Posts Tagged ‘hosting’

Creating a Joomla! staging site

Tuesday, November 1st, 2011

Wendy RobinsonIf you’re a Rochen customer or regular reader of this blog, then you’re well aware of the exclusive to Rochen cPanel plugin, Joomla Utilities,  which makes installing and managing Joomla an absolute breeze.  In the last 12 months we’ve brought you features such as one-click installations, security tweaks, file and directory permission fixes, super administrator password resets and even mass management of multiple installations for Rochen resellers.  The features work for all Joomla 1.5, 1.7, and future releases. We work continually on these features to make Joomla management through your Joomla hosting as easy as possible for you.

Creating your staging site with our new Clone tool

Our newest addition to the Rochen-exclusive tools set is the ability to create your own Joomla staging site within a separate directory or subdomain of your hosting account. This feature is possible with our brand new Joomla Utilities Clone tool.

Designers and developers of Joomla websites know that sometimes it’s necessary to be able to test out a new extension or template, or do some custom development and/or trouble shooting, without causing interruption or possible error to a live installation. It can be tedious to copy a site over to new directory manually, as you have to edit your configuration files all over again, import a copy of your database, and possibly adjust various links on your staging site.

With the clone tool you no longer have to worry about using your valuable time to do all of that. We’ve created this new feature so that all you need to do is go in to your Joomla Utilities option in cPanel’s CMS Utilities and just select the installation that you wish to clone, and then enter the directory or sub domain where you want to clone it to. It takes your entire installation including all data, extensions and template files, as well as the database, and duplicates it all in to your chosen directory, leaving your live site untouched and open for business. So easy!

From there, you can begin working on your staging site. Add any new extensions or templates you’ve been wanting to try, fix up any old or nagging issues in the code, and run as many tests as you need to. All without interrupting your live Joomla website in any way!

For a preview, we’ve prepared one of our quick demo videos below:

In other Joomla Utilities news, you’ll now notice that the handy cPanel plugin has a new look!

Our own in-house developer, Thomas, has taken some of the excess information and layout out and trimmed the Joomla Utilities interface to blend it in better with the standard cPanel look and feel.  As well, he has created a more efficient user experience as you can now quickly select your desired function from a list, as well as hide the instructional information if you don’t need to read it every time.  Check out the new look below:

A New Look For Joomla Utilities

A New Look For Joomla Utilities

Thanks for your time! To learn about the other Joomla Utilities features and watch more demo videos, head over to our Joomla Utilities page.

-Wendy

Wendy Robinson joined the Rochen team in June 2010 as a sales support staff member. She is also currently involved with the Joomla! project as a member of the Community Leadership Team.

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Posted in Hosting Backups, Joomla, Joomla Updates, Joomla Utilities, Reseller Web Hosting, Web Hosting | 4 Comments »

Easy Joomla! 1.6 Installation and Joomla! Site Migration

Thursday, January 27th, 2011

Wendy RobinsonBack in November we introduced our new Joomla! Utilities cPanel plugin, a set of tools exclusive to Rochen hosting customers that allows the Joomla! user to easily install, upgrade, maintain and enhance the security of their Joomla websites.

Today we have two brand new features for Joomla Utilities which we are very excited to tell you about. Now when you access Joomla Utilities in your Rochen hosting control panel you will have the following additional options:

Install Joomla 1.6:

When you go to the Joomla installation section of  Joomla Utilities you will now be able to opt whether you’d like to install the most current version of Joomla 1.5 or Joomla 1.6 with a single click of your mouse. Rochen’s hosting platform is fully performance tuned and secured for both versions.

Migrate Joomla to Rochen from Another Host:

This feature is very exciting and is going make life a lot easier when it comes to moving your Joomla site from your old/current host to your Rochen hosting account. All you need is your FTP information from your current host and you will be able to migrate your entire site over to Rochen with just one click.  The migration feature supports both Joomla 1.5 and 1.6 websites.

We’ve prepared another demonstration video below so that you can check out the new features right away:

The above new features are available in addition to all of the current Joomla Utilities  features listed below:

  • Simple Joomla installation tool that unlike other “auto installers” always installs the latest stable version of Joomla
  • Ability to install multiple Joomla installations to your secondary domains,  sub domains and sub directories
  • Automatic security hardening for new Joomla installs
  • Reset the password for any Super Administrator account under a Joomla site
  • Update the Joomla Core in a single easy step
  • Security tweaks that prevent arbitrary scripts from running
  • File and Directory Permission optimization / repair tool – useful if moving a Joomla site to Rochen from another host
  • Easily password protect your Joomla Administrator panel
  • Joomla sites that were not initially installed using the “Joomla Utilities” feature can still be managed and updated
  • The “Joomla Utilities” are built directly into your Rochen account’s cPanel so there is no third-party extension to install or maintain under Joomla meaning zero hassle
  • White labeled so that resellers can offer Joomla Utilities to their own clients without Rochen being visible

The “Joomla Utilities” option is available on all Rochen’s shared servers, ready for immediate use by Business Hosting and Reseller Hosting customers. Managed Virtual Server (MVS) and full Managed Server customers, who have not already done so, can request this be installed on your server at no extra charge by opening a technical support ticket via the My Rochen customer portal.

Thanks for taking the time to check out our new Joomla Utilities features! If you have any comments or questions, please post them here as we’d love know what you think.

-Wendy

Wendy Robinson joined the Rochen team in June 2010 as a sales support staff member. She is also currently involved with the Joomla! project as a member of the Community Leadership Team.

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Posted in Joomla, Joomla Utilities, Security, Web Hosting | 6 Comments »

Top 3 Questions at the Rochen Hosting Sales Desk

Friday, July 30th, 2010

Wendy RobinsonEveryday I answer emails from existing and potential customers about our services at Rochen. The questions vary and some are more specific then others. However, I’ve noticed a trend in some of the things people ask and would like to shed some light and offer the answers to the top three sales questions here in this post.

The #1 Question at the Sales Desk is “How can I upgrade my Rochen Hosting Plan?”

As I tell people all the time, “It’s Easy.”

How Easy it?

If you are currently on a Rochen shared hosting plan that no longer meets your needs, you can upgrade anytime to a larger plan simply by opening a support ticket in our My Rochen customer portal a member of our technical support staff will be able to assist you to make the necessary changes to your account. As our support staff operate 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, you can upgrade whenever it is most convenient for you.

Do you know what the best part is? There’s no downtime in it for you. Other then your extra storage space and bandwidth, you won’t feel a thing!

Question #2: “Can I use your services before I redirect my DNS?”

Yes, absolutely.

When you sign up for an account with Rochen we give you a temporary url to use. With access to a temporary url you are able to upload your website to our servers before you switch your DNS and transfer the site permanently. This gives you the opportunity to view and test the functionality of your website, and clear up any issues. When you’re ready, just point your DNS to our nameservers (which you receive from us via your Welcome email). All done accordingly, you should experience no downtime as the DNS propagates.

Switching your DNS may vary depending on your domain registrar but is usually a simple process. Never cancel your domain registration on the assumption that you can re-register it with Rochen. We do not handle domain registration.

The third most common Inquiry is actually a tie between: “How many email addresses can I have with my plan?”, ” How many databases do you limit per account?” and, “How many subdomains can I have?”

The answer to all of the above is that we don’t actually limit those features in number.

With your Rochen hosting plan you can have as many email addresses, databases and subdomains as your plan’s available space allows.  It’s simple too and doesn’t cost you anything extra. All of these can be managed, by you, via your cPanel account in just a few steps. Email addresses are even easier to set up now with our Google Apps utility which is an available alternative to Rochen’s own email service included in our plans.

I hope to do more posts like this as new questions come in.  That’s all for now though! Thanks for reading.

If you have any questions about our services, you can reach us at sales@rochen.com, browse our Knowledge Base or ask a question in our customer forums.

-Wendy

Wendy Robinson joined the Rochen team in June 2010 as a sales support staff member. She is also currently involved with the Joomla! project as a member of the Community Leadership Team.

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Posted in Customer Support, Reseller Web Hosting, Web Hosting | No Comments »

WordPress 3 and Rochen Hosting

Monday, July 12th, 2010

Rochen is a specialist hosting company with extensive experience hosting a number of todays most popular open source scripts like WordPress, Drupal and Joomla, among others. With this blog post we’re highlighting one of these excellent projects, namely WordPress.

WordPress, the world’s most popular blogging platform, and the same one we use here on our own Rochen blog has recently released their newest version, WordPress 3.

Some of the new features added are:

  • WordPress and WordPress MU have merged, allowing the management of multiple sites (called Multisite) from one WordPress installation.
  • New Custom Menu Management feature, allows creation of custom menus combining posts, pages, categories, tags, and links for use in theme menus or widgets.
  • Support for Shortlinks.
  • Ability to set the admin username and password during installation.

A full list of the changes can be found here: http://codex.wordpress.org/Version_3.0

Many of these cosmetic changes  help provide a smoother user experience, as well as that, additional developer tools and changes have added even more power to WordPress.

If you currently run a WordPress Blog on Rochen, be sure to login to your admin panel and follow the links/steps to upgrade to WordPress 3.

We’ve included a Video highlighting some of the new features and changes in WordPress 3 for our readers below:

In my next blog post, I’ll focus on Joomla and the upcoming Joomla 1.6 release which is now already in Beta. Look out for that!

- Brad

Brad Baker has been a member of the Rochen team since early 2003 and is a founding member of the Joomla! Open Source Project. He currently is part of the Joomla LeadershipTeam, and also blogs here.

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Posted in Web Hosting | No Comments »