We know, mainly virtualization is connected with either Windows VPS or Linux VPS services, but as far as typical web hosting services are concerned from people’s point of view, they always think of number of websites on a single web server but in Desktop virtualization process it is not necessary to decrease number of computers and contract the things in to a single server. Reduction in the cost of infrastructure and management required to server maintenance is one of the most important feature of Desktop virtualization. Through manageable desktop environment, modified provision of systems and other devices of client side one can notice the benefit of Desktop virtualization and additionally the important factor like bandwidth is used in more improved manner. Upgrades are easily possible and available to servers in terms of storage and network stuff very easily.
A user uses data and applications from the similar server on which is running and streaming those applications and data, and this allows it to provide improved security to the applications as well as an improvement in transmission of desktop processed workload from client side to the hosted location. Adopting to virtualization also enable to client to split up any important or confidential data and applications and make it secure from any type of suspicious and unauthorized offends. Different level of security patches and permissions can be assigned to virtual machines by network administrators.
In today’s hosting market there are lot of web Hosting providers available with attractive discounts and special offer to drive the customers towards their web hosting companies. When a person is totally new to all this then obviously he get confused about all these things and marketing slogans of Web Hosting companies, and if the he is weak in terms of technical knowledge then things become worse for him. Following are some features I would like to share with these type of people so that they can get exact idea about his needs and available options in the market.
Cpanel:
These are the very basic but most important tools to be included in hosting services, cPanel is one of the the best control panel for the purpose of managing website and analyze many things about that particular website. Important tasks like creation of new email Ids, parking multiple domains, taking and restoring backups of data are performed throughout the cPanel.
Fantastico:
This is another great utility which is used for installation of various web applications. Interface becomes very easy because of Fantastico, web applications like forums, blogs, other open source tools can be installed with a few clicks.
Add-on domains:
Newbies usually get confused when they don’t have enough knowledge about Add-on domains feature which makes it possible to host many website within a single web hosting account. One can add multiple domains and sub-domains using a single shared hosting account.
Shopping carts:
Shopping carts are known as application specially developed for e-commerce websites. Because of shopping carts a webmaster can sell products online and receive payments through online transactions.
Dedicated IP address
Many people have heard about dedicated hosting and they think that dedicated IP concept is related to it only, but the fact is different as dedicated IP can be obtained to keep your website’s identity unique one which helps your website to remain unrelated from other websites which may be fraud or of spammer’s hence may harmful for sharing the same IP address with them. Dedicated IPs are also beneficial from search engine optimization point of view.
There are many other features involved in a web hosting package but here I feel the above one to be highlighted specially while making a web hosting deal.
Content Delivery Network which is also know with its short form as CDN is a group of highly optimized servers from all over the world, though this group is widely spread one but logically its unique. The system is designed in such a way they user’s request will be redirected towards the closest server to him which produce best results for the websites which have large number of visitors from all over the world. This system works impressively by making a unique system of various web hosting servers which contains data which is placed at various points in network to optimize the bandwidth access to clients all over the network.
Few people might get problem while accessing the images and videos from the servers from long regions but if the the same data made available on a CDN network then it will reflect higher accessibility with higher speeds. The working of CDN is based on specifying the directory on a server which pulls all the files. One need to go into W3 total cache setting to enable the CDN function and make the required changes in URL.
The only drawback of this CDN transparency towards user-side, a user can identify if a CDN is accessed or not, because a delivered URL can be different that the requested URL. But as he is going to access the service much faster then he should not been so worried about it.
If you are a serious webmaster who is very careful about his website then you might have idea about ‘how important a control panel is for your website?’ There are many control panels available and selection of a specific control panel is a difficult decision because each of these comes with their own pros and cons.
cPanel
Many webmasters will claim cPanel as the best control panel and even web hosting services providers provides a hosting package with this name as ‘cPanel web hosting‘. More than being simple and availability of extra features this control panel is very easy to learn and comfortable from both, client and admin side. Latest upgrades of providing better support for service clustering in windows it has captured more share of internet market, but still this feature has few bugs which should be removed very soon.
Plesk
Plesk’s presence is very long in the market as it has few features of its unique type and not available with other control panels. Plesk provides better clustering support than any other control panel. It is possible to set up a network of multiple servers and make them to act as a single service unit. So surprisingly it becomes possible to run both Linux servers and Windows servers as a single unit. According to to recent news Parallels has taken over Plesk
Direct Admin
This control panel is becoming very popular with a cruising speed these days. Though it may not have as much features as other control panels have, but so far stability and resource usage is concerned it is far better than others. Other advantage is because of having less features the ratio of bugs is also less. This is suitable for budget hosts as it is capable of hosting multiple clients with a great stability.
Other control panels like ‘Hsphere’ are outdated already and being dominated cleanly by above three which are really making the choice difficult for webmasters.
One can describe PuTTy as a client program for the network protocols which are mostly used for running a remote sessions on a computer system which is connected to a network. Such programs include SSH, Rlogin network protocols and Telnet. This PuTTY obligates towards client side of a particular session and not on the server side where does it actually runs.
In other words one can say that PuTTY makes it possible to analize a operation on the computer system which can be different that the computer system where actually it is running. For example you can operate a computer system having any operating system, software etc from other computer which has different parameters.
PuTTY supports both xterm terminal as well as DECterm but PuTTY’s default terminal type to any server is as xterm if any problem persists with it then it can be reconfigured as vt220.
If anybody has a question that ‘Which commands can be executed in a PuTTY terminal window?’ then it is basically wrong question because no process occurs inside PuTTY but it only a tool of communication which forwards the commands typed by you to the another computer and responses from that computer back to you. PuTTY has nothing to do with running applications on any of the both computer systems ans so that command execution depends on the system’s execution compatibility to those commands.
By using PuTTY the security level of web servers can be maintained. It is very easy to run PuTTY by downloading ‘puttygen.exe‘ which is widely available on Internet.
If you are facing an issue wherein PHP scripts does not show the correct time, the reason for this can be mostly said to be because your web hosting server is based in a different time zone. The issue can be simply sorted out by changing the date.timezone setting in PHP.
As per your location you can set the date.timezone value in PHP by adding the below to your php.in file :
ate.timezone = “Asia/Calcutta”
The example is stated assuming that you would like to set the timezone for your PHP script to Asia/Calcutta.
If you face any issues while executing the above, you can contact your web hosting service provider for further assistance on the same.
The ways to connect by FTP to a host for your web hosting account are mentioned below :
The most simple way to connect is by using IE which has proved to the best in regards to FTP support. For connecting with your browser, you need to use the below mentioned address :
ftp://FTPUSER:FTPUSERPASSWORD@mydomain.com
If your FTP user to connect is similar to user@mydomain.com, then you will have to make sure that you URL encode it like the below mentioned :
ftp://FTPUSER%40mydomain.com:FTPUSERPASSWORD@mydomain.com
This address is URL encoded and comes from YourFtpUser@YourDomain.com where @ has been substituted with %40, which is the ASCII code for @.
Generally you would require to change your MySQL collation in order to solve any problems with foreign character encodings. The very common step that can be taken here is to change your MySQL collation from latin1 to utf8. The same can be changes by using phpMyAdmin and the by following the below mentioned steps :
1. First you need to login to your cPanel account provided with your web hosting account and then click on phpMyAdmin icon located in the Database Box.
2. Now you need to select the Database you would want to manage from the drop down menu located on the left.
3. Then click on the Operations tab in the top menu of your phpMyAdmin
4. Once you click on Operations you will see at the bottom of the page the collation option. You need to now select a collation from the drop down menu and click on the Go button.
Please be informed that after you change the collation of a database only the new tables will be created with the new collation. All the other tables will remain with the collation, they were initially created with.
You can place a banner for an unregistered user in vBulletin easily following the below mentioned steps:
1. First you need to log in to your vBulletin administration area ( for e.g. http://mydomain.com/forum/admincp).
2. Then you need to go to Styles & Templates from the menu located in the left. Choose Style Manager.
3. Now click on << >> to collapse all options.
4. Then you need to choose where you would like your banner to be placed or located.
5. After finalizing on the position of the banner you need to scroll to the bottom and add the following code:
<if condition=”in_array($bbuserinfo['usergroupid'], array(1, 3))”>
Your banner code goes here in HTML
</if>
The above code would mean that if the user has groupid 1 or 3 the following code should be executed. By default 1 and 3 user group ids belong to unregistered and awaiting-approval users. If you have any further issues pertaining this you can contact the support staff for your Web Hosting Service Provider.
As Apache and Tomcat have high importance in web server hosting industry. There are both good and bad side this integration of Apache with Tomcat and there are different opinion about the same. Following are some points I would like to attach the discussion.
Clustering – When Apache is used as front-end it works as a front door for multiple Tomcat instances. Apache has the ability to ignore if any one of Tomcats fails. For this you need to use a hardware which is load-balanced.
Security – I we compared Apache with Java then we can know that Java has its own security manages and Apache works on bigger mid-share. Though this is a controversial topic but when one prefer to go fo Apache he needs to secure two systems at the same time but which can be appreciated by search engines also.
Clustering / Security – It is possible to use Apache with multiple tomcats for multiple URL name-spaces and in such situations Tomcats can be more protected individually. Though Apache is smarter proxy server one need to take care of it.
Add-Ons – In Apache one can add PHP, CGI and pearl very smoothly and such addition is very effective for Tomcat. Unlike Tomcat, Apache has many modules to be plugged in.
Dcorators - It possible to perform multiple decorators when Apache is in front of Tomcat which does not support of quick code.
Speed – Though it is very hard to compare speed between Apache and Tomcat, when things come to static content, Apache is quicker than Tomcat. But this only applicable in the case of high traffic websites. There are some exceptions where Tomcat wins the race by using connector wisely.
Socket Handling – In many cases Apache it known as better socket handler than the Tomcat. Tomcat handles the sockets through JVM which require to go through platform, hence makes Tomcat slower.
