Category Archives: Encryption

When Do We Need MySQL Databases With Our Web Hosting?

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Whenever you buy web hosting, your hosting provider is sure to include an option called “Databases” in his price quotation or package details. But not many of us know what are databases and why we need them when setting up a website. This article aims to explain a couple of reasons why we use databases and when we need them for our website.

The database systems we usually get with our web hosting accounts are all relational database systems or RDBMS. If we take a Windows hosting server we usually get Microsoft SQL aka MSSQL and if we take a Unix based system we usually get MySQL. Both these systems put your website data into tabular layouts for fast and easy retrieval.

Databases are a collection of rows and columns, where each row or column is related to the others in some way. Due to this relation, information from this database can be retrieved quickly and efficiently as compared to if the data was stored in any other unstructured format. You can consider a database as a collection of multiple spreadsheets which are all related to each other in some way or the other.

Security

A major advantage of having your data stored in a database is the ability to protect the database from unauthorized access, or the ability to protect a database record from being tampered with. A simple example would be the storage of login credentials. In a simple way, login credentials can be stored in a simple text file and be read by your script which does the authentication. However, your file will always save the password stored in plan text, making it vulnerable to anyone who has access to it. Databases have the ability to encrypt the entries using a hashing algorithm to obscure them. Further, to read or write to the database, you need to specify login details, something which is not easily possible with an ordinary text file or spreadsheet.

Efficiency

Due to the manner in which data is stored in the database, retrieval and storage is most efficient. Unlike a spreadsheet, where anything and everything can be stored in any cell, SQL restricts the type of information stored in each row or column based on certain conditions. This validation is inherent in the properties of SQL and is an added advantage for a programmer or developer. Due to the various inbuilt mechanisms that are present in RDBMS systems, they are the most preferred method of storage and retrieval of data.

An article on the DatabaseJournal Blog explains this in a lucid way:

“…The problem with text files is during a read, if the text file is large, it can take quite a bite of time to open and scan the contents of the file looking for what we want. Also, if we wanted to see all the sales to a specific customer, the entire text file would have to be read, and every line occurrence of the customer name would need to be saved in some temporary place until we had them all. If we saved to a spreadsheet instead of a text file, we would have a Sort feature built in. So we may be able to find all the sales to a specific customer quicker, but again, if the file was large, opening the spreadsheet could take a great deal of time.”

Administrative Control

Database systems also have various control mechanisms which allow easy administration of the database and tables within it. The most important part is user management. Each user can be given specific rights to the database, thereby allowing limitation in access so as to secure the data from being tampered, modified or altered. Database Administrator’s can tweak many settings of the database thereby restricting the flow of data, the connection speeds, maximum number of connections to the server and even adjust what hardware resources should be allocated for performing a task.

Taking a backup of your website in cPanel Paper Lantern

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We all should regularly take backups of our website, whether we like it or not. A backup is like a flashlight, you never know when you may need it. You may never need it or may need it once in 365 days. But if you do need it and don’t have it, you will regret it.

1. Login to your cPanel account (For more see this article)

2. Select the Backup option in cPanel

3. Under the Partial Backups option, you can choose which parts of your website to backup.

The Home Directory option will allow you to backup all files in your account, except for the MySQL databases and the cpanel account configuration. This option will download a .tar.gz file i.e. a compressed tarball which contains the entire folder structure and files inside your hosting account.

The Database Backup will allow you to download a backup file for each individual database. The file format for the database backup is dbname.sql.gz i.e. it is a compressed file, which contains a .sql file of the database.

You can also download domain wise email forwarders, in .gz format by clicking on the Email Forwarder option.

 

Do note: If your internet connection is interrupted or there is some download issue, your downloaded file may be incomplete or corrupt. Always verify downloaded backups before relying on them.

Why Are Website Templates Preferred Over Custom Web Design?

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Why Are Website Templates Preferred Over Custom Web Design?

Why Are Website Templates Preferred Over Custom Web Design?

Template based website systems are overtaking the requirement for a custom made personalized website. Even web designers are constantly finding ways in which to package their products and manufacture them in bulk. But what are the reasons for people buying template based websites and avoiding custom built websites? This articles aims to highlight the major factors which influence the purchase of a template based website design over a customized one.

Turn Around Time

The crux of setting up a new website is having it up and running quickly. The main objective is to put the website out and keep improving it. Most design firms take ages to put out the first version of a website. They have lengthy procedures and sometimes have long and cumbersome processes to be followed before any work can be made live. This often leads to delays and long timelines, which cause disinterest in the client and also demotivate the design team. This is remedied by ready made template based options which allow a certain level of customization to personalize the template for the clients business.

Seeing Is Believing

Just like ready made clothes, templates allow you to see a live working of the website and allow you to preview and simulate the website’s functioning before you actually purchase it. This means that you can see a fully functional sample website with dummy text and images and actually visualize how it would suit your website design. While tailor-made clothes will definitely fit you better, there is always a time-lag and also a risk of the tailor getting it wrong.

Cheaper

A ready made website will definitely work out cheaper than a custom made one, especially due to its re-usability and lack of personal touch. This maybe very crucial for a business which is newly launched and wants to atleast have a placeholder website to show to customers. This is also a crucial factor in determining the long term goal of the website and how you would like to keep evolving your online strategy.

Independence

A very major factor in deciding your design option is whom you are dealing with. Many designers consider themselves to be at par with Picasso and Michelangelo. This means that you may have a tough time in getting them to do things in a time-bound or disciplined way. Almost all design firms that we have dealt with have overshot their promised timeline and taken more than double the time to do the work correctly. While a bit of creativity should be left to the discretion of the design studio, it should also be clearly agreed that time is of essence and that a delay in work can be costly. Some businesses have taken years on end just to get the first glimpse of their website live. By that time their funds were drained and they had lost a considerable amount of revenue from online sources. On the other hand, templates allow you to go to any designer or coder to alter the design. Some websites even offer their own customization service. The bottom line being that your design source is with you and you are not locked into the services of a particular firm of developers.

Customization

Although a template can hardly be tweaked to suit your corporate branding, you can make a lot of changes to make it look more personalized. Just like you can get a ready-made shirt altered to suit your size, you can get a ready website also tweaked and twisted to give it a better look. It may look clumsy and a bit out of place, it may even look very cliche and standard, but for the price it is definitely a good deal.

A Simple Explanation Of What Big Data Is

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A Simple Explanation Of What Big Data Is

Big Data has become a new buzz word in the IT industry. Everyone is talking about it and repeatedly using it to impress others, even if they themselves don’t really know what it means. Big Data is often used out of context and more as a marketing gimmick. This article aims to explain what Big Data really is and how it will be useful in solving problems.

Physics and Mathematics calculations can give us the exact distance from the East Coast of USA to the West Coast, accurate to about 1 yard. This is a phenomenal achievement and has been applied to various technologies in our daily life. But the challenge comes in when you have data which is not static, which is constantly changing and changing at a rate and in volumes which are humongous to determine in real time. The only way we can process this data is by using computers.

IBM data scientists break big data into four dimensions: volume, variety, velocity and veracity. But there are many more aspects of Big Data. Big data can be described by the following characteristics:

Volume is the size of the data which determines the value and potential of the data under consideration and whether it can actually be considered as Big Data or not. Variety means that the category to which Big Data belongs to is also a very essential fact that needs to be known by the data analysts. This helps the people, who are closely analyzing the data and are associated with it, to effectively use the data to their advantage and thus upholding the importance of the Big Data. Velocity refers to how fast the data is generated and processed to be useful. Variability of the data can also be a problem for the analysts. Veracity is the quality of the data being captured. Accurate analysis depends on the veracity of the source data.

Analogies

An article on the Tibco Blog provided a very simple analogy to understanding what Big Data really is. Their blog says that:

“One analogy for Big Data analysis is to compare your data to a large lake… Trying to get an accurate size of this lake down to the last gallon or ounce is virtually impossible… Now let’s assume that you have built a big water counting machine… You feed all of the water in the lake through your big water counting machine, and it tells you the number of ounces of water in the lake… for that point in time.”

A better, more visual analogy is presented by Paul Lewis of Hitachi Data Systems. He often explains about Big Data by showing a picture cartoon filled with hundreds of people who are doing different things in the picture, looking busy. He explains:

“You need to find the person with the suitcase of money (Value)…but there are many people (Volume), all walking at various speeds running to work (Velocity), from all walks of life (Variety), some are crooks (Veracity).”

Importance and Benefits

One of the major reasons why we need Big Data is for prediction and analysis. One of the best examples where Big Data can be seen in action is the Large Hadron Collider experiment, in which about 150 million sensor deliver data 40 million times per second. After filtering and refraining from recording more than 99.999% of these streams, there are 100 collisions of interest per second. Another important example is Facebook, which handles over 50 billion user photos.

Healthcare is another area where Big Data can play a significant role. One of the most amazing example is Google Flu Trends, which analyses search data from various locations and uses the Big Data Analysis to identify patterns of Influenza epidemics and endemics around the world. Although this data is not necessarily accurate or may have a lot of false positives, it highlights the potential of what Big Data can show you.

A key benefit of Big Data is that there is no specific format in which it is stored. Crudely put, it is a raw dump of data i.e. it is unstructured. The system uses complex algorithms to classify and process this data, which makes it very special.

Why you should think thrice before taking a Dedicated Server

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We are all prone to wanting more in almost everything life offers. This is also common to buying website hosting - we want more. More hosting space, more processing power, more RAM and more bandwidth as well. We want a bigger, meaner machine which has all the bells and whistles that your money can buy. But we rarely stop to think, whether we really need it and whether that is really the solution to everything. This article tries to reason why you should rethink your purchase of a Dedicated Server for your website or web application.

Why you should think thrice before taking a Dedicated Server

Misled by Developers

The most common cause of goofing up a dedicated server decision is due to being misled by your software developers or designers. Many a time, they have no clue how much of the resources they will really need and want to save themselves the trouble of migrating your data at a later stage, hence they coax you into believing that you need a monster configuration server which will magically solve all your problems. The less experienced the developer is, the less empirical or statistical evidence he will show you, for justifying the purchase. 3 years back, we received an email from a friend, asking us for a very high configuration machine. When we realized he was being guided by his developer, we suggested that they do a trial run on a small 5 GB shared hosting account. Till date, they have not needed more than that and are very happy we saved them the huge expenditure.

Warped Estimates

Before we suggest a Dedicated Server, we request the client to send us an estimate of his requirements and how he has come to that conclusion. Most of the time, the client has made wrong calculations and drastically changed the entire estimation by using predicted figures, which may not actually work in a production environment. This may mean that he has either under-estimated the requirement and will need to upgrade the server in the short term or he has overestimated the requirements and goes for an overkill solution. There are numerous benchmarking tools, which can help predict the exact amount of resources that the website or application requires and also helps test the limit of those resources.

Over-ambition

In the past few years we have often heard from atleast 10 different clients, that their future plan is to make an “online portal like Facebook”. While that may seem like a very progressive thought, it is often accompanied by a lack of planning and exaggeration. Ofcourse everyone wants to be the best, but they want to do it overnight, without looking into the path travelled by the industry giants. This over ambition eclipses their decision of doing some realtime tests and then jumping into the project in full swing. We often see that those who take a dedicated server, drop the idea by the 5th or 6th month, when they realize that their requirement was miniscule or their goal is not achievable at the time.

Laziness to troubleshoot

Another common reason why people want to go in for a Dedicated Server is because they don’t want to get down to the root of the issue of high resource usage, but instead would like to work around the issue by pumping in more hardware resources. A blaring example would be that of a small time ecommerce portal, which was so badly coded that the SQL queries kept getting throttled due to being slow, clumsily written and buggy. Rather than modifying the query to its optimum best, the webmaster chose to add more CPU resources by upgrading the server. This solved the problem for a few weeks, till the query started taking more time. Thereafter he went in for a better configuration server. This time, in a few weeks the same problem cropped up and he realised that the problem lay in his SQL coding and not in the server. He has now happily switched to shared hosting and has got the SQL beautifully optimized. His laziness definitely cost him time and money, but it also made him wiser for the long-term.

Easy Ways Of Speeding Up Your Website Instantly

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Many clients wonder why their website is slow and why it gets slower every couple of months. We often assist clients in determining issues with their website and sometimes even need to convince them that it is not related to their hosting service. It’s like having a great car but a lousy chauffeur. No matter how good the car maybe and how fast it could go, if the chauffeur is not competent, the high-end car is worthless. In the same way, no matter how fast your hosting server is, if you do not have a well coded and well designed website, your website is bound to open with a crawl. This article helps draw the attention of website owners to the various things that can be done to speed up their website to make it more SEO friendly.

Clean Code

The most important thing you need to do to improve your website’s load time is the clean and simple programming. There are some programmers who can obtain special effects on a page with 50 lines of code. There are better programmers who can achieve the same thing in 20 lines of code. This is dependent on the skills and experience of the programmer and the logical thought process. Even Search Engines want to serve up clean and quick content to their website visitors. They don’t want to inflict upon their visitors a slow and cluttered website. The short solution is to Keep It Simple.

Onsite resources

When linking to images or other media that we like from an external website, we often prefer to load the image or music or video by embedding the other persons link in our own page. This is also known as hot-linking. Earlier, some webmasters used to do this to save on their own websites bandwidth usage by causing the image to load from another person’s website and using up their bandwidth.

CDN and Content Caching

A CDN is a content distribution network, which distributes a mirror copy of your website across their global network of servers. When a visitor requests a page from your website, instead of contacting your web hosting server, it contacts the server closest to the visitor, which has a mirror copy of the website. This greatly reduces the time taken to access the page and serves up the content at lightning speed. From time to time, the cache of your website, which is mirrored on the CDN servers is updated. This means that any changes that you make on your website will not be updated across the CDN instantly and your visitors will see a delay in the fresh content. However, you may choose to cache only the static parts of your website which do not change very often, but the dynamic parts of the website can be called from your web hosting server directly.

You can also use page caching techniques to make your pages load faster by creating a temporary storage of the content on the users computer. This may cause a delay in displaying fresh content, but you can tweak the cache to only store the static pages to serve up faster.

Minimize Plugins and Frills

A major cause of your website slowing down is 3rd party plugins. We all want to connect with our audience on social media, but you should avoid using third party plugins for social networking. Some of these plugins pull statistics and display information from the plugin creator’s website, which may lead your website to become slow. While your page loads, the information is constantly requested from the plugin makers website, which causes your page to remain waiting till the data is transferred from there. A slow plugin may cause your visitors to see the page loading indication in their browser and may also cause other parts of your page or other plugins to remain in the queue. This can drastically reduce the speed of your website pages. To avoid this situation, it is best to remove slow plugins and constantly monitor the page load speed accordingly.

Compression

Easy Ways Of Speeding Up Your Website Instantly

Some compression tools which are inbuilt on your web server allow you to compress each request before sending it to your visitor’s computer. When a visitor requests a webpage from your website, the server will zip up the page content and send the compressed information to the users browser. The visitors browser will then decompress the data and unzip the file for display. This reduces the size of the data being transferred, leading to a reduction in speed and also a reduction in data transfer usage. Compression takes up a bit of processing power on the visitor’s machine and on the server, but the CPU usage is so negligible that it is worth the resources to increase the speed of the website loading.

How WordPress Makes Friends With Search Engines. A Look At Google, Yahoo And Bing

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WordPress has always been the most preferred blogging platform and Content Management System on the internet. It does contain many out of the box features for making your website or blog easy for search engines to crawl and index. But there is a lot that can be improved too. This article explains a couple of the out of the box features and some more features which you can add using the help of plugins, to make your site truly SEO friendly for search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing.

How WordPress Makes Friends With Search Engines. A Look At Google, Yahoo And Bing

How WordPress Makes Friends With Search Engines. A Look At Google, Yahoo And Bing

Human-Readable URLs with Keywords

On a fresh install of WordPress, you will notice that your Page URL’s or Permalinks look something like http://news.hostingxtreme.com/?p=213452098346 which obscures the true content of the article or information contained on that page. Not only do Humans find it difficult to recall a page number or URL with a number in it, but even Search Engines detest these obscure URLs which are non-descriptive. Instead Search Engines will prefer to see something with a category and a name in it. Hence, WordPress allows you to setup Permalinks which will automatically change the URLs to a modified version of the article’s Title. So an article titled “How Auto Installers Enhance Your WordPress Experience” will have a URL like “http://news.hostingxtreme.com/how-auto-installers-enhance-your-wordpress-experience/”.

This type of URL will be easily understandable by Search Engines and also contains the keywords which the author would like to promote. This allows Search Engines to retrieve that URL more easily and in a more systematic manner.

Featured Images, Categories and Tags

WordPress allows you to add a featured image in your article page or post, which can be used to identify your article and to give it a boost in image results. An article on Fire Extinguishers may have the picture of a Fire Extinguisher set as the Featured Image, so that in Image Searches, it will be given priority for those keywords.

You can also add your article to Categories and Tags. You can setup these categories and tages prior to writing the article and also add new categories and tags as you are writing the article. Adding a category for the pages and posts facilities the internal search engine and also external crawlers from understanding the structure of your website and the grouping of similar articles. This will allow the searcher to be presented with many suggestions based on the category selection of the article. The category may also influence the URL of the article, which may be rewritten to incorporate the category name as well.

Image Information

Search engines cannot see an image. They can only read the textual content of your website. Which is why we have Captcha code’s on forms, to prevent automated submission of the form by software. When inserting an image from the media library, the Alt Tags and Image title is automatically picked up from the Image Name and Image Meta Information that maybe present. This allows your image to be easily searched and indexed by search engines so that the image search results will pop up your image when the associated keywords are searched. You can alter or modify the alt tags and title tags and also add a caption to the image, to make search engines easier to find.

Plugins for everything

For all the SEO optimization features that are not built-in to WordPress, you can always install plugins to do the job for you. XML Sitemaps generation is one such SEO feature which you must have, and can be easily created using a simple WordPress Plugin which is free. You can also tweak page URLs and customize them further using other plugins for that purpose. There are numerous plugins which help you to optimize your site for Search Engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, in a step-by-step manner. You could also try Plugins like All in One SEO Pack for WordPress and WordPress SEO by Yoast which are popular and recommended by the champions of the industry. Don’t forget that SEO is hard work and needs your time and patience to produce quality results.