Archive for the 'General' Category
Colocation, which involves installing your company’s web servers and other networking gear in a secure data center environment, offers many advantages over monitoring and troubleshooting your own networking equipment in-house. Whether offering access to numerous carriers and other content providers, providing 24/7 technical support right at the end of a telephone, or just protecting your actual equipment from theft and tampering, colocation facilities are fast becoming indispensable to businesses who make their living on the World Wide Web.
For the majority of businesses and enterprising sole proprietors, having a reliably available commerce website is critical to their operations anymore. When these outfits go looking for a web hosting firm, they commonly expect that their website in question will be available to potential web visitors as close to twenty-four hours per day, seven days per week, as possible. Unfortunately, due to a variety of factors, some of which are beyond their control, web hosting companies simply are not one hundred percent perfect. So in order to entice a business or sole proprietor to keep their website with the firm, these web hosting providers offer uptime guarantees, or SLA’s for the website owners.
When a business or sole proprietor is on the lookout for web hosting for their website, there are a number of factors that they might consider. Chief among the most important of these is the characteristic of unlimited bandwidth hosting. A question is sometimes asked regarding this all important criteria, why do you need that much bandwidth? There are a variety of reasons that a business or individual would require unlimited bandwidth hosting for their website, including having a script heavy website which is also a database driven website, having a video and audio file intensive website, and having an all around enormous size of website.
There have been a multitude of changes in the last decade of computers and information technology, particularly within the realm of sever racks. For example, the very term “server rack” has undergone significant change from its original definitions, when it sprung from the related terms of data cabinets, enclosure cabinets, and computer racks. These computer racks were originally designed to hold hardware for computers on nineteen inch rack rails. The first of these computer specific racks were widely distributed by Electronic Industries Alliance, or EIA.
In web hosting services as in all things, you get what you pay for.
Free hosting for your website may seem like a bargain at first until you consider the hidden costs. You have an impossibly cumbersome web address to deal with, search engines will ignore you, and you can’t add message boards, online shopping carts, chatrooms or any of the other interactive features that will keep your prospective audience coming back for more. Why did you put all that energy into designing and uploading a website in the first place? Because you wanted to excite other people about something that excited you! With a free hosting service, however, your cherished site will become little more than a billboard for ads, banners, pop-ups and other spam commissioned by your host.
A network audit is something that every company should do, but very few actually ever get around to doing. For most it is important, but not the highest priority. Any company with a network that includes multiple users, intensive security protocols, or highly secure information should have an audit on even higher priority.
A network audit is similar to a tax audit in most respects. This is a comprehensive review of network policies and procedures, to ensure that security is adequate, that the network can keep up with traffic levels, that there is no malware on a network, and more. So what exactly might be included in a general network audit?
Any reader who has ever considered starting an Internet based business, or who already has a business for which he or she is planning to put up a website, will need to be familiar with a basic term. Rack Hosting is a layman’s phrase for what is more professionally called collocation hosting. The rack part of the phrase pertains to either buying or leasing a portion of space, or a rack of space, on a web hosting firm’s server. This gives the individual or business the rack space to host the online business. Such rack hosting is most ideal for anyone who is just starting out his or her website portion of the business, or for a business which is expanding. There are a variety of terrific benefits in such rack hosting to any enterprising website owner.
You can’t blame businesses who are wary of any new “buzzword” technology. They’ve been burned several times by previously hyped solutions that failed to live up to their billing, and sometimes caused more problems than they solved. Cloud computing is one of the latest discussion trends and not only do businesses find the term somewhat ambiguous, they are wondering if it will really be the next big thing, or, is it just superlative fluff?
When people need a user-friendly interface for managing their Web sites, they can trust in cPanel (“control panel”) to give them the powerful features they require. Computer binary and programming language code runs the Internet behind-the-scenes, but it can be extremely cumbersome for the novice business owner with other core competencies. It is easier to use point-and-click icons in an Application Programming Interface (API) that sends orders to the computer, network and Internet; it is easier to use cPanel.
One of the most popular programs for hosting a website is cPanel. Its popularity is due to its simple user interface and powerful administrative functions. In this article we will go over how to use some of the important modules.
First, we will look at how to protect a website directory from unauthorized access. Login to your server and select the icon on the main cPanel page that says “Password Protect Directories”. You should now see a list of your directories on your site; choose the directory you wish to protect. The next step is to type in a user name and password for this directory. That’s it, you have password protected the selected directory! It is this simplicity that makes cPanel a webmaster’s dream.
The second tip on configuring cPanel involves another security feature called the IP Deny Manage. The IP Deny Manager allows you to block an IP address, a domain name, or even a whole block of IP addresses. Using this feature is also simple, just click on the “IP Deny Manager” icon. This will bring up a page with a box at the top to add the ip or domain you wish to deny. Click the add button after you input the ip address and you have blocked that address. If you wish to remove a blocked address, simply click on the drop down box, select the ip or domain you wish to unblock and click the “Remove” button. Traffic is allowed once again from that machine.
The next useful security feature in cPanel we will explore is hot link protection. This tool will allow the webmaster to prevent other sites from linking directly to your content. You can define precisely which urls are allowed to hot link to your web resources. On the cPanel main page click on the icon that says “Hot Link Protection”. This will bring up a page with a text box in which you can type any urls that you wish to allow to directly link to your web resources. Below the large url textfield is a small input box that allows the user to determine what types of resources are able to be linked to. Separate different types by a comma. Below the resource box is an url redirect box that allows us to redirect the site attempting to hot link to us to another destination, alternatively we can show a customized error page.
Along with the previously mentioned redirect ability in the hot link utility is a dedicated redirect module. The icon on cPanel’s main page for this is labeled simply “Redirects”. When you open this you will see two input boxes near the top labeled “Add Redirect”. The one on the left is the address of your site to redirect from and the box on the left is the address to redirect the user to. You can redirect part of your website to another directory on your site or to a third party web address. After filling these input boxes in, leave the drop down box on temporary and click the “Add” button to enable redirection. Disabling this feature is as simple as selecting the drop down box under “Remove Redirect”, selecting the resource you were redirecting, and clicking the “Remove” button.
The next tip covers how to quickly set up an autoresponder email in the cPanel main page. The first step is to click on the icon labeled “Mail”. This will bring you to the mail manager interface. About half way down is the autoresponder setup; click this. Next, click on “Add Autoresponder”. This will open a form that looks similar to a regular email form in which you can set the various components of your email response. Before you begin, be sure you have a POP email address for the autoresponder. First, type in the email address of the autoresponder, the domain portion will already be filled in. The next input boxes are the standard “From” and “Subject” fields, fill these in and then type your auto reply message into the textbox area. You can enable the checkbox to allow html email or leave it unchecked for plain text. Finally, click the “Create” button at the bottom and your autoresponder is done!