Category Archives: WordPress

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.

Google Hates These Things You Do…

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There are a couple of things that Search Engines look at when ranking your website in search results, for various keywords. These include original content, number of links pointing from other website’s to yours, your overall online presence, the quantity of relevant content on your pages. People have tried long and hard to manipulate Google’s search algorithm by trial and error of various methods. The bottom line being that you just can’t fool Google. Although there maybe more than 2000 factors which determine how your site is ranked, there is a sure-shot list

Google Hates These Things You Do...

Google Hates These Things You Do…

of points which Google hates and will punish you if you do those things. This article aims to highlight some key points which you should definitely avoid if you want to be in Google’s good books.

Plagiarized Content

Google hates copy cats. The whole purpose of Google is defeated if it is not able to serve up fresh, genuine and relevant content for a user’s search query. When a person look for something using Google, he is dependent on Google to provide the most accurate websites which will provide the information sought. If Google does not catch the attention of the searcher, he will look for the information elsewhere and Google would have lost out on potential ad revenue in the process. Google says:

“Purely scraped content, even from high-quality sources, may not provide any added value to your users without additional useful services or content provided by your site; it may also constitute copyright infringement in some cases. It’s worthwhile to take the time to create original content that sets your site apart. This will keep your visitors coming back and will provide more useful results for users searching on Google.”

Dummy Websites

To get back links from external websites, webmasters buy many domain names and put up rudimentary content with a link back to the parent website which they want to boost in search results. Google calls these doorway pages and penalizes doorway sites themselves and also websites using doorway pages. Since these websites or pages are “typically large sets of poor-quality pages where each page is optimized for a specific keyword or phrase” they offer no value added benefit to Google users.

“Google frowns on practices that are designed to manipulate search engines and deceive users by directing them to sites other than the one they selected, and that provide content solely for the benefit of search engines. Google may take action on doorway sites and other sites making use of these deceptive practices, including removing these sites from Google’s index.”

People also use such dummy websites to automatically redirect visitors to the real website and mislead the user about where they are being taken. The dummy website will show up on Google Search Results, but the user is ultimately taken to the real website which has nothing to do with the search results.

Paid Links

Paid Links are basically links which are not earned due to quality, but are instead bought from websites which are willing to make a quick buck. This dilutes the quality of content for the search results and leads to irrelevant or misleading information. Google classifies buying or selling links that pass PageRank, excessive link exchanges, large-scale article marketing or guest posting campaigns with keyword-rich anchor text links and even using automated programs or services to create links to your site as Paid Links. These are all liable for being penalized and even removed from Google’s Search system.

Comment Spamming

Google’s Webmaster Support says that “If you’ve ever received a comment that looked like an advertisement or a random link to an unrelated site, then you’ve encountered comment spam.” Comment Spam is visible on many blogs, which have popular content. Spammers post a comment or remark about the article and surreptitiously insert a link with their own brand or promotion in it. Comments are usually in the form of random praise about the article or some obscure sentence related to the article content and sometimes is outright junk text. All these qualify for the penalty by Google.

Will You Lose Your Domain Name If Your Vendor Shuts Down?

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Will You Lose Your Domain Name If Your Vendor Shuts Down?

Will You Lose Your Domain Name If Your Vendor Shuts Down?

Many businesses buy domains from various sources. Some buy them from their Web Designers as a package with their designing fees, some people buy from their hosting vendors, some people buy it themselves online. There are also those who buy it from their hardware vendor or maybe even a yellow pages directory service. But what happens if any of these resellers or companies shut down? Who will process your domain renewal? Will you lose your domain if the company shuts down or becomes unresponsive? This article attempts to explain how you can avoid losing your domain when your vendor or domain reseller shuts down.

Keep your WHOIS information uptodate

The most important factor in determining a domain’s ownership is the WHOIS information stored with the Registrar of the Domain Name. We often buy domain’s from middle-men or resellers of the Domain Registrar. While resellers can give you an exceptionally good price, they may not give you control of your domain name. This means that you are at their mercy for everything to do with your domain. One thing you must ensure, whomever you are buying the name from, that the domain must be registered on the name of the true owner or the person authorized by the true owner. This authorized person could include an officer or agent of a company, the CEO or even an IT manager. But this should definitely not be the web designer, a middle-man or even an employee of the vendor. This will ensure that when you want to control your domain name or transfer it out at anytime, if you send a mail from your registered email address and have control of it, the registrar will help you take control of your domain name. If you do not have control of your domain name and your vendor shuts down, you will have quite a tough time in proving that you are the owner of the domain name.

Keep the domain control in your hands

As soon as your domain is registered, or shortly after that, you should insist on having the Domain Name Control Panel details. This should include the login name, password and URL from where you can login. As soon as you receive these details, you should try them out and check to see if your domain can be managed with those login details. You should also change your password for that control panel and only share the details with those you trust. The domain control panel access need not be given to the web designer or hosting company, unless you would like them to manage the account. If they would like to make changes to the DNS entries or pointers of your domain name, they can always guide you on how to do it. You can also take the help of your domain name vendor to guide you on how to make the changes.

Domain Registrar to the rescue

If you do end up clueless about your vendor, or if your vendor becomes unresponsive or has shut shop, there is still hope. You can always contact a higher authority i.e. the Domain Registrar. The Domain Registrar is given a license by ICANN (internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) to sell domain names. These Registrars in turn appoint resellers or vendors, from whom you may have bought the names in retail. In the rare case of a Registrar going out of business or shutting shop, all her domains are automatically shifted to a new registrar and all the domain owners are informed about it. This means that your domain will always be under a Registrar no matter what. The Registrar is bound to follow some rules and standards and will cooperate with you if you can show that you are the real domain owner. Usually, if you want to make changes to the domain name WHOIS records, but have lost access to the control panel, you can always fax your identity proof to the registrar and get access to the domain control after a few formalities. If the Domain Registrar becomes difficult or unresponsive, you can escalate the matter in the form of a complaint to ICANN. This way, you know for a fact that your domain name will never be lost, if you take timely action.

 

Useful Tools on Ubuntu Linux To Manage Your Web Hosting Account

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Your web hosting account comes with an awesome control panel that will allow you to do a lot of tasks online, without the need of any software on your local computer. This can save a lot of time and effort required for downloading apps and software. It is especially helpful when you are travelling and want to manage your account or upload files and check email. At the same time certain functions are best performed by the software installed on your local computer.

Useful Tools on Ubuntu Linux To Manage Your Web Hosting Account

This article lists a couple of useful tools if you are using a Ubuntu computer and are also managing a website.

FTP Client

It is important to have an FTP client for managing and manipulating the files in your account. The FTP client also allows you to use a secure encrypted connection to connect to your account and make changes. It also allows you to change file permissions and also make recursive changes automatically through a GUI interface. You can also compare directories and files and limit the bandwidth for downloads or uploads. You can change the priority of downloading files and also set a command to be executed at the end of the download queue completion. Your control panel does come with an online file manager, but the uses of that file manager are pretty limited, unlike a local FTP Client. On Ubuntu, we recommend FileZilla FTP client.

Mail Client

Email is an integral part of having a web hosting account and the use of email is almost inevitable. You can choose to store your emails on the server or download them to your local computer. Outlook is one of the mail clients which is very popular on Windows, however, it does not have a version for the Windows operating system. When travelling or using another computer, you can always use the online Webmail Client to access your mail. On Linux we recommend Thunderbird to download and access your emails.

Website Copier

Although you may not always require this tool, a website copier or extraction tool can be a useful tool to backup and troubleshoot your website. The copier will copy all your files and store them on your local computer in the same file structure as on the server. The copier logs will also give you the error codes and and any other warnings that would be visible to your website visitors. WebHTTrack is the ideal solution on Ubuntu.

Image Editor

Getting your images ready for the web can be quite a challenging task, especially if you have little experience in image editing. Everyone needs a basic image editing tool which can crop, put arrows and labels, resize and change the format of images. Some image editor software are expensive, but there are a lot of free alternatives which you can use on Ubuntu. We recommend Shutter for basic image editing and GIMP for expert users. Many control panels now do come with a basic image resizer and cropper, however, they are no match for comprehensive tools like Shutter and GIMP.

Terminal Emulator

PuTTY is a free terminal emulator for advanced web hosting users. This means that it will allow you to run commands on your hosting server through a software on your local computer. It can be especially useful when you want to run scripts or commands which do not have a Graphical Interface or which do not run through the browser. PuTTY is also helpful when you want to test your POP3, IMAP and SMTP connections through telnet.

6 Questions Asked by First Time Website Owners

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There’s always a first time. Even when buying web hosting to setup your website. Not everyone is tech savvy, but we all like to satisfy our curiosity about the new toy we are going to buy. If you were born before the 80’s you are most likely to ask questions which will make your web host chuckle at your innocence. This article lists some questions which a web host often has to answer when dealing with a new client who has never bought a hosting account. All these are intelligent questions which may appear silly to some.

6 Questions Asked by First Time Website Owners

1. Will I be able to use Linux Hosting if I have a Windows computer at home?

This is a very common question which we get to hear from people born before the 80’s. Those who are Microsoft Windows fans are often skeptical about using Linux Hosting for their website, because they relate the incompatibilities of Linux with the Windows OS. However, the only major difference in operations is that Linux cannot run ASP which Windows hosting can do. Besides this Linux servers are more stable and less prone to damage or security risks.

2. Will my email be secret on my web hosting server?

Customers are always worried about privacy and security of their data. As we always like to answer this question with- All web hosts have the ability to see anything on their server. Whether it is Amazon, Google, Yahoo or anyone else. The only differentiating factor is which one is a lesser evil as far as you are concerned and whom you trust the most. You may also consider who is most accountable to you and whose processes are most transparent. Besides this, the information overflow on the server keeps your data as secure as a needle in a haystack.

3. Can I install my own pirated version of Windows in my hosting account?

We don’t always feel like answering this one, because the answer is pretty obvious. if you still haven’t got it, the answer is No. You cannot install your own version of any software on shared hosting. neither can you install your own operating system on a VPS and you can most definitely not install a pirated version of Windows even if you have a dedicated server. No host will endorse it and in some cases may take action against you.

4. Do I need to provide my passport copy when booking a web hosting account?

You don’t need to provide any identification proof when purchasing an account. it is assumed that when you pay by PayPal or Credit Card, you are a genuine party and your bank has done the necessary verification before issuing a Payment facility to you.

5. Can I turn off my website in the night?

The whole point of buying hosting space from a third party vendor is so that you can keep your website live 24 x 7 and without having to keep your home computer on throughout. While you can turn off your website or block access to it every night, it would be better not having those facilities or not having a website at all. Some banks and utility services suspend their services in the night, to accommodate maintenance activities, however, if it is done on a daily basis, it may be frustrating for your users who are expecting a 24 hour service.

6. Can I automatically find out the contact details of the persons visiting my website?

If you want the details from your visitors, why not ask for them directly. You can get a lot of statistics on visitors and their visit behavior, but if you are expecting to know how your visitor looks and where he lives, you maybe a bit disappointed. The closest you can get to knowing more about your visitor is his IP address. Based on the IP Address you can identify the area where he lives. If you want more details, you would need to ask for them or surreptitiously gather that information.

 

Do You Need To Take Care Of A Website Hosting Account?

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Do You Need To Take Care Of A Website Hosting Account?

Do You Need To Take Care Of A Website Hosting Account?

Setting up a website is become easier day-by-day. Whether it is paying for hosting or buying a template or installing a CMS, everything now requires just a couple of clicks. However, there are some things which are unavoidable and must be followed as a set of best practices to keep your website and web hosting account in good health.

Virus and Malware Scan

Adding this to your weekly maintenance check list is a must. Scanning your entire hosting account for virus and malware activity will help you stop a disaster in time. Although most of the time you will see that you account is clean, sometimes, in public upload folders or in incoming mail attachments you may notice a trigger being set off. Cleaning up these infections will help you to avoid more maintenance in future. As they say “A stitch in time saves nine”.

Resource Usage Check

Some hosts allow you to see your Resource usage on the shared hosting server and also show you how much of RAM, CPU and Apache Processes your account has used in the past few days. This can be a key factor in diagnosing issues and understanding how your website performs under different conditions. Noticing irregular behaviour at an early stage can avoid a major outage of your account. One of our clients noticed a large spike in CPU resources every night. Upon further investigation he identified a runaway rsync script as the cause. This avoided his site being throttled or limited by the server software. Checking the resource usage atleast once in 7 days is a good practice.

Backups

We don’t need to say this, but taking regular backups has hurt no one. Not only should you take backups for an emergency or downtime, but taking backups before each modification to your website will allow you to revert to a backed up version in case your code gets corrupt or your programmer goofs up. Before installing anything new or updating your CMS version be sure to take a backup. Spending a little money on backup will save you hundreds of dollars when you really need to go back to a previous version of your website. As a standard practice, you should backup your entire account atleast once a week preferably at off-peak hours. Download the backup on a remote machine.

Updates

You will be surprised at the amount of updates you will need to carry out on your website, especially if you have a database driven CMS. WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and other similar CMs systems push out updates atleast a couple of times a month. with auto installer software, updating is a piece of cake and can be done in seconds. However, you must also understand the implications of every update on your website code and customizations to the system. Ideally you should check for new updates every 2 days, so that a critical security flaw in your web app can be quickly patched before it is exploited by hackers or malware.

Suspicious Activity

Your web hosting control panel will definitely have the ability of showing you the activity and error logs of your account. These can be especially useful when you want to diagnose an error or understand your web apps behavior. An additional utility of the logs is to detect patterns of suspicious activity and timings of such behavior. Logs can help you avoid a major problem by showing you the patterns of the activity that you really want to know. An ideal interval for checking logs would be atleast once a week. Checking the visitor logs, apache error logs and any custom logs that your CMS generates can be extremely helpful.