Archive for June, 2011

posted by admin @ 19:17 PM
June 24, 2011

disqus commenting toolIf you deal with blogging and have your own web log with numerous articles and thankful active readers, you are most likely to need a powerful tool that would help you with comments management. Currently the most popular tool of the kind is Disqus and today we are going to talk about it specifically. It’s not new and by now it has gained great popularity. You are most likely to have seen it used at different blogs, including ours, but if you are still hesitant about whether to install it on your own blog or not, let us tell you something, that may help you make up your mind quickly.

Numerous comment options

Blogging wouldn’t have any sense, if the ideas we share didn’t get any reactions. Comments are those reactions and they are very important – they let make friends with the most active readers, build partnership with like-minded professionals, share opinions and search for verity in disputable situations. One of the drawbacks of standard blog commenting tools is accessibility – anytime one wants to leave a comment, they need to provide their name and email. The procedure doesn’t look inconvenient, but it has a rocky bottom – people willingly provide their email addresses, that may be used by a spammer if their database somehow gets compromised.

The Disqus tool offers a lot of options, that are not only convenient but also way more secure. You can leave your comments not only as a guest, but also using your Disqus, Google or Yahoo account. Apart from this, you can use your social media accounts – Twitter and Facebook; OpenID login is available as well. Choosing the preferred way of commenting will make your blog readers become recognizable and let them build their online reputation. This will also help you with news sharing.

Social media aspect

Yes, you heard it – anytime you issue a new post, you have more chances to let it become popular, if you use Disqus. As soon as your blog reader comments on it using Twitter or Facebook with a reaction, their comments are placed under their accounts on the correspondent social network. If your post is interesting and catchy enough, it may get hundreds of views overnight thank to prompt spreading. Apart from that you can make new acquaintances faster – once you have a small conversation in your comment section on your blog, you may bring it at once to Twitter or Facebook. On the one hand it will let you keep your comments clean, while on the other hand you will be able to build partner or friendly relationships faster and easier.

Fighting spam

We have already mentioned spam as one of the problems connected with blogging. Many spammers use blog comments to leave spamvertized messages so it sometimes becomes hard to monitor blog comment sections. Even anti-spam tools, that really are very helpful, cannot cover all comments. And if your blog is rather popular and the spammers leave messages that pass all checks – finding non-spam comments may be hard.

Using Disqus makes things easier – since it disables native comments tool after the installation, all human comments arrive to Disqus, thus all the comments that you’ll keep receiving under the native comment section in your blog admin panel will be spamvertized and you can remove all of them without hesitations. As for spam in Disqus – their servers have a great database that is constantly updated and maintained, additionally you will be able to use administration dashboard to set your own comment policy.

If you want your blog to become more popular and live, you should look into installing Disqus comments tool on it. With its help you will be able to optimize the work of your blog and resolve a great deal of issues, connected with commenting – easier accessibility and high spam-protection will let both you and your thankful readers enjoy your blog and use it more actively.

posted by admin @ 19:19 PM
June 17, 2011

windows vps hostingRecently one of our readers asked us to post an article about the benefits of Windows driven VPS hosting. Since we’ve been looking into provision of this service as well, there was some interesting information gathered and we would like to share this with you. We thought that showing both upsides and downsides of this type of hosting is more fair. Sure, this article is posted from our point of view, so it reviews peculiarities of Windows hosting in terms of use of VPS-hosting specifically as a platform.

How is Windows run on VPS servers?

Running Windows on VPS usually implies the use of two types of virtualization technologies – XEN – the technology, generally applied in creation of fully virtualized VPS platforms and Hyper-V – special virtualization system, developed by Microsoft to run Windows VPS server only. XEN is known to many of our readers – this virtualization technology allows to create and manage virtual servers keeping them completely isolated from each other, while using same hardware resources by different system kernels – each fully virtualized environment keeps the system with its kernel that addresses to the layer of virtualized hardware.

As for Hyper-V – this technology needs some description. In fact, it is a hypervisor that works on the basis of partitioning with at least one parent partition that has access to hardware and can create child partitions that host guest OSs within virtual environment – just like XEN and its interfaces. But if you take a closer look, you can see that Hyper-V is a version of core installation of Windows Server 2008 with virtualization support – which makes it look much like OpenVZ that utilizes modified Linux kernel. Thus, it is fair to call it a symbiosis of two technologies.

What is so special about Windows VPS Hosting?

VPS as a platform to run Windows on has become a real discovery for many users who needed Windows-based hosting but could hardly afford a dedicated server while experiencing issues with shared hosting, run under this OS. Indeed, using Windows as a server OS and namely for hosting needs is quite troublesome – initial resource usage is higher than that under Linux, disk usage policy and work of the disk subsystem is more complex, and full functional access can be achieved only by establishment of remote desktop connection (RDP) or a control panel. The latter aspect caused the biggest inconvenience, since shared hosting users are not usually provided with RDP access while the control panel functionality is limited so, that the lack of privileges makes the use of many tools impossible.

Use of VPS hosting has solved many of those problems – VPS carriers with large amounts of RAM allowed to delegate resources that are enough for the system to operate with additional software and cover the loads created by resource intensive programs (e.g. Microsoft Exchange server); RAID hard disk arrays + virtual disk partitioning allowed to minimize the I/O loads and increase the read/writing speed. Finally, a VPS allowed to create isolated environment, which enabled the users to manage their servers under “Administrator” privileges.

What are the downsides to keep in mind?

Besides the obvious upsides of Windows-based VPS hosting, there are, however, downsides that should be considered while making the choice. First of all the price – when it comes to evaluation of Windows hosting in general and its hosting on a standalone server in particular, all licenses, starting from the OS itself and all software, seem to cost an arm and a leg. The server is not going to be cheap as well – as mentioned above, Windows requires more resources, so the least powerful virtual server you will need is a XEN-based VPS – which are more expensive than those under OpenVZ – with 1 GB of RAM at minimum (you can find plans with 512 MB of RAM offered, but there won’t be much resources left to operate with). A Hyper-V based server with same resource rates will grant you more stable hosting, but it is going to cost more.

Mentioning this downside we don’t mean that the pricing difference is going to reflect in tens of dollars compared to Linux VPS hosting, but this may make some users think, whether they need it – at least those, who are not sure, if they are going to prefer ASP and .NET to PHP. If you are sure about the use of Microsoft software, here are some more tips on what you should be careful about.

Accessibility. You may be happy about having RDP and control panel access to your server – both provide clear intuitive interfaces, the former actually makes you feel like sitting at your home desktop, but are those means actually enough? If your server gets too overloaded, you may not be able to access it to reboot it, so you will need to send a support request which definitely causes a time loss. What you may make sure about before choosing your Windows-driven VPS host, is if they offer remote reboots from the host’s client panel – this may save your time.

Monitoring. Unlike Linux-based VPS servers, those running Windows need more severe monitoring, which may result into either bigger expenses – so you will need to hire an administrator or involve your host’s support team – or stresses, caused by constant inspection of your server’s state and investigation of issues it has or may have in future.

There are even more aspects, related to OS Windows itself to be kept in mind – security, as Windows is quite vulnerable; software-related; usability-related and others. So it is fair to get back to the question, whether you really need it. Many webmasters who are asked to create a site to work on a Windows server usually ask this question. And when they receive a solid “yes” they want the project to be described as clearly as possible. Thus, if you imagine your project well and see the full picture of how it is going to be run and why exactly it needs Windows, you are on the right way, and we hope, that your experience in this is going to be positive.

skype down yesterdayYesterday was another day the unavailability of Skype brought great disservice. Although this fail was not global, it did affect many users including those who run business over Internet or use the Web as a powerful secondary channel with Skype serving for business communication. Support calls and chat sessions, on-line meetings – all types of conversations, run over Skype dropped dead having if not paralyzed then significantly disrupted the activity of hosting providers, e-shops, on-line consulting agencies and many more businesses. It’s not know for sure why this outage took place, but that is not something we are going to discuss today.

Today we will tell you how to take serious preventive measures to avoid such issues in future. In fact it is not recommended to use Skype or similar services as a primary channel for business communication, no matter if this communication is within the organization or between the company personnel and their customers, but if you do, you should definitely back them up.

Backing up Communication Channel Within the Organization

To sound the most helpful and to cover as many aspects as possible we decided to split our tips into ones for issues with communication within the company and into those that affect communication between staff and customers. Let us start from company internal issues since those are kind of easier to be resolved, at least in terms of organization of the backup channel, since the ways to do that may be quite difficult.

Instant Messengers

Facebook chat and Google Talk have pushed traditional instant messengers out, but the protocols are still working and worth being used. Yes sir, dig out your good old AIM or ICQ accounts’ credentials, fire up your clients and bring the conversation there. An interesting thing about those is that you can easily move all your business contacts to a separate list that is going to make the communication easier. Moreover, some of the latest ICQ clients support audio and video conversations, too.

Local Chat Platform

If you limit communication within your company to instant messaging on the one hand and want to make it secure on the other hand, there’s nothing better than setup a Jabber (XMPP protocol based) server and get some Jabber-complient client to keep all your internal business discussions within it. A well-organized server will let you communicate with your partners and gather them in conference rooms world wide, regardless of their location. And if some serious security is required, you may limit your Jabber server accessibility so that your partners could connect to it over VPN.

Local VoIP Platform

If live audio conversations are vital, you can either setup a server that would support voice over IP technology or signup for some VoIP service. Both variants imply the possibility to make calls over Internet using special software installed on local machines that are connected with the VoIP server. Organizing such a channel for communication within the organization is going to be rather cheap since you and your partners will only use extensions, which does not expect any cell or land phone calls being made. Other solutions will require more expenses which nevertheless stay worthwhile.

Backing up Communication Channel Between Personnel and Customers

Instant Messengers

Those can be used as a backup solution for communications between staff and your customers, too. There are, however, aspects that should be kept in mind while moving your support chat to AIM or any other service. First things first, using public messengers for communication with your customers does not look quite professional – so while switching to those channels, even temporarily you need to create a special user login, which name would somehow be connected with your company and your business. Another thing to check is your customers’ tastes – some may use MSN, some prefer AOL, some chat via ICQ. Finally, you will need to be able to update your clients on that rather quickly – using your corporate blog, forum, Twitter account or Facebook or even main website page will be fine to provide those backup account names.

On-site chat system

This is something that should actually be a primary channel and of course you will be hardly able to install it as a backup channel once your experience a crash, but if you have a chat system but prefer using Skype instead, it is high time to refer your clients there. It may also be worthwhile to reconsider the system in use so that it wouldn’t make you to switch to Skype at least for instant messaging – currently many chat systems have convenient interface and support numerous features – chat-to-email delivery, operator or service rating and many more.

VoIP Platform

Unlike Jabber that is mostly used only locally, VoIP platform can be used as a communication channel for both staff and customers. This channel however, will require more expenses than an “internal” one since you will need to have a land line phone number bound to your VoIP server. Thus, accepting call withing roaming and from cell-phones may affect your balance. On the other hand, if it is a backup solution and the issue is not to last long – you can sacrifice your funds for maximum uptime of your service.

As far as you can see, there are many other ways to build a reliable on-line communication channel for your business. Some of them may not be free but the money you will spend on those will provide your with great reliability and good quality of connectivity. You can use one of very cheap VPS plans we offer to set up a communication platform for your business. In this article we do not deface Skype, of course – we just issue a friendly reminder for everyone, who use public communication services for business activity since those may fail and damage your business easily.

posted by admin @ 19:25 PM
June 3, 2011

RAMThis question is the one many people ask themselves before purchasing their first VPS. Indeed, when you only check out the plans, you cannot tell for sure what intensity of RAM usage you expect. What you know, is the approximate amount of physical memory used by the software you are going to run on your VPS. Software system requirements, however, are usually not enough to estimate the real use of RAM needed for the particular application or script to operate, and thus it is hard to know how much physical memory the entire server with all its background processes in general is going to need.

There are some facts that you know that might help you there. For instance, we know that the server in its basic installation – usually LAMP – requires at least 128 MB of RAM. Choice of the control panel will make you add another 64 MB to your requirements (if your choose WebMin or DirectAdmin) or even 128 MB – if you want to run cPanel. This makes a minimum of 256 MB with a lack of operating options. What you can run there is email and FTP exchange (not intensive though) and hosting of simple websites. Dynamic and script-driven websites, such as CMS will also fit this configuration but you may need to implement many adjustments, some of which can limit the functionality of your online project.

If you look into running something more serious on the Web, you will need to search for a more solid solution. Let us review bigger VPS configurations and estimate what can be hosted there.

512 MB

This is one of the most popular configurations available on the market of VPS hosting. A VPS with 512 MB of RAM usually becomes a step-up for users who have never dealt with VPS servers before and who gave this type service a try on a smaller plan and then requested an upgrade.

If you want to host E-commerce software or run a script that is going to use your server resources constantly – a VPS with 512 MB of RAM is going to suit you perfectly. This plan will also fit those, who look into using a VPS as a platform for hosting reselling – simple shared hosting, of course. WordPress and Magento users will also find such a VPS a better luck, since 256 MB virtual machines never let them run those CMS full-throttle.

1024 MB

A one-Gig VPS is a choice of a Pro. Many gurus and experienced webmasters, as well as resellers and other online business holders, either purchase those servers at once or upgrade to them shortly.

If you deal with hosting reselling, you will find a VPS with 1024 MB RAM to be a perfect solution for serious reseller business. Unlike smaller VPS plans, those and higher let you offer the so-called Master reseller hosting which implies that your resellers will be able to sell hosting, too. And of course, a more powerful VPS will let you manage the clients easier. Indeed, if you have a thousand clients or more, whatever the business you do is, why should you partition them into groups to send emails hourly so as not to overload the server. You deal with e-commerce, so you must have some special offers and discounts and you want to be sure, everyone knows it – a powerful VPS will let you notify everyone at once without overloads or any other issues.

2048 MB

If you need a power of a dedicated server, but do not want to pay extra for the features you do not need, a 2 GB VPS is something you will like.

Those servers are usually the top ones among many VPS hosting providers and thus have the highest privileges on the carrier. This feature will make you feel absolutely comfortably on your VPS and it is worth it. Such a powerful VPS is heaven for big online projects and geeky things – those servers are capable of letting you refuse from standard server configuration, so one can easily install there such popular software as Java, Tomcat webserver, FFMPEG and many other tools, to make their online project a hi-tech multimedia pad.

We hope that this review of the most popular VPS plans helped you find out what you need or may need for your online business. If it did, you may like the news that since recently we run a special offer that has doubled RAM on all our VPS servers, so now our 256 MB, 512 MB and 1024 MB plans come with 512, 1024 and 2048 Megabytes of RAM accordingly.

But if you think VPS is not enough for you, take a look at our cheap Linux dedicated server hosting offers.