Web Hosting Blog

• 07Feb

  Understand Cloud Computing

  Computer, General, Web Hosting, Web Hosting Articles No Comments

  The basic description of Cloud Computing is the use of computer data storage, web or software applications, central processing units via the Internet alongwith software development tools and associated software architecture components. It is another way of computing in which typically scalable resources are provided as a service on the Internet. This technology integrates Software As A Service (SaaS), Web 2.0 and other recent well known trends of technology which targets a common theme of reliance on the Internet for satisfying the computing needs of the users.

  Cloud computing is a computing model in which tasks are assigned to a combination of connections, softwares and services accessed over the network. This network of servers and connections collectively called as a “Cloud”. Computing at the scale of the cloud allows users to access power equivalent to that of a supercomputer. Cloud computing can be contrasted with the traditional desktop computing model where the resources of a single desktop computer are used to complete tasks and an expansion of the client/server model. Cloud computing can be used to sort through vast amount of data. Like grid computing, cloud computing requires the use of software that can divide and distribute components of a program to thousands of computers. New and advanced processors, virtualization technology, inexpensive and fast servers, disk storage, broadband internet access all have combined to make Cloud computing a compelling model.

  
  

  A major advantage of Cloud computing is that it allows users and companies to pay based on the server utilization, used processing power or the for the actual consumed bandwidth.

  Tags: Cloud computing, grid computing, Networking Technology, SaaS, software as a service, virtualization, Web 2.0

• 27Nov

  Identifying Fraud Orders in A Web Hosting Business.

  Computer, Database Hosting, Dedicated Server Hosting, Hosting Support, Linux Hosting, Linux VPS, Linux web hosting, Micfo Web Hosting, Microsoft, News & current Release, Web Hosting, Web Hosting Articles, Windows Web Hosting, cPanel Hosting No Comments

  To run a successful web hosting business one must be capable of Identifying the fraudsters who wish to order a particular web hosting package. Efficient management is essential for the smooth functioning of the web hosting business.

  Here are few ways of that would help to identify the fraud orders and keep away the fraudsters spoil the business.

  Verification Of The IP Address

  Verification of the IP address is the first step in the order verification process. Almost every billing software shows the IP address and other information such as the host name of the IP, the country of the person placing an order with the web hosting company. Another way of checking the information is through a third party service such as the WHOIS service (www.whois.sc) or www.ip2location. Once the information is displayed, the country of the origin of the IP and the country mentioned in the order needs to be verified. The state and city details too can be cross checked. If the details matches then the order can be sent for processing. If the details does not match then its clear that the order is fraudulent. Incase you receive such an order then it should be marked as fraud and the order should be terminated.

  Domain Name Verification

  With the use of the third party whois service, users can get the whois details. Using these details of the person ordering the web hosting package can be cross checked for the physical address and E-mail address mentioned in the order. Genuine orders will have the details matching to the ones mentioned in the order. Yet sometimes there is a chance that the details does not match, in that case we cannot come to the conclusion that the order is fraud as the domain name might have been purchased through a company address. Hence, the domain name verification has some restrictions. In case the domain name seems senseless, then there is wide possibility that the order is a fraud order.

  Disable Auto Sign-ups

  If the web hosting company has enabled the facility of auto sign-ups on its web-site then a fraudster may sing-up and send spam or install Trojans or viruses for phishing purpose before you getting time to recover from the damage. So, it is recommended that the auto account creation facility should be disabled.

  Usage of Third Party Fraud Detection Plugins

  A web hosting company can use make the use of a third party service such as MaxMind. It is a fraud scanning software which is integrated in the billing software. It helps to identify fraud orders automatically (Note: It is not 100% fool proof).

  

  Phone/FAX verification

  Web hosting firms can give a call on the contact number provided in the order details for the purpose of identifying between fraud orders and genuine orders.

  Even after every careful steps are adopted by the web hosting company, fraud orders is a never ending problem. There is no completely fool proof solution for fraud orders. But, following the above tips helps reduce the fraud order sign-ups upto a large extent.

  Tags: Domain Name, IP address, MaxMind, phishing, spam, Trojans, Viruses, Web Hosting, web hosting business, web hosting company, Web Hosting firm, web hosting package, whois service

• 19Nov

  Revolution in mouse technology from Microsoft’s Arc Mouse.

  Computer, General No Comments

  The revolutionary mouse from Microsoft delivers a spectacular design which combines the portability of netbook mouse and comfortability of desktop mouse.

  

  Sixty percent(60%) of the entire hardware can be folded. Its available in two colors : Red and Black.

  

  Features Of Arc Mouse.

  30 Feet Wireless Range : The 2.4 GHz wireless mouse has an USB connectivity micro-transceiver which has the ability to connect wirelessly within the range of 30 ft.

  Portable Folding Feature : This new technology mouse is capable of folding for upto 60% of the complete design of the fully stretched size. The mouse has a strong metal hinge at the folding section. The mouse can be switched Off just by folding the mouse (Need to make changes in its options).

  Status Indicator : Arc Mouse has a unique battery status indicator which turns red if the battery is low.

  Buttons can be Customized : Media, Programs and files can be accessed very fast with the customization of the buttons.

  Transceiver : The mouse has a micro-transceiver at the bottom of the mouse.

  Either Hand Usage : The Arc mouse can be used by any of the hands with amazing comfortably.

  New Laser Technology : Laser Technology is much more precise, delivers smoother tracking and the mouse takes lesser response time.

  Multiple Usage design : This mouse can be used with Laptops, Netbooks and Personal Computers (PC’s).

  Long Battery Life : Microsoft gives a warranty period of 6 months for the batteries.

  Warranty : The mouse comes with a three year warranty period.

  

  SUMMARY

  The new product of Microsoft comes with a unique appearance, design which is collapsible and comes with a wireless receiver and above all it is easy to set up. The Microsoft’s Arc Mouse price range between $46.78 - $59.99. The mouse is covered with an extremely high quality glossy paint.

  Tags: Arc Mouse, desktop, Laptop, Laser Technology, micro transceiver, Microsoft, Microsoft Arc Mouse, mouse, netbook, Wireless, Wireless Mouse

• 17Nov

  Simple Steps To Fasten the Computer.

  Computer No Comments

  Users must perform the following steps once every month for the smooth functionality of Personal Computers.

  Free UP Disk Space

  Freeing the disk space improves the performance of the PC. The disk clean up tool helps users free up space on the hard disk.

  The Disk Clean up tool helps :

  • Remove Temporary Internet files.
  • Empty Recycle bin.
  • Remove downloaded program files.
  • Remove optional unused components of Windows and
  • Remove unused programs

  

  To access the Disk Cleanup Tool :

  Click Start >> All Programs >> Accessories >> System Tools >> Disk Clean Up >> Specify the drive that needs to be Cleaned

  Scroll through the list of files that need to be cleaned up. Clear the check box for files that are not intended to be removed and press Ok. Click Yes when prompted to confirm the tool to do the task.

  De-fragment the Hard Disk

  Disk fragmentation hampers the overall performance of the computer. It is a Windows utility that segregates the fragmented data and stacks it in an organized fashion. Ideally this tool should be accessed atleast once a month or after Installation or deletion of files and programs occur.

  

  To use the Disk Defragmenter:

  Click Start >> All Programs >> Accessories >> System Tools >> Disk Defragmenter.

  Users need to specify the drive that needs to be defragmented. First select the analyze option then depending on the results decide if its required to defragment the drive.

  Detect and Repair Disk Errors

  This is another useful tool to keep the hard disk free from errors. It is also called the Check Disk tool.

  

  To gain access to the tool, follow the procedure:

  First close all the files >> Click Start >> My Computer >> Right click on the partition of the hard disk >> Properties >> Tools >> Check Now tab >> Check disk >> Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors >> Start.

  If the tool detects any bad sectors then select fix errors.

  Tags: Microsoft Corporation, Microsoft tools

• 17Nov

  Simple Data Security Tactics: White listing and Black listing.

  Computer, General, Server Security, data security No Comments

  White listing and Black listing are common tactics used for data security.

  Black listing is security trick of allowing information about known malware.

  White listing permits only safe programs to run. These two are security tricks used by many businesses where keeping the computers free from malware is of utmost importance. Major resources are spent by IT departments for keeping away the bad stuff or finding and removing the unwanted malware. Trojans, Viruses, Malware and Spyware or any such unwanted programs can cause damage to computer’s or the complete network.

  Black listing is a common data securities or prevention methodology. Antivirus and antispyware programs after regular intervals scan the system for catching the unwanted programs and remove them from the hard drive.

  

  Whereas White listing only permits known or approved software’s to install and run.

  Sometimes both the techniques are used for more efficient protection. It is called the white over black methodology. In this only approved programs are run, users can remove the system slowing programs such as Anti-virus and Anti-spyware.

  Different white listing products use varied strategies to block executable files from running.

  Tags: antispyware, antivirus, Black listing, data security, Information Security, malware, spyware, Trojans, Viruses, White listing

• 14Nov

  Procedure of Disk Migration to Windows Server 2003 R2 Standard edition.

  Computer, Exchange Server, General No Comments

  Before starting the user needs to be aware of the service packs that have been installed on the Operating System (OS).

  

  The preparation starts with the standard procedure of Disk CleanUp and Disk defragment.

  • DISK CLEAN-UP : Start >> Run >> Cleanmgr.exe
  • DISK DEFRGMENTER : Start >> Run >> Dfrg.exe.

  • Before the disk is mede to follow these procedures. Users need to make sure that the disk has a minimum disk space of 1.5 Gb (Giga bytes) for the completion of the setup. The set up occupies a temporary storage and after the set-up is complete the occupied space can be available.

  Before the Set-up Users must back up the files:

  Before the migration users must do a thorough virus scan of all the drives and disks.

  The back up must include back up of the complete disk which includes System State Data, further details are available in the Help and Support column.

  The server must be Offline before the back-up initiates.

  • The users must be asked to log off from every domain, before the migration.
  • Then the server must be disconnected from the internet connection.
  • Every service provided through the servers must be halted until the migration is successful. (For location of active services : Start >> Run >> Services.msc)
  • Disk utilities must be turned off such as Anti-virus, back-up softwares.

  When migrating to Windows Server 2003 R2 Standard Edition, the Windows Business Server 2003 R2 transition pack Wizard must be run.

  Following Steps needs to be performed before migration:

  1. Insert the Windows Small Business Server 2003 R2 Transition Pack CD into the drive and step through Setup. If Setup does not begin automatically, from the root of the Windows Small Business Server 2003 Transition Pack CD, double-click the shortcut to Setup.exe.

  2. Re-installation might be required of service packs.

  3. Restart services for third-party applications that were stopped before the migration.

  4. Internet Connection must be restored.

  5. Go to Windows Update and review the available service packs and hotfixes to be sure that you have installed all the ones that you need.

  Tags: Operating System, Server 2003, Small Business Server, windows, Windows Business Server 2003, Windows Server, Windows Server 2003 R2 Standard Edition

• 14Nov

  Most Cheapest Laptop’s.

  Computer, General, News & current Release No Comments

  European soon would get laptop’s at $100.

  An organization named “One laptop per child” OLPS has plans of selling laptops through the online store of Amazon to the European markets from 17^th November.

  The OLPS has adopted the scheme of Give one Get One which has already been running in US markets. The scheme covers the concept of donating one laptop to a school kid in a developing country when a user buys a laptop for themselves.

  The organization has planned to introduce the scheme to 27 European nations, Switzerland, Russia and Turkey. The Xo laptop is expected to cross the cost of £268 (313 euros). The Give One Get One scheme was first introduced in US in November 2007, the organization claims to have sold 190,000 machines through this scheme. The previous problem of delivering the machines has been overcome by signing up with Amazon for its ordering and delivery.

  The OLPC scheme aimed to create a small but powerful laptop for school children in very cheap rates.

  

  The final delivery machine costs approximately $188, and OLPS organization has sold 600,000 machines, despite Xo facing competition from the Intel’s Classmate laptop.

  Tags: Amazon, Europe, Intel, Laptop, Russia, Switzerland, Turkey, XO Laptop

• 13Nov

  Quick Preview of Load Balancing

  Computer, Customer Service, Dedicated Server Hosting, General No Comments

  Load balancing is a term in computer networking, it is a technique in which work can be spread between two or more computers, hard drives, other resources or CPU’s. By using the load balancing technique optimum resource utilization can be achieved, the response time too improves. There is an increased reliability achieved through redundancy, if multiple components are used with load balancing instead of one. A multi-layer switch can be used to get the balancing service.

  

  Load balancing can be used as a link between internal communications in computer clusters basically high availability clusters.

  The main application of load balancing is to provide a single Internet service from multiple servers, also called the server farm. The load balanced systems include large Internet relay chat networks, NNTP and DNS servers, popular websites, and high bandwidth FTP (File Transfer Protocols) sites.

  In terms of Internet services a load balancer is a software where external clients connect to a port to access services. The load balancer forwards the request to a backend server which in turn replies back to the load balancer then the load balancer replies to the client. In this complete process the client is unaware of all the process which is carried out in the back-ground. By the load balance technique, the client need not contact the backend servers directly, which is good in terms of server security and attacks on kernel network stack securities.

  A round robin DNS does not require a dedicated software or hardware node, it is also an alternate method of load balancing. In this many IP addresses are associated with single domain name and the client has the option to choose between Dedicated servers. Load balancers use variety of scheduling algorithms to send the request to a particular backend server for processing the request. Load balancers use various factors such as servers reported load, response time up/down status, amount of traffic, number of active connections etc. to chose between backend servers. High performance systems use multiple layers of load balancing.

  Features Of Load Balancer

  There are many special featured offered with Load Balancer’s.

  • SSL Offload and Acceleration : SSL applications can be a heavy burden on resources of a Web Server. The CPU might respond late and the users might get a slow response. To solve such problems, a load balancer which is capable of handling SSL Offloading with a special hardware can be used. The burden on the web servers can be reduced without the performance getting hampered when the load balancer takes care of the SSL connection.
  • HTTP caching : The load balancer has the capability of storing static content hence some requests can be handled without contacting the web servers.
  • HTTP Security : The load balancer can hide the HTTP error pages, remove server identification headers from HTTP responses and also encrypt cookies which prevents users from manipulating them.
  • Asymmetric Load : Ratio can be manually assigned inorder to give greater load on particular servers than others.
  • Priority Activation : The standby servers can be brought online when some of the servers fails or the load on the available servers gets too high.
  • Content aware switching : The load balancers have the capability to send requests to different servers based on the URL been requested.
  • Firewall : From security perspective, direct connection to the backend servers can be prevented by the use of a load balancer.
  • HTTP Compression : It reduces the amount of data to be transferred for HTTP objects by using gzip compression.
  • Priority Queuing : Or rate shipping is the ability to give different priority to different traffic.
  • TCP Buffering : Responses from the server get buffered and fed to clients.
  • Content Filtering : The load balancer can randomly modify the traffic.
  • TCP Offload : Every HTTP request is a different TCP connection. This feature utilizes HTTP/1.1 to combine multiple HTTP requests from multiple clients into a single TCP socketto the back end servers.

  Tags: backend server, Computer Networking, DNS servers, internal communications, Internet service, kernel, load balance technique, Load Balancing, multi-layer switch, optimum resource utilization, round robin DNS, Server Security, servers

• 13Nov

  11 Vulnerabilities in Firefox. 4 are Critical.

  Computer, General, News & current Release, Web Browser No Comments

  Mozilla has released an updated version of Firefox browser. This new release covers 11 vulnerabilities that exposed users to code execution information stealing or denial of service attacks.

  

  4 out of 11 vulnerabilities were considered critical.

  The 4 critical vulnerabilities are as follows :

  1. MFSA 2008 53 XSS and JavaScript privilege escalation via session restore. The feature available with the Firefox browser of session restore has a flaw of violating the same origin policy and run JavaScript in another site. This vulnerability could also be used by an attacker to run arbitrary JavaScript with chrome privileges.
  2. MFSA 2008 55 Crash and remote code execution in nsFrame Manager. This vulnerability was a part of Mozilla’s DOM code which could be exploited by modifying properties of a file input element before it finishes initiating. An uninitialized memory is accessed by the browser which resulted in crash. The crash might be used by an attacker to run arbitrary code on the victim computer.
  3. MFSA 2008 52 crash with evidence of memory corruption. The developers of Mozilla identified and fixed many stability bugs in the browser engine used by Firefox and other Mozilla products. Some showed evidence of memory corruptions under certain circumstances
  4. MFSA 2008 54 buffer overflow in http index format parser. In this flaw Mozilla parsed the http index format MIME type. By sending a specially crafted 200 header line in the http index response an attacker can cause the browser to crash and also run arbitrary code in the victims computer.

  All these critical 4 faults have been fixed along with the rest not so critical flaws.

  Tags: Firefox, Firefox browser, Firefox Update, JavaScript, Mozilla, vulnerabilities

• 07Nov

  Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR)

  Computer, General No Comments

  AIR is a cross platform operating system runtime which enables web developers to empower their existing web development skills. It enables developers to build and deploy web applications and content to the desktop.

  Few reasons why web developers prefer AIR are as follows:

  Cross platform desktop application : An application written for a desktop can be run on any platform MacOS, Linux, Windows, etc.

  Applications acts as desktop applications : AIR is full featured application framework which gives users access to file system, system tray and web all at the same time.

  Desktop Applications written in JavaScript or HTML

  Better integration for web applications.

  

  Adobe AIR was released on June 16 2008. AIR provides support for building international languages. Its 1.1 version includes support for Windows XP tablet PC edition and 64 bits edition of Windows Vista Home Premium, Business, Ultimate and Enterprise. Its applications can operate offline too, and can upgrade itself when reconnected to the web. More than 180 applications are available on Adobe AIR market place.

  Tags: Adobe, Adobe AIR, AIR, cross platform, desktop applications, HTML, JavaScript, linux, MacOS, Operating System, Web Development, windows, Windows Vista, Windows XP

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