Tag Archives: hosting

Mar 24

Free Magento templates

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We all know how important is the unique look of your eCommerce website for your business. Thus, TMDHosting has released twelve professional Magento templates which are freely available to our customers. Additionally, these templates are not available for public download and it is highly unlikable to find any other Magento website with the same template as your one.

Be advised that as a TMDHosting customer you are entitled to receive free Magento installation as well as free templates and components installation performed by our highly experienced support team as a part of our Magento hosting package.

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If you need any assistance in the process you can always contact our experienced and friendly representatives via our live chat.

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Mar 23

Magento hosting

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In this article we will summarize the most important points that should be covered when you are looking for a Magento hosting. Be advised that these topics are based on the official documentation, recommendations and forum of Magento as well as customer feedback and search engine key words research.

  • System requirements compatibility
  • Extra fees and installation services
  • Knowledge base, tutorials and extras
  • Technical support and eCommerce experience
  • General Hosting plan features

System requirements compatibility

The first and most important point is that your future host should be fully compatible with Magento system requirements. Most of the modern hosting companies should be compatible with some of the Magento requirements. Still, be advised that your host should be fully compatible with all of them for best performance. It is important to mention that no a hosting service which does not fully cover the official requirements is not absolutely qualified for the Magento eCommerce platform.

You can easily check a hosting server about its Magento compatibility by the official Mangeto check script. For example, below are the results that should be displayed if your hosting is fully qualified for Magento application. The results are from our TMDHosting server:

Congratulations! Your server meets the requirements for Magento.

  • You have PHP 5.2.0 (or greater)
  • Safe Mode is off
  • You have MySQL 4.1.20 (or greater)
  • You have the curl extension
  • You have the dom extension
  • You have the gd extension
  • You have the hash extension
  • You have the iconv extension
  • You have the mcrypt extension
  • You have the pcre extension
  • You have the pdo extension
  • You have the pdo_mysql extension
  • You have the simplexml extension

You can download the Magento compatibility check script from here.

If you would like to perform the Magento compatibility check on your end, please click here.

Extra fees and installation services

It is very important to be aware of any other fees that are applied in additional to your hosting plan. For example, if your hosting company charges for Magento installation services or any extra fees are applied for modules, components and themes installation.

As most PHP/MySQL based applications the Magento installation is a straight forward procedure and you should not be charged for this service due to the fact that it does not require any development or specific technical support work nor additional time of exclusive work. Furthermore, Magento team has developed a very easy-to-use fully automatic module installation feature fully integrated in the Magento application. Thus, no additional fees should be applied for modules, components and template installation as well.

Considering the facts above, TMDHosting provides free Magento installation as well as free modules, language packs and templates installation included in our Magento hosting package.

Knowledge base, tutorials and extras

It is very important to check your future host knowledge base and tutorials available. The more information is provided by your hosting company, the more experienced their representatives are with the support and hosting service of the Magento application. The most important information you should be looking is a straight forward guidelines on how to install, configure and maintain your eCommerce Magento website.

We completely understand that as much as possible information should be available for our customers. Thus, we have created a content-rich tutorial base for Magento, as well as many video tutorials.

Additionally, we have created unique Mangeto templates which are freely available for our customers. Please note that these templates are not available for public download and only as a TMDHosting customer you can take advantage of having your unique look and feel for your eCommerce website.

Technical support and eCommerce experience

Even with the best knowledge base your Magento host should provide excellent support. This is of a great importance in order to make sure that you will be able to build your eCommerce website trouble-free from the first to the very last step. Only a support team with good understanding of the eCommerce concept and a lot of experience with online shops can provide accurate and timely assistance.

General Hosting plan features

Despite all the Magento related configuration settings and requirements you should be looking for a feature-rich hosting plan. Most probably you will need email accounts, additional databases for other applications as well as FTP accounts and statistics of your website visits. Last but not least, SSL feature should be available for you as a hosting feature upgrade in order to make sure that your website will be able to provide secure payment process. All of the above should be unlimited and freely included in your hosting package.

In our desire to create a complete all-in-one eCommerce Magento hosting package we have collected all the required basic hosting features such as Emails, MySQL database support and FTP as well as specially optimized hosting environment for the Mangeton platform. Please review our Magento hosting package and feel free to contact our experienced representatives via the live chat.

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Mar 19

10 great plugins for your WordPress blog

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I believe that many bloggers will agree that one of the most enjoyable part of blogging is actually creating your blog. Thus, we decided to share a short list of plugins that we believe should be installed on your blog. We can not agree more that the plugins you decide to install depends on a great extent on the results you would like to achieve and the type of blog your are building, still there are some that most probably include in your blog no matter what topics will be discussed on it.

I will start with one of the most popular WordPress plugins nowadays:

1. All in One SEO Pack

This plugin is fully out-of-the-box. It automatically optimizes your titles for the Search Engines in order to improve your SEO. Additionally, it generates Meta tags based on your post content and avoids the duplication of content which usually occurs in Meta tag and key words listing in most of the blogs. Moreover, you can it is fully customizable and you may edit any data that will be applied to your post. This add-on as most WordPress plugins can be installed just with a few clicks in the admin area of your blog and will automatically include special fields on your post page where you can additionally SEO optimize your posts.

2. Google Analytics for WordPress

Well, you may SEO optimize forever your blog but the only way to see the real results of your work are the traffic statistics. Google Analytics has proved to be a leader in the traffic analyze and statistics. This plugin is of a great help when it comes to adding your Google Analytics tracking code. Just copy the unique ID that will be provided by Google Analytics for your website in the configuration menu of this plugin and it will automatically insert the required code in all of your pages and posts. Again, it is fully customizable and you may exclude certain categories, posts or pages which will not be included in your statistics.

3. Sociable

No matter if you have a personal, business or public organization blog, your goal most probably is to get as many as possible readers on your website. The social networks, such as Digg.com and Stumbleupon.com, can be massive sources of real, natural traffic of readers really interested on your blog topics. This plugis add a button via which your readers may subscribe your posts to about 100 different social networks, search engines and websites such as Google, Yahoo, Facebook and MySpace.

4. NextGEN Gallery

Even not designed as a gallery, WordPress turned out to be a great platform for building photography blogs. Furthermore, if you are an eager traveler you may would like to share your pictures to spice your stories and experience on the road. NextGEN Gallery is may be the best plugin for creating interactive gallery pages on your WordPress blog. In includes functionalities such as slide show, JavaScript Effect, sortable albums, tag support as well as the great PicLens support.

5. Google XML Sitemaps

Creating your website sitemap may be a very hard time sometimes especially when your blog contains a large amount of articles and pages. This plugin will create a complete sitemap of your website. Furthermore, the format and syntax is fully compatible with all search engines and fully complies with the official sitemap Sitemap Protocol 0.9 as defined by Sitemaps.org. When you generate your sitemap you can simply set a link on your blog page to the sitemap.xml file and you can be sure that all the pages will be crawled by the search engines.

6. Contact Form 7

Simple but so flexible contact form that you can literary achieve any information-submit page possible. The fields of information that will be input by your visitors are fully modified. Furthermore, this plugin provides the functionality to include radio, drop down and multiply choice areas in your form via which you can create even a quiz or poll results of which will be mailed to you. Additionally, it supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA and Akismet spam protection.

7. MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer

Not as popular as the others but still very useful plugin especially when you have a very large list of ping sites which should be “notified” on every post. This plugin saves your blog from getting tagged as ping spammer. If you are not exactly sure how the ping websites and service work you may check our SEO for blogs post.

8. Akismet

Most probably the ultimate spam protection available for blogs and not only. This plugin is even available by default when you install your WordPress blog. In order to activate it will require a WordPress.com API key which can be obtained by a simple registration on the WordPress.com sign up page. It protects your comment forms without even including captcha using a very sophisticated self-improving engine and one of the largest database in the world for spam checking.

9. WP Security Scan

This plugin performs a permissions, ownership and configuration security issues with your WordPress installation. Additionally, it reports password weaknesses and database security issues, providing short guidelines how to resolve the issues as well as lock out/log incorrect login attempts, .htaccess verification and test for XSS vulnerabilities.

10. Google Maps Anywhere

Maybe no all blogs will need this plugin but if your blog is related to geographic locations and you need to pitch point certain locations on the map this is the plugin for you. This easy-to-use plugin allows you to insert Google Maps and Street View into your blog.

If you need step by step guidance on how to install, configure and manage your WordPress blog you may refer to our detailed tutorial here.

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On the other hand, if you are looking for a professional hosting solution for your WordPress website and full support including free WordPress, plugin and templates installation you may check our WordPress hosting plan.

Mar 03

Create your quality gallery today

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You don’t have to be a professional photographer to make a pro online gallery

Photography is passion – it takes skills, time and endeavor. Very often to take the right shot you need to be lucky and patient, very patient. You need to get well-equipped as spare batteries, memory cards, and of course good eye for details. Happily there are so many quality and affordable products on the market now that you don’t have to ruin yourself to buy a good camera. And that’s only before you realize that the easiest way to show your best shots to lots of people is the Internet.

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