Web Host Uptime Monitoring purpose and tools
Posted by Smirnovi4 in Technology on February 24, 2010
Using web hosting services normally presumes storing content located on a remote server that is available online 24×7x365, which means that such a hosting server is powered and connected to the Internet constantly. A very important notion in web hosting technology is uptime. Wikipedia defines it in the following way: “Hosting uptime refers to the percentage of time the host is accessible via the internet“, therefore, if a customer is paying for hosting services, it is crucial for him to expect and receive the maximum uptime values. Although hosting companies do apply various monitoring techniques to track server’s state at any given moment of time, no technology is perfect and thus it is important to perform your own independent uptime monitoring, which may come in handy in emergency situations. So how do you measure uptime values correctly? Should you expect a 100% uptime? What web site monitoring tools are available to a regular user? These questions are not as simple as they appear at a first glance. Information in this article will be useful to those interested in understanding and monitoring uptime of an account or server. Read the rest of this entry »
Gmail made social – Google Buzz social network is released
Google Buzz and Gmail logos
On Feb 9 2010 Google launched its new product named “Buzz”. This is an integrated into Gmail Google social network, the primary purpose of which is provision of social networking capabilities to Gmail accounts. For any Gmail account holder social Buzz now appears as an additional option in their menu. As posted on Google Official blog, developers see a huge social network underneath Gmail. This vision is really reasonable, as Gmail services are not only free and very popular, but are also much interconnected. A great example of the linking and integration is a bundle of Gmail and Google talk, which let’s you chat to people you send emails to from your Gmail. In this post you will find a brief Google Buzz review describing its distinctive features. Read the rest of this entry »
Boosting Up Blog Capabilities with Essential Wordpress Plugins
In this post I would like to share some of the great Wordpress plugins available today free of charge. As you probably know, there are thousands of plugins available today. It can be a tough goal to select the ones that not only perform the required actions, but also are stable and secure. In order to provide you with some kind of a starting point I have conducted a search for essential WordPress plugins. This is a sort of a recommendation review aimed at introducing available capabilities and helping you choose what suits you best.
I tried to introduce some order into the numerous plugins functionality descriptions and came up with the following purpose classification matrix:
Plugin purpose classification matrix
I have been looking for some great plugins for WP lately. In this post I would like to share the results of search for the essential WP plugins available today free of charge. The main idea was to find the most useful plugins using the minimalistic approach. What this means is that as there are literally hundred thousands of tools available nowadays only few of them are stable, efficient, comfortable and productive. So I set off to find the plugins that may be helpful both to me and all of you out there. So below is what I wound up with.
In order to introduce some order into the functionality descriptions of numerous plugins the following purpose classification matrix has been created:
I placed the useful plugins into groups according to this matrix. So let’s take a closer look…
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Bringing Forth Pros and Cons of VPS and Reseller Web Hosting Plans
Posted by Smirnovi4 in Uncategorized on January 8, 2010
Many of web hosting newbies bring up a question about differences between a reseller hosting and a VPS and wondering which one is best for their project needs. Unfortunately, it is not that simple to answer this question. There is a number of touches that require a closer investigation on the subject to give a decent answer. First of all, a lot depends on the initial aim, i.e. whether the account will be used to resell hosting, utilized directly to host own content, used as a test ground for products in development or all at once. Moreover, Skills possessed by an owner of an account matter a lot as well as the price differences. Let’s take a closer look at both hosting types to draw reasonable conclusions… Read the rest of this entry »
Simple, yet powerful Wordpress backup script. Cron job setup howto.
Backups as precautions against data loss.
Every hosting account holder must understand the importance of backups. They play the same role in information technology, a car insurance plays in everyday life. Backups help you in case of unexpected issues with content on your account. Forums, blogs and similar projects take a lot of time to develop, but one serious spontaneous error in the system can damage all your information or even make it vanish entirely. This can happen due to numerous reasons: hardware and software faults, to name a few. Take into consideration such widely spread activity as hacking, and you will realize the scale of existing menaces. As a matter of fact, any Wordpress blog, which is not updated on time, can easily fall victim to such malicious activity . This is also true for any kind of web software. Last but not least, you can accidentally make errors in data of your blog yourself, and then you need a point to roll back to. Backups enable you to do just that.
One of the easiest ways to make sure you can recover after most content related disasters is to make backups of your account from time to time. In case you run a Wordpress based blog, having a backup of entire account is not necessary. It is enough to simply have a couple of healthy database dumps, which contain all important information, including your posts. Since posts are the most important part of any blog, having them in reserve archives saves you a lot of work in case of emergency restoration.
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OpenVZ and XEN virtualization technology insight and comparison
Posted by Smirnovi4 in Technology on December 8, 2009
Virtualization is a widely used technology nowadays. A whole set of hosting plans is based on it – the so-called Virtual Private Servers (VPS). They allow steady transition from regular shared to the most powerful dedicated solutions. While big projects may require the power of an independent dedicated server, some personal and small-to-medium businesses may not need such resources at high costs at first. At the same time the needs of such customers may not be satisfied with what regular shared hosting has to offer due its nature . Unlike shared hosting, V PS allows full isolation from other users on the host server. It provides full control over the account (i.e. root access), remote reboots and system restore.
Nowadays various approaches and implementations of virtualization exist. In this article we will compare two most widely used virtualization engines: OpenVZ and Xen. The main goal of the article is to provide basic concept, and outline the differences and similarities of the two engines.
Concept and vision of Windows Azure Cloud Platform
As recently announced by well a known IT giant Microsoft, its Windows Azure Cloud Platform will be launched into production state on January 1 2010. Currently the platform is in its technical preview state, which in a way means that it is not widely available to anyone who wants to “taste” it.
So what is this Cloud Platform? To answer this question we need to answer a question of what a cloud computing is first. As explained by Wikipedia: “Cloud computing is Internet- (“cloud-”) based development and use of computer technology”. Simply speaking, this is an internet based environment aimed at providing software in a form of a ready to use service, with no need to worry about technical specification of the hardware required, installation and configuration procedures and maintenance. All this is being carried out on the side of the Host, on a so-called “Cloud Platform”.
Essential web site security measures
Most hosts today offer server-side security, which means that they protect the servers including the OS and services that run on it. However this doesn’t mean that they guarantee protection of either content or software on your hosting account. There are two main reasons for this:
- You possesses full login information to your account. This means that if a password is stolen from you the host stops being capable of protecting anything on your hosting account.
- You are free to install software such as CMS, Ecommerce systems, Blogs, Forums etc. This in turn means that if you put an application that has vulnerabilities your entire site will be in danger. Of course hosts could track all installations on the server, but for a shared server this would simply mean existence of a whole army of administrators monitoring the server 24×7x365 and no such thing as cheap web-hosting would be possible.
As you see the responsibility for keeping your site up-to-date with latest security measures lies mostly on you. But why so much mess about this security thing? Because there are lots of hackers constantly looking for ways to take advantage of someone else’s information. There is no miracle cure for protecting from everything, but there are definitely a few things you can do to ensure better website security. In this article we will tell you about basic web site security measures.
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Google Wave Opinions and Tips
There is a huge number of articles available these days about Google Wave. Some of them describe various features that are yet to be and already are implemented in this astonishing new technology. What I would like to share in this post is our impressions from using Google Wave. Our Sitevalley team got sweet opportunity to get an invitation to use Wave Preview while it is still not freely available to everyone and for this we would like to thank Google a lot! From very start it was a big load of fun to play with waves and actually most features are still not clear enough for us. Here you will find a few feature reviews, some basics about the conception of Google Wave and several personal impressions we got when using it. I also attached a nice extension list and cool video for those who is starting to use Google Wave or is at least interested in doing so some time soon.
SIMPLEST WEBSITE WITH JOOMLA (PART 2)
Welcome back to Sitevalley blog. In the previous post we have covered the basics of creating the content for your site when using ‘Joomla’ as Content Management Systems. Joomla can be easily installed using the ‘Installtron’ in your DirectAdmin control panel. The ‘Joomla’ installation is available on ‘All-inclusive’ Plan.
This is the second part of the tutorial dedicated to the creation of the simplest website. Here we will cover the creation of menus and layout of your website.
So far we’ve been pursuing the following goals:
- Main topic of the site should be information about computers;
- There should be 4 sections dedicated to history of computing, hardware, programming languages and computer networking.
- There should also be a section for the owner of the site that will be dedicated to his personal news and the like.
- The front page should be dedicated to special stuff.
- The sections for links, search page and news feeds dedicated to computers should be included. Also news feed should be available on the front page.
At this point you should have performed all actions described in the first part of the tutorial. Therefore you now have all the content related data in your Joomla.
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