our scalable Java Cloud Hosting platform, has been performing great for the past 10 days. Many users have signed up to trial the platform in our free beta period. We’ve received a lot of very valuable feedback – everyone keeps telling us how fast, stable and easy-to-use our cloud is compared to our competitors and traditional Java hosting!
For those of you who have not tried our platform yet, here are a couple of videos to show you how easy it is to get started with your first applications deployed to the cloud in just a few minutes!