Tag Archives: Best Web Hosting

How Many Servers Does A Web Hosting Service Need?

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How Many Servers Does A Web Hosting Server Need?

How Many Servers Does A Web Hosting Server Need?

Web Hosting customers don’t always realize what goes on behind the scenes of their web hosting service. The layman often thinks that the web hosting service is just another software installed on a monster computer, bit of which are sold to the end user. But there’s a lot more that goes on behind setting up a web hosting service. While some hosts use separate machines to run services like email, FTP, HTTP etc., some hosts install all these services on a single machine. This article takes you into the web hosting world and shows you which software servers are running to give you the best web hosting experience with different services.

Web Server

The web server is one of the most important parts of your web hosting service. The web server is what actually delivers your web page to the user’s browser. It also handles different requests for information that your browser makes and also takes care of incorrect or erroneous requests. When you see 404 error pages or warning messages, these are all served up by the web server. Web hosts commonly use IIS, Apache, Nginx and Tomcat amongst many different web servers. Web servers use the HTTP protocol to communicate with the user’s browser. The administrator also has the capability of restricting folders, files and websites through the web server configuration.

Mail Server

The mail server is essential when providing email service. The mail server allows the sending and receiving of email on specific ports. The mail server helps filter the received mail to different users’ folders and thereby allows multiple domains to be hosted on a single physical machine. Mail servers are also capable of redirecting mail and applying conditional filters to weed out unwanted mail and fight spam. Most mail servers allow the use of third party plugins or software to aid them perform their functions. For example mail servers can intelligently use third party RBLs or black lists to identify if a mail sender is actually a source of spam which should be rejected before he can reach the mail server. Mail servers usually use IMAP, SMTP and POP3 protocols to serve their purpose.

FTP Server

Almost every web host offers FTP services to transfer files. But most users don’t realize that this requires an FTP server at the hosts end. An FTP server allows connections using the FTP protocol, for the transfer of files. This aids users in downloading or uploading files in simple, quick and efficient way. FTP servers control the bandwidth usage, user connections, authentication system and even file management for the user. FTP servers are inexpensive to maintain and are now considered as included in any web hosting package.

SQL Server

An SQL server is a database management server which allows users to create and store data in relational tables, using the Structured Query Language or SQL. On windows machines, Microsoft MS SQL is installed, whereas Unix based hosting systems usually come with open source alternatives like MySQL, Postgresql, MariaDB among others. Web hosts sell databases based on the package that the user takes. Each database requires CPU and memory resources to function properly. Databases form up the backbone of most websites which have a Content Management System or which store a large amount of data.

Others

Some web hosts offer their own DNS service, for which they need to run a DNS Server on their systems. The DNS server just maps the domain name to the servers IP address so that when a visitor is using a service on a website, he is served up the right information from the right source. Premium web hosts offer File Sharing services and have a Web DAV Server either separate or integrated into their Web Server (as above). This allows users to quickly sync files to and from their website onto their mobile devices. Almost all web hosts also provide an SSH service so that users can connect securely to different ports for different services on the account.

While web hosting may seem like an easy business, managing all these services can be quite a task, which web hosts need to do on a daily basis.

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 Webmail Be The Future Of Email Storage?

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Will Webmail Be The Future Of Email Storage?

Will Webmail Be The Future Of Email Storage?

With email being a primary mode of formal and official communication around the world, an important question that should be asked is that how and where will users store their data. As data storage evolved and modes of storage cross conventional limitations, innovations in Information technology has taken thing to the next level. People have stopped using their desktops for storing their email and prefer to have webmail storage which allows them to access their mail from any location at any time without dependence on any hardware. This article discusses the factors which may influence a users decision in using webmail for storing email.

Mobile Devices

Mobile devices have a lesser capacity to store as compared to our desktops and laptops. Mobile devices are used more for storing entertainment material like movies, games and music rather than emails and office work. Hence, people using mobile devices are more likely to keep their emails on their mail server rather than downloading them

Cheap Disk Space

As hardware prices reduce, so does the price of disk space. Both physical hard disk drives and even virtual storage space costs lesser and lesser day by day. Due to economies of scale, online storage space works out far cheaper (per GB) as compared to a hard disk. This encourages email users to outsource their email storage to an online solution rather than to have the headache of managing and storing the emails on their local computer.

Cloud Storage

A major reason why people will not download mails on their phones or computers is because of lack of accessibility. We all want a single location for managing our mail and documents. Earlier people would use multiple devices to download their mail and were virtually locked in to that device to manage their emailing. This meant that any hardware failure would lead to work disruption. Similarly backups were also tougher to make on a specific device. Your entire online life depended on that one device. If you bought a new device or upgraded it, you would need to carefully migrate your data. Today’s world is platform independent. You are not locked in to one type of device or one specific device. With web mail and online storage you can access your mails from any device. Your mail client only becomes a viewing tool and not a storage tool. It doesnt matter how you access your mail when it is online. You can use a laptop, desktop, mobile phone or even a browser enabled device to see your mails.

Profile Personalization

Another important feature after storage is singularity of your customization and profile. Many of us have our email signature stored with our email clients. If we use our mobile phone, we have to reset our email signature. If we use a separate webmail client, we need to reconfigure our entire signature and email preferences all over again. With webmail, any device you are on will have the same settings as other devices which access your mail. You don’t need to bother about the consistency of your email preferences or personal customization to your profile or email interface as it is always consistent.

How Should You Report Spam Mail For Quick Action?

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How Should You Report Spam Mail For Quick Action?

How Should You Report Spam Mail For Quick Action?

We are all affected by the scourge of spam mail. Many of us receive thousands of emails which are fortunately filtered out by our email services or email software. The main issue that everyone has with spam is that it prevents us from noticing genuine mail, which may get lost in the noise of continuous junk. Spam delays or prevents us from getting to our legitimate or important mails. There are various agencies around the world, in many countries dedicated to fighting spam mail and protecting the interests of email users across service providers. There are various agencies which you can complain to about spam. This article explains how you can complain about spam mail and get some effective remedy.

SpamCop

SpamCop.net is a spam reporting service which complains about spam on your behalf, to the service provider of your spammer. When you report a spam mail to spamcop, it forwards your complaint to the correct authority in charge of the IP Address or network of the origin of the spam mail. It picks out the Abuse Complaint details of the network provider and sends a pre-drafted email filled in with the details applicable to your complaint. The best part about spamcop is the enforce ability of the complaint. SpamCop provides spam activity information and statistics to various anti-spam filter services which use these details to block mail even before they reach a mail server. If you are blacklisted due to a spamcop complaint, your IP Address will no longer be able to send out emails to people who are using those blacklists and filters. If that happens, mails from your server will be delayed or will bounce. If your are providing an email service, your service will be disrupted till the spam doesnt stop.

The Abuse Email Address of the IP Address Owner

The email address of the network owner maybe a bit hard to find out, but it should surely yield some results. Most Network Operation Centers, Data Centers and Hosting Providers take abuse complaints very seriously. Action on abuse complaints includes disconnection of services or even temporary suspension of the offender’s service. The abuse contact is supposed to be a one-point communication address by which anyone aggrieved by the behaviour of a certain subscriber or network can report the issues to that person. You can find out the abuse email address of a domain name by visiting abuse.net or simply sending a mail to the default abuse address i.e. abuse@domain_name.com or postmaster@domain_name.com where domain_name is the actual domain name which appears to be sending out spam.

Government Spam Reporting Systems

Various countries around the world have passed anti-spam laws to help tackle the scourge of spam mail. Federal Trade Commission in the USA, Canada Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL) Reporting Center in the Canada host an email spam reporting service, which in turn forwards your complaint to the appropriate network operator. The limitation of these bodies is that they may not be able to do much for email or hosting services which are located beyond its territorial jurisdiction.

Mail Client or Webmail Plugin

Nowadays there are many tools available to email users for reporting spam or sending complaints about email service abuse. Webmail services like Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail have a “Report Spam” button or a “This look like spam” which not only places a complaint but also filters out similar messages in future, by educating the spam control system. Mail client’s like Outlook also have various add-ins to report and delete spam. Some Anti-virus and Firewall software offer integrated email scanning which automatically reports suspicious bulk emails to a central command system.

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.

Would You Prefer Transparent Web Hosting To Unlimited Hosting?

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Would You Prefer Transparent Web Hosting To Unlimited Hosting?

Every consumer wants the maximum juice for his money. More space, more bandwidth, more databases and more of every other thing. But where do we draw the line? In reality, there is nothing like Unlimited Hosting Space, because the physical medium that the data will be stored on has a limit. You may call it scalable or even elastic, but it is surely not unlimited in the true sense of the word. Unlimited Hosting providers often give a clarification or explanation of the meaning of their Unlimited Hosting Plans and who they are meant for. This article discusses the trend of people avoiding unlimited plans and instead looking for transparent web hosting packages.

Clarity and Certainty

The most important reason why people prefer the vanilla shared hosting plans with clearly demarcated limits on space and bandwidth, is because those place offer more certainty and transparency. Giving defined limits and offering clarity of plans indicates that the provider aims to be more transparent and offer a fair deal. There are numerous Hosting Providers who aim to cut costs and try to serve as many customers as possible by using unethical means. The Unlimited Hosting plan was designed to tackle customers who haggle over the Price - Space ratio. By giving Unlimited Space, there is no further argument possible.

Resource Allocation

Resource allocation in Unlimited Plans is often skewed. While you may get “Unlimited” Disk Space or Bandwidth, your account will be restricted by other limits like Memory usage, CPU usage, Rate of Transfer and maybe even load time. This is pointless when your aim of taking an unlimited hosting plan is to be more ambitious and use more resources. Many providers put up a clear notification on their website, indicating that resources are not really Unlimited i.e. they are restricted to a maximum of 20 GB. In fact Big Rock India, a leading web host in India states on their website that

“….we have determined that anyone using over 20 GB of disk space is likely to be using our server as a backup device or to serve video content and such and that is not an acceptable use case for our shared hosting service. We have similar limits for other parameters.”

This is a primary reason, why people would prefer to take a 20 GB account rather than take an Unlimited Hosting account which ends up being the same price.

Better Pricing

Many a time, we don’t need a lot of space, but due to our consumerist mentality, we end up buying the bigger plan with more space - as much as we can hoard. This leads to us believing that we have got the maximum benefit for the payment we made. We never use all of the space and that is exactly the case for the bulk of users who buy the Unlimited Hosting Plans. A large number of buyers don’t do the math properly. Its probably just laziness rather than ignorance. They will purchase an Unlimited Hosting Plan at a higher price, when they only need about 1 GB of space, although the 1 GB plan is cheaper. The price and space illusion draws them into choosing the wrong plan. As people get smarter and realize that what they need is not Unlimited and they are able to clearly define their requirement,

Peace of Mind

In an Unlimited Plan, the user is always on tenterhooks that his account maybe throttled or get suspended for excessive resource usage. Some providers allow you to see the Resource Usage of your account, while others arbitrarily turn off your account or prevent it from using any further resources. As mentioned earlier, Unlimited Plans have skewed resources, which is why the chances of exceeding resources on them will always play on the minds of a professional user. A serious web designer or webmaster will never take an Unlimited Plan and will prefer to opt for a transparent plan which clearly defines the limits of the account.