HTTP Blog

To enable success of your website, you require a perfect web host to suit your needs. The reviews of the web hosting company should contain should give a detailed picture of services offered to you. For example, a 24 hour, round the clock support will be of great help to you to tackle any problem at a time, beyond office hours. The review should also indicate the policy of the host on traffic overages, as you may be charged for exceeding limit when you get spike in traffic. You can also study the refund policy and guaranteed uptime of the web hosting company in the event of your website going down.

From a feedback, you will come to know about the satisfied clients of the web hosting company. You can find links to sites hosted by them so that you can contact the webmasters. You will be able to discover whether they are satisfied with the web hosting company. With reviews and feed back you can get an idea about the essential e-commerce features such as SSL technology, MySQL database, shopping cart etc. If you are an individual webmaster, it is not possible for you to know about the web hosting companies listed in the directories. Many websites encourage their visitors to post their feedback in comments field of reviews. Visitors can freely leave their feedbacks on the review page, when they want to say something about the web hosting company.

Many websites constantly update the reviews and feedbacks which are really useful to you. By studying reviews, feedbacks and informative articles you can get more knowledge about the hosting offers and latest developments in the field. The search of reviews and feedbacks helps both a raw beginner in the field as well as business owners who require powerful web hosting solutions and features such as dedicated or VPS servers, Linux or Windows etc.. Feedbacks will give you an idea and first hand knowledge of what the experienced users are thinking about the web hosting company. While choosing a web hosting company you will be looking for best deals and cheap offers from web hosting companies. You can take the guidance from many hosting reviews and customers’ feedback so that you can choose a best provider. Many hosts provide management and updates for their customers and facilities to control their web account, perform administrative tasks and change passwords. When choosing a web hosting company for hosting your site, you can look for reviews and feedback on the companies to make a comparative study. You can take the help of major search engines like Yahoo and Google for this purpose.

Countless domain names are bought and sold everyday. If you currently buy or are thinking about buying domain names with the intent of reselling them, for profit, you might want to be a bit more cautious when it comes to who you sell them to.

There are unscrupulous individuals who obtain domain names by purchasing them, using PayPal or a similar service, only to request a refund after the domain name has been transferred to them.

Unfortunately, it is next to impossible for the seller to re-gain possession of the domain. Why? The buyer has full control of this domain, after the transfer.

There is no law that forces him to return it, as requesting a refund from a payment service is legal. (Because a domain name is a non-tangible item.)

Large domain registrars make it a practice not to discuss fraudulent domain transfers, with anyone. Simply put, if you are authorized to transfer a domain, it is up to you to make an informed decision in regard to the buyer.

This post was not intended to discourage anyone from buying and selling domains. The majority of buyers are honest and are not out to get something for nothing. It’s just a reminder to use caution, in any type of business dealing.

If you are looking for a great way to encourage more people to leave comments, on your blog, there is a relatively new Wordpress plug-in that will do just that. The idea behind it is actually quite ingenious.

Comments are very important to the popularity of any blog, regardless of the niche. Without visitor interaction your blog is destined to remain ‘the new kid on the block’. Unfortunately, that is almost a fate worse than death.

Wordpress Magnet encourages visitors to leave interesting comments, relative to the subject matter, by offering something in return. This ‘something’ is whatever you decide on. It can be a free eBook, report or newsletter. It might even be a discount on your product or service. It’s really up to you.

This plug-in can be used on all of your Wordpress blogs and is very easy to install and set up. There is a small charge for it, but it is WELL WORTH the investment.

In the event you are dissatisfied with the results, Wordpress Magnet comes with a 60 day money back guarantee. (No questions asked!)

Since almost everyone loves to get something for free, this is truly a unique idea. What have you got to lose? Consider the use of Wordpress Magnet, today!

I recently bought twenty .info domain names with the intent of setting up my own groovy blog network. Yes, you guessed it; I want to be a big Internet blog mogul some day.

I was very happy with my purchase, as my total investment was less than $25. ‘What a bargain’, I though to myself. That is until a friend of mine decided it was time to burst my bubble.

It seems that many people, my friend included, look at .info domains as an inferior species. They feel that no matter how well they are developed and how much they are promoted, they will never amount to much.

As the owner of all of these brand-new, eagerly awaiting to be developed, domains I am hoping beyond all hope that it just isn’t so.

I realize that I will be missing out on some traffic, because I’m not a .com. The person that types in the URL abc123.com will probably not try abc123.info, as well. But, that is something that I’m willing to live with.

Personally, I think a website is successful because of how it is marketed not because it has the distinction of being a .com. Here’s hoping I’m right!

Some fellas are experiencing errors with long form post data - when users press send button not all form fields are submitted. This is because Cpanel with suhosin patch does accept only max post vars of 200. Avactis shopping cart users may experience problems with country post data. The fix is very easy, you need to add the following string to your php.ini

On most Linux platforms your php.ini can be found /usr/local/lib directory. Full path: /usr/local/lib/php.ini

Add to the bottom of this file:

suhosin.post.max_vars = 2048

Remember to restart your Apache daemon and you should be set. You can check the new value with phpinfo(); function output. Cheers!

Sorry for being a bit lazy and non posting lately. It’s been  busy time for me and finally I thought I should follow up and post something useful.

I joined another company that uses Vmware for all test environments, including Linux and Windows OS. It’s pretty neat virtualization software - you can install new nodes without sitting near the console in a cold data center room and it fully supports Windows 2003 and Windows XP. We have been running Suse Enterprise versions on it using Oracle DB and so far so good.

The only drawback of using virtual private servers is the low performance on the IO - we have been using SCSI disks some in RAID 10 configuration but it still much lower than for a dedicated box. However, as I previously noted vmware is great FREE software that you can run for almost any test environment or even a small secondary daemons - SMTP or DNS, for example. Stay tunned for more news!

Exit from boot menu. Continue with flow.
Preparing to decompress…
100%
Decompressing SW from flash
100%

OK
Running from RAM…

******************************************************************
*** Running SW Ver. 1.0.3 Date 29-Mar-2007 Time 10:49:18 ***
******************************************************************

HW version is 00.03.00
Base Mac address is: 00:1d:7e:7a:2a:81
Dram size is : 32M bytes
Dram first block size is : 17152K bytes
Dram first PTR is : 0xF40000
Flash size is: 8M
01-Jan-2000 01:01:05 %CDB-I-LOADCONFIG: Loading startup configuration.
Device configuration:
PCB revision: 1
Slot 1 - SRW2008 HW Rev. 0.1
Tapi Version: v1.3.3.1
Core Version: v1.3.3.1
01-Jan-2000 01:01:17 %OS-A-MEMORY: Main System Memory Pool Overflow
01-Jan-2000 01:01:17 %ERHG-E-SEND: return to the DEFAULT sizes of TABLEs
01-Jan-2000 01:01:17 %ERHG-E-SEND: RSP_INIT: Fatal Error

**************************************************
***************** SYSTEM RESET *****************
**************************************************

Some users may be getting the above error message with Linksys SRW2008 Gigabit switch.

To fix this error you should delete the config file. Hit the Escape key when the following is displayed on the switch console:

Autoboot in 2 seconds - press RETURN or Esc. to abort and enter prom.

when the system boots up and then Chose Delete File option. After enter the filename:

config

and hit enter. Reboot the switch and switch should be set to all defaults.

I am a big fan of caching - the more data you can cache on the server side the more web visitors you can serve on the same hardware. The more files are cached in your web site visitor browser - the faster performance your site will have and less bandwidth bill from your hosting provider.

There are many ways how to do caching and I can dig into this field for days. Today, I spot one nice blog post on MegaBurst that pretty much provides technical information on web site caching techniques that can be easily implemented in your web site. Thumbs up guys - nice work and information!

It would be great if web hosting can be done with just one or two servers backing up each other with all the bandwidth one needs and having all the loads and traffic going through them. But that is really not ideal not anywhere close to what is real. With the growth of the World Wide Web and the traffic going through the net, server hosts just could not keep up with very large web sites or blogs. The way has been described by a few computing gurus in the past when they eschewed the use of neural networking architectures – using various servers cooperating with each other to share the load while each provide the best service to their nearest internet clients.

Content Delivery Network providers or CDNs have revolutionized World Wide Web performance that is not taking full use of both the cheap bandwidth offered by competing telecommunications bureaus and the powerful servers we now have.  Not really that powerful, but when working in cooperative mode such as what is found in CDNs, these servers can be awesome in the breadth of service they can provide as web host servers.

For sure, managing multiple services over a network is a lot more complex. Load balancing is one critical function of the CDN to make sure that not a single sever in its network bogs down due to severe traffic or computing loads.  This is basically the benefit of using various servers serving the same content using different physical locations.  This used to be the domain of large enterprise systems geographically scattered and this computing model lends itself beautifully to content delivery in the World Wide Web.

Multi server balancing uses the intelligence built into layer 4-7 network switches or multi-layer switches that identify incoming and outgoing loads to distribute over the servers they control. Traffic going into the switch gets distributed across server clusters with the end-result that loads are balanced; total throughput is increased and thus ensures hosting reliability and efficiency.

Client requests get routed to the server node nearest their location or to one with the least traffic if the content request is too large for other nodes to serve. Some special routing algorithms are employed such as Global Load balancing, HTTP protocol based request routing, and DNS Anycasting.  Proximity-based request routing is done using reactive and proactive probing techniques and connection monitoring. These are tools that form part of the systems used to manage CDNs.

The World Wide Web is now home to multimedia contents that are clearly defining the wave for future home and personal entertainment options that used to reside with cable and other broadcasting media forms.  News content delivery, music and high definition movie files, personal video and high resolution images as well as ebooks and presentation files for corporate and individual use have come to make content delivery over the net a technical challenge and a delightful multimedia experience for those who can get their content fast enough.

Many folks have been getting the error message sending email using php’s mail() function on Fedora, Red Hat Enterprise and Centos boxes, possible many others.

This error usually happens if you are using Postfix or Sendmail MTA. The error shows up in the maillog file as follows:

postfix/sendmail: fatal: Recipient addresses must be specified on the command line or via the -t option

You can fix this problem by editing sendmail_path value in php.ini file and uncommenting the following line (possible, making the changes to it as shown below)

sendmail_path = /usr/sbin/sendmail -t

Restart Apache and see if it works. It does for me

We have been processing all COM and NET domain names using our application cluster and based on our tests we have compiled the following:

.NET TLD statistics on September 22, 2007
Registered domains: 10278275
Domains not resolving: 1212471

.COM TLD statistics on September 22, 2007
Registered domains: 73383356
Domains not resolving: 8847418

Here is the chart for your convenience.

We all know that a video basically is the process of electronically capturing and processing it digitally so that it can be viewed later as it is the direct recording of continuous and sequential processes. The logic is simple. It morphs the stills continually on a well-defined basis which gives the form of video telecast.

Streaming of video is nothing but another type of video recording and broadcasting especially found useful in internet and networks. In streaming, what exactly happens is the moving images in a sequential order are sent through the network in a very compressed mode so that it can transfer faster and the receiving station doesn’t face much problem in obtaining the final result, hence compression is necessary. With the facility of streaming, there is no real need of downloading the entire content or anything as such.

It’s often seen that many websites broadcast some live or video streams on their websites to give the reader some visual pleasure and give real recording of the events that the viewer is interested in. The data comes through the network, gets buffered and played right after. The viewer must have an uncompressing program which does its action and makes the data or media ready for viewing and all.

In today’s world of fast paced life, none has time to wait for the processes occurring in. So there have been ample competitions in some software providers to provide faster streaming to the viewers and gain popularity. First one needs to choose the video file format and then proceed accordingly. There are several formats like Windows media, real media, quick time, MPEG-4, and lots of other methodologies. One such wonderful and faster method of proper streaming is attained through Flash Streaming. Here we underline some of its use and benefits, which it accompanies with itself.

This method is typically known as Flash Video (FLV) and it is the product of Adobe Corporation, if we are concerned with the registered trademark name and related company. Flash videos are especially hit in websites and internet because of the reason that they come up with browser plug-in facilities, which supports and embeds flash video on the webpage in a favorable way. They contain bit streams and provide higher quality of vision. The embedding for audios take place in .mp3 formats, which is widely accepted and well received. The best part of the flash video streaming are pointed out below.

• The video streaming in this FLV format enables the viewer view of the video right when play button is clicked.
• The network is very efficient and high on performance and customer satisfaction because it doesn’t jam up the data transfer occurring through internet.
• There is inbuilt load balancing capacity embedded in flash video streaming, which can smoothly transfer video data to destination eradicating busier traffic.
• The bandwidth limit is optimal for the work and it caters to the needs of the clients rather successfully than other video streaming software.

It’s no secret that Cpanel servers are load-hungry when you move quite a large site on the server. There are quite a few things to do:

1. server optimization
2. daemon optimization
3. disabling built-in stats processing software
4. updating logfile processing

and much more. I suggest disabling built in automatic stats processing - awstats, analog and webalizer. You can quickly script to logrotate logs and do own stats processing. For folks who prefer awstats there is only ONE OPTION if you have a bandwidth and load hungry site - use -staticlinks option and generate static files with Awstats. This is the only solution.

If you have any other guys or friends on the server - disable web update for Awstats statistics option in the Cpanel admin control panel. If you have problems with optimization and high load, crashes for your Cpanel box - there are quite a few companies out there willing to help.

Nowadays there are many providers offering unmanaged dedicated servers with 1000’s GBs of data transfer, but not many say what bandwidth measurement system they have in place.

Over 80% providers use 95% industry burstable bandwidth method that usually not work for all web sites. 95% method is where top 5% burst rate bandwidth are cut off from your monthly bandwidth (usually MRTG) bill. This may sound fine at the beginning but if your web site bursts for more than 36 hours then you will pay for the bandwidth you actually didn’t use. However, 95% method is good when you have a short burst of bandwidth, for example, 25 hours of using full 100Mbps assuming top 5% is removed from the port readings and not counted towards your monthly bandwidth usage. 95% method also counts the highest traffic in or out, but doesn’t not sum it up.

Actual bandwidth method counts all bytes coming in and going out to the switch port your server is connected. Works very well - you pay for the bandwidth you actually use. No more, no less.

So always remember to ask your dedicated server provider what bandwidth method they are using to monitor your bandwidth usage and how much additional transfer will cost.

Lately, I have seen quite a few offers in shared hosting field named seo hosting. I was wondering what is all about and quickly learned the following:

Seo web hosting is a hosting service that is created for search engine optimization hosting (SEO). It is usually a standard shared account with ability to select different C address block IP addresses so that you can do some Grey-hat interlinking between your own sites, for example. It’s been known that if you are linking multiple sites on the same C address block (255 IPs, for example 10.10.10.*) there is not a big link weight passed to the site you are linking. That is why many companies offer shared hosting with different C address blocks.

Not all SEO hosting companies offer different dedicated IPs from multiple C-blocks, some just offer dedicated IP addresses for your own sites as well as different DNS servers you can mix and match. This niche is very specified and only experienced hosts are doing it.