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Yes that’s right, I am offering two 12 month shared hosting plans as prizes for a Free Magento Hosting Competition – no strings attached, totally free. Why? Well, constantly doing Magento installations for other people gives me a great deal of insight into the operations of hosting companies. I thought it was time I started sharing those insights by doing a series of reviews for web-host companies that offer Magento hosting.

I reached out to several prominent host companies asking for a trial access period to test installations for my hosting reviews. Not only have the handful of initial companies been very helpful and co-operative, two of them have actually gone one step further and offered a prize for my readers!

Just to give those two companies a quick and well deserved shout-out for their generosity, a big thank you to A2 Hosting and Nexcess Hosting. To sweeten the deal even more I have decided to also offer free Magento installations to the winners of those two 12 month packages. So you’ll not only get a free year of Magento hosting, you’ll get a professional Magento installation done for free too!

I haven’t started writing up the Magento installation hosting reviews yet, but they will be trickling in over the next week to 10 days. I just thought I’d let you all know I have the hosting prizes available and will be starting to accept entries to the competition. What’s the competition, you ask?

I’m going to compile a list of top do’s and dont’s for hosting companies, based on my readers experiences. So I want you to tell me about your positive and/or negative experiences with web hosting companies. I’ll compile them and create the lists. All entries will go in the draw to win one of the two 12 month hosting packages. If your entry makes me laugh, I’ll make it a blog post, so be funny and get a free link!

So please go to my competition page and enter the draw, I’m really looking forward to hearing about other people’s experiences with web hosting. I bet you are looking forward to a chance to win some super sweet prizes.

If you are a Magento hosting company interested in being reviewed, please contact me to make arrangements.

Magento allows you to disable Google checkout functionality for each product. Under certain situations though (when upgrading from 1.2 to 1.3 for example), the state of your products eligibility for sale through Google Checkout changes.

If you find yourself unable to sell products through Google checkout you can easily enable Google Checkout for your products through the Magento admin interface. However if you have many hundreds or thousands of products going through each one is not an option.

Here is a solution that will allow you to set the state of all your products to enabled for Google Checkout, quickly and easily. Testing has been limited to my own development installation, so as always backup your data before running anything.

Read more…

Well I have finished another of my free Magento installations and have some more excellent feedback to share. I helped Alan Bold with his Magento installation and here is what he had to say about my work:

Thanks for the kind words Alan, I look forward to working with you in the future. For any readers interested in help with a professional Magento installation, please do not hesitate to contact me.

So I have got my first review for my Free Magento Installation offer, I’m very proud of it and thought I’d share it with you all.

I Helped Konrad Bloor install Magento for his store East To West. The store isn’t live yet obviously because Konrad is still configuring it and setting up his inventory. Here is what he had to say about the quality and professionalism of my work:

Konrad’s review has been added to my services page, which you should check out if you are interested in help with a Magento install or would like to discuss any Magento related services. As of right now I still have 2 remaining Free installations, with 2 reviews pending, so if you would like to get professional Magento help, and do not mind writing a comprehensive review like Konrad’s, then please get in touch with me.

If you have recently hit a brick wall when installing Magento 1.2.1 on a shared hosting service with the error: Database server does not support InnoDB storage engine then you’re not alone. I came across this today while helping with a Magento install (one of my 5 Free Professional Magento installs). There is not a lot you can do, short of installing an old Magento version and not upgrading in the future, which is not a really good solution at all.

My recommendation was to either:

A) Request that your hosting provider enables InnoDB, which may or may not be possible. I notice shared hosting providers find all sorts of excuses for not supporting InnoDB, there looks to be plenty of reasons to have InnoDB enabled to me. This is really easily done by simply not having the skip-innodb line your mysql server configuration. Sadly though if it is in there, they probably opted to put it in there, and may not be willing to take it out.

or B) Move to a hosting provider that does support the new 1.2.x Magento and modern Mysql storage engines properly. That’s not always as easily done as it’s said though unfortunately. Read more…