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If it happens that your hosting server (GoDaddy hosting for example) doesn’t provide tools to manage your account effectively, don’t be satisfied with that. You shouldn’t complain neither. Instead, go and install your own on-line tools.

PHP File Manager is one of such tools. It consists of one PHP script that you can upload to your server and have fully featured file manager running on-line. With it you can upload, copy, move, delete, compress, uncompress files on your server. You can set permissions, edit configuration files, check server info, and even execute system commands on your server. Quite impressive! And it’s open source and absolutely free. Make sure that only you can access your tools by installing them in password protected folders or assigning an URL that is hard to guess.

Once you have one running, don’t stop. Analyze your servers features, compile a list of items you miss much and go find a replacement you can install yourself. Tools for managing email accounts, domains, databases, server logs and statistics - everything is possible.

Not every hosting provider gives you SSH access. All you have is FTP, and when you install or upgrade your server software you have to download it first to your desktop, unzip and then upload each file to the server via FTP. It’s okay when it is small archive with a few files in it, but when you need to upload a 50Mb archive with a lot of small files in it, huh? It’s no fun.

Luckily most hosting servers have ‘curl’ and ‘unzip’ utilities installed. I use them right from PHP script to make any installation or upgrade to be quick and simple. This script I made freely available to everyone. You can download the script from our Downloads page.

There is no guarantee that this script will work on your server, but most of Linux hosting servers should work without problem. And of course it is not the only solution to the problem. Feel free to ask questions and report any issues in comments to this post.

With a number of hosting companies adding Ruby on Rails to their list of supported technologies, Ruby is getting wildly popular for small and medium size projects. Easiness of deployment, low resource consumption, friendliness to shared environments, compatibility with agile methods of development makes Ruby on Rails an interesting alternative to other web technologies.

That has not happened to Java. Being the most popular technology for large size, enterprise applications, Java couldn’t make its way to the masses. Java hosting is still quite expensive, troublesome in shared environments, harder to administrate. While PHP remains the most popular technology among web application developers, especially for small projects.