Using web hosting services normally presumes storing content located on a remote server that is available online 24x7x365, 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 »
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 »
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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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 »
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.