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Tips To Prevent Failed Backups Of Your Website

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Tips To Prevent Failed Backups Of Your Website

Tips To Prevent Failed Backups Of Your Website

Most of us keep regular backups of all our important data, especially which is on the internet. Websites should also be backed up regularly as a safety measure in case of a disaster and also as a version tracking mechanism. This ensures that in the event of our website being hacked or becoming corrupt, we can quickly restore it to a prior version. Most of us have automatic mechanisms to take a backup. But little do we realise that taking a backup doesnt really end there. We need to ensure that it is a workable backup and not a dummy file which has not value. This article explains how we can prevent backup file failures and how to ensure that our website backup will be of use when we need it.

Elements

An important aspect of taking backups is not to forget any of the elements that make up your account. Your web hosting account has several elements which need to be backed up so that you can restore your entire account. This means that you need to backup things like Email, Website Files, Databases, Configuration Files, Web Statistics, Email Forwarders and any other customizations that you may have done with any of these elements. Hosting Control Panels like cPanel or Plesk may allow you to take backups of these elements separately or compile them into a single compressed file. Forgetting even one part of your account backup may render your website useless. Many people forget to take a backup of their database files since the backend is not something that the users interact with. Similarly, the small configuration files and customizations can also boost the speed and efficiency when you attempt to restore the backup.

Disk Space Shortage

The in-built backup options of your web hosting control panel will usually save your backup in the home directory of your account. This means that the backup will also consume hosting space within your account. If you are on a limited space plan, you should have atleast 50% free disk space before you backup your account. If you do not have enough space, the backup may not complete fully or may get corrupt. This can be disastrous when you are dependent on it and when you want to restore the account. Ensure that you have enough free space so that your backup is not stuck.

Failed Download

One of the most common failure points when taking a backup is the download to your local machine or onto the media you are ultimately backing up on. Very often, when the backup file is being downloaded on the media or machine, the network connection may drop or the process maybe terminated. This may indicate that the file has been downloaded, but actually the file is only partially downloaded. A client of ours who was switching from shared hosting to a dedicated server was taking a backup of his website on his own. He started downloading the backup file from his hosting account. The size of the backup file was about 600 MB. On his internet connection, it indicated that about 8 minutes were left for the download to complete. In between the download process, his internet connection dropped. He noticed that the file transfer had stopped and file was on his hard disk. However, he did not notice the file size and assumed that the entire 600 MB has been downloaded. The backup file was corrupt and had downloaded only 350 MB. Luckily he noticed the mistake and was able to retrieve the backup file. You may not always be so lucky.

Integrity Check with the Checksum

The best way to ensure your backup file’s integrity is using a checksum tool to verify the checksum of the file before and after it is downloaded. Ideally this means that you get a unique hash value of the file from the web server. This unique hash value is tied to the file and is almost impossible to reverse engineer. Then, after you have downloaded the file, retest for the checksum of the downloaded file on your backup media. The checksum of the file should be exactly the same. If the file is corrupt or tampered or has not downloaded properly, the checksum will mismatch and you will get to know easily. This ensures data integrity and provides assurance of a healthy backup file.

 

Can You Pay To Become Popular On The Internet?

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Can You Pay To Become Popular On The Internet?

Can You Pay To Become Popular On The Internet?

Every new website owner wants to know how he can rank high in Google so that his website sale’s take off and he can make a quick buck through his online portal. The truth is that you need to invest pots of time and money to make your website successful. You need to spend a lot of resources in understanding what your clients want and how you can cater to their needs. There is no shortcut to becoming famous or popular, although there are many companies which claim to be able to boost your online reputation. The unethical means that they use are often caught and your site maybe heavily penalized for adopting such means. This article explains why paying to become popular online is a myth and has no long term positive effect.

You Can’t Fool Google

We all want to come up in Google’s ranking for the keywords that represent our products and services. We are all willing to put in a large amount of time and money in coming up in the top 10 in Google. There are also a lot of websites which claim to do Search Engine Optimization and can guarantee tons of traffic to your website. These are all short-lived services, which will be detected by search engines and will be blocked. Google uses an unknown number of factors in determining where and why your website should be ranked in the search results. Some people estimate over 2000 factors which affect your search engine ranking for a particular keyword. Google’s algorithm to rank pages is a secret and is not publicly known. While many people claim to know it, they don’t seem to be very successful at manipulating it.

Penalty For Paid Links

All Search Engines penalize site’s with inbound paid links which try to show legitimate traffic. Google’s website says:

“Any links intended to manipulate PageRank or a site’s ranking in Google search results may be considered part of a link scheme and a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. This includes any behavior that manipulates links to your site or outgoing links from your site…Additionally, creating links that weren’t editorially placed or vouched for by the site’s owner on a page, otherwise known as unnatural links, can be considered a violation of our guidelines.”

As far as the penalty is concerned, Google clarifies that:

“The consequences for a linkselling site start with losing trust in Google’s search results, as well as reduction of the site’s visible PageRank in the Google Toolbar. The consequences can also include lower rankings for that site in Google’s search results. If you receive a warning for selling links that pass PageRank in Google’s Webmaster Tools, you’ll see a notification message to look for “possibly artificial or unnatural links on your site pointing to other sites that could be intended to manipulate PageRank.” That’s an indication that your site has lost trust in Google’s index.”

Click Farms Can Spoil Your Reputation

Apart from the penalties that your site will be subject to by the Search Engines, Click Farms which bring in paid clicks or “likes” or “followers” to your website or social media pages can be harmful to your reputation. The fake profile pictures, abusive comments and suspicious activity can be quite a repelling force for your genuine clients and prospects. Click farms pay people to just keep clicking on links, pages and ads without application of mind. A YouTube Channel - Veritasium has also highlighted how these Click Farms can show false statistics of popularity and mislead webmasters.

Quick Fame Can Be Dangerous

Getting legitimate traffic to your website by employing unethical means may get you listed higher in search rankings in the short term, but it can also lead to your site coming up on the radar of the wrong elements. When SEO firms post your website URL on click farms and shady blogs, it can attract a lot of negative attention and cause malicious attacks to be targeted to your website.

Working hard and working the right way is the only way to get your website to rank higher. Tricks and manipulations may work temporarily but not in the long term.

Are Cheap Domain Names For Real? Whats The Catch?

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Are Cheap Domain Names For Real? Whats The Catch?

Where should you purchase a domain name from is purely your own decision. Although the differences in domain name management facilities are few across different providers, the pricing varies drastically. There are various factors (besides competition) which contribute to this disparity in pricing. Knowledge of these factors is important in influencing your decision in how to and from where to buy domain names. Savings can range from a few dollars to even $50 per domain name. This article explains why domain names are available at such a cheap price and why sometimes it maybe an illusion to fool the customer.

Addon Services

Many Domain Name providers offer the cheapest pricing because they provide only the basic rudimentary domain registration services. They do not provide any extra services and only allow minimalist domain management options. Domain Name Servers (DNS), Email Forwarding, Domain Forwarding, Free Landing Page, WHOIS Privacy and some other services are facilities which are charged extra. If your domain name provider is giving you these services for free along with cheap domain pricing, it is definitely worth it. But to maintain a slim margin and to undercut the competition, most domain registrars charge a hefty additional fee to provide these addons.

First Year Pricing

Most domain name providers offer a very cheap price for domain name registrations to lure new customers to their service. However, many providers mislead people into buying from them by displaying an extremely low price for registration. They do not mention what the price for renewals will be. Renewals are offered at the normal price which most providers offer, which will obviously be much higher than the price of the first year registration. Most customers do not read the fine print at the time of registration and follow the price carrot into the providers net. This is often a reason why customers are delighted at the time of registering the new domain but are frustrated the next year when realization dawns upon them. A transparent host will clearly indicate that the domain pricing will increase from the next year onwards, as the offer or pricing is only applicable on fresh registrations.

Reseller Discounts

Some websites offer cut-throat pricing for Domain Registrations, Renewals and even Transfers. This is possibly due to the fact that they themselves receive a heavy re-seller discount from domain registrars and are able to pass on the discount to their customers. Registrars do not usually sell domains to the end user in a big way. Their retail pricing is very high and discouraging for retail clients. The easiest way for them to get customers is to shift the burden of customer acquisition on the resellers. The incentive given to resellers is proportionate to the yearly commitments of the resellers. Hence if you try and compare a reseller’s price with the price of the same registrar, it will be like comparing apples and oranges i.e. they are uncomparable.

Bundled Pricing

Many hosting companies offer heavy discounts on domain name pricing if you bundle a domain name with their hosting packages. If you cease to keep their other products or services, your domain which is bundled with it will be renewed at their regular or standard pricing. The cost of the standard or regular pricing maybe much higher than the discounted pricing, but it is natural that the service providers who offer such discounts will obviously offer an incentive to promote their products or services. If you really need the bundled product, then it would be a good idea to take the package, but some clients often buy the bundle just because of the price illusion that they are getting the domain name free. This is not the case, especially due to the fact that the cost of the domain name has also been factored into the price of the bundle. Similarly it will offer a good perspective on how much the principal product should really cost.

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.

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.

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.