One of the most popular features of our web hosting packages is the Softaculous autoinstaller application. Softaculous allows you to install a range of applications (400+) at the click of a button. All you need to do is populate it with basic information and off it goes making the downloading and uploading of huge scripts a thing of the past.

Whether you’re looking for the latest version of WordPress or a fresh Magento install for your new online shop – Softaculous can handle it.

It is used widely across the web by both novice, first time users right through to professionals. It’s speed, ease of use and sheer choice of applications in its repository makes it the most popular one click install applications around.

All of the hosting accounts we offer here at HostPresto from our basic hosting packages right through to packages designed for experienced webmasters come with Softaculous installed. This means you can get up and running in no time.

Below we’re going to run through which we consider to be the top 10 applications available for autoinstall via Softaculous.

WordPress

WordPress is arguably the most popular application on Softaculous at the moment and that should come as no surprise. There is not much I can say about WordPress that you won’t already know. It’s the most widely used blogging platform around with more than 75,000,000 installs at the last count. It’s truly a powerhouse of the content management system world. You can take a look at what WordPress can do for you via our wordpress hosting plans.

Joomla

Joomla is the go to content management system should you not want to go down the traditional blog route. Part of its popularity is due to its vast extension and module repositories. Not to mention themes. People tend to use Joomla to build and manage actual websites as opposed to blogs although WordPress has transformed into more of a CMS in its own right which is causing Joomla to lose a lot of its market share.

MODX

MODX is an open source content management system and and is a great alternative to the above for those who want a little more control of their build. It brands itself as the most customisable CMS on the market and is written in PHP. It’s fast, secure and fully scalable.

One of the attractions of MODX, particularly in the web developer community is that it is highly secure and not many exploits exist for it in comparison to something like WordPress. You can see our hosting packages designed for MODX here.

Ghost

If you’ve become disheartened with WordPress than the Ghost publishing platform might just be for you. It’s open source and brands itself as a lightweight professional publishing platform. Whilst it doesn’t have all the bells and whistles that come with WordPress it is the blogging software of choice for some pretty major players.

One of my favourite features is the Markdown editor which makes it easy for you to format elements of your posts all the while being able to preview how it will look to the end user unlike WordPress where you’d need to save a draft and view the page in your browser to see how it renders.

PrestaShop

PrestaShop is fast becoming a genuine competitor to ecommerce powerhouses such as Magento and Woocommerce. At the time of writing it boasts of more than 270,000 active installs – so they must be doing something right.

As you’d expect with any high end online store application it comes with lots of store templates, a fully featured website builder and over 50 world class payment gateways to boot. You can also customise shipping options.

Magento

Magento has to be the most feature rich shopping cart platform on the market. It is completely free to download and install and powers hundreds of thousands of online shops worldwide.

As mentioned, the feature list is extensive and comes with all the options you’d expect for designing and building your online store. All payment integration is also handled by Magento and the analytics and reporting systems are second to none. If you’re serious about your business then Magento should most definitely be your first choice.

We offer Magento Hosting right here at HostPresto. Plans fully optimised for peak performance of your Magento store.

OpenCart

Another great open source shopping cart application, OpenCart. It has lots of front end features such as a wish list generator and fantastic zoom and lightbox features. It brands itself as the best ecommerce platform – a bold statement but it certainly has a user base to back it up.

OpenCart claims over 340,000 installs making it a major player in the market and powers some of the biggest online stores around. As well as that, it also has a marketplace featuring over 13,000 modules and themes so you can get your store to perform exactly how you want.

Bootstrap

Bootstrap is the most popular HTML, CSS and JS framework on the market. It allows you to quickly and easily create responsive, mobile first projects with ease. It’s fast, lightweight and utilises preprocessors such as Less and Sass.

The Bootstrap website also provides lots of examples for common elements such as forms, buttons and cards. It also features full template examples containing dynamic navigation systems which give you an excellent starting point.

Laravel

Laravel is fast becoming one of the most widely used PHP coding frameworks available. It is feature rich, reliable and highly scalable.

It brands itself as the “PHP Framework for Web Artisans” and you can see why. The code is simple and clean, particularly if making use of the Eloquent ORM. Where as previously you’d need to write hundreds of lines of code to perform a function, the extensive ORM allows you to perform the same task with a single line.

Simple Machines Forum (SMF)

We all know how expensive community software can be which is part of the reason SMF is so popular and if you want to create a feature rich forum without paying through the nose for it then SMF is most definitely a viable option.

But just because it’s free it doesn’t mean it’s low quality. It’s well written and due to its wide usage it also comes with lots of themes, add ons and a fantastic support and development community.

Obviously, if you are putting a site together you don’t need to limit yourself to the one click autoinstall applications. There is a wider choice out there. But for straight forward ease of use and time saving – it’s difficult to beat.