| uCoz | |
| Homepage: | www.ucoz.com |
| Website Type: | Web Services |
| Location: | Moscow, Russia |
| Language: | English, Russian, German, Spanish, French, Hungarian, Ukrainian, Arabic, Swedish, Romanian, Polish, Armenian, Portuguese |
| Registration: | Required |
| Owner: | uCoz Media |
| Num Employees: | 100+[1] |
| Num Users: | 1.5 million |
| Launch Date: | 2005 |
uCoz is a free web hosting with a built-in content management system. The modules of the uCoz CMS can be used together to build a fully featured website, or separately, e.g. as an online shopping platform, blog, webforum etc. As of July 10, 2015, there are more than one and a half million websites created in the uCoz system.[2] uCoz is among the top sites for Russian-speaking users according to Alexa Internet.[3]
Initially, the basis of the service development was formed by the combined experience of several developers, which consisted in previous work over different services such as polls, free guestbooks and, more importantly, a professional CMS script (WoCatalog Pro). On 29 October 2005, after almost a year of development, uCoz announced the Russian version of the system. In June 2007, the English version of the system was officially announced, and in August the German version. Currently, uCoz is also available in Azeri, Spanish, French, Arabic, Hungarian, Romanian, Swedish, Polish, Portuguese, partially in Hebrew, Latvian, Ukrainian, and Georgian languages.
In January 2013, Yandex, the 4th largest Search Engine in the world announced the transfer to uCoz for its project Narod. This was the 2nd largest free website hosting platform on the Russian Internet, and the merger increased uCoz's market share substantially, as the company was already the market leader before the merger.
uCoz is backed by the Mail.ru group, has its headquarters in Moscow, Russia and other offices in Saint Petersburg, Rostov on Don, Kazan and Cherkassy, Ukraine.
Being a SaaS system, uCoz has the features of this type of platform like closed source code, but with the availability of template customization. Templates consist of $BLOCKS$ and expressions in a custom template language. Also client-side JavaScript customization is possible. On some paid tariffs server PHP scripts are available, but they are unlike ordinary mod_php. PHP is available inside template expressions and as proxied subdirectory, but with some limitations like inability to connect to MySQL. Also, non-PHP files are accessible by PHP scripts, but not proxied, not available from browser. So it is suitable to develop uCoz-specific scripts (i.e. payments), but not to install generic PHP software. Also, it has the unavailability of running databases (all this is possible within Web 3.0 PaaS concept), which is balanced out by a great number of built-in system capabilities. Also, the system is fully HTML5 and CSS3 compatible.
The system also provides uAPI for many of its modules, so it is possible to implement features on another hosting in any programming language.