Web Hosting Blog

Web masters and Web designers are enabled with an easy access to various aspects of web hosting systems by the use of cPanel control panel.  It offers a simple web based graphical user interface (GUI).

The interface offers simplicity and flexibility in managing the web hosting accounts. The management of a web hosting such as creating, deleting, modifying etc. has become fairly simple. There have been constant technological improvements seen since the time of its evolution, which has made cPanel one of the most used and much preferred control panels in the field of web hosting. Currently cPanel is supported on Linux platforms only and web hosts offer it with Linux Web Hosting solutions.
cPanel is generally interfaced with the end user via ports 2082 and 2083 with authentication accomplished through surfing to a specific web page and logging in. Since, cPanel is graphically based, it is very easy to use and extremely sensitive for beginner as well as expert users to work with.

If an individual wishes to set up a blog, php link directory, mailing list or any basic management system, cPanel can prove to be the best alternative.
cPanel has many qualities and one of its greatest attributes is Fantastico.

Fantastico is bundled set of software which can be used to install several different applications to one’s web hosting account.
Fantastico is an extremely useful application that usually is offered for free by web hosting service providers alongwith cPanel. It is designed to run on Unix platforms and satisfies the core purpose of facilitating the simple installation of a wide range of popular scripts. The add-ons are absolutely free, most of them can be installed with a single click. Fantastico proves very useful for Blogs, Content Management systems (CMS), Customer Relation applications and E-commerce tools. Other programs include discussion boards, photo galleries, project management tools and website builders.

Individuals with less or no technical skills can use Fantastico and cPanel.

As an amateur, any webmaster can get confused with the common web hosting terms which can make things complicated. Therefore, below is a list of commonly used terms in the business of Web Hosting.

Bandwidth : Bandwidth is the term that is used to describe the amount of data that is passed or is estimated to travel across a communication channel in an estimated period of time. It can be measured monthly, quarterly, semi-annually or Annually. It depends on the plan a client signs-up for.

Hosting Plan (Dedicated Hosting) : A dedicated hosting is recommended for websites that incur high amounts of traffic. A user gets complete root/administrative access to the server. Same is the benefit with a VPS or Virtual Private Server.

Gigabytes (Hard Disk Space) : It is an unit to measure a computers storage capacity. One Gigabyte equals one billion bytes.

DNS : DNS is an abbreviation of Domain Name Server. It differentiates between different institutes such as .com, .us, etc.

Domain parking : When an individual or any company purchase domain names and keep it unused is known as domain parking. Later when required, they can link those domains to their required old domain. Domain parking has become a common way of business, individuals buy domains in a bulk, park it and then resell it at a higher price.

FTP : FTP or File Transfer Protocol is a common way of transferring files or data across a network in a secure way.

Auto-Responders: While auto-responders are not email accounts in themselves, they are assigned an email address and it auto-respond to anyone who sends them an email. The reply is a pre-formatted email and every response is identical to the corresponding queries.

HTTP and HTML : HTTP or Hyper Text Transfer Protocol is used inorder to request or transmit web pages and components over the Internet and various other computer networks.

HTML is an abbreviation of Hyper Text MarkUp Language which is used to structure the multimedia and text present in a website. It also creates hyper text links between electronic documents.

ISP : One might be aware of this, an ISP is the Internet Service Provider. An ISP is essential if one wishes to connect to their servers.

There are many more terms that I would describe in my later post. The above mentioned terms of Web Hosting are some of the very commonly used one’s and are essential for a webmaster to know.

Now-a-days we face newer threats over the Internet each day. Normally, connection to the Internet is unprotected. If one tries to transfer data over an insecure network there are more chances that others might try to gain access to the data. They might try to sell the information or try to gain advantage from it. This might end up in losing valuable data of yours and ofcourse valuable clients too, and the basic reason for such a loss is the failure to invest in security.

The entire world is facing the consequences of spammers, eavesdroppers and attackers. Inorder to cope-up with these problems, developers have come up with effective security solutions. One of the ways is SSH access.

SSH is the short form for a software developed by SSH Communications Security Ltd. They have managed to gain trust of users by providing web administrators a more secure way to access servers remotely. A login system installed with SSH, requires any user to an authentication process inorder to gain access to the network.

Working of SSH

After logging in through SSH, it communicates with the desired remote computer. Since the connection is secured the two machines can secretly communicate with each other. SSH itself acts as a shield against intruders. It transmits senseless data to the intruders computer. Yet, if the intruder tries harder to barge in, SSH would get disconnected.

SSH is compatible with almost all the operating systems such as Windows, Macintosh and Unix. Installation of this application is fairly simple.

Some of the Web Hosting providers offer access to SSH with their web hosting plans. With some of the others, you need to place special request inorder to gain access on a Shared Web Hosting or Reseller Hosting solution.

Secure payment gateways play an important role in any online business that involves online transactions. E-commerce websites, web hosting are few of such businesses where Payment Gateways are often required.

A payment gateway facilitates the transfer of information between a payment portal (such as a website ) and the Front End Processor or acquiring bank.

When a customer orders a product from a payment gateway enabled merchant, the payment gateway performs a variety of tasks to process the transaction:

1. A customer submits an order on website .

2. The web browser on the customers end, encrypts the information to be sent to the merchant’s web server. This is done via SSL (Secure Socket Layer) encryption.
3. The transaction details are then forwarded to their payment gateway. This is again an encrypted connection.
4. The transaction information from payment gateway is forwardee to the processor used by the merchant’s acquiring bank.
5. The processor then forwards the transaction information to the card association (For example: Visa/MasterCard)
6. If an American Express or Discover Card was used, then the processor acts as the acquiring bank and directly provides a response of approved or declined to the payment gateway.
7. The card association routes the transaction to the correct card issuing bank.
8. The credit card issuing bank receives the authorization request and sends a response back to the processor with a response code. In addition to determining the fate of the payment, (i.e. approved or declined) the response code is used to define the reason why the transaction failed (such as insufficient funds, or bank link not available)
9. The processor forwards the response to the payment gateway.
10.The payment gateway receives the response, and forwards it on to the website (or whatever interface was used to process the payment) where it is interpreted and a relevant response is relayed back to the card holder and the merchant.
11. All this procedure usually gets completed in 2-3 seconds.

Most of the payment gateways provide tools that automatically screen orders for fraud and calculate tax in real time prior to the authorization request being sent to the processor.

List of different Payment Gateways :

PayPal : PayPal is one of the highly used payment gateways in any online business for money transfer. PayPal performs payment processing for online vendors, auction sites, and other commercial users, for which it charges a fee. There is a nominal transaction fee charged for receiving money.

Google Checkout : Google Checkout is another online payment gateway service provided by Google. It aims to simplify the process of online payment. Users can store their credit/debit card and shipping information in their Google Account, so that they can purchase at participating stores at a single click of a button. Google Checkout also offers fraud protection as well.

2Checkout : 2CheckOut provides you with a customizable transaction interface, multi-level customer service interaction and a satisfaction survey system that is completely voluntary and, in most cases, customer initiated.
Money Bookers : Moneybookers is an e-commerce business that allows payments and money transfers to be made through the Internet. It serves as an electronic alternative to traditional paper methods such as checks and money orders. Moneybookers performs payment processing for websites, online auction sites, and other corporate users. Moneybookers requires identity verification before using their service to minimize fraud and prevent money laundering. This gateway does not usually get involved in merchandise disputes and the availability of credit card chargebacks may be limited.

Most of the reputed large web hosting providers use any or all of the above mentioned payment gateways for their online transactions.

Active Server Pages or ASP Web Hosting is one of the different Web Hosting solutions. It means that a web hosting provider offers support for ASP. Embedding an ASP code into a website’s HTML page transformers it to a dynamic data driven website. If a visitor browsing a website developed using ASP, the pages can change according to the action of the users.

An ASP code permits oneself to link web pages to a database. A user can interact with the web page by logging in and using their own personal settings or interactively place orders on the website.

Let us understand ASP first. ASP is an abbreviation of Active Server Pages. These are HTML pages which contain ASP scripts embedded into it. That helps in creating dynamic database driven web-pages, a user can access data in a database as well as interact with page objects like Java Components or Active X.

When a user enters a URL in the browser or clicks on a web page one is requesting to send a file to the users computer, it is in a form of normal HTML format. When the users browser receives the web page it would look exactly the same as it did on the server. On the other hand, if an ASP file is received by the users computer, the ASP code could be the current date, or time etc.

One can find number of web hosting providers who offer support for ASP. It is safer to host a website developed in ASP on a Windows 2000 Server, as they are more stable and most of the ASP components work well with Internet Information Services (IIS). One needs to host an ASP web site on Windows Server only, as it is a Microsofts product and does not support Linux. Hence, one can also search for web hosts that offer Windows Web Hosting services.

An individual, when choosing a web hosting company, usually takes into consideration the bandwidth and diskspace that is offered with a particular package. Along with this the uptime is the true point of attraction. Most web hosting companies offer an uptime guarantee. But, it is necessary to understand the true meaning of this.

The web hosting uptime is a measurement of the time a server has been running, the longer the uptime, the better is the service. Uptime is not only crucial for web hosting companies, but to any company or individual having a web-site. It is very important for any website to be functional 24×7, as there might be multiple number of visitors in search of information or services that a particular website offers. And, for that the website should be hosted with a web hosting provider who provides maximum uptime guarantee.

There are various factors that may affect a web hosting uptime. Users too should understand that web hosting providers strive hard to keep the servers up and running smooth, but sometimes there are unavoidable circumstances such as natural calamities/disasters, that might affect the uptime committed by the web hosting provider.

Usually, the downtime is classified in three ways. 1. Planned Downtime, 2. Semi planned Downtime and 3. Unplanned Downtime

1. Planned Downtime can be caused when a server is scheduled for an upgrade or down-grade. Web hosts keep the clients informed about such changes to the server.
2. Semi-Planned Downtime: It may be caused when software providers find a solution to a known loop hole in the application and release a patch to overcome the problem, and it needs to be put into place.
3. Unplanned Downtime: This is the worst and most frustrating (at times) type of downtime, it may be caused due to software or hardware malfunction, server overload and attack the server or a malicious software.

The uptime guarantees provided by a Web Hosting provider, is based on the past information. There are few ways to maintain and monitor the uptime. Also, there are services that provide 24×7 monitoring. But, large web hosting companies usually have a separate department that looks after the uptime and monitor their servers 24×7. Today, there are techniques by which a web hosting company can actually provide 100% uptime. But, this service can be provided by larger companies only, as the hardware required for such architecture is almost double than that of a small web hosting company.

Some companies take the efforts to inform their customers about the possible downtime. Larger hosting providers are able to recover faster from the downtime than the smaller one’s.

An individual should do thorough research when choosing a web hosting company. It can avoid the downtime of a particular website. There are applications available, that are capable of tracking a web hosting companies uptime. One can also visit different forums provided by either web hosting providers or other review forums to learn more about and particular company.

If a website is already hosted with some web hosting provider and is facing downtime, it is recommended to contact their technical support department and lodge a ticket/complaint against the issue. If one faces the same problem frequently, then looking for a better hosting provider is the best possible alternative to avoid downtime.

Cloud Hosting, Cloud Computing and Cloud Architecture are the latest and fast emerging technologies. There are many explanations to the term Cloud. Many get confused between the terms Grid Computing and Cloud Computing. Cloud Hosting systems are becoming more and more popular, because web hosts, basically Shared Hosting providers have to deal with a large amount of websites which require growing amount of resources.

One can find the best possible definition of Cloud Hosting in Wikipedia. I would like to take it as an entirely new and advanced method of computer technology. The major difference that I see is that, in Cloud computing, users purchase computer technologies as a service and not as a product.

The Cloud can be taken as an approach to build computer architectures and deliver services and applications to the customer with scalable, virtualized resources and software resources to be provided as a service. The Cloud can also be taken as a process of merging the physical computer resources with the Internet networks.

A Cloud Hosting can supposedly become the most popular type of a hosting solution. With this it would be possible to provide services on “Pay per Usage basis”. A Cloud Hosting architecture can be achieved by making use of the existing Virtualised and Clustered techniques. The Web Hosting provider must make use of the Fail Over Cluster or High Availability (HA) Cluster which can guarantee that the web hosting service made available through Cloud shall be redundant, multi-node that can offer dynamically scalable resources. A Clustered system is the most basic requirement of Cloud Hosting solution.

The Cloud Hosting services are usually based on load-balanced clusters, in which the data is stored on Storage Area Network (SAN). Any of the servers of the cluster can be easily added to or removed from the system when required. If any server is down for maintenance or for any other reason is out of service, other nodes are capable of taking the load.

Benefits

1. The consumers are billed for the use of compute cycles,
2. An indicator which measures how much processing time the web hosting customer’s applications use,
3. They pay only for the resources they use,
4. They can easily increase or decrease resources,
5. Web Hosts can get any new servers deployed instantly,
6. Ability to deliver better uptime than web hosting services delivered from standard servers,
7. With Cloud technology one can use different technologies together as part of the same cloud
8. One does not need to buy or install hardware or software each time.