The new year is a popular time for new websites to appear online, but a website is only as good as it’s hosting. We’re so confident you’ll love our web hosting platform, that you can now try us out for just 99p, and we’re keeping our 30 day money back guarantee in place, too.

During the promotional period, all our monthly hosting products will be available for just 99p for the first month! This promotion does not apply to yearly web hosting products.

Our packages inclued access to unlimited bandwidth, MySQL databases and Email boxes. They also come with a full version of website builder, an iPhone / Android web hosting control panel and a library of over 65 one click install web apps including WordPress, Joomla and OpenCart.

Click here to find our more about our web hosting and why choosing the right web host matters!

We’ve listened to your feedback, and added five new web apps to our Starter, Home and Pro hosting packages. As always, our one-click installable web apps are absaloutely free!

Textpattern
Textpattern is a standards-compliant content management system with an intuitive admin control panel and an active community. It’s surprisingly powerful yet simple to use, and benefits from a wide range of plugins and unlimited authors per install.

Pixelpost
If you’re into photography yourself or have clients who want a gallery or photoblog, then Pixelpost may be the perfect solution. You can get set up and running in seconds with our one-click install, and there are plenty of free templates to choose from if you don’t want to create your own.

Mantis
Need to track bugs within your internal systems or for the software you create? Mantis is a great free bug tracking system with a large array of features.

PHProjekt
Looking for a way to get more organised? PHProjekt is a full-scale project management system ideal for agencies and businesses who have multiple projects on the go. PHProjekt is extremely well-structured and ideal for tracking project progress and keeping all the team members up to date with developments.

phpMyFAQ
Add an FAQ or knowledge base to your website in seconds with phpMyFAQ. It’s easy to get set up and running, and you retain full control over the look, feel and functionality as it’s self-hosted.

We’re always taking requests for (non-Magento!) web apps, so please leave a comment below if there are any you’d like to see.

If you are a goMobi customer , next time you log in you will notice some fantastic new features for you to use. There’s nothing you need to do either – the update happens automatically across all goMobi accounts. The new features include:

Analyse traffic with complete site analytics
Site owners can view traffic data for their mobile site by day, week, month, or a specified date range, via a new Analytics tab in the Site Manager. Traffic data can be exported to CSV.

Create and print a QR Code-enabled marketing flyer
Site owners can now generate a QR code for the mobile site, and a printable marketing flyer that contains the QR code, the URL, and an image of their mobile site.

Upload images to a new hosted image gallery
Site owners are now able to upload up to 16 images with descriptions to create their own image gallery. Images will be displayed in a 4×4 grid on the site.

Enhancements to existing features:

• More icon sets
• Support for multiple locations and coupon codes
• Ability to connect with popular location-based services (foursquare, Facebook Places, Google Places, Yelp and Gowalla
• Better social network support (especially on higher end devices)
• Improved colour choices for backgrounds and text/title

If you want to create a mobile optimised version of your website, find out more about goMobi here.

That’s not all though, we have now upgraded all our Hosted Exchange mailboxes to a massive 10GB! This isn’t just for brand new customers; all our existing customers have had their mailboxes upgraded as well.

For just £5.99 per month, The Hosting Folks Exchange email hosting includes:

• Free Microsoft Outlook 2010 (2011 for Mac users)
• 10GB of storage space (upgraded from 4GB)
• Outlook email Boxes
• Mobile phone access
• Enterprise virus & spam protection

With Exchange Server 2010 you have the freedom to securely access all of your email from virtually any platform, web browser, or device to get more done, wherever you are. Whether it be from your desktop, iPhone, Blackberry, iPad or web browser, your email is fully accessible and synchronised from the same email Exchange server.

If you already have Microsoft Exchange 2003 or 2007 emails hosted elsewhere, transferring in your existing data is quick and easy, with no loss of data or uptime. Click here to read more about Hosted Exchange and how it can help increase your productivity.

We’re always looking for cool new web applications to offer our customers, and this past week we added not one but 14 great new applications for you to enjoy, so if you’re a customer of The Hosting Folks, you can now start using these packages and more in just a couple of clicks! It’s that easy!

OpenCart

OpenCart is a powerful ecommerce solution packed with features so you can create your own online shop. If you’ve thought about selling online – or your customers have – then OpenCart is an attractive and user-friendly way to create a store and start making money.

Some of OpenCart’s many features include:

• Unlimited products and categories
• Multi-currency support
• Product reviews and ratings
• Template designs
• More than 20 payment options and 8 shipping options
• Integrated discount code system
• SEO benefits
• Sales reports and printable invoices
• Back up and restore tools
• Automatic image resizing
• Guest checkouts

Open Web Analytics

Open Web Analytics is a great way to track your website statistics if you’re looking for an alternative to Google Analytics, or an additional source of information about your visitors. Packed with features and fully open source, OWA is a great tool to improve visitor experience as well as helping you keep track of what’s popular and what needs more work. We’re pleased to announce that it’s now available as a quick and easy one-click install from your control panel!

Features include:

• Open source, running on PHP, MySQL and JavaScript
• No limits on data logging
• Ability to track multiple websites
• Heatmaps, conversion goals and goal funnels
• Mouse movement tracking
• Optional command line interface for admins
• PHP and JavaScript tracking clients
• Full integration with WordPress and MediaWiki without the need for third party plugins
• Plugin support for Drupal

And much more!

Piwik Analytics

Quite a few people have requested this open source web analytics solution, so we’re pleased to announce it’s been added to our library. It’s a good alternative to Google Analytics and Open Web Analytics, or can be used alongside them for a wider scope of information.

Features include:
• Real time web analytics reports
• Powerful API
• Easy to use interface
• Customisable dashboard and widgets
• Build your own plugins or take advantage of those on offer
• Large, active community

Simple Machines Forums

If you’re looking for an attractive message board solution, Simple Machines is definitely worth checking out. It’s already a popular choice with plenty of our customers, and now you can install it quickly and easily.

Features include:
• Template system for easy editing
• Advanced permissions and user management
• Multi-language support
• Open and well-documented source code
• Tracking of new and old unread topics
• Designed for optimal performance and scalability
• SEO friendly
• Package manager for automatic install/uninstall of mods
• File based caching for better performance

Zen Photo

Zen Photo is ideal if you want a user-friendly and hassle-free way to present your photos online. This gallery software can be used for displaying digital art as well as photos, so it’s one to consider if you’re a designer or photographer. It’s also a good choice for family albums.

Features include:
• Lightweight and low maintenance
• Easy to use
• Good variety of plugins/extensions
• Photo commenting
• Stats to automatically show the number of clicks per album and per photo
• Search capabilities
• Search engine friendly URLs

Status.net

Microblogging is huge at the moment, so creating your own network is a great way to share information and communicate, whether it’s within your business or simply with your site’s visitors. Collaborate, ask questions, and share resources in real-time using Status.net software.

Features include:
• User profiles
• Activity streams – incorporate content from business processes, applications, content streams etc.
• Public and private user group functionality
• Direct messaging
• Upload and share documents, images and video
• Searchable conversations and archives
• Follow topics of interest
• Taggable content
• 3rd party application support
• iPhone and Android apps available
• Integrated analytics
• Plugins and extensions available

Lime Survey

If you’ve ever spent ages searching for free survey software only to be frustrated by the limitations, then Lime Survey is for you. Whether you’re conducting extensive research or simply want to ask your visitors a few questions, Lime Survey is packed with useful features and, best of all, lets you create unlimited surveys.

Features include:
• Unlimited questions and participants in a survey
• Unlimited surveys at the same time
• Multi-lingual surveys
• 20 different question types
• WYSIWYG HTML Editor
• Image and video support
• Conditions for questions depending on earlier answers (skip logic/branching)
• Anonymous survey options
• Open and closed group of participant surveys
• Sending of invitations, reminders and tokens by email
• Option for participants to buffer answers to continue survey at a later time
• Survey expiry dates for automation
• Enhanced import and export functions to text, CSV, PDF, SPSS, R, queXML and MS Excel
• Basic statistical and graphical analysis with export facility
• Screen reader accessibility

PrestaShop

We’ve had a lot of requests for the award-winning PrestaShop, so if you’re looking for an ecommerce solution then it’s one to check out.

Features include:
• Wishlists and customer review functionality
• Customer groups feature
• Referral program and loyalty system
• Returns management
• PDF invoices and delivery slips
• Extensions available
• Pre-configured support for PayPal, Hipay, Moneybookers and more
• In-depth visitors stats
• SMS alerts
• Multi-language support

TomatoCart

As an ecommerce software finalist in the 2010 Open Source awards, TomatoCart is renowned for its user-friendly admin panel and lightweight framework. It’s another option for ecommerce websites looking to focus on usability and speed.

Features include:
• Well-designed and intuitive admin panel
• Multi-language support
• Gift certificate and discount coupon integration
• Customer reviews, newsletter and wishlist functionality
• Integrated Piwik web analytics
• Lightweight
• Complete content management system

Simple Invoices

If you have a business, whether it’s web hosting, web design, or even offline, you can use Simple Invoices to bill customers, track payments and much more – for free.

Features include:
• Browser-based, so accessible from anywhere (great if you want to create, update or print invoices for clients whilst you’re with them)
• Send invoices as PDFs
• Export to Word, Excel or plain text
• Total and itemised invoices available
• PayPal payment support
• Recurring invoices
• Create receipts, estimates and quotes as well as invoices
• Payment tracking and reports

Vanilla Forums

Another requested one-click install, Vanilla Forums is an attractive and user-friendly solution for anyone wanting to add discussion functionality to their website.

Features include:
• 500+ plugins
• WordPress and Blogger integration
• Easy embedding
• Lots of themes
• Social network log ins
• Full mobile compatibility
• Easy imports from popular software such as phpBB and vBulletin
• Ability for users to upload files
• Free community support

Pligg

Ever fancied creating your own Digg-style website? Now you can install a script to do just that in under a minute. Your visitors can submit links and rate other people’s, and you don’t need to be able to code or have to pay someone to do it for you.

Features include:
• Groups for members
• Private messaging
• Ability for users to rate and comment on articles
• Free and paid modules available to extend Pligg’s capabilities
• Smarty templates for easy modification
• Easy upgrades
• Well-integrated RSS functionality

Moodle

Moodle’s an open-source software veteran with over 44,000,000 users, so it seemed only right that we add it to our list. If you’re looking for a learning-based content management system, Moodle is your best bet. As well as being suited to educational sites, you can also use if for your own courses, tutorials, tutoring and more to increase your authority in your industry.

Features include:
• Scalability
• Additional activity modules (e.g. forums, databases and wikis)
• Support community
• In-depth developer documentation
• Multiple language support
• User-friendly
• Easy to organise courses, modules, assessments
• Support for images, videos and other downloadable files for easy access