WebDeal, which is both a world-class eZ Publish expert and an IBM Business Partner, has now brought together the best of two worlds to the benefit of its enterprise customers.

Large enterprises need to run the best, most stable software solutions, but not even top-notch solutions will work well unless they run on powerful server systems. These server systems must in turn be sustained by an excellent hosting infrastructure.

After performing a battery of quality assurance tests, WebDeal’s technical team can now attest that the combination of eZ Systems’ eZ Publish Content Management System (CMS) and IBM System z hardware is possible on WebDeal’s premium hosting environment. WebDeal’s System z users will be able to run eZ Publish without having to make any changes to their existing server platform.

This announcement further establishes the concept of “Technical Excellence” that has become WebDeal’s trademark.

eZ Publish is eZ Systems’ award-winning, Open Source CMS for web publishing, media portals, intranets, e-commerce and extranets, while System z is IBM’s mainframe platform for the enterprise. WebDeal is the world’s leading eZ Publish hosting provider, and therefore also the most qualified to unleash all the potential of eZ Publish on mainframe platforms.

The last few seconds before projects and Internet hosting companies officially support PHP 5.2 via GoPHP5.org.

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.

If your PHP-based software or Web server still does not support PHP 5, I would conclude they are living in the past. I personally would be looking for something with a better vision of the future...

The following are some links for installing the Drupal content managmenet system on a virtual private server (VPS) hosted by Linode.com. Please feel free to comment or add links about your own experience of installing and maintaning a CMS (doesn't have to be about Drupal) on a VPS or even a dedicated server. If the reference is good, I'll add it to the list.

• Victor Kane's aWebFactory: VPS! Getting Drupal up and running on a linode
• Jeff Beeman: Just got rolling with a VPS on Linode (Part 1)
• Jeff Beeman: Just got rolling with a VPS on Linode (Part 2)

By the way, CMS Report is hosted on a VPS at Dakota Hosting (a reseller account I own). I've had very good luck with the virtual server at Dakota Hosting and would recommend them any day over shared hosting.

Honestly, I'm not trying to put so much focus on Drupal when you consider CMSReport.com is a site that is supposed to put focus on at least 29 other content mangement systems.  It's just that there is so much coming out from the Drupal community that it is hard to ignore.  The latest is Victor Kane's experience with setting up a virtual private server (VPS) for the Drupal CMS.

Well, after realizing the limitations of shared hosting for Drupal development, I decided to go with the big boys and use a dedicated server or VPS solution, at least for development. So I can make a multisite install for the docs and I can make subdomains for each development site.

So after perusing various options, I decided for linode. After checking out the various plans, I decided on the Linode 300, and got 50% more disk space by paying for a year.

The good news for non-Drupal users, is that the VPS how-to can easily be applied to other CMS applications.  Check out the complete story.

Yesterday, I upgraded the PHP version on my server from 5.2.4 to 5.2.5. PHP 5.2.5 brings improved "stability of the PHP 5.2.x branch with over 60 bug fixes, several of which are security related". I also reintroduced eAccelerator back onto the server. I stopped using eAccelerator last spring, not so much because I had any real issues with it, but because I spent the summer months hosting my sites on the cheap.

This time, when I compiled the new version of PHP 5.2 onto my server, I also made the decision to not load the latest version of PHP 4. Although most of the Web applications I run on the server are PHP 5 compatible, I've always made sure I also had access to a version of PHP 4. The time has finally come though where I really don't have a need or desire to host a content management system that is only PHP 4 compatible.

Last weekend, both Linux Today and Linux.com provided links and excerpts to an article I posted here at CMS Report.  You can see some of the stats on my newly quantified site at quantcast.com.  While those managing large sites shouldn't be too impressed with those numbers, I'm personally pleased with the current level of traffic this little 'ol site of mine is seeing.  I'm not only "Wowed" with the number of people visiting my site to read the posts, but I'm also grateful for the opportunity to learn from those of you that leave some quality comments for all to consider.

More importantly, this past weekend's traffic bump was the first real test I had for CMSReport.com since it's been hosted on the new VPS.  I've done very little tweaking of the VPS, so I'm looking forward to seeing how much I'll be able to improve the server's performance once I find some free time.  Either way, it is very doubtful that CMSReport.com would have stayed up under the previous shared hosting plan.  The VPS gives me a lot of room for growth...oh yea!

"This article is primarily aimed at people who need to make their local development environment visible to the Internet. If you are interested in developing Facebook applications your ears should be perking up at this point. If you are interested in hosting your own website from home, there are more things to be considered..."

Complete Story

You may have not have been able to access CMS Report Friday evening and early Saturday morning.  That's because I've moved CMSReport.com over to a new shared hosting account with Dakota Hosting, a hosting provider I'm associated with via a reseller plan. The same host provider I've been using using all summer.

The fact that I'm still using a cheap hosting plan is a big surprise to me.  Why is that?  As you may recall, I had only planned to host my Drupal sites on a budget hosting plan for a few months.  After hosting my sites on a VPS for so long, I wanted to feel the aches and pains a Drupal newbie experiences when they find their site has performance issues due to an oversold shared hosting plan.  I wanted a learning experience and was prepared for the worse.

To be honest, I also was buying time until I came across better reseller plans to host my sites (Drupal and non-Drupal included).  However, looking at the various hosting plans provided by a number of providers was a frustrating experience for me.  I won't name names, but unfortunately there are a lot of hosting companies out there that do a very good job of hiding what features they do not provide under their plans.  I came across a couple sites that liked to cap your CPU usage to the point that half of my pages couldn't be delivered to users.  Or if they said they offered both PHP4 and PHP5, I found their PHP5 implementation to not be that straight forward or worse, the "how-to" undocumented.

A few months ago I mentioned that I was hosting my site using a "budget shared hosting plan through my reseller site which is comparable to the hosting plans offered by GoDaddy".  In that same article, I also mentioned that although I prefer to run my sites on a Virtual Private/Dedicated Server (VPS/VDS), I wanted to try experimenting with the cheap shared hosting plans despite the plans not offering full MySQL functions such as CREATE TEMPORARY TABLE.  For the most part, my sites have been running fine on the shared hosting plans but I wanted better control (oh how I miss Linux command line via secure shell).  So, I began searching for a better reseller hosting plan.  Unfortunately, my search for the perfect reseller host plan still continues.

I thought my hosting requirements were pretty simple.  I wanted a reseller hosting plan that provided CPanel, PHP5, MySQL5, secure shell, and a license to a client billing system such as ClientExec.  Oh and I wanted to be sure the hosting plans provided were Drupal friendly.  While I host more than just Drupal sites I've found that if the server is configured properly to run Drupal then it can run almost any other PHP-based CMS out there.  All in all I wanted a shared hosting plan where I spent less time managing the server, yet had the controls I needed via a Linux shell.  Simple enough right?  In fact I thought I found a great reseller plan through ResellerZoom (RZ).  However, after spending most of my weekend hours trying to work it all out, I've come to the conclusion I'm still looking for something that works better.

During the past couple years I have recommended to people that they host their Drupal sites on a virtual private server (VPS) instead of a shared hosting plan.   While a large number of people do not have problems running Drupal under shared hosting plans, I have always felt that there are less headaches with using a VPS to host your sites.  For example, with a VPS I don't have to worry whether the shared hosting plan gives me the necessary MySQL privileges needed by Drupal (especially CREATE TEMPORARY TABLES and LOCK TABLES).  From time to time, you also hear from people with "Drupal friendly" shared hosting plans eventually find that their hosting company isn't so friendly toward their Drupal site.  Planet Drupal contributor, Clancy Ratliff, is one of the most recent  examples for having a host provider not really happy she is using Drupal.  So I often ask myself, is shared hosting for Drupal really worth the trouble?

I don't know if shared hosting is worth the trouble but a chain of events have brought me to giving shared hosting another chance for my Drupal sites.  Last month, I pushed my VPS so close to the bleeding edge that it became unstable.  While I was able to get my sites back online, the downtime clearly told me it was time to move my sites to a new server.  While most visitors observed a performance improvement  for my Drupal sites since the server migration, it's only now that I'm letting the cat out of the bag.  For the past week, CMSReport.com has been under a shared hosting plan and not a VPS.   I'm currently running my site using a budget shared hosting plan through my reseller site which is comparable to the hosting plans offered by GoDaddy.

I don't know how long I'll keep my site on a shared hosting plan but I am currently enjoying a break from the work, worry, and experimentation that comes with administration of a VPS.  While I may go back to a VPS, I thought it would benefit some newbies and other Drupal users my experiences and thoughts on migrating my sites from a VPS back to a shared hosting plan.