Tag Archives: Website Hosting

5 Issues You Are Sure To Face With A New Web Hosting Account

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Every web host invests some amount of resources in providing customer support. Although most support is routine and predictable, web hosts put systems into place to avoid any type of inconvenience to the customer, so that there is no need for providing support. Most support issues occur when the account has just been created or has been transferred over from another provider. This article lists the most likely support issues a client will face

5 Issues You Are Sure To Face With A New Web Hosting Account

in his first few days of taking a new hosting account or transferring his hosting account into a new service.

Email configuration

Setting up email for a new web hosting account, amounts to about 60% of the support that web hosts have to provide to new customers. Email configuration, although pretty consistent across hosts is a major cause for concern for a web hosting client atleast in the initial days of having the account. Most web hosting providers provide detailed instructions and support material with the welcome email which goes out to customers. Despite this, email configuration remains one of the most common causes of support tickets in the first few days of buying a hosting package. Clients can overcome this by carefully looking at the welcome emails or support forums and documentation. Web Hosts can avoid such support by clearly mentioning the email configuration in their welcome mail or automatically sending it to the client.

Passwords

Web hosting clients need to remember several passwords for several different options. This can be quite a task and can cause undue frustration. The web hosting client must keep a record of all his passwords, including email passwords, web hosting control panel, domain control panel, billing area, SQL databases and FTP accounts. Some passwords maybe common, but most passwords can be retrieved or reset through the billing control panel. In some cases only one master password is used to access all these services, however this can be quite dangerous if the password falls into the hands of the wrong persons.

Domain DNS

When you have just transferred your domain name or have bought your domain name from some place other than your web host, you may run into issues with pointing your domain name to your web host’s servers. To ensure that your website does not have downtime, you need to ensure that the DNS settings are properly changed over to the new configuration. This would mean either altering the Name Server or NS records or modifying the A records. Name Servers take upto 48 hours to migrate globally and this may affect the visibility of your website if not done properly. A records usually change in about 10 minutes. Each web host requires different setting to be put in, specific to the services that they offer. It;s best to take support of your web host and ask them to clarify any doubts that you may have before you start making changes to the DNS of your Domain Name.

Login URLs

Like passwords, a web hosting client needs to remember a list of different URL’s which will help him to login to different places. The control panel URL, billing area URL, Mailing List manager, Webmail URL, Support Forums URL, Documentation URL, Contact URL are some of the links that you need to remember or record, to make things easier.

Billing

Till the first billing cycle is over, most clients get confused or muddle up the account billing. This happens especially when changing hosts. Clients follow the old hosts billing cycle until they receive warning emails and account suspension emails from the new host. Some clients continue to use their old calendar reminders to make payments, thereby throwing things out of gear. Till about 1 year of having the account, billing issues like forgotten payments, delayed payments, account suspension occur, which can be simply avoided by following the reminders from the web hosting company and making payments on time.

Why Copying Another Website’s Code May Be Harmful

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Why Copying Another Website’s Code May Be Harmful

We all have a favorite website and a favorite website design. We are impressed by some websites and also detest many. We try and incorporate what we have seen and felt about other websites, into our own web design, sometimes copying large chunks of the other websites. While this may achieve a short term goal of having a website which is pleasing, it may not be a very good idea in the long term. This article explains why copying the code of another website may be harmful for your website in the long run.

Security Flaws

When you mindlessly copy code from another website, you also copy over the flaws and vulnerabilities associated with it. This means that you may be exposing your website to several threats and exploits, which you may be blissfully unaware of. 90% of website developers use template based code or reused code snippets for page elements like menus, slideshows, banners and even animation. There is never any improvements or modification made to the code and they just adapt it to suit the needs of the client. Little do they realise that if and when a security flaw is discovered in that code snippet, their client will also be affected. Once a website is made, very little care is given to updating the code or replacing old technology with new, thereby offering little hope for security. Once of our client’s website was defaced more than 3 times in one month, because the developers kept restoring the old site which contained an inherent vulnerability in its menu system. Despite repeated warnings and inconvenience, they were completely unaware about how to solve the issue and correct the menu.

Efficiency

Large companies very often have carefully planned websites, proportionate to the web hosting resources that they possess. This means that their systems are capable of handling heavy animation, large data processing and truckloads of visitor traffic. Simply copy pasting their code onto your website can drastically reduce the efficiency of your website, causing it to repel visitors rather than attract them. A lesson can be learnt by an upcoming online retail shop, which tried to introduce features similar to Amazon, on their own website. Little did they realize that Amazon had monster servers with tons of RAM and Processing Power, which their Shared Hosting was no match for. Their site started ranking lower and served up pages slower, due to the great disparity in what they wanted the website to do and the resources given to the website.

Copyright Infringement

Copying source code of a website is a Copyright violation. Large companies sue their competitors for copying their source code, thereby claiming damages worth millions of dollars. Although in developing countries like India, China and Brazil copying of source code is rampant, enforcement is weak. Even then, in all these countries, copyright infringement is a criminal offence and the punishment can be very severe. In India, the police can search and seize computers and devices used to copy the website code, without a warrant from a magistrate. This has greatly helped reduce copyright violations as far as software source code and websites is concerned.

SEO

Although there is no concrete indication to show that if your website has copied source code then search engines will penalize you, there is a large probability that your website will not do as well as the site from which you have copied. If you copy text from a website and use it on your own site, search engines are sure to give you a lower ranking. However, as mentioned earlier, many large websites which are our role models, have given great thought before designing their website in a particular way. Their website has been specifically designed for their website, their business, their brand, their target perception and their environment. It is exactly like a tailored outfit, which has been crafted as per the specific measurements of the customer. It just wont fit as well on anyone else.

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.

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.

Do Banking Websites Need Special Web Hosting Services?

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From Internet Banking to Online Shopping, many people wonder whether banks use special hosting services or servers with better security. Over the years banks have started using a mix of various technologies to protect and secure their customer’s data from unauthorized or malicious activity. This article points out some ways in which your net banking transactions are protected by the bank.

Isolated Hosting

Do Banking Websites Need Special Web Hosting Services?

Banks mostly do not outsource their web hosting or application hosting facilities. They prefer to do everything in-house. This means that they actually allocate a room or maybe even a building to house their IT infrastructure. This is done to isolate all their systems from any interference or security threats. They maintain the servers in server room and have in-house staff to take care of them round the clock. This expense is highly justified especially when you compare the risk and liability involved in case of banking frauds. Some banks do outsource their backup systems to third party vendors, just to maintain a remote location backup to be on the safe side. All the information is securely stored on all servers handling the data. Even the Internet Connection given to banks is a leased line i.e. a line dedicated to the bank, which runs directly from the ISP to their facility. This ensures stable connectivity for the banks network and also helps ensure isolation from other traffic, interference or interception. Banks cannot use Shared Hosting, especially to maintain control and flexibility and also to ensure confidentiality.

Encrypted Records

All traffic to and from the banks servers are encrypted to prevent any leak of data or any compromise of financial information. Even between the main office and branches, the entire communication channel is encrypted and all messages sent through the network are immune to tapping by unauthorized persons. It would be disastrous if a message being relayed by a bank’s branch or bank officer is manipulated to cause a wrongful financial loss or gain to any person. This means that from the sender’s end right upto the receiving end, the entire communication needs to be secret. Conventional hosting may not be a good option for the bank as encryption systems and security mechanisms may not be standard across various hosts.

Backups

Backups are taken in different forms at different times. Many banks mirror the data on their servers in real time so that failure of any Hardware will not result in loss of data. There is always redundancy in every aspect of the banks network. This means that every bit of hardware has a standby replacement ready for replacement incase the original fails. This minimizes downtime and helps the bank recover from a disaster. Banks also keep copies of the data stored outside their premises or in different locations or maybe even a different city, to help mitigate any risk of destruction or loss of the data. A Singapore based bank sends its yearly backups to its office in India, to ensure that in case of any natural or man made disaster hitting their locality or even city, their data is atleast safe and backed up. Banks are becoming more backup conscious especially in the light of the global terrorism scenario.

Security and Monitoring

Just like banks need physical security, their IT infrastructure needs virtual security as well. The places where their servers and data centers are located need to be secured and protected to prevent physical access to the information on the systems. Banks ideally have all their stored data in encrypted format, hence even if it is stolen, without the access credentials, the data will be junk for the thieves. Even if they can retrieve the files and documents, chances are that they wont be able to do much with them. Banks have a dedicated IT team to look after and monitor the resources round the clock. They may also outsource monitoring of their IT infra to various external agencies, incase they are handling some sensitive or country specific information on those servers. Apart from this, a team of network specialists is always on standby to initiate

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.