SSL certificates

You may have noticed when you access your gmail or yahoomail account the https in the internet browser address bar. Https stands for hyper text transfer protocol secure, meaning the information from your computer to their servers and from their servers to your pc. The data is transferred over the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) with the help of certificates the domain is authenticated by third party, then data is encrypted before submitted. This way true data can not be seen by others. Dedicated SSL is a must if  you have an online store or website where you accept important info (credit card payments and other). It also authenticates your domain and prevents possible phishing.

SSH

SSH is a powerful feature and a tool which allow you to have secure and encrypted access to your server or host. With SSH you can copy files, access CVS (concurrent version system), cron jobs, setup file permissions, list files and many other tasks. Dreamhost uses OpenSSH as a SSH server which is free and open-source tool, currently the best on the market. After you enable SSH on your account (there is 20 minute delay) you need to install a SSH client to be able to connect to the server. Good client for Windows is Putty, for linux is ssh (openssh) and for Mac OS X is built in. After you connect to the server you can unzip/zip files, modify files, create new directories and access other dreamhost services.

In order your site to be hosted on dreamhost you need to setup your domain so it is pointed to these nameservers. This can be setup at your domain registrar.

What are nameservers for?

Nameservers maps IP addresses to names (domain names). Every computer including web servers needs IP address so it can be connected to the Internet. Because numbers are hard to remember, especially long numbers, people have invented the domain name system (DNS) which is responsible for this. There are several root dns servers around the world that respond to queries for domain names. They return the authorative nameservers for specific domain, which return the IP address browser needs or any other application. The application then connects to the IP address and asks for the webpage in question. Nameservers can be setup at any domain registrar. At least two are required because if the first one fails the second will continue to serve the queries.

MySQL is the most popular free open-source (GNU GPL)  relational database management system (RDMS). It is used by many popular web applications (wordpress blog, joomla cms, drupal, phpbb forum, galleries and many others) for data storage of settings, text and even binary data (photos or other files). MySQL is often mentioned with together with PHP web programming language, and with Apache HTTPD and Linux OS they are part of the popular LAMP setup. Lots of tools have been developed to ease the work with MySQL databases. The most popular is phpmyadmin tool (written in PHP) that allows you to easily manage databases, create/edit tables, execute queries, browse databases and other tasks.

DreamHost MySQL

Dreamhost supports MySQL on their servers. Interesting option is that you can have your own VPS dedicated MySQL queries in case your site or service are very popular. With dreamhost control panel you can easily add new databases, setup mysql hostnames, users etc. You can have unlimited databases.

phpbb (PHP Bulletin Board) is a popular forum script built with PHP web programming language. For storage of data uses MySQL database system, but it also supports other DBS (including PostgreSQL, Oracle, Firebird, MS SQL, SQLite and others). It is free, open-source software, and it is licensed under GNU General Public License. With phpbb you can create online communities with unlimited users, subforums, permissions for users and/or usergroups, administrate, ban. Users can self register, there is a captcha (visual confirmation image) to prevent bots to auto register, or users can be added via admin panel. Plugin (mods – modifications) system is integrated, which allows develelopers to add new features withot altering the core code. There are many plugins available and offer many features including friendly urls (SEO), user and admin tools and other. With style manager you can easily change the entire look of your community forum. Large number of templates are available and you can easily edit them to further style your forum.

Dreamhost phpBB

On dream host you can install and run phpbb without any problems. Your dreamhost account is perfectly setup. For fast installation you can use the one-click control panel installer or if you prefer you can install dremhost manually. On our test the software was running great.

Dreamhost have the best uptime than most of other hosts, and this is big plus. The average loadtime/response time is 0.438 seconds (less than a second) for the server to start sending data back to the browser. This is excellent too (anything below 0.6 seconds is great). With these reports dreamhost have shown that they are serious company and that you can rely on them.