SiteValley Web Hosting Blog

Picking The Best VPS Configuration For Your Website (Part 1)

Archie — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 17:04:52 +0000

Choosing The Right Way. Source: thefrisky.com

When website owners decide to purchase a Virtual Private Server for their websites, they are often concerned about its configuration. If upgrading from a shared hosting account, a user may pick a too weak server and put it down right after the website launch, as virtual servers do not have such strict limits on resource usage set, as shared ones do.

If someone is purchasing a VPS at once, without having the site actually tested elsewhere before, its owner may pick a wrong software configuration and not even have the website started (we don’t think that error pages hosting is funny or profitable).

A fair question is “Which VPS configuration to choose to provide my website with the most optimal hosting solution?” Here go the answers.

VPS Configuration Types

Virtual private servers differ in their configuration by many parameters. Those usually depend on their vendors’ likes and commercial interests; presence of trained personal, able to work with this or that software; welfare and funding, etc. Studying the market of VPSes we can define the following main configuration options:

1. Virtualization Type

Virtualization Technology. Source: ibm.com

Nowadays there are two most popular virtualization technologies – Xen and OpenVZ. We have already talked about both and compared them, so to make the long story short, we are just going to tell, that Xen technology supports full virtualization and a wide range of operating systems. It does not have any inter-carrier shared resources, what makes the work of each server autonomous (there is even a separate /swap partition created under each virtual machine). OpenVZ is a specialized Linux-solution, which is faster but it lets the carrier share resources (RAM/CPU), what may cause overload issues to both virtual and physical machines. On the other hand, resource sharing allows OpenVZ users to get temporary RAM-boost – so-called burst-RAM.

2. Control Panels

Domain Reselling as an Element of Reseller Hosting Business

Archie — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 14:44:13 +0000

You probably remember our articles on how to pick a platform for reseller hosting business and Reseller billing software comparison. As we continue the series of useful articles for resellers, the next thing we are going to talk about is domain reselling.

What Does It Work For?

Domain reselling business is to some extent easier to run than hosting reselling, and because of this many people choose to conduct this business. The advantage is obvious – unlike a hosting reseller, you don’t need to administer anything but the name servers (in most cases only once – after the domain purchase) and you are not supposed to resolve any technical problems, as there can hardly be any. What you need to do is just watch them being updated on time.

Taking into account the latest trends of services unification, it becomes understandable that in order to attract more customers a company should provide a range of services. Thus, to become a successful hosting reseller you also need to provide domain reselling. Your clients will be really glad to realize that they can pay for several services using one client area. Additionally, this will make things easier for both you and them in terms of support – you will be able to manage your customers’ domains.

How It Works?

Domain reselling is a special service, offered by domain registrars. The idea of this service is to increase the domain sales by attracting new registrants not directly, but through a reseller. This idea became very popular since domain reselling is more profitable for both the registrar and the reseller, than an affiliate program, which is not that easy to manage, considering the amount of domains sold annually.

Being resellers, registrants are able to control all their resold domains under their own accounts and to set custom prices. Branding is allowed as well. Branding option may be useful, if a simple reseller wants to become a featured one or even a domain investor. Usually, domain resellers choose a range of TLDs they are going to offer. Usually, the so-called popular TLDs: .COM, .NET, .ORG, .INFO, .BIZ. Domains with such TLDs used to have a floating price on the market and considering the discounts, the registrars provide their resellers with, the latter can make a good profit out of it. Additionally, being a domain reseller, a hosting reseller can make such marketing moves as free domain provision for the top hosting plan.

Summary

Reselling is a nice small business solution for those who do not have their own platform to start an own independent company. Such business, however, is a perfect launch pad, so it should be organized so, that it would look professional. We hope, that tips we publish will help you with improvement of your business. Next time we are going to bring out more ideas on how to improve your reseller business, as it may grow into a standalone company one day.

Varieties of WordPress Software Usage for Building Different Types of Websites

Archie — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 05:46:03 +0000

WordPress is a perfect blogging script, which has become very popular due to its user-friendliness. Many people, however, do not use it in any other way than for a blog or a newsfeed. We made another research on WP and found out that this software can be used for a number of other purposes. The websites below are built on the WordPress platform and enhanced with customized themes and plugins. This is an independent research, the websites are not strictly classified – we have picked those, which were built using WP in the most unusual way.

Build a Review Site

Let’s say you are interested in cinema, music or videos. You are likely to have your own opinion on all that. And most probably, you are intended to share your views and build a community around it. In this case you might take a look at http://typographica.org/ site owners. They deal with typographic design and make reviews of different fonts and type books. The way the website is built allows everyone to register with the site and gain Author or Contributor privileges for posting.

Build a Personal Website

If you want to have a personal website, but Facebook or Live Journal is not enough for you – build a WordPress-based website to share your ideas, thoughts and latest achievements in a newsfeed way. Such solution would fit those who are connected with art, sports or some social activities. One of the websites to look at is http://www.jefffinley.org – a personal site of a designer and artist, who partially deals with Internet marketing.

Place your Portfolio

If you are a designer or photographer or anyone else, who does their job well and has something to share, you should pick a portfolio to represent your best works. Many people install some gallery script in such cases, but WordPress can cope with this task just as good. If you look at http://lonnroth.info you will understand that a gallery has nothing to do with a well-built portfolio website.

Build a Gallery

When talking about galleries, we can’t neglect the fact that depending on the goal and the way you would like to have your content represented, even an online gallery may be created without using a gallery script. Taking http://cssremix.com as an example we clearly see, that a WordPress-based gallery is ways better, as it allows to lay out more image thumbnails, linked to real websites.

Open an Online Store

If you are running a small online business, a sophisticated and therefore expensive e-commerce software may not be needed for you, at least for now. That is where you can use WordPress to reach your goal. With WordPress enhanced with some of the E-commerce plug-ins you can run a website to sell your goods from. Here is the nice example of such a website: http://www.carmats.com.

Additional information and sources

WordPress community keeps growing. There are more and more plugins, themes and extensions released. Both developers and end users are much interested in making WP a tool, which would become one of the easiest sitebuilders known. The websites reviewed above are not all we found, but they are the ones, which drew our attention most, since we ourselves deal with both WordPress hosting and hosting of E-commerce and Gallery websites. This research lets us understand that a single script, if flavored with enthusiasm can do more, than usually expected. If you are interested in what else WordPress can do, have a look at http://www.webdesignerwall.com/trends/30-untypical-wordpress-sites/ and http://www.ndesign-studio.com/blog/best-wordpress-sites. Additionally, you can always follow updates on official WP site: http://wordpress.org/showcase/.

SiteValley Launches Official Facebook Page

Archie — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 07:36:45 +0000

Summer brings more time and space for fun, so we at Sitevalley decided to spend some time on creating additional space for us and our customers to have fun. As a result, we welcome you at our official Facebook page. Follow our most recent events; take part in serious and funny discussions; meet fellow bloggers and forum runners; find new business partners and clients.

Contribute

The page is only being developed now, so we would like you to leave your feedback on what sections you would like to see there. If you are an existing customer, you should definitely have something to say, after those weeks, months or years you’ve been with us. If you are only looking into purchasing a hosting account, you may have some questions, and our Facebook page is the great channel to communicate with us directly.

Meet Our Team

If you used to know us by signatures and discuss only support issues, you are going to have a perfect chance to have a less formal conversation with us. We are open for any dialogues and discussions. You can PM us for something personal or start topics to involve both us and other fans into a discussion.

Share Your Moods and Knowledge

Do you like posting on walls? Well, we do, so you are welcome to post links and videos you would like to share. We are sometimes asked for an example of a site, built via this or that script. Our privacy policy, however, does not allow us to share such information. You on the other hand, as a site owner can do that freely, so if you are fine with it – feel free to post a link to your site. Apart from letting the others know what particular software can be used for site building, you may expect attract new visitors, new clients and more traffic.

Enjoy

The word “fan” is one letter away from “fun”. Being SiteValley fan is having a lot of fun. Await promos, quizzes and contests and get ready to them – everyone is invited – take part and win some very cool prizes.

Live your life in SiteValley style – we give home for your websites, while your website is a home for your ideas. Join us to share your ideas and learn something new from your fellow-fans, bring your friends and relatives with you. World of hosting is not only coding, debugging and optimization – everyone who owns a website becomes a part of the Internet – a part of a system and already a culture of the new generation. What would it be, if everyone suddenly quit? We at SiteValley are striving for making the Internet a better place. If you share our beliefs, let us do that together.

SiteValley Facebook page – where our fans live.

5 Tips On How to Pick a Name for Your Business Website

Archie — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 06:18:31 +0000

Picking a domain name for your website is always a responsible step. If it is a business website – the responsibility is times higher. This article outlines couple of tips to help you make the right decision.

Register a Domain Before Your Website Goes Live

If you are only starting your online business, you are not likely to launch your website off hand. It does take time to work out a strategy, to have the website developed, to find reliable hosting, etc. If a web page is an additional marketing or media source for your business, it will take even more time – time which may be enough for someone to “steal” your domain name. Therefore, it is always better to register a domain name in advance. Maybe you will be paying extra, but it is anyway better, than trying to find the desired name on a marketplace or end up with no domain at all.

Make Out a Neat Catchy Name and Pick a Matching Extension

If you want your domain to become a word of mouth and a Google ranking rock star, make sure the name you make out is relatively short and easy to remember and to spell. Abbreviations may work in some cases, but make sure that they are understandable for your visitors.

Talking about domain extensions or TLD’s (Top Level Domains) for business websites, we usually mean such popular ones, as .COM, .NET and .BIZ. Additionally, the Internet was recently shocked with the launch of another TLD, perfectly fitting to companies and corporations – a .CO, which is now becoming more and more popular. The choice of the extension is essential, since some names may not match some TLD’s in terms of spelling and pronunciation, while some may hit a bull’s-eye (e.g. a Women’s Business Center, which launched womenbiz.biz).

Another thing to bear in mind is local search ranking. If your business is operating in some specific geographic area it is recommended to get the corresponding ccTLD (county-code Top Level Domain) like .co.uk, .de, .com.mx and so forth.

Try to have some relevant keywords in domain name

If SEO is one of your key promotion strategies, then consider registering a domain name with some of your main keywords included. This will help with your SEO efforts and will you’re your site more relevant in the eyes of potential customers. Moreover, when the search query is included in the domain name, search engines automatically make them bold, which increases the chances of getting higher CTR from organic listings. If you deal with car rent, a carsforrent.com domain would hit the spot. On the other hand, you should be careful with making out a domain name from keywords solely – this may make it spam-like and hardly attract any clients, as it won’t be memorable and easy-to-spell.

Create Aliases

Just one domain is not always enough for a serious business project. It is advisable to also have an alias. Aliases may play different roles. For instance, you have a mybizpage.com domain as a main one and register a .CO domain in addition. You add this mybizpage.co as a parked domain, so now you have two domains displaying the same content.

If you a running a blog or a forum along with your main website, you may use an alias for it. First, it is more secure for the main account, than having it hosted in the main domain’s subfolder (mybizpage.com/myblog); at second, you receive another domain for cross-linking and SEO. That’s where abbreviations and shortenings may come in handy.

Don’t Let Typos Steal Your Traffic

There is no spell check for domains, so people may have your domain name misprinted. In this case they will get a “not found” error message… unless a misprinted domain is registered and redirected to the correct one. Namely, you need to figure out, which typos are most likely to be made and register domains with those misprinted names. Then you set a simple redirect to your website, which will make you sure that all your potential customers hit the right site – yours. If you take your business seriously, you should take care of this; otherwise your competitors may do this and then all the traffic will be redirected to their website.

Conclusion

We hope those little tips will bring you some big assistance when you face a question of website launch and domain registration. In case you have already had some thoughts about starting your own web project, it may be worthy spending a couple of minutes browsing through our pages and studying the plans we provide. Our shared packages come with a free domain, so you may start making up a name for your website with the tips above in mind.

.CO Domains Registration is now available at SiteValley.com

Archie — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 05:23:45 +0000

Do you run a website for a company or a corporation? Or maybe you are just interested in registering another domain with a popular extension? Whatever it is going to be, you will be pleased to know that Sitevalley.com is now offering .CO domain registration for only $30/year.

.CO is a new country-code top level domain (ccTLD) for Colombia, which has burst into market as it was promoted as a domain, perfectly fitting for companies, corporations and e-commerce projects, one may run. Such promotion is obvious, as “Co” is a usual shortening for such businesses. Now this TLD has all the chances of becoming widely accepted among internet audience, as it is not only meaningful, but might also be a good alternative to the famous .com. With over 25 year presence on the market, .com has left very low chance to register a catchy and memorable domain name.

Another concern is URL shortening. Since .CO Internet S.A.S. has officially launched it on the 20^th of July, 2010, trademark holders have already reserved their brand domain names. Many of those did not actually register the same name with the new extension, but used abbreviations or shortenings. Thus Overstock.com got another name of o.co, while Twitter secured a t.co domain as a part of their service.

With Sitevalley.com besides paid registration you may even get a .CO domain for free, if you signup for our Small Business Hosting package with annual billing cycle. Don’t miss this opportunity!

Don’t hesitate to contact our Support Team. E-mail us to sales@sitevalley.com now to learn more details and dispel any doubts you may have.

USER-SIDE ACTIONS FOR SPAM PROTECTION IMPROVEMENT

Archie — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 21:01:03 +0000

Ever since Internet became available to the public and started being used on commercial purpose, the problem of SPAM emerged. There are many types of spamming – via e-mail, through instant messengers, even by posting forum threads or replies and blog comments. Today we are going to tell about ways of fighting the most irritating type of spam – e-mail spam.

What is SPAM? Ways It Works, Impact It Makes

SPAM'ed PC Image source: http://www.pc1news.com/

E-mail spam a.k.a. unsolicited bulk e-mail (UBE) started spreading in the early 90’s. Since most spam messages have commercial content, it is also called unsolicited commercial email (UCE). SPAM is usually sent through zombie networks (or botnets) – networks of virus or malware-infected computers. And if UCE just irritates the mailbox owner by the fact of its delivery, fraudulent or virus-containing spam may cause bigger problems – credit card information leaking, password and other security data loss or even making the recipient’s computer another zombie.

Nowadays all Internet, web hosting and public e-mail services providers have a ruling in their Terms of Services and Acceptable Use Policies (TOS/AUP) regarding outgoing spam delivery prohibition. Spammers cause much abuse, as the complaints sent to the administrators of the servers, where bulk mailers are located, may lead to the servers’ IP addresses getting into an IP blacklist. In some cases, when the complaints are multiple and the spammer cannot be taken out (sometimes it is really hard to trace and locate a spammer on the server) – the server may get null-routed. If it is a shared server, (spammers usually choose non-expensive shared plans to perform a “one-shot” bulk mail delivery or spam until the account is suspended/terminated) – it is usually a disaster for a hosting company, because when an IP address gets blacklisted – it may take up to a week to have it “delisted”. Now imagine how much time it will require for the upstream provider (datacenter) to review the null-route removal request (not counting the time required for the investigation).

User-end Spam Protection Measures

Let's Stop SPAM Image source: http://www.dayoldcake.com

It is obvious that server administrators need to take strict security measures to avoid any outgoing spamming attempts. But what about the incoming spam? Sure, anti-spam systems and filters used on the servers do not accept spam messages, but the rules set in there cannot be too strict, since it is a shared server and you simply cannot tell who really deals with online pharmacy and who is being spammed by some creepy offers. That’s where the user should take additional measures.

When talking about user-end means of spam prevention we first of all mean native control panel tools. There are two of them.

SpamAssassin

SpamAssassin is an open source spam filter, compatible with such mail services as procmail, sendmail, Postfix and qmail. Being easy to extend and to configure, it gets perfectly built into almost any hosting control panel. Below you can find the snapshots of DirectAdmin and cPanel-driven SpamAssasin tool:

General View and Main Options of Direct Admin-driven SpamAssassin

General View and Main Options of cPanel-based SpamAssassin

As you can see, both panels provide a little bit different interfaces and configuration options, however both have two main options we are to describe: blacklisting and “spam score” assignment.

The former option is the one to take out all the messages from a given domain (*@domain.com) or a separate mailbox under it (user@domain.com). It is recommended to use, if you are constantly receiving targeted spam from some organization. They may be just harmless newsfeeds but have no unsubscribe option, which is rather irritating. Thus, you either lock out the entire domain or a particular account (in case you are interested in getting some useful information from other mailboxes).

The “spam score” assignment option works in a different way. It passes all incoming email through with no blocks, but analyzes each of them. The analysis covers the email content: subject, headers, body (for spam-keywords, attachments, html-code, etc.). Once the set score is reached, the email is discarded and moved to the spam folder. This allows the user to analyze why the email was labeled as spam and either blacklist or whitelist it. SpamAssassin does have a sad drawback though – it cannot be “trained” to keep email addresses in memory, so that those messages, which constantly get into the spam box, could be sorted and then automatically blacklisted.

Manual Email Filtering

What cannot be done with the help of SpamAssassin, can be easily done manually by means of a control panel. Creation of additional filters will not only grant you better spam protection, it will also let you trace the most active outgoing addresses. This in turn allows to blacklist those addresses and lessen the load on your server – if the email is rejected by default, the system consumes less server resources, than for its content analysis.

Email filters in different control panels have different sets of options. Apart from the entire domain and single account filtering, all of them are able to filter e-mail subject and body. Depending on the configuration, some may filter by message size and others – by headers or added recipients (CC, BCC).

cPanel E-mail Filter View and Options

Direct Admin SPAM Filter View and Options

Report Spam

Public e-mail services like Gmail or Yahoo! provide their users with spam reporting options. This is very useful, since depending on the number of complaints on a single account/domain the strictness of measures to take varies. Your hosting provider may not provide you with such an option, but who says you are unable to report spam on your own? There are many Real-Time Block Lists (RBL blacklists) on the Web, two of them, however, are the most trusted and recommended for use – SpamCop and SpamHaus. Both services accept unofficial spam reports, so you should not experience any problems – just provide their team with as much information as possible. Namely, you need to provide the email address, domain and IP the spam was received from, and attach or better paste the subject of the spam mail you received together with headers and email body (but do not just forward the spam message).

Besides escaping spam delivery from the reported domains/IPs, you will help others, since once the spammer gets blacklisted, other servers which perform RBL block checks for incoming emails will stop receiving spam from those email and IP addresses as well.

Bottom Line

When hosting services users complain on incoming spam to their support team and server administrators, they usually receive a reply, that it is almost impossible to get a 100% spam protection. Some people get irritated when they hear it, but it really is true – server administrators cannot set too strict filtering rules, while spammers are becoming more and more sophisticated at bypassing the existing ones. The user-side actions, however, are able to increase this rate, so if our article assists you to reach a 99.9% spam protection rate, you make consider the spam-fighting mission accomplished.

Comparing Automatic Script Installers: Fantastico DeLuxe vs Installatron

Archie — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 13:57:26 +0000

We hope, you remember us posting an article, where two hosting control panels – cPanel and DirectAdmin were brought face to face. Well, if you do, you may find it interesting to learn the peculiarities of automatic script installers provided by those panels – Fantastico DeLuxe and Installatron.

Nowadays there is no need in downloading the source code of the needed software or web application to have it setup on the server. Compilations, failed installations and post-setup debugging are not needed anymore – everyone uses webhosting script installers now, saving time and becoming able to build their sites off-hand.

Needless to say, a professionally coded powerful script can make any website look way more attractive. Additional options and tools, offered by the scripts, help small business websites grow into big projects, and personal websites – grow into a community with a large number of visitors. It is really hard to believe that all this can be done with just a couple of clicks.

Let us take a closer look at both cPanel Fantastico and Installatron tools, provided with DirectAdmin hosting.

Fantastico DeLuxe

Fantastico installer is a really quick tool. It stores only one version of the needed software – the latest; sets up the database and its user on the fly and is fast about the update or removal of scripts. Choosing a cPanel host, you should keep in mind that Fantastico is an addon, which means that not all hosting companies can provide it along with their packages.

Before we proceed with detailed description and comparison of both tools, please check the categories and scripts that are offered by Fantastico DeLuxe on their official website.

Installatron Applications Installer

If you need a detailed description of what and when is happening on your server, Installatron is definitely the right choice for you. This software reports any step it is going to make and although it takes more time for script installation/removal to be carried out, such option may be useful, especially for newbies.

Installatron scripts can be checked out at their developers’ webpage. Meanwhile we will move on and compare both installers in action.

Fantastico vs Installatron

As you might have already noticed, both tools provide almost same scripts. If categorizing, those scripts may be distinguished as blogs, forums, content management systems (CMS), galleries, and e-commerce tools. Such groups are sorted in both installers to the left with right side left for software features description.

Fantastico General View

Installatron General View

As you can see, Installatron provides more details, than Fantastico – not only does it provide technical information about the product, but also shows related links. This love for details can also be seen in group script listing – this is something Fantastico does not have:

Installatron Group Listing Feature

This, of course, doesn’t grant Installatron an “Epic Win”. Sure, it is convenient for comparison of different tools of the same type, but most users already know exactly what they want to install by the time they start installation.

Let’s say we know what we are going to install and passed all the steps using both installers. Installation with Fantastico is a prompt 3-step action.

1 – You make a click to start new installation:

Step 1 of Script Installation Over Fantastico

2 – You choose the directory for the installation; provide access and administrator’s data.

Step 2 of Script Installation Over Fantastico

3 – You finish the installation. Database and user are setup automatically.

Step 3 of Script Installation Over Fantastico

Final installation message – and you can follow the URL to login to your administrative area right from Fantastico:

Fantastico Installation Summary

Installatron seems to be having more questions to ask you.

Starting Script Installation Over Installatron

Beside choosing the installation directory and providing access data in two different steps, you will need to choose the software version (not a bad idea actually, if your server has some restrictions or outdated software), the database creation way (automatic/manual) and… agree with the license.

Installatron: Choosing Installation Directory

Installatron: Choosing Version, Accepting License, Selecting Database Management Type

Installatron: Providing Access Data

Installatron: Finalizing Script Installation

Once the script is setup, Installatron provides installation summary the same way Fantastico does.

Installatron Installation Summary

You can view existing installation in both tools, but Installatron allows you to make it easier than Fantastico, whose developers moved the needed button to the very bottom.

Installatron Existing Installation View

Fantastico Existing Installation View

To Summarize

If you haven’t chosen your control panel yet, this comparative article might help you to make the right choice. It is obvious, that Fantastico is designed for those, who know what to do and how to do it. Such users use installers just to speed up their work – after that they do everything on their own.

Installatron users may feel more comfortable, as there’s more care taken of them both during software setup and after it – more tips, more support options which is very useful. An experienced user, however, may consider it a time waste, especially if administering dozens of account, which require a separate script to be installed under each addon or subdomain.

To make the long story short we may say that both script installers are going to be a perfect addon to your control panel. If you are an administrator of a multi-account (domain) infrastructure – you should definitely consider Fantastico. If you are planning to run your personal website or a small business project – Installatron is more likely to fit your needs.

If you are sure what you are going to host and already know the platform you would like to host it on, you may have a look at our shared hosting plans at SiteValley.com. We offer 4 specialized packages: Blog Hosting with WordPress preinstalled, Forum Hosting with phpBB at your disposal, Gallery Hosting with Coppermine ready for use and E-commerce Hosting with OsCommerce on a board.

Must Have: Top 5 Mozilla FireFox Addons For WebSite Administration

Archie — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 23:36:50 +0000

When uploading a personal or a business website via FTP or administering it through server-side software – sitebuilders, scripts, etc. – many people immediately check out the changes on the Web. Those, who are interested not only in the outlook of the web page, but also need some technical details (e.g. page size, page elements source and the time taken for loading), are recommended to tune-up their browsers with a Site Admin Kit from Sitevalley. It is our personal research, ran on the latest version of Mozilla Firefox with useful Firefox add ons, we picked for you.

Why So Slow? Checking Loading Speed With YSlow Firefox Addon

This question is usually asked by the site owners to their webmasters, who in turn ask the same question to their host’s support team. However, it is not always due to a hosting company not taking care of the server load or connectivity, it may also be a local ISP issue or… a resource intensity of the website, which requires more time to get loaded. Such sites usually include blogs and forums with a big number of posts and galleries with pictures. So, if you want to find out which end exactly the slowdown is taking place at, you may want to use the following addon:

YSlow Addon Loading Speed Report

YSlow addon is a small useful tool, which uses Yahoo!’s Smush.it service and is one of the top rated addons. It is installed on the right in the status bar and once being run, traces all the pages you load, providing the page size and telling the time it took to load.

What Is Stuffed There? Discovering Site Objects With AdBlock Plus Addon

The screen shot above shows, that the tested site is rather resource intensive, so no wonder it takes that much time to load. However, who said it cannot be optimized.

AdBlock Plus Addon Launch

For the administrator to do that, he or she will definitely need to know what exactly requires optimization. But do you to take a closer look?

If you are an active Internet surfer, who hates pop-up windows and different adverts, you might already have AdBlock Plus addon installed – AdBlock Plus download is available at the hyperlink above. If you are wondering, how an advert-blocking tool can help with website administration – have a look at the screen shot below:

AdBlock Plus Addon Pane

As far as you can see, a click on “Open blockable items” brings out a pane, where all web page elements are listed and sorted by type. Such way of displaying makes analysis a lot easier, though in fact it’s the same information, available in the Page Source View. After this analysis you understand, that there are too many pictures, for example, so you either remove some of them or compress them – here’s the simplest optimization way.

Have It Debugged With FireBug! How To Use FireBug Addon For Firefox

Optimization is not only about page size cutting. Sometimes the scripts, applied on the web page create much load and cause slowdown due to their misconfiguration. In order to have this resolved, the above mentioned addons are not going to be sufficient. Here is where some more serious means are needed.

Using a FireBug addon for your Mozilla Firefox browser you are getting enabled to not only analyze the page content, but also to debug and edit it. Firebug addon download may require YSlow to be installed for complete functionality. When you access your site, just click on the icon of a bug on the very right of your browser’s status bar and you will get a pane with several tabs:

FireBug Addon Console Tab

The “Console” tab is usually blank. However, in case there are any errors in the code, all of them are traced and displayed. Then there goes “HTML” tab, which allows to see the structure of the site:

FireBug Addon HTML Tab

There are dropdowns available to see the hierarchy. The right-side split provides the detailed code. Another tab gives a Cascade Style Sheet (CSS) layout:

FireBug Addon CSS Tab

“Script” is the next tab. It reveals all the scripts, executed on the website:

FireBug Addon Script Tab

Another useful tab is for Document Object Model (DOM). As you can see, it gives an outlet of all the objects, used on the website:

FireBug Addon DOM Tab

The last but not least tab (not taking into account YSlow, which is also available and which we have already got acquainted with) is “Net”:

FireBug Addon Net Tab

This one gives a full picture of the page loading process. It decomposes the page into minimal object (CSS, images, etc.) and counts their size and time, taken by any of them to get loaded. It really is very important for optimization analysis, as it allows to spot the most problem objects.

Stay alert!

If you are a Virtual or a Dedicated server user or even just a user of simple shared hosting, whose host has a public-available server status checking system, you may need to have another Firefox addon installed – Nagios Checker. After Nagios Checker download you will need to have it adjusted, this will require the details of the server, where Nagios software is installed.

Nagios Addon Minimized

Nagios addon gathers the information on service alerts from the Nagios server and displays them in the status bar:

In case of alerts it starts blinking with yellow or red (depending on the threat) and when you highlight it with the mouse it gives a full sheet:

Nagios Addon Alert Prompt

A click on the warning will bring you to the full Nagios web interface.

Time to Reload.

Let’s say you have finally optimized your website. You save the changes, reload the page and then see something is missing. You make another change, save it, reload the page again… this may last too long to bear.

Perhaps now, having installed a ReloadEvery addon you will save more time. After ReloadEvery addon download and installation it will be available on a right mouse button click:

Enabling ReloadEvery Addon

This Firefox addon will let you set the needed reload time interval and apply it to the needed tab or all tabs. In order avoid Firefox overload, reload settings are not saved and should be applied any time you launch your browser.

Summing up

The addons above are supposed to help you a lot with administration of your web site. Those tools are easy to install and rather user friendly. Being well developed, they do not overload the browser and their design does not obscure the working area. We picked this Top 5 using our own administrative experience and experience of our customers, whom some of those tools were suggested. In case you know another useful addon, which might be helpful for site administrators, feel free to share your ideas.

Verisign Announces Price Increase On .COM/.NET Domains

admin — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 17:08:46 +0000

Most of you are likely to have already heard something about Verisign planning to increase fees for .com and .net domain registration. New fees are to come into force on July, 1 2010 and are going to make 7% increase for .com domain registration and 10% increase for .net domains. The official announcement was published by Verisign a half a year ago – on the 17th of December, 2009 – but it seems to come into consumers’ concern only now.

Impact And Reaction

Though Verisign is not a domain registrar, they managed to prompt global price increase among their investors, sponsoring registrars and their resellers. However, if the prices announced by Verisign are expected to be $7.34 for .com domains and $4.65 for names with .net TLD, some domain name registrars have already sent .com/.net prices up to $15.

There is, however, some good news. Some companies started newsletter delivery with an offer to renew domain names registration for the old price and introduced discounts for new domain registrations. Such discounts are going to reduce the cost to even a smaller rate, than the current cost of the domain.\

Beside this, the price increase did not cause the chain reaction, so the price for other TLDs is not going to be changed. This means that anyone will be able to register domain names with different extensions for a lesser price.

What about SiteValley prices for domain registrations?

We at SiteValley.com have officially decided to keep our fees on the current level, so the .net/.com price is going to stay $12 as it was. Additionally, we are not going to cut any plans of free domains provision. If you are intended to get a stable and reliable hosting solution, you should definitely take a look at our Shared Hosting plans, any of which comes with a free domain, including .com and .net extensions.