We have recently upgraded our Tomcat Java hosting packages to have Tomcat 6 available to them. We have also increased the amount of diskspace given to the Java hosting accounts in General. The j2000 range of java hosting accounts now have 2GB of diskspace and the J4000 hosting accounts have 4GB of space available.

Tomcat 6 implements the following Java specifications: servlet 2.5 and JSP 2.1 specifications and uses J2SE 1.5 & JEE 5.


If you’re interested in ordering a java tomcat 6 hosting account please follow the link.

If you are looking for a new domain name or to set up a new website, now is a great time to get started. With hostingireland you can now get a .ie domain name for half price. But not only a .ie you can also get a .com , .net, .info, .biz, .org or .name domain for half price over the next thirty days. To get a half price domain all you need to do is order your chosen domain.
So if you’ve got an idea for a site or have been toying with the idea of bringing your business on-line. Then get started right now and check if your domain is available add some hosting and off you go.


You can check a domain’s availability by following the link.

If you are looking to set up a website and have little or no knowledge of code then using either Joomla or Drupal could be a good choice for you. Both of these open source software projects provide a full framework for creating a fully featured web site.


We provide an easy set up option for these software bundles within your hosting accounts control panel. Under Software and Services you will see an icon for scriptilous. When clicked this will launch the installer. From here you can then choose the software package that you wish to install within your hosting account. If you choose to install Joomla or Drupal, it will install the required databases and also the files that Joomla or Drupal require in order to run.


If you wish, you can choose to install these software bundles in a separate folder. Once installed you can simply browse to the folder where the software is installed. Once there you can login to the admin area with a user name and password that you would have been prompted to create when starting the installation. Then you are done and ready to begin creating your website.
Get a hosting account that supports Joomla and Drupal
Pro Ultima Hosting | Pro Business Hosting


Though it may be a little daunting at first, with some persistence and the help of some good, free tutorials on the web Drupal Tutorials and also Joomla Tutorials , you will soon have a dynamic, managable website up and running.

We’ve teamed up with Attracta to give our customers some great new SEO tools available directly from your CPanel control panel.
Below are the links as they appear in your Cpanel.




Included are tools to get your site listed in Google, and if you are already in Google, it may get even more of your site’s pages listed, and improve your page rank with the back link builder. Other tools include a broken link checker, search engine visit tracker, helpful meta tag tool and more…


We are able to offer the Attracta™ Basic-level SEO tools at no extra cost to you (Normally over €40/year).

Simply login to your Hosting Ireland website control panel, look for the new SEO Tools category, and click on “Get In Google.” to get started.

We are proud to announce the launch of three new Linux hosting accounts. The new hosting accounts reflect our understanding as a web hosting company of what the requirements are for the swiftly evolving web.
Here is a quick overview of each of the new packages:


Pro Lite
10GB Disk Space
10GB Data Transfer
3 Web Sites
30 Email Accounts

To find out more about the Pro Lite Hosting package visit the Pro Lite Hosting Information


Pro Business Hosting
20GB Disk Space
100GB Data Transfer
15 Web Sites
150 Email Accounts

To find out more about the Pro Business Hosting package visit the Pro Business Hosting Information

Pro Ultima Hosting
50GB Disk Space
500GB Data Transfer
50 Web Sites
300 Email Accounts

To find out more about the Pro Ultima Hosting package visit the Pro Ultima Hosting Information

CloudLinux is an operating system (OS) that is commercially supported and interchangeable with the most popular RPM-based distribution on the market.

CloudLinux uses LVE technology
LVE is an isolation technology that increases server density, stability and reliability. If you want to find out more then you can read about it here Find Out More


Some of the Hightlights of CloudLinux
1. Give hosting providers control over CPU resources (I/O and memory limits to be released)
2. Prevent individual accounts from slowing down or taking down a server
3. Protect servers from unpredictable issues that drain resources for other tenants
4. Increase density so you can host more tenants on one server
5. Identify accounts that are over-using resources so you can address their needs
6. Lower risk and increase efficiency on shared servers Improve server performance

CloudLinux is available for both Dedicated Servers and Vps Servers.
If your’re interested in finding out more about CloudLinux visit our page.

A Complete Payment System

Sage Pay Go is the complete card payment service that is simple to manage and easy to integrate with your website or e-commerce platform.

Affordable payment processing

Sage Pay Go has a flat-rate pricing system which means you’ll know what your costs are up-front:

• €25 per month for merchants processing up to 1,000 transactions per quarter
• €0.15 per transaction for merchants processing more than 1,000 transactions per quarter, with a minimum charge of €25 per month
• No set-up fees, no percentage fees and no annual charges.
• Bolt-on a Sage Pay merchant account – it’s competitively priced with no set-up fees or minimum terms.

find out more and apply


Why Sage
Sage Pay is the union of Protx, the fastest growing payment service provider (PSP) and Sage is one of Ireland’s most trusted business brands.
Sage has fine-tuned the payment process over the last 10 years, and securely process millions of transactions each year for our 28,000+ customers.
Sage has twin data centres and disaster recovery initiatives to ensure your payments are being processed all day, every day.
Security
Sage Pay is level 1 PCI DSS compliant (the highest level) and are active members of the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council, so you can be confident that your customers’ data is safe.

find out more and apply

We are now offering the .me domain name. The .me domain name is the national tld for Montenegro, however because of its uniquely personal tone, the .me domain is being widely adopted as a social tld. As you can imagine, there are quite a few combinations with .me, two examples are “contact.me” and “marry.me”. The tld is also unrestricted, which means that if it is available you can register it.
To check domain availability view our .me domain name registration page.


Why not get “yourname”.me
What better domain to set up a personal site or blog under, than a .me. Why not check and see if “yourname.me” is available ?


How will Google respond to a .me domain?
With so much interest in the .me domain name, and with a lot of domain names being registered that are not specifically aimed at Montenegro, it would be fair to wonder whether perhaps Google will adjust how it views this tld and that perhaps it will view it as more of a global tld with a wide appeal rather than simply of interest to Montenegro.

.co the new .Com ?
Hostingireland are now offering the .co tld for domain registration. The .co Domain is being touted as the new .com. Whether or not that is the case is up for debate. However since launch, the first 15 minutes saw 90,000 .co domain names being picked up. After only 3 days over 280,000 domain names had been registered and the current count (at time of writing) is 349,910.

.Co domains are available to register by anyone and there are no restrications applied. The .co registry describes the .co domain as
Associated globally with the words “COmpany,” “COrporation” and “COmmerce” – the .CO domain is easy to recognize, simple to remember and flexible to use. And that makes it the perfect platform for today’s socially networked individuals, entrepreneurs and companies to create .COmmunities, share .COntent, and .COnnect, .COmmunicate and .COllaborate.

An interesting question is how Google will view the .co domain name and more importantly how it will be ranked in the world pages search results. Nobody is sure at the moment, but it is speculated that Google, while slightly favouring the country specific tld in that country’s search results, doesn’t negatively rate tlds that aren’t the global tlds ie (.com .org .net) etc…


If your interested in learning more about the .co domain name, and checking if your name is available, then take a look at our .co domain registration page.

The changing face of PHP

As of the 22nd of July, PHP 5.2.x is no longer supported and the latest release 5.2.14 marks the final bug fixing release in the 5.2.x branch. However, if you are like me, you will appreciate that the amount of new features in 5.3 makes this a welcome change as we see new features for 5.3 roll in like namespaces, late static binding and goto functionality, I am happy to see this new face of 5.3 become the standard face of PHP.

However, if you have an existing site, which was written in 5.2.x or before you may be concerned that an upgrade of the PHP on your server will cause issues for your PHP code, and you may be right. Fortunately the amount of deprecated functions from 5.2.x to 5.3 are minimal and even less features have been removed, hence most developers can breathe a sigh of relief.

Tips for updating your code

We will be trying to help you through the upgrade procedure as much as possible, as we roll out 5.3.x to all of our PHP web servers, and of course http://www.php.net can be referenced for the most in-depth discussion of upgrading, we will be trying to focus on the changes most likely to effect an existing site.

For anyone who isn’t even remotely familiar with PHP, it is most likely that you are using a pre-made product, like WordPress, OSCommerce or Joomla, and the best thing to do would be to contact the support/community of whichever product you are using, and ask them for help upgrading your installation to the latest version.

Alternatively, you probably had your site built by a web developer and you will need to contact them, to find out if changing to PHP 5.3 is going to cause you any trouble.

Backwards incompatible changes in PHP 5.3

For the rest of you, you will clearly be looking for some details on what isn’t going to work any more, firstly I want to mention that it is quite unlikely that any of these features are currently in use, but for the sake of completeness I will list them here:

• clearstatcache() no longer clears the realpath cache by default, to make it clear the realpath cache, send a ‘true’ as the first argument to this function.
• realpath() is now fully platform-independent. Consequence of this is that invalid relative paths such as __FILE__ . “/../x” do not work anymore, to correct this, replace __FILE__ with dirname(__FILE__).
• The call_user_func() family of functions now propagate $this even if the callee is a parent class.
• The array functions natsort(), natcasesort(), usort(), uasort(), uksort(), array_flip(), and array_unique() no longer accept objects passed as arguments. To apply these functions to an object, cast the object to an array first, to do this, put ‘natsort((array) $object)’ instead of ‘natsort($object)’.
• The trailing / has been removed from the SplFileInfo class and other related directory classes.
• The __toString magic method can no longer accept arguments.
• The magic methods __get, __set, __isset, __unset, and __call must always be public and can no longer be static. Method signatures are now enforced.
• The __call magic method is now invoked on access to private and protected methods.
• func_get_arg(), func_get_args() and func_num_args() can no longer be called from the outermost scope of a file that has been included by calling include() or require() from within a function in the calling file.

The words ‘goto’ and ‘namespace’ are now reserved.

Deprecated Functions

• call_user_method() (use call_user_func() instead)
• call_user_method_array() (use call_user_func_array() instead)
• define_syslog_variables()
• dl()
• ereg() (use preg_match() instead)
• ereg_replace() (use preg_replace() instead)
• eregi() (use preg_match() with the ‘i’ modifier instead)
• eregi_replace() (use preg_replace() with the ‘i’ modifier instead)
• set_magic_quotes_runtime() and its alias, magic_quotes_runtime()
• session_register() (use the $_SESSION superglobal instead)
• session_unregister() (use the $_SESSION superglobal instead)
• session_is_registered() (use the $_SESSION superglobal instead)
• set_socket_blocking() (use stream_set_blocking() instead)
• split() (use preg_split() instead)
• spliti() (use preg_split() with the ‘i’ modifier instead)
• sql_regcase()
• mysql_db_query() (use mysql_select_db() and mysql_query() instead)
• mysql_escape_string() (use mysql_real_escape_string() instead)
• Passing locale category names as strings is now deprecated. Use the LC_* family of constants instead.
• The is_dst parameter to mktime(). Use the new timezone handling functions instead.

Finally…

So it is clear that upgrading the code from 5.2.x to 5.3.x is not a difficult procedure, and all the new features that will become available in 5.3.x will be very useful in any new projects being built in our hosting accounts. If you have any questions concerning the upgrade of PHP on our servers please contact us at info@hostingireland.ie