Apache2 has growing demand among Linux Hosting consumers. For installing Apache2 you need to enter the following command at a terminal prompt.
sudo apt-get install apache2
Further more you need to place directives in plain text configuration files, these directives are separated between the following shown files and directories
- apache2.conf: This is the main Apache2 configuration file. Contains settings that are global to Apache2.
- conf.d: This contains configuration files which are applicable globally to Apache2 and some other packages which can be used by Apache2 for addition or symlinking files to this directory.
- envvars: Apache2 environment variable are set in this file.
- httpd.conf: Named after the httpd daemon, this was the Apache2 configuration file, it can be used for particular configuration option which globally affects Apache2.
- mods-available: Not only for loading modules but also for their configuration, this file can be utilized. (Only few specific and not all of the modules are included it this file)
- mods-enabled: This file has the ability to hold symlinks of files situated at /etc/apache2/mods-available, and this makes it possible to enable the symlinked file enabled at the next time Apache2 is restarted.
- ports.conf: Herea are the directives which analyze, which TCP ports Apache2 is listening currently.
- sites-available: Configuration files for Apache2 Virtual Hosts can be found in this directory. These virtual hosts permit Apache2 to get configured for more than one website which have their own separate configuration settings.
- Sites-enabled: similar to ‘mods-enabled’ here one can find symlinks at /etc/apache2/sites-available directory, also when a particular configuration file in ’sites-enabled is found symlinked, the website configured by it can be kept active when the Apache2 is restarted.
While browsing various websites you can notice that inclusion of videos in website has become quite common and also important these days. Video websites are known for highly visited websites on the internet so to loose such visitors to video websites, webmasters have started to display the required videos from their own websites. This keeps the visitor busy on their own website and prevents him from getting distracted to video websites. Apart from this, inclusion of videos is also very important as video marketing is one of the most effective marketing techniques.
‘Embedding a video’ is a very popular technique followed by several webmasters, as it saves you website hosting resources and the video is actually hosted on another video sharing website. But there are some other disadvantages of embedding of video, as the watermark of video sharing website will always appear in the video clip and you have to solely remain dependent on that particular video website for the accessibility of embedded videos. If you want to get rid of this kind of embedding then the only solution for it is directly uploading that video on your webpages and to save the resources you should use flash video format, which is the most used video format over the internet. ‘flv’ is the lightest format can be used for video files and it also has the advantage of cross platform support and built-in streaming ability. Due to use of specialized compression technique, .flv files are very small in size and can be loaded and browsed easily with enhanced speed. Surprisingly there is no effect on the quality of video due to such compression. High audio quality with stereophonic sound can be achieved with flv video formats. With help of Flash CS3 video encoder, some widely available third party software one can easily convert flv video files in to flash movies. If you are the real owner of the video held on your website then most of the Flash FLV players allow you to attach your own logo to avoid any possible theft of your video.
Well, a domain name is nothing but a textual version of the IP address, this is the number which points to a specific website, you can also visit this website by entering the IP address in a specific manner and you would get a brief idea about domain name. For humans it is suitable to remember the name (domain name) of a website than remembering this multiple-digit IP address. In addition your website also gets your desired brand name you succeed to get your desired domain name.
So from technical point of view your website is identified by systems with it’s IP address and the domain name is just for the suitability of human beings. Let’s refer to this definition of domain name provided by ‘wikipedia’ “A domain name is an identification string that defines a realm of administrative autonomy, authority, or control in the Internet. Domain names are formed by the rules and procedures of the Domain Name System (DNS).” One can purchase these domain names from domain name providers but these days Web Hosting Services providers also provides (provide) you the domain name at a cheap cost. This also helps you to save your time and effort, while you go separately for buying domain names. ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) is the corporation which manages the development and architecture of Internet domain name space. Authorization to domain registrars is also provided by the same corporation.
As most of us know about the high popularity of internet services, many of the people just use the internet smoothly but they are not aware of actually what goes on behind the scene. Here I won’t drag you in typical description that how the Internet is the network of many big networks and so on, but while studying the functioning of the internet, websites and web hosting server, we would come to know that they are expected to fulfill the requests of client computers for specific webpages. Such clients use applications called browsers (Firefox, IE, Chrome etc.) while performing such requests for their desired webpages. Normally a URL (Uniform Resource Locator) is typed by client in to the address bar of the particular browser used by him, to direct to a web server by means of its Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN). For example to visit Host.co.in’s home page a visitor is required to only type
http://www.host.co.in (FQDN) but if he want to visit contact us information of Host.co.in then he need to type FQDN (http://www.host.co.in) followed by path (/contactus.php)
‘http’(Hyper Text Transfer Protocol) is the most commonly used protocol for transferring webpages. There are also other two other types of protocols supported as ‘https’(Hyper Text Transfer Protocol over Secure Sockets Layer) and ‘FTP’ (File Transfer Protocol) specially used for uploading and downloading files.
As most of use know and Wordpress is the most popular platform for building websites and blogs. While working in wordpress many times you need to upload the data. This data can be of any type like an application file, an image or any video. The default limit set for such uploads is 8 megabytes. Experienced webmasters who has hosted there websites with large web hosting resources, know very well that many times the data to be uploaded can be larger than 8 megabytes and fortunately one can increase this 8 megabytes limit in wordpress. Many webmaster try to do it by making changes in ‘.htaccess‘ file, but this doesn’t work always. I would like to share following simple method to extend the maximum upload file size limit in wordpress.
- Crate a ‘php.ini’ file and upload it in to ‘/wp-admin’ folder.
- Then add the following code
memory_limit = 28M
upload_max_filesize = 28M
post_max_size = 28M
file_uploads = On
Here I have used 28 megabytes for just a example and you can replace with your desired limit to be set for maximum upload file size limit in wordpress.
Threats to Online Businesses are not new in today’s widely spread internet world. To achieve highest security for an online business SSL Certificate plays an important role. The term ‘SSL’ is basically related with website hosting services. It’s expected from Webmaster to think and implement the security systems in a smarter way. The websites with SSL certificates are the most trusted websites on the internet, the simplest way to identify such websites is the starting of URL as ‘https://’ where as you will find other normal websites starting with ‘http://’. SSL certificate is a Digital certificate assigned to a website which approves the identity of a Website as a secured website. When a website deals with online transaction involved with money the people are very conscious about its reliability and how secure it is to make payment thorough those websites. The specialty of SSL opted websites is that every information is encrypted for security purpose before it passes thorough networks, to avoid an the leakage of sensitive information. So if one is dealing through an SSL secured website then he can be sure that the information he is providing through it will remain fully confidential and secure.
Following are is some of the information that is contained in the SSL Certificate
- Name of the owner of the SSL Certificate
- Serial Number and the Expiry date of the Certificate
- Copy of the certificate owners public key
- Digital Signature of the Certificate issuing authority
We saw ‘What Is WAMP And WAMPServer’ in the last post, here we are going to learn about ‘LAMP’ which is nothing but a substitute to WAMP when one has hosted his website on ‘Linux Hosting Server’. LAMP consists of Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP/Perl/Python, where Linux is an operating system, Apache is a Web Server, MySQL fulfills database requirements and PHP/Perl/Python work as scripting languages. The idea of LAMP was originally invented in 1999 by ‘Michael Kunze’ in a German magazine, though the four elements were not approached to work together but in the later period these open source applications were made available for free of cost and as a bunch called as ‘LAMP stack’. Because of having the ability to make a strong web application platform, LAMP gained the popularity in very early stage in such a way that in today’s market LAMP services are available as by default with almost all the website hosting services providers.
There are multiple security options available while using LAMP, you can configure Apache and PHP to remain hidden so that your information would not be leaked by any possible hacking attacks. You can find more about LAMP security at :- Is Your ‘LAMP’ Secure Enough?. LAMP tools are easily available with the features of easy configuration and being very robust. Being as an open-source application, LAMP is supported by the larger community, which constantly adds features and development to meet the requirements of it’s users. For deployment, configuration and maintenance of LAMP, one needs to spend very little effort and time, furthermore you don’t need any type of administrative details for it.
WAMP is quite a well known term among Website Hosting Services industry. WAMP is acronym for the combination of Windows, Apache, MySQL and PHP/Python/Perl. In this combination the first three are constant ones and for the fourth one it varies among PHP, Python and Perl. There may be a few occasions in which Python and Perl can be used together. The reason behind the popularity of WAMP is because it provides four important elements Operating System, Database Web Server and scripting application which are required for a web hosting server. When all these four elements are used as combined then such a usage is called as ‘Server Stack’. In this (WAMP) server stack you use ‘Microsoft’ Windows as an operating system, ‘Apache’ as a Web Server, MySQL to work as a Database and you can choose one from PHP, Python and Perl to be used as scripting language. WAMP it is totally related with Windows Web Hosting Servers and has nothing to do with Linux Hosting Servers. For Linux Hosting users there is ‘LAMP’ which substitutes ‘WAMP’
To adopt WAMP one needs to download ‘WAMPServer’ which is an open-source Windows web development environment. It comes with a service manager as a tray icon. This enables an easy management of the server and easy installation of multiple releases of Apache, MySQL and PHP as add-ons. With WAMPServer the installation process is automated and you can secure your setting files while making any changes over your web servers. You can experience a great flexibility with ‘WAMPServers’ as enabling and disabling services of WAMPServer is just a matter of clicks.
With a left click on WampServer’s icon, you will be able to:
- manage your Apache and MySQL services
- switch online/offline (give access to everyone or only localhost)
- install and switch Apache, MySQL and PHP releases
- manage your servers settings
- access your logs
- access your settings files
- create alias
With a right click :
- change WampServer’s menu language
- access this page
‘Portable Document Format’ which is widely known as PDF is a self-contained cross-platform document from the famous ‘Adobe Systems’. Working with PDF document has become a regular affair now. In day to day business activities one needs to put a lot of documents together by merging multiple documents in to a single PDF file, this is also called working with PDF Mode. PDF is very handy to create the documents which are not easy to edit and are not created with the purpose of avoiding any future edition work on them.
A typical PDF document appears similar to a normal document on the screen as well as in a printed format but unlike a word document, the user is not capable of editing it normally. Its appearance is also free from the software package, computer and operation system originally used to create it. PDF format files are highly compressed though they contain text, images, graphs and any other data to be used for display purpose, this high compression enable it to get downloaded quickly and efficiently. Maintaining its original (at the time of creation) format at recipient’s end is the feature makes PDF very popular. Though PDF works almost on all platforms but one needs to install the required ‘reader application’ (Adobe Reader) to make the system compatible of reading PDF files. In case of Linux systems of Linux Hosting servers the software are available different than the software for Windows website hosting servers. Because of its reliability most of the business houses use PDF for documentation for disseminating many of their business activities. While working on the internet if you do not want to save or download a PDF then you can also read the file on a temporary basis and once you close the browser (or tab) it will also get closed without saving any data on your local computer.
Meetings are one of the most important activities in Business houses, because any important decision related to business can be taken after arranging proper discussion among the important authorities of that particular organization. Now a days many organizations have placed their business houses at different geographical locations to work as branch offices and this is very necessary especially for multinational companies. Regular communication is very important among these branches situated miles away from each other, telephonic communication and communication through Internet services are vastly used for this purpose but old technologies were allowing just two people to communicate at the same time with each other and it was not possible to bring more than two people in such a discussion. Web Conferencing is the technology, introduced to overcome this limited number of people’s ability to participate in a meeting held at a far away location.
Web conference allows multiple persons to interact with each other being situated at any place(with the availability of internet, software and required hardware for conference) in the world. Now a days due to new invention in conference technology people can not only communicate but also can see each other on screen (real-time) while the conference is being carried out, this is called Video Conferencing. Web conferences are more popular among professional business houses for simple oral communication but when you need to represent any images, videos which contain different surveys, numbers and graphs then video conference is most effective to share this kind of data among all attendees. Furthermore looking each other while communication creates a special psychological effect over the people in communication with each other. Video conference also plays an important role in different types of scientific projects where a person need to share his experiments visually among multiple people.
