Let me talk about what you can do first with the Baby croc shared hosting account.

• Unlimited disk space : my current disk space usage is about 8 GB
• Unlimite email account : I do not have many email accounts, because it’s headache to maintain multiples email accounts. I would rather recommand to use Google App service
• Unlimited bandwith : Current monthly transfer records shows that I used over 16GB
• You can add unlimited addon domains meaning that you can add additional domain with wordpress to the same account without extra charges.
• You can maintain DNS services for your domain.
• CPanel, SSH access

It’s so attractive with unlimited disk space, bandwidth, addon domains, and it’s so cheap! It’s only about 7 dollars per month. What more anybody would want form a hosting service?

The baby croc or shared hostings is basically that you are sharing the server with other people. It is not clear how many people are sharing the server together, but it is clear that there are some limitations on what you can do.

Here are some the limitations

1. The maximum PHP memory size is 64 M per execution.
64MB memory is still amazing, but you can not allow more than that. When you enable ‘php.ini quick config’ in the CPanel, the PHP will read in the php.ini file in your home directory. You can actually edit the file and set ‘memory_limit’ to more than 64M, but in fact memory limit error will occur if more than 64M is used.

2. The maximum number of simultaneous processes are 25.
This is the biggest problem that I am experiencing. If the simultaneous process goes over 25, the web request will result 500 Internal Server Error. If you’re WordPress site is slow and have many simultaneous visitors, many of them will see the 500 Internal server error. I am having problems with one of my WordPress site which has some plugins utilizing curl functions. When the remote site is unreachable, the curl function is basically waiting for the reply and does not timeout automatically. So this process will idle and eats up available processes slots. And eventually my visitors will soon see 500 error pages when maximum available processes are all used up. You have to login to your CPanel and manually kill the idling processes.

One way to solve is to define the Conneciton timeout setting for curl function.

curl_setopt($session, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 10); //10 seconds time out

3. Does APC work with Shared Hosting?
For security reason, the suPHP is used. And that is fine, but the real problem is that any kind of PHP opcode cache solution will not work including APC. I have searched everywhere to find the solution to implement APC or any similar solution to speed up the PHP processing, but I found that it is not possible under suPHP. APC or opcode cache solution stores binary opcode data in the memory space to speed up the next processing of the PHP resource. However, under suPHP this is meaningless , because each PHP processes are separate processes and won’t be recognized.

By default the php.ini does not come with apc.so file , but I was actually able to install apc.so file and I succeeded to show APC in the phpinfo() result page. And ran some benchmarking software to compare the speed with and without apc.so library enabled. But basically there was no difference in the processing speed. (If you are interested in trying this yourself, let me know)

4. FastCGI can be activated easily.
FastCGI is well known for enhancing PHP processing speeds by running number of persistent processes to handle the requests all the time. You can activate FastCGI by adding below line into your .htaccess file in the document root directory.

AddHandler fcgid-script .php

However, I do not recommend you to activate this unless you are on the VPS or dedicated server. On the shared hosting account, you can have only upto maximum 25 processes. With FastCGI enabled, those FastCGI php processes will take available slots and you have much less simultaneous process slots. Also your website eventually becomes unstable and you would soon see 500 Internal Server Error message.

So I have spent some time to find a way to speed up my WordPress sites , but all the well known methods were all failed.

However, the best method for me was to use ‘W3 Total Cache’ plugin . It is little bit confusing when you first try to set the settings with all the options. But I only recommend to use Page Cache. Database cache will create so may files in the disk which will increase the number of inodes. (There is limit on the number of inodes you can create under Hostgator Shared account) But the result is amazing!

If you know a good tip on speeding up PHP process under Shared hosting account, let me know!

Thank you for visiting wpmarking.org.

And found these gems. High quality wordpress themes which are absolutely free.

First, check out these goodies from popular “For Purchase” themes provider ‘woothemes’. They have some free themes which are nice. Actually these free themes have been available for some time now, but they still look good. Just remember to select “Free” from the selection box. So you can browse only the free themes.http://www.woothemes.com/themes/free/

Now here is another great site that provides High quality wordpress themes. There are 11 themes right now but it seems the collection is growing as time goes by. Their themes are all WP 3.0 compatible , supporting menu management. And they are absolutely free! I checked out all the themes and loved them all. I really appreciate site5.com for sharing the beautiful themes with all of the Internet users. Cheers to site5!
http://www.site5.com/wordpress-themes/

Please share with us if you know any high quality WordPress theme sites. Thank you.

Updated: Actually you can find a lot more High quality free wordpress themes by googling “free high quality wordpress themes”. Here are some of the results. It’s surprising that there are so many high quality themes.

• http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/08/19/100-free-high-quality-wordpress-themes-for-2010/
• http://artatm.com/2010/10/45-beautiful-free-high-quality-wordpress-themes/
• http://www.instantshift.com/2010/02/19/60-latest-high-quality-free-wordpress-themes/
• http://www.wpzoom.com/wordpress-themes-sets/50-free-wordpress-themes-for-personal-blogs-of-high-quality/

Now before you submit your website, it is important to generate sitemap. The Sitemaps protocol allows a webmaster to inform search engines (not only Google) about URLs on a website that are available for crawling. It is made of XML file listing all the files in your website indicating their importance (priority) and  change frequency.

Here is a sample Sitemap XML file.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9 http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd" xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">	<url>
		<loc>http://wpmarketing.org/</loc>
		<lastmod>2009-10-13T12:28:17+00:00</lastmod>
		<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
		<priority>1.0</priority>
	</url>
	<url>
 
		<loc>http://wpmarketing.org/privacy-policy/</loc>
		<lastmod>2009-10-14T04:40:51+00:00</lastmod>
		<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
		<priority>0.6</priority>
	</url>
	<url>
		<loc>http://wpmarketing.org/2009/10/top-5-wordpress-plug-in-for-internet-marketing-all-in-one-seo-pack/</loc>
 
		<lastmod>2009-10-13T12:28:17+00:00</lastmod>
		<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
		<priority>0.4</priority>
	</url>
	<url>
		<loc>http://wpmarketing.org/2009/08/fighting-adblock/</loc>
		<lastmod>2009-10-13T04:58:18+00:00</lastmod>
 
		<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
		<priority>0.2</priority>
	</url>
 
        <!-- cutting off . It's too long to show here -->
 
	<url>
		<loc>http://wpmarketing.org/about/</loc>
		<lastmod>2009-08-05T12:08:20+00:00</lastmod>
		<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
		<priority>0.6</priority>
	</url>
 
</urlset>

Basically, it is not that difficult to create the file, but tedious and lots of labor may be involved if done by hand manually. Especially for the blog site with frequent article posting, you will need a plug-in for that which would update the Sitemap automatically. So here is Google XML Sitemaps plug-in.

Basically his plug-in will create a XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog. It will include all the WordPress pages and posts and even external pages that you defined. The sitemap is automatically updated whenever you modify any page or post, so it’s just convenient. It also notifies Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Ask.com automatically. You can’t ask for more.

It works pretty well right after the activation, but it is possible that you may need to create a file named sitemap.xml and/or sitemap.xml.gz in your WordPress root path and make them writable by webserver (If you are using Hosting providers with up-to-date system, you wouldn’t have problem).  And the default settings are good enough so you should not do anything else. But if you want to rebuild the sitemap, click on the ‘rebuild the sitemap manually’ link marked with Red box in the above image.

By default, Google XML sitemaps is automatically calculate the priority of each posts using the comment count of the posts. If you want to custom define the priority,  you can select ‘Do not use automatic priority calculation’ option in the ‘Post Priority’ group box.

Then you can use Priorities group box to specify custom priorities.

You can easily check the sitemap by adding ‘sitemap.xml’ at the end of your WordPress URL. For example , http://wpmarketing.org/sitemap.xml . Here is the output.

Now that you have the sitemap ready,  you can go to your Google Webmaster Tool account and add your sitemap.

One extra feature would be nice – To be able to define priority per post and page. I hope the author is planning to add this feature soon.

Next plug-in will be about Plug-in for Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a free web statistics application provided Google.

Thank you for visiting wpmarketing.org

* Google XML Sitemaps Website : http://www.arnebrachhold.de/projects/wordpress-plugins/google-xml-sitemaps-generator/

* References: List of other Sitemap generator tools (Not just for WordPress): http://code.google.com/p/sitemap-generators/wiki/SitemapGenerators

1. All in One SEO Pack : SEO is important. It’s the most important part of the website maintenance. and the most difficult. Main SEO tasks consist of managing title tag, and keyword  and description meta tag. Especially I think title tag and description meta tag are important.  ‘All in One SEO Pack’ plug-in make it very easy to maintain out of the box. You can define title , keyword, and description not only for your blog but for every articles using the article’s content. You can specifically define them manually or the plug-in will automatically generate them using tags and categories.  This is the most popular plug-in for SEO.

Once activated you will need to update the settings in the ‘All in One SEO’ sub menu under Settings. You will need to select enable and fill out the Home Title, Description, and Keywords.  For the other options, you can just use the default settings.

I think more important feature is that you can define individual settings per post. Without this feature, a WordPress blog will have the same keyword and descriptions throughout all the sub pages. That’s really terrible for the SEO.

There are other numerous SEO plug-ins in the WordPress website. ‘Headspace’ is another popular SEO plugin-in, but it’s a little bit more complicated than ‘All in One SEO’. 

I highly recommend ‘All in One SEO’ and you will see the results right away if your website has not been SEO optimized before. I had an experience that the traffic was increased about 20% after the plug-in installation. Be patient, the traffic increase was started about a week later.

If you know any other good SEO plug-in, let me know.

Next plug-in is about Google Analytics.

Thank you for visiting wpmarketing.org

1. PHP code content evaluation
Some modification on PHP evaluation that you can use <?php and ?> within the entry content for PHP evaluation.

So, in the previous version, if you wanted PHP code output, you could not use <?php and ?>. But now you can use them inside the entry item.

Previously you could only define PHP codes only.

print "<div style='border:1px dotted red; padding: 5px;'>";
print date("m/d/Y H:i:s");
print "</div>";

But now, below code will work too.

<div style='border:1px dotted red; padding: 5px;'>
<?php print date("m/d/Y H:i:s");?>
</div>

2. Custom ShortCode
Also extra feature for custom short code is added. You can define your own custom short code prefix and post fix. So you don’t have to use [hana-code-insert] shortcode any more.

If defined, custom short code format can be used instead of [hana-code-insert name='Entry Name' /]. For example, if you define {{ for start indicator, }} for end indicator, you can use {{Entry Name}}. But beware, your new shortcode format may conflict with other plugins and cause one or more plugins to fail.

There are some restrictions. ^ and \ characters are not allowed. And start and end indicators should not be used part of entry name. HTML comment tag is a good candidate for the customs shortcodes indicators. (Start indicator <!-- , End indicator : -->) In this way, even if the Hana Code Insert is disabled, these shortcodes will not show this way.

Hana Code Insert Admin Setting Screen.

Some of the tested custom Short Codes in a post.

===================
[[testing123]]
===================
~~testing123~~
===================
{{testing123}}
===================
This time it uses html comment.
<!-- testing123 -->
===================
 
[ hana-code-insert name='testing123' /]

Below is the output. Note that [hana-code-insert] always works regardless of whether using customs shortcode or not.

I am planning to implement Text Widget Support and enhancement in the Admin settings screen in the next version. (Additional description to recognize code snippet better, Search Fuction, etc..)

Enjoy! Let me know if you experience any problem.