Having Fun with Google!

You know Google as a search engine.  You also know that, like all search engines, they constantly add different features to bring in more users.  So you’ve probably heard of, say, Google Maps , Google Earth and now Google+ .  But did you know about these other services? Picnik Picnik is Google’s free Photoshop equivalent.  Instead of just relying on reviews we tested it out.  It loaded pretty quickly, was easy to use, and provided an impressive array of options for a free service.  One nice feature is the ability of users to upload their own filters, a lot of which we enjoyed.  We’re not sure what the pay service offers outside of layering: if you don’t need that, then you’ll probably find enough functionality in the free one. Google Books Google has the goal of scanning every book every published and displaying the full text on their web site.  No one will fault them for aiming too low, given that they themselves estimate this number to be roughly 130 million.  What’s more is that this has run into all sorts of copyright issues.  Nonetheless, there are currently 2 million books available through Google Books , and this number continues to increase. Panoramio Sort of fusing Google Earth, Google Street View and Wikipedia, Panoramio lets users upload pictures of real-world locations, and submit them so that they are viewable and linked to Google’s other services.  Note that pictures are reviewed by internal editors, so it doesn’t have Wikipedia’s immediacy.  On the other hand this means that you don’t have to worry about your kids finding adult material uploaded by some wiseguy.  Also users who send in photos can choose their own licensing restriction. Google Trends OK, perhaps it’s only a geek like me that finds this fascinating.  Still, maybe others will enjoy a section of Google that will display a graph showing the historical search popularity of certain terms.  I say this even staring at the sadness of how much the word “pinball” has declined as a search term since 2004.  Anyway, you can modify your graph to search by specific region or time period, and the data can be exported as a CSV file. Google Scholar Chances are either you know of this and already use this, or else don’t and don’t have much need of it.  Nevertheless, if the democratic nature of the internet can get much for you some days and you want peer-reviewed papers on a serious topic, here is where you’d find it.  While much of what you’ll find here you could find just through Google proper, it’s the options here that make this feature useful.  Not only can you search by subject area, publication name and publishing date, but you can even search through legal opinions, including those of specific courts. Google Translate We could be serious here and close out this list with Google Code and all of the API tools that it includes, or Google SketchUp , their downloadable 3D renderer.  That’s all useful, but we feel instead like pointing out that Google Translate is now 50 languages large, including the ability to auto-detect the input language. Related posts: August 13, 2010 – The Secrets of Buying and Selling Domain Names

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Having Fun with Google!

What the New User can Learn from the GoDaddy Account Hack

Recently a security breach occurred in 445 of GoDaddy’s web hosting accounts.  While that may not seem like a lot on a percentage basis, that is also high enough to indicate that the hack was some type of systemic problem.  This can scare the new user into a lot of frantic questions. Panicked thought is seldom a clear thought.  So even if you were one of the accounts in question, there are things that you’ll want to consider when evaluating this incident. Innocent until proven guilty One of the most obvious knee-jerk responses is the one that is most necessary for us to correct immediately: blaming GoDaddy.  When something like this happens, until you have very specific, proven reason to believe otherwise, it’s unwise and unfair to blame the host.  We’re hesitant to even use this as an article topic for that reason.  We only are because this will happen now and then, and it’s good to have the object lesson. Why did this only happen with GoDaddy though, you might ask?  There are many reasons that have nothing to do with them.  The most obvious is just efficiency.  By focusing their attack on one host with many users, the hacker(s) don’t have to concern themselves with more than one system architecture. What actually happened? Let’s summarize the incident.  The compromised accounts had their .htaccess file changed.  This is a file that handles URL requests on the user account level.  It sets rules for how to treat different requests to that user’s web site based on different criteria.  In this case, it was set so that any hits to the user’s site that came from a major search engine were redirected to a malicious outside site.  This site in turn infected the surfer’s browser, continuing and amplifying the disease. The accounts have since been re-secured, but this does now require that we ask the pertinent question: how were the accounts infiltrated?

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What the New User can Learn from the GoDaddy Account Hack

What to do When Everything is Running Well at Your Web Hosting Business

Believe it or not, owning a web hosting company is not always the hectic, out of control affair we think of it as. In fact, a lot of your time may simply be spent in front of your desk playing Solitaire as the bytes travel back and forth. Your servers may finally be running smoothly on autopilot, but does that mean you should take the opportunity to kick back, relax, and stop working on your systems? Absolutely not! When you’ve got some “down time”—and not of the server variety—you’ve got a golden opportunity to ensure your servers are smooth, slick, and up to date. You never know when the perfect storm may be just around the corner, and the smart web hoster takes every placid opportunity to give his servers a looking over. With that in mind, here’s some ideas for you to capitalize on the next time everything is running smoothly on the home front: Run Updates: This seems obvious, but taking the time to ensure your servers are up to date is a must. You may have fixed every other aspect of your hardware imaginable, but when’s the last time you checked to see if CentOS added any new features

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What to do When Everything is Running Well at Your Web Hosting Business

Using cPanel to Setup Cron Jobs

The “cron job” is one of the basic programming tools that remind you that you can get a lot of function out of learning just a little code.  A “cron job” is simply a command that you instruct your server to perform at regular intervals.  It can literally be any command that you can run normally. You have the power! Not only are the advantages of this obvious, but once you realize the power you can get from this in just a few commands, much of what you use control panels for may start to seem frivolous.  You can, for example, in just a single command backup an entire directory once a week and email it to yourself.  Don’t be scared: we are diving a bit into expert stuff here, but only to prove the point.  You can do a lot with very little. So how do you do it? Even by cPanel standards this is one of the easier functions to perform.  Scroll down in your cPanel home page.  You’ll probably find “Cron Jobs” in the Advanced section.  Click on it and you’ll be asked whether you like it easy or hard.  Personal preferences aside, there’s not much reason to go hard.  Click on “Standard” to get to the main cron jobs screen. You will first enter the email address that the results of the cron job will be sent: if it is not successful, the email will contain the error message, though this may require some debugging on your part.  Next you will enter the command.  One unavoidable technical note: the command must be typed in using the full path.  So if you are running a script that is in your home directory, you must specify the full server path to it. Get your timing right Now you need to specify how often you want the cron job to run.  Most of this is self-explanatory, though there is at least one potentially confusing item.  You can specify the days that the job will run both by days of the month and days of the week.  That’s not confusing by itself, but what happens if you choose both?  Let’s look at the combinations. “Days” = “Every Day” and “Week Days” = “Every Week Day”: This will run the cron job on every single day. “Days” = “2” and “Week Days” = “Every Week Day” : This will run the job on the 2 nd day of the month only.

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Using cPanel to Setup Cron Jobs

Guarantees – Separating Fact from Fiction

As web hosting companies continue to try to get a leg up on one another, many of them include in their offerings different types of “guarantees”.  This is the point at which we remember that, like any other, these are businesses, and the “guarantee” is a marketing tactic. We also remember, though, that this word does still mean something: it bounds the web host to certain types of behavior, with potential consequences if they don’t follow through.  What do guarantees mean then, and what can you expect if your host can’t meet them? Disk space and bandwidth – Not so much One of the most popular is the guarantee of “unlimited” disk space and bandwidth .  It shouldn’t take too much of a technical expert to be suspicious of this one.  Of course, disk space and bandwidth can’t possibly be unlimited.  Walk into any one web host right now, and you can calculate the precise amount of data they can hold and data transfer they can handle.  Granted, those numbers will boggle you if you think about them too long. To run afoul of this guarantee, though, won’t require you to go that high.  It will only require you to go high enough that you are long past using what you pay for.  It’s impossible to say how high this is, and maybe some hosts will bite the bullet and not say anything no matter how bad you abuse their systems.  Likely, though, what will happen is beyond some very egregious point, your host will ask you to either upgrade your account or (politely) take a hike.  Since they are free to do business with you or not they aren’t technically breaking their pledge.  So just don’t host the entire EMI back collection on your $3.99 account. Uptime – Possibly more true Since uptime is one of the most critical features a web host can provide, providers attempt to guarantee percentages of time your web site will be accessible.  This is another one to take with a grain of salt.  There is clearly only so much a web host can control, especially outside of its own facility. 99.9% uptime is the industry minimum standard, and is the only one you should really put much stock into: at a minute and a half a day, it’s a reasonable expectation.  Just adding one more 9 to that brings it to questionable enforceability.  99.99% uptime means that your site is down no more than one minute per week.  99.999% gives them 26 seconds a month to get your site back up. Now granted, web hosts are doing more real work to back up these guarantees, such as the increasing use of multiple data centers in different cities.  Just make sure that your host gives you some indication that you will be compensated if your site goes down for longer than 26 seconds. 24/7 support Finally there are support guarantees, and these you should keep them to.  Given the chaos that can go on in any business, let alone a web host, these can be brazen claims depending on the specifics and one you might need to rely on.  Hold their feet to the fire on this one.

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Guarantees – Separating Fact from Fiction

The Ins and Outs of DirectAdmin

By just about every measure, cPanel is the #1 web hosting control panel .  In the web hosting world, though, that typically means that there are a gaggle of alternatives that are 2 nd best and trying harder.  While not all of them have gained a strong footing among web hosts, one that is climbing the ranks is DirectAdmin . The first complete version of DirectAdmin was released on Mar 1, 2003.  Reviews of some of its earliest versions circa 2005-6 weren’t so hot.  Lately, however, it’s been gaining traction, as evidenced by the active user support forum for it, and the increasing number of hosts offering it alongside of cPanel.  In fact,  vpsLink , HostPC and SiteValley includes this control panel among their standard hosting options. So what is the main drawing point for DirectAdmin? Simple: It’s simple. DirectAdmin’s main draw is how light it is as a software package.  “Light” means a lot of good things for the user. First, it means that it is fast to operate, not having cPanel’s heavy overhead.  This is especially critical on shared hosting services, since it might be several dozen users at once using these.  That kind of processing can add up fast if not done right.  Second, it means that it is easy to use and navigate through.  Its interface is also very similar to cPanel, so users crossing over won’t spend a lot of time re-educating themselves. Third, being a lightweight package means that it is far more reliable and doesn’t crash nearly as much.  When it does crash, the recovery is comparatively pretty quick and clean.  Finally, being a smaller package means that it’s also a cheaper package, resulting in lower price passed on to you, the end user.  A number of free web hosts use DirectAdmin for this reason.

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The Ins and Outs of DirectAdmin

How To Connect To Your Server Using SSH

SSH is about as cool as sliced bread, if maybe not a little bit more so. Seriously, it’s a great way to get at your server’s terminal shell, which—as we all know—is the hotbed of power. From there you can change just about any aspect of the server, not to mention seriously screw things up if you don’t know what you’re doing. Regardless of your skill level or knowledgeability, if you’re going to do any serious web mastering with your server, you’ll need to access the server shell at some point. To do this, you’ll need to tunnel commands server-side via SSH. There are several ways to accomplish this, but each operating system treats the process slightly differently. Lucky for you, we’ve got a common way to get at your server via SSH for all three major operating systems

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How To Connect To Your Server Using SSH

Why Your Site Would Be Better With a Virtual Server

We don’t intend to tell you how to host your website, but every now and again we do get a pretty great idea to improve your chunk of the Web. This weeks thought is one of our better, and if you’re looking to expand on your shared web hosting plan , you owe it yourself to read our thoughts below on why virtual servers could be the lifeblood your business needs. To start off, we should likely explain what we mean by virtual servers. Think of a virtual server this way – when you have a single piece of hardware, and store all of your various sites to that one server, your files are all mashed up together into the same block. With virtual server hosting, you’re free to partition your single server into many different separate entities, none of which overlap. In essence, it’s like putting walls on your server, keeping all your different sites apart. Best VPS Hosting – InMotion Hosting InMotion’s Linux VPS Hosting is an affordable hosting solution for small and medium businesses that need features such as a custom firewall, dedicated mail server or more control over security. Compare InMotion Hosting against other VPS Hosts and see why InMotion is the #1 choice for virtual private servers

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Why Your Site Would Be Better With a Virtual Server

Common Web Hosting Terms And What They Mean

If you’re new to the world of web hosting, you may find yourself swamped with endless lists of terminology that sound like Greek to your fresh ears. Web hosting , like any other tech industry, comes with its own unique retinue of words, many of which aren’t necessarily self-explanatory. However, that doesn’t mean most of them can’t be explained in a few short sentences. To help ease you into the modern trends of web hosting, we’ve compiled a handy list of the most common terms in the business. We’ll do our best to explain them, but if you find yourself befuddled after we’ve done our best, don’t hesitate to hit up Google: There are plenty of more complex definitions out there, and we won’t blame you for skipping our more generalized information. We’re ready if you are, Astronaut, so buckle up and get ready for blast-off! Here we go, Major Tom: Domain Name e: A domain name is the exact URL title of the site you’re looking to host. For example, Google’s domain name is www.Google.com .

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Common Web Hosting Terms And What They Mean

Solid State: A Solid Solution To Your Speed Problems

If you’re concerned about your dedicated server’s speed performance, and have exhausted all other avenues of improvement, then maybe it’s about time you pursued a Solid State Drive (or SSD) for your server. It’s an expensive method, but it will get the job done, to be sure. In case you need a bit more convincing—We sure would!—we’ve compiled this handy guide to the costs and benefits of an SSD below. What Is A Solid State Drive? Solid State Drives are massively different than your typical hard disk drive (or HDD) . The complexities of either’s construction could take years and a Master’s degree to explain, but to put it simply, an SSD has no moving parts, while an HDD involves a rotating magnetic disc.

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Solid State: A Solid Solution To Your Speed Problems

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