Using a “cache” plugin for speeding up your site is like putting band-aid on a gaping wound. It’s only a temporary fix, and not a real long-term solution.

Plus a cache plugin has its place, but it’s certainly not for a membership site, where DAP will need to make calls to the database to figure out who’s viewing the content, are they a member, what products have they purchased, what content do they have access to, etc.

If you want to speed up your web site, you must address the core issue, which is — your web site is getting more traffic than your web server (web hosting account) can handle.

So here are a couple of ways in which you can speed up your web site:

• The easiest thing you can do is to revisit all of your plugins that you have enabled. Remember that every single plugin adds some overhead to (read “slows down”) your web site or blog. So use only as few plugins as you absolutely must. With so many cool plugins available freely for WordPress, it is very easy to get carried away, and install tens of plugins, most of them adding very little value, but sometimes causing the most overhead in terms of server resources. So keep only a bare minimum of other plugins (some social plugins are a real pain – making calls to third-party web sites to get their information from).
• If you are hosting on a shared (a.k.a “cheap”) web host paying just a few dollars a month for hosting, then your web site is basically competing for server resources (like memory and bandwidth and database access) with possibly tens (or even hundreds) of other web sites on that same server (many may not belong to you, but to others with whom you are sharing the server – and hence the name “shared hosting”).Search for the keywords “digg effect” or “slashdot effect” on Google, and you’ll see how many WordPress sites crash when a link to the site appears among the top results in popular social sites like Digg.com, Reddit.com or Slashdot.com.

  If your traffic levels have outgrown your server, then the best thing you can do is to upgrade to a bigger server, or get a Virtual Private Server, or even get a dedicated host, depending on your budget. See our recommended web hosts list.

Question: You ask what to do if your host does not support cron jobs?

Short answer: Fire them and get a better host.

Ok, the basic idea of a cron jobs is that it allows you to run scheduled tasks, that run automatically, frequently, silently, in the background, without requiring manual intervention.

DAP uses cron jobs to do things like…

• Send out autoresponder emails
• Send out broadcast emails
• Manage your outgoing queue of emails so that you can stay within your cheap web host’s strict hourly email sending limits
• Process and manage affiliate data & commissions , and
• Do some clean up jobs

Any membership script worth more than $1, should ask you to set up cron jobs for sending out emails. You couldn’t possibly send out an email blast to even 100 members in real time. If your membership script doesn’t require you to set up a cron job, then they’re worth absolutely nothing.

But DAP requires you to set up a cron job to do all of the tasks above.

And even the cheapest of the cheapest web hosts will allow you to set up a cron job.

If yours doesn’t, seriously you have only 2 choices…

1. Stick to your pathetic host, and lose the ability to use powerful scripts like DAP
2. Or do the smart thing and move to a better host. There are plenty of good ones out there, and there are a few we recommend highly, and they’re very inexpensive.

The choice is pretty obvious, no?

Progress Bar Never Stops

You’re seeing the green “Loading… Please Wait” progress bar continuosly running – it never stops and comes back with any data.

If this is a new setup, then it’s possible that your web host does not have a library called “JSON” enabled. Just ask them to enable it for your server. It’s rather simple to do, and we’ve never seen a host that won’t do this for their customers.

If it’s an old setup, and it was working previously, then your host made some changes that caused the library to stop working. So you still need their help in resolving the issue.

Error Message: “There was an error returning data’”.

One possibility is that your database or web site is temporarily down, slow, or plain not responding for some reason. So DAP cannot connect to your database, and comes back with this error.

Or it could also be the “Progress Bar Never Stops” issue from above.

Direct Integration with Shopping Carts and Payment Processors

DAP directly integrates with the following Payment Processors without the need for any additional third-party shopping carts:

• Authorize.net
• 2Checkout.com
• ClickBank
• Digiresults
• Google Checkout
• e-Junkie (e-J does not allow recurring payments)
• JVZoo
• Paypal Standard
• Paypal Website Payments Pro
• Plimus
• WorldPay
• WSO Pro (Warrior Plus)

DAP also integrates with the following Shopping Carts

• 1SiteAutomation.com (a 1shoppingcart private label)
• Premium Web Cart
• InfusionSoft
• WP eStore

Indirect Integration through 3rd Party Shopping Carts

Since DAP integrates with Shopping carts like 1SiteAutomation.com (our white label of 1Shoppingcart), e-Junkie, Premium Web Cart and Infusionsoft, that means that it also integrates (albeit indirectly) with all of the Payment processors and gateways that these carts support. So, or example, since DAP works with 1SiteAutomation, it essentially integrates with all payment providers supported by 1SiteAutomation, like:

2CheckOut.com (direct integration too)
Authorize.net (direct integration too)
Bank of America
BluePay
Concord EFSNet
Cybercash
DPI Merchant Services
e-Commerce Exchange
Echo Inc.
ECX QuickCommerce 3.0
Epoch Systems
eProcessing Network
EPS SecureNet
EWAY (Australia)
FastTransact
Firepay
Google Checkout (direct integration too)
GoRealTime/EPP
GoRealTime
iBill
IntelliPay ExpertLink
IONGate (Costco)
iTransact RediCharge
LinkPoint Secure
MCPS WebLink
MerchantPartners
Moneris
NETbilling
Network Merchants
Paradata
PayCom Processing
Paymentech (direct integration via Authorize.net)
PayPal (direct integration too)
PayPal Payflow Pro (via e-Junkie)
PayReady
Planet Payment
PRIGate
PSiGate
RightConnect
RTWare WebLink
Shift4
SkipJack
StrataPay
Surepay
TrialPay (via e-Junkie)
TrustCommerce
USAEpay
uSight
VeriPayment
VeriSign PayFlow Pro
ViaKlix (Nova Systems)
WorldPay (direct integration too)
YourPay

For the full list and more details, click here

1-Click Upsells

If you use DAP as a shopping cart, then you can do 1-Click Upsells/Downsells like the pros, without the need for any external shopping cart or upsell service provider.

DAP directly allows you to do 1-Click Upsells using Authorize.net, Paypal Website Payments Pro and Paypal Standard. Upsell-Tree plugin for Authorize.net and Paypal Website Payments Pro is included for free along with your purchase of DAP. However, the Upsell-Tree plugin for Paypal Standard is sold separately.

Of course, if you need advanced shopping cart features – like ability to calculate shipping, tax, and coupons, then you’re better off using 1SiteAutomation.com.

1ShoppingCart & GoDaddy

If you want automated recurring order processing using 1ShoppingCart (1SC) or 1SiteAutomation.com, then DAP needs to be able to process the recurring email notifications sent by 1ShoppingCart, which it does on the back-end when the DAP Cron Job runs every 10 minutes.

However, if you’re using Godaddy as your web host, then because GoDaddy disables a mandatory PHP library (“imap”) on all their servers for some reason, DAP is unable to process the recurring order email notifications from 1ShoppingCart.

This is not an issue if you are using GoDaddy as just your domain name registrar, and using some other service like Dreamhost or Hostmonster as your web host.

But if you’re using 1SC & GoDaddy hosting, you will have to end up doing manual cancellations if any member cancels their subscription, or if their credit card fails and their recurring payments don’t get processed.

Please note that 1ShoppingCart order processing works great with all other (non-GoDaddy) hosts.

Q: What’s the difference between storing files on Amazon S3 and serving it using the S3MediaVault.com plugin, as opposed to hosting the files right on your web site and having DAP serve them directly?

A: If you have a large amount of video, audio and other files, then a lot of people viewing and downloading them from your site (if they are stored on your site itself) will use up a lot of resources on your server – like site loading time, server memory, server bandwidth, etc – and your site could slow down considerably.

Plus of course, there are also bandwidth charges that your host will charge you with for all of those downloads, which are usually not very cheap.

Instead, if the files are stored on Amazon S3, then you don’t have to worry about your site slowing down, or you using up too much bandwidth and getting slapped with huge bandwidth fees, because the files are being served from Amazon’s huge S3 servers which have tons more resources and speed compared to your web host. Plus in the long run, the bandwidth is also going to be cheaper on S3 compared to your host.

And don’t put too much faith in your web host’s “Unlimited Bandwidth” clause, because if you read the fine-print carefully, you’ll see that as per their TOS, if you consume large amounts of bandwidth and use too much of the server resources, this could cause other web sites (belonging to others) on the same server to slow down and have a degrade in performance. And they could consider this abuse of their TOS, and could either slap you with huge bandwidth or server utilization fees, or even ask you to take your web site elsewhere because you’re causing issues for other site owners on the same server.

Here’s how you can move an existing DAP installation from one host  – or domain – to another.

• Log in to your web hosting control panel, go to “phpMyAdmin”, select your WordPress database (which is where the DAP tables are also installed, by default)

• Do an “Export” of just the DAP tables. Select the “SQL” option and select “Save as File”. All DAP database tables start with the text “dap_”. Save this file on your desktop – let’s say you call it “dapexport.sql” (it could also be “dapexport.txt” – does not matter what the exact extension is – .txt or .sql).

• Make a back up of the dap-config.php file (located in the “dap” directory on your old site/domain) on your desktop

• At your new site, install WordPress
• Copy the database info from your new blog’s “wp-config.php” to the “dap-config.php” file stored on your desktop.
• Then log in to your web hosting control panel of your new site, go to “phpMyAdmin”, select your WordPress database, go to the “SQL” tab, open the export file from above (dapexport.sql), copy the contents, paste into the SQL tab and hit “Go”. All dap data from your old site is now on your new site.
• Upload all dap files to your new site (don’t do full installation – just upload the files).
• Also upload the LiveLinks files to wp-content/plugins/ .
• Upload the new dap-config.php file from your desktop to the “dap” folder on your new site.
• Log in as WP admin, and activate the LiveLinks plugin. It should give you a warning that DAP is already installed. That’s ok, that’s what we want it to say.
• That’s it. DAP is now moved over from your old site to your new site.
• Log into your DAP Dashboard using your old DAP admin login info, and you’re all set.

The Basics Of Sending Email Through Your Web Site

DAP is not an email service (like, say, Aweber).

DAP is just a script – a tool, like Microsoft Outlook or Thunderbird – that simply sends out email using your web host’s email server.

It is your web host’s mail server that actually sends out the email to the recipient. So once DAP sends out the email, it has no control over what happens next.

It’s just like when you put your (regular mail) letter in the mailbox (post box). It is then up to the Postal Service to actually pick up your letter, and deliver to the destination address.

So if the emails that DAP sends out don’t get delivered to your recipients, there could be more than one reason for that.

Welcome Emails Not Going Out

See this post: Troubleshooting Welcome-Email Delivery

Autoresponder Emails Not Going Out

If yours is a new site setup, then this is usually because the hourly cron-job has not been setup.

However, if the emails were going out fine previously, and suddenly stopped going out, then it usually is because…

• Something changed on your host that caused the cron to stop working.
• There is an error in the job queue, because of which DAP is unable to proceed with the remaining non-error emails. This could have happened if you tried to send out a broadcast to a CSV list, and there was an error in one of the emails from the CSV list.
• You’re trying to use a third party “SMTP” server to send out the emails, and your server is unable to connect to that server because the authentication settings you’ve configured on “Email > SMTP” are incorrect.

Steps to troubleshoot

1. Make sure that the hourly cron (dap-cron.php) is still running – you need to look at your web hosting control panel for that.
2. Go to “System > Job Queue” and scroll through any items there, and see if there are any scheduled messages there with the status “Error”. If yes, then click on the “Delete Jobs In Error” link. That will delete any jobs that can’t be processed because of an error in the email id or in the import process. Also be sure to click on “Delete Successful Jobs (till yesterday)” just to clear up old, sent emails.
3. Also go to “System > Logs” and empty the logs.
4. Go to “System > Config” and set “DAP Log Level” to “5″. That will start logging all the details you/we may need for troubleshooting.
5. Wait for the top of the next hour and then re-visit the queue and see if emails are going out.
6. If they still aren’t going out, go back to “System > Logs”, copy paste all text there, and open a new ticket with that info, of course, also giving us more details about the problem, what you have tried, etc, along with your login info for: FTP, WP Admin, DAP Admin, and Web Host Control Panel.

Server Blacklisting

If your inexpensive (read as cheap shared web host is hosting a large number of sites on one server, and one of them knowingly sends out spam (or mistakenly gets flagged for spam), that will put the email deliverability of every web site on that server in jeopardy, because your site now shares the same IP address as that of an “alleged” spammer.

So your emails get sent to junk/spam folder by Gmail and Yahoo. Or worse, they just totally disappear into the ether.

Hourly Email-Sending Limits

Almost all shared hosts have hourly email sending limits. For example, DreamHost has an outgoing limit of 300 emails per hour. Which means, a total of only 300 emails can be sent out per hour through any web site hosted on DreamHost. All of the following count towards the 300 limit:

• Emails sent by any scripts on your site – like DAP
• Your WordPress blog notification emails
• Your WordPress admin emails,
• WP forgot password emails,
• WP comment notification emails,
• Forum notification emails,
• Forum emails sent to each other by your users,
• Forum-software Admin notification emails,
• Support software user and admin notification emails
• Tell-a-friend emails
• Viral-inviter type emails
• Emails sent through Outlook or Thunderbird where you have set the outgoing SMTP server to be your web site’s SMTP server
• Emails sent by others using the same SMTP server to send out emails-  like your business partners, employees, etc
• DAP User welcome emails, Payment notification emails, Forgot password emails, Autoresponder emails, Broadcast emails, etc

So do you see how quickly you can go over that hourly limit of 300 emails per hour?

But here comes the worst part…

Once you go over that limit, any emails that are actually sent by you or the scripts running on your site, will not actually result in any kind of error. The mail server will respond by saying that the email(s) has been sent successfully, but in reality, on the backend, it quietly “snuffs out” the email. Which means, it doesn’t go anywhere – just gets sent to a “blackhole”. So you keep thinking that you sent out the email. DAP keeps thinking it has sent out the email. But in reality, the emails never actually get sent.

This is the same as you actually putting your letter into the mailbox at the Post Office. But then, imagine this: The postal worker who comes to pick up your mail, quietly goes to the back of the post office and dumps it all into one giant trash can, and destroys all of the mail. So you’re thinking you actually mailed out that important check to pay your utility bill. But the utility company never gets your check, and they slam you with a late fee.

Possible Solutions

1) DAP + Aweber (most expensive, most reliable)

2) DAP + 3rd party SMTP service provider (AuthSMTP.com or SMTP.com) (less expensive than Aweber, slightly less reliable too)

3) DAP + Good web host (cheapest option, but can have mixed results – all depends on your host).

You could always use DAP and external SMTP service provider like AuthSMTP.com or SMTP.com to send out bulk mail through DAP while totally bypassing your web host’s email system. This is probably the next best thing to using a service like Aweber.

And if you can’t afford even that, then simply use DAP on a good web host. We ourselves use just DAP and Dreamhost‘s email servers to send out emails to all of our users.

And DAP also has built-in job queues to schedule outgoing emails while also making sure that you don’t exceed your web host’s hourly email sending limits (dreamhost’s limit is 300 emails/hour, I think). We use multiple SMTP servers from our own other web sites, all combined to be able to send a few thousand emails per hour.

But even with a lot of planning, it is easy to go over the hourly limit.

So the next time you see in your Job Queue that emails were sent out successfully, but the recipient never received it, here are some things to check:

1) It landed in your recipient’s junk/spam folder. Ask them to whitelist or add your email address to their contacts list.

2) You have overshot the limit, so you would have to actually send out the email again.

3) Try to send out broadcasts during a low-traffic time – say like later in the night – when you’re not actively sending out emails, and using up precious email counts from that hourly quota.

(Or… “DAP vs MailChimp”, “DAP vs. GetResponse”, …. “DAP vs 3rd-Party-List-Service”)

We often get asked why use Aweber (or other third-party list service) when DAP itself is an autoresponder. So here’s a brief overview of when and why it makes sense to use DAP or Aweber.

Why Aweber

DAP is not an email service like Aweber.

DAP is just a tool – like Outlook or Thunderbird – that simply sends out email using your web host’s email server.

If your inexpensive shared web host is hosting a large number of sites on one server, and one of them sends out spam (or mistakenly gets flagged for spam), that will put the email deliverability of every web site on that server, in jeopardy, because your site now shares the same IP address as that of an “alleged” spammer.

So your emails get sent to junk/spam folder by Gmail and Yahoo. Or worse, they just totally disappear into the ether. Your customers never get your email. Your campaign suffers. Your conversion plunges. This won’t happen with Aweber.

Aweber (and other premier email service providers) have staff on hand just for this purpose. Their core business is about email deliverability. They spend a lot of time, money and resources dealing with regular ISP’s (like AOL and SBC) to make sure their lists – and their reputation – remain clean. Which is also probably why they shut down large lists without much of a warning to you, and do other similar crazy stuff.

I guess it works for them – and the other Aweber users, because when you send out an email through your Aweber list, it almost always gets there in your recipient’s inbox. Which is very cool. And which is why they also charge so much for their service.

But if you can’t afford their high fees, then you can of course use DAP’s built-in email autoresponder, whose deliverability is only as good as your host’s spam reputation Of course, you can always use DAP and external SMTP service provider like Fusemail.com or AuthSMTP.com (which we use ourselves) to send out bulk mail through DAP while totally bypassing your web host’s email system. This is probably the next best thing to using a service like Aweber.

And if you can’t afford even that, then simply use DAP on a decent web host. We ourselves use just DAP and AuthSMTP.com to send out emails to all of our users. DAP also has built-in job queues to schedule outgoing emails while also making sure that you don’t exceed your web host’s hourly email sending limits (most web hosts limit you to 300 outgoing emails/hour). We also use multiple SMTP servers from our own other lesser-used web sites, all combined to be able to send thousands of emails an hour.

When it comes to features, here’s what DAP does *not* have that more expensive services like Aweber and GetResponse provide.

Advantage: DAP

• Unlimited Autoresponders
• Unlimited emails for free (no limit on how large your list can grow – so practically free, since you’ve already paid for DAP)
• No additional cost for this service – part of DAP
• Add same email to multiple Autoresponders (DAP special)
• Email throttling so as to not exceed your web host’s hourly email sending limits
• Ability to merge member data – like password – into emails (DAP only – you can’t do this if you use a 3rd party list service)

Advantage: Aweber and the others

• Ability to track open rates
• Ability to track click-through rates (coming in a future version)
• Ability to automatically send out your newly published blog posts as a broadcast (coming in a future version)
• DAP has no “Pretty Form” generators like Aweber & Getresponse (coming in a future version)

So given a choice, here are your options in the exact order listed below:

1) DAP + Aweber: Match made in heaven

2) DAP + 3rd Party List Services: 2nd best option

3) DAP + Your Web Host: Very usable and workable option as long as you are hosting with a decent web host.

Feel free to comment below if you have any questions.

Minimum Web-Hosting Requirements

• PHP version 5+
• MySQL 4+
• PDO support (for PHP, enabled for MySQL)
• JSON support (for Ajax)
• Ability to run Cron Jobs (scheduled jobs, very useful when sending out autoresponder & broadcast emails)
• Some flavor of Unix/Linux server operating system
• Preferably Apache web server.

Please note that as a potential DAP user, you don’t have to know what any this means.

These are commonly available on almost all decent web hosts. So it’s ok if you don’t understand a single word from the above list

Also, if your current host does not have any of these features, we’ve seen that most web hosts enable these for your web site, at no additional cost, if you just asked them.

Check with your web host. If they can’t help, then here are a couple of recommended, DAP-Certified web hosts.

Windows -vs- Linux

DAP works right out of the box, flawlessly, on all flavors of Unix/Linux.

But when it comes to Windows servers, while DAP has been found to work on some installations, it all depends on the kind of Windows setup. We have spent way too much time troubleshooting Windows installations, so we do not recommend Windows-based servers. If you must use DAP on a Windows-based server, unfortunately, you’re on your own. We’re unable to support such installations.

DAP works off-the-shelf on almost all decent web hosts.

But as in any industry, some hosts are just outdated, run old and outdated software, do not offer a choice to upgrade to the latest server software (like a recent version of PHP or MySQL). And some are just plain not helpful at all.

If you had a choice of picking a new web host, then here are the web hosts we use ourselves, and highly recommend, and they have everything readily available that DAP needs to run smoothly.

VPS Hosting

LiquidWeb

If keeping your site(s) running almost all the time, and having insanely great support from your web host,  are both important to you, then you should go with a VPS server from LiquidWeb. For about $50 a month, you can get yourself a great server, with terrific up-time and support. And did we say support is crazy good?

Shared Hosting

If you can’t afford the $50 a month for a VPS server, or don’t see the value of very high site availability or great support, then the next best option is shared hosting, where you share a server with other business owners. Not all shared hosts are made equal. And that’s why we highly recommend the following two web hosts.

1) HostGator

2) HostMonster & Blue Host: We think they might just be two different names for the same hosting service owned by the same parent company. Feel free to correct us if we’re wrong.

NOT Recommended (“FAIL”)

DreamHost

We’ve recently added DreamHost to our “NOT RECOMMENDED” list, as we’ve had so many issues with them on our own various web sites, many that aren’t even running DAP, and are simple WordPress blogs – some are actually plain HTML web sites, and the web sites go down all the time, emails get delivered very late, many emails go missing.

This has been happening on too many of our sites and this has gone on for far too long for us to tolerate. A majority of our sites have been hosted with DreamHost for about 5-6 years now, and we’re now finally pulling the plug on all of them, one by one. We’re moving all of our web sites over to LiquidWeb.

And the biggest joke with Dreamhost, is that when any of your web sites hosted on DreamHost go down, and you go to their site so you can open a support ticket, you’ll almost always find that even their own web site – dreamhost.com – is down! And they always use a different domain (dreamhoststatus.com – maybe hosted at Hostgator for all we know, LOL!) to notify people that various servers or services are down. Would you trust a web host that can’t even keep their main site up and running? We certainly don’t. So 1.5 thumbs down for DreamHost.

GoDaddy

GoDaddy is great for registering your domain names. For hosting? Not so much.

We’ve seen many issues with GoDaddy-hosted sites. Their email systems don’t work consistently on all servers. It works great for some, while some of our other users have reported that even simple admin notification emails from DAP don’t get sent correctly. To compound the issue, Godaddy queues up even real-time emails on their end, and only send them out as batches. Which means even instant “Thank You” emails sent to your buyers with their membership login info, may not get sent for a couple of hours, even though DAP has actually sent them out, but are being intercepted and put on a queue by Godaddy to be sent out later in a “batch”.

The other big issue we’ve seen with GoDaddy is that they don’t allow the use of a PHP library called “imap”, which is a very important library for doing email-based order processing. So this means, if you’re using 1SiteAutomation.com (or any other private label of 1ShoppingCart) and wish to do automated cancellations using DAP’s email order processing, this will not be possible if you’re using Godaddy. So bottom-line: Do not use Godaddy if you have a choice. And even if you must, then do not use GoDaddy if you’re planning to use 1SiteAutomation (or any other private label of 1ShoppingCart).

1and1

We wholeheartedly recommend AGAINST using 1and1 for your web hosting. These guys are so stuck in the 90′s, and provide you with some lousy tools.

For instance, the process for setting up a cron job on 99.9999% of the other hosts takes about 2 minutes, because it’s all point-and-click using a browser.

On 1and1, if you see the tutorial they’ve provided at http://faq.1and1.com/scripting_languages_supported/cron_jobs/3.html , they’ve made it so terribly complicated, that it would take us too much time just to setup a simple cron job! And spending 20-30 minutes for something that normally takes less than 1 minute on other hosts, is simply NOT worth our time. So if you’re on 1and1, we won’t be able to set up cron jobs for you for free. We would have to charge you to set it up for you, so just be aware of that. Two Thumbs DOWN for 1and1.

If Your Host Is Not Listed Here

If your host is not shown here, then don’t worry – it doesn’t mean that DAP won’t work on your host.

These just happen to be the ones we have used, have done countless installations on, for our DAP users, and highly recommend if you have the option of picking a new web host.

This is exactly why we offer a 30-day money-back guarantee when you purchase DAP – so that you can make sure DAP can run on your current web site, and also help you decide if DAP will work for you.

So there’s no risk to you, regardless of who you are hosting with.