Web Hosting Blog

• 05Feb

  Control Panels For Windows Web Hosting

  Dedicated Server Hosting, Email Hosting, Exchange Server, Microsoft, Plesk Hosting, Virtual Private Server, Web Hosting, Windows Web Hosting, cPanel Hosting, cpanel No Comments

  Windows Web Hosting is one of the most preferred web hosting options present in the Web Hosting Industry. The Windows web hosting services offers access to control panels in order to manage the web hosting account. With a control panel managing the account becomes simple, there is no need to contact the administrator everytime for resolving simple tasks such as creating a new mail account under a domain, deleting an account etc. There has been an increase in the number of users opting for control panel access for a web hosting account.

  Windows web hosting control panel’s are few as Windows isn’t an open source operating system, hence lot of knowledge of programming in order to be able to produce an application that is able to fully function with a Windows server. Windows web hosting services are becoming more and more popular in terms of control panels too due to the growing demand for Windows web hosting services and customers.

  
  

  There are various control panels offered by web hosting companies. Three control panels that are mainly offered by web hosting firm’s are Plesk, DotNetPanel and Hosting Controller.

  

  Out of these three Plesk is more widely used and it has been in the market since a long time. Plesk is considered to be the most reliable and stable control panel. Hosting controller is classed by many web hosting providers as unreliable but DotNetPanel has yet to gain exposure. These three control panels satisfy the core purpose of managing the Windows web hosting accounts hosted on the Windows servers.

  Below are few Advantages offered by the three control panels:

  A] DotNetPanel : DotNetPanel doesn’t only emphasize on standard shared Windows Web Hosting services but on advanced Microsoft service hosting too to support web hosting service providers increase the range of Windows based web hosting products. Cheap Hyper V based VPS hosting solutions as well as Microsoft Server 2007 e-mail hosting solutions can be provided by web hosts with this control panel. Web hosting services can be offered with a cheap cost by using DotNetPanel hence offering cheaper web hosting solution.

  B] Hosting Controller : Hosting controller is the biggest rival of Plesk provisioning characteristics. But, yet Hosting Controller has many other features to offer web hosting providers like built-in back-up and restore feature to ensure that if any data gets lost due to a software or hardware failure then there will be back-ups which can be relied on. control panel due to its focus on offering shared Windows web hosting services. Hosting Controller does not include any advanced management and

  C] Plesk : Plesk has the ability to offer the web hosting service provider as server administrators as well as the customers as easy way to use interface which one can use to configure the different settings related to both Plesk and one’s server as well as to create web hosting accounts for the customers front end. Plesk proves to be useful for those who are hosted on the server and wish to manage the account successfully and effectively. Plesk is more

  

  user friendly compared to others hence a newbie too can easily use Plesk.

  Similar to Plesk, cPanel has proved to be the most popular control panel for Linux web hosting.

  Tags: DotNetPanel, Hosting Control Panel, Hosting controller, Hyper V, Microsoft Server 2007, plesk, VPS hosting, Web Hosting, Windows Web Hosting

• 26Nov

  Types Of Internet Hosting Services

  Dedicated Server Hosting, Domain Name, Email Hosting, Linux Hosting, Linux VPS, Linux web hosting, Micfo Web Hosting, Web Hosting, Windows Web Hosting, cPanel Hosting No Comments

  With the development of Internet the e-commerce services too have increased rapidly.There are varied types of web hosting services that are available with various web hosting service providers. Below are the different types of services offered in Web Hosting category.

  1. Virtual Private Server (VPS)
  2. Dedicated Hosting,
  3. Free Hosting,
  4. Shared Hosting,
  5. Clustered Hosting,
  6. Reseller Hosting,
  7. FFmpeg hosting,
  8. Blog hosting,
  9. Image hosting,
  10. Video hosting,
  11. DNS hosting,
  12. E-mail hosting,
  13. Application hosting,
  14. Social network hosting,
  15. Game server hosting.

  1. Virtual Private Server (VPS): The VPS is also referred as Virtual Dedicated Server (VDS). It is a method of partitioning a physical server computer into multiple servers in a way that the appearance and capabilities of running on its own dedicated machine. Every virtual server can run operating system on the individual partition.

  The VPS is as good as a dedicated server but the VPS package is cheaper than that of the dedicated server package.

  2. Dedicated Server Hosting: The dedicated server hosting is also called as managed hosting service. It is a type of hosting service where the client leases the entire service. The server is not shared with any of the other clients. This type of service offers more rights and flexibility than the shared hosting as the client has the complete control of the server. The client can decide the operating system to be installed or the hardware to be selected as per requirements. The server administration can be provided by the hosting company. The dedicated server is often housed in the data centers.

  3.Free Hosting: Free web hosting is just an advertisement tactic, actually its never free. Free web hosting has a lot of limitations, such as:

  • Limits on the hosted files
  • Smaller bandwidth
  • Disabled hotlinking files
  • File type restrictions
  • No uptime guarantee
  • No allowance of custom URL’s (Pronographics)

  Extra features That May be Available:

  • Web based control panel
  • Free email accounts for the domain and sub-domain
  • File transfer through FTP
  • Forums and community resources not typical to paid hosts.

  4.Shared Hosting: In shared hosting many sites may be hosted on a single server. The resources of a single server are shared between multiple customers. A shared web hosting option is one way of cheap and economical option of hosting the web-site. Many users share the overall cost of the server maintenance.

  5.Clustered Web Hosting: The clustered hosting technology is designed to eliminate the problem of typical shared hosting infrastructure. This technology provides customers with a clustered handling of security, load balancing and the required website resources.

  6. Reseller Hosting: Reseller hosting is a type of web hosting where the account owner has the privilege to use the allotted hard drive space and bandwidth to host websites on behalf of the third party. The reseller buys the web host’s services and sells them to its customers. A reseller does not require an extensive technical knowledge of web hosting.

  7. FFmpeg hosting: FFmpeg is the term that is referred to every assortment of software that is freely available. It is helpful form recording, converting and streaming of digital video and audio files. It falls in the category of video hosting services.

  8.Blog Hosting: Weblog / blog software/blogware is a type of software that consists of a specialized form of content Management system desigined specifically for creating and maintaining weblogs.

  9.Image Hosting: An image hosting service allows individuals to upload images to an Internet website. The image host will then store the image onto its server, and show the individual different types of code to allow others to view that image.

  10.Video Hosting: A video sharing service allows individuals to upload video clips to an Internet website. The video host will then store the video on its server, and show the individual different types of code to allow others to view this video. The website, mainly used as the video hosting service, is usually called the video sharing website.

  11.DNS Hosting: It is a type of service that carries out Domain Name System servers. Free DNS hosting services too are available.

  12. E-mail Hosting: E-mail hosting service is another type of Internet hosting service which runs e-mail servers.

  13. Application Hosting: An application service provision is a type of a business that provides computer based services to customers on the network. The most limited sense of this business is that of providing access to a particular application program (such as customer relationship management) using a standard protocol such as HTTP.

  14. Social Network Hosting: A social network hosting service is a web hosting service that specifically hosts the creation of web-based social networking services, alongside related applications.

  15. Game Server Hosting: A game server might be leased by game clients for playing multiplayer games over the internet. The Game server Providers (GSP’s) are the companies that lease dedicated game servers. Game server providers often offer web based tools to help control and configure the game servers

  Tags: Application hosting, Blog hosting, Clustered Hosting, Dedicated Hosting, DNS hosting, E-mail hosting, FFmpeg hosting, Free Hosting, game server hosting, Image hosting, reseller hosting, shared hosting, Social network hosting, Video hosting, Virtual Private Server, vps, web hosting services

• 20Nov

  Future Web Hosting Initiates With Virtual Private Servers

  Dedicated Server Hosting, Email Hosting, Exchange Server, Linux VPS, Linux web hosting, Micfo Web Hosting, Web Hosting, Web Hosting Articles, Windows Web Hosting, cPanel Hosting No Comments

  Experts of the Hosting Transformation Summit believe that Virtual Private Server (VPS) is the future of Web Hosting industry.

  Exactly like the stand alone web server, Virtual Private Server (VPS) can perform and execute the tasks. The VPS hosting technique includes multiple servers on a single physical web server. The physical server is split with the use of highly sophisticated kernel based partitioning software. Every VPS has its own hard disk, IP, operating system, RAM and control panel with complete root SSH access and 100% guaranteed equal share of CPU processing power. The most important quality of the VPS is that any VPS account cannot affect the other accounts in spite of using the same hardware.

  

  FEATURES:

  Every VPS account has its own system configuration files and applications.

  Every VPS account has its own processor, users, files with full access of the root.

  Every VPS account can have its own system libraries or else, the existing can be modified.

  Every VPS account can have its own IP addresses, port numbers, tables, filtering and routing rules.

  BENEFITS

  Any VPS file cannot be accessed by any other VPS account or VPS user present on the same hardware, hence enhancing privacy and security.

  The VPS users have the complete control of the root, which enables users to modify server configuration files, install software’s and applications.

  

  Every VPS user gets the complete hardware resource, hence every VPS user present on the same hardware gets equal optimum resources.

  
  

  VPS account is much cheaper than going for a dedicated hosting account. Day by day VPS web hosting account is preffered by more and more users. VPS hosting falls in the category of cloud/grid computing and virtualization computing. VPS technology is an advanced technology of the future of web hosting.

  Tags: advanced technology, Cloud computing, Dedicated Hosting, privacy, security, Virtual Private Server, virtualization, vps, VPS hosting, Web Hosting, web server

• 13Nov

  General difference between Clustered and Shared Web Hosting.

  Database Hosting, Dedicated Server Hosting, Domain Name, Email Hosting, Linux Hosting, Linux VPS, Linux web hosting, Micfo Web Hosting, MySQL Hosting Issues., Plesk Hosting, Search Engine Marketing, Web Hosting, Windows Web Hosting, cPanel Hosting, cpanel No Comments

  Clustered web hosting is designed to eliminate the problems inherited from the typical shared web hosting technology. This type of hosting provides customers with a clustered handling of security, load balancing and necessary resources.

  Human interference is not required in clustered hosting as the clustered hosting platform is data driven. The resources are virtualized beyond the limits of a single physical server which removes the limitation of the website to be present on a single server. The processing power and application resources are shared in Cluster web hosting. Incase of any changes done to a customer’s account then it gets propagated to each server present in the cluster. Whereas in shared web hosting changes to a configuration file takes effect after the server is re-booted. In clustered hosting multiple layers of security are integrated into the platform whereas in other types of web hosting the security layers are not integrated in the platform. The Clustered hosting network layer protection require intelligent routing, built in firewalls and proxy technology. It comprises of redundant switching fabric.

  Shared web hosting service refers to the hosting service in which many websites are hosted on a single server. Each website is assigned a particular limited space (Depends on the Shared Hosting Package) in which the web server resources are shared between many web-sites hosted on the same server. Shared web hosting is the most economical type of web hosting service available. Shared web hosting requires web based control panel such as cPanel, Plesk, Direct Admin etc. The servers might have Windows or Linux operating systems installed on them. Both have similar interfaces and functionality with only difference in the operating system. As the resources offered by a single server are used by each website optimum performance cannot be expected which is not the case with dedicated web hosting service. The secure websites are not properly supported in shared web hosting platforms. All the websites share the same IP address and the same domain name. Improper configuration of file permissions with shared files might lend access of file to other users present on the same server.

  Tags: Clustered web hosting, cpanel, dedicated web hosting service, Linux Hosting, plesk, Shared Hosting Package, Shared Web Hosting, shared web hosting technology, Virtualisation, WebServer security, windows hosting

• 03Nov

  Plesk and cPanel

  Email Hosting, General, Linux Hosting, Linux web hosting, Micfo Web Hosting, Web Hosting, Windows Web Hosting, cPanel Hosting, cpanel No Comments

  Plesk and cPanel are the most common control panels provided to users by the web hosting services. Using the control panels users can create and modify the websites. Plesk can be availed with Linux as well as Windows operating systems, whereas cPanel can be available with Linux only. But the engineers are working on cPanel to be made available with Windows as well.

  Users need to decide the between the control panels at the time of obtaining a web hosting account. The control panel should be easy to use and should have better built-in utilities. Depending on the users requirements the selection of control panel should be done. Though Plesk and cPanel offer similar basic features, which is the reason they are so popular. Using any one of the control panels users can create, modify or delete e-mail accounts, manage them, maintain domain or sub-domains and upload files and manage them as well. Add-on’s too are available with both Plesk and cPanel which helps creating and managing websites.

  Plesk

  As stated earlier, now-a-days Plesk is the highly preferred control panel. The reason is because it is highly reliable if compared with any other control panel. Its compatibility with Windows operating system (OS) makes it so popular amongst web hosting service providers. Plesk includes various versions for Linux and Windows OS’s. Plesk can be very easily learned. Due to which user’s time and money are saved.

  

  The only drawback of Plesk is, the web developers and web designers do not have the privilege of creating their own add-ons and applications. Plesk has some security issues too, which means hackers can easily drop into the control panel no matter if the user changes its username and password.

  

  

  Yet, if the user wants a control panel which is compatible with both Linux and Windows, Plesk can be the one. But if the user needs to install any programs and wants more easier control panel, then cPanel would be preferred.

  cPanel

  cPanel or Control Panel is another much preferred graphical web hosting control panel which is simple and easy for administering the websites. cPanel is supplied by cPanel Inc. cPanel is majorly used by commercial web hosting services. It requires monthly licensing as it is a proprietary product.

  

  Most of the web-developers and web designers prefer cPanel. cPanel was designed for Speed hosting, its based on Perl scripts and mostly do not require access to databases. cPanel is helpful for designing and development of attractive websites as it is an excellent Graphical User Interface (GUI).

  

  Few of many features of cPanel are database management, domain and sub-domain control, FTP, back-up facility, e-mail management etc. Loading is a very quick task with the use of cPanel. Fantastico and RVSkins can be installed using cPanel. cPanel provides each and every detail of the web-site due to its statistics sidebar. Web Host Manager (WHM) is available with cPanel. Reseller web hosting can be simplified with the use of WHM. WHM can also be used to set up reselling account and resell web hosting service.

  With the use of site migration module in cPanel, websites and web hosting accounts can be easily migrated to other web hosting service.

  Both the control panels have excellent graphical user interface. But cPanel has a better GUI than Plesk. It is more user friendly. Most of the web hosting service providers provides cPanel. Fantastico Deluxe installer is included in cPanel, which has many web utilities and powerful scripts. Installation of blogs, forums, content management systems (CMS), community boards, e-Commerce shopping carts, e-mail accounts and many other web tools can be easily done with the use of Fantastico. Users need not be a web programmer neither s/he should have knowledge of databases coding. One can install utilities and scripts easily. Plesk too provides an application pack but cPanels Fantastico cannot be compared.

  Tags: control panels, cpanel, e-Commerce, Fantastico, Graphical User Interface, Hackers, linux, Operating System, OS, Perl scripts, plesk, RVSkins, security, Speed hosting, Web Host Manager, Web Hosting, web hosting services, WHM, windows

• 22Oct

  Wrong Disk Quota for Email Accounts in Webmail

  Email Hosting, cPanel Hosting No Comments

  Greetings ,

  Pissed off with wrong disk usages for your email accoounts in Webmail ?

  Dont worry ..

  Just find and remove below files from your account ..
  1. find /home/username/mail/ -name maildirsize

  2. find /home/username/.cpanel-datastore/ -name “diskusage_*”
  Cheers :)

  Kyle

• 08Oct

  Email Error: Unrouteable address

  Blogging, Email Hosting, Linux Hosting, cPanel Hosting No Comments

  Hello Friends,

  While sending emails from your email address and you get the error Unrouteable address with RCPT reject. That means the problem at receivers end.

  Check the following things.

  1. Check the domains entry is available in userdoamins.

  2. Check the domains entry is is available in localdomain

  3. check the domain must having catchall address set if not then set
  vi /etc/valiases/domain.com

  *: username

  4. also make sure that the mail folder having ownership user:mail

  5 restart exim services once.

  6. Now your problem will get resolved.

  Tuks:)

• 29Sep

  How spamassassin works.

  Email Hosting, Linux Hosting, Server Security, cPanel Hosting No Comments

  Greetinngs,

  Check out its feature on how it works.

  –> There are several ways that SpamAssassin makes up its mind about a
  message:
  –> The message headers can be checked for consistency and adherence to
  Internet standards (e.g., is the date formatted properly?).
  –> The headers and body can be checked for phrases or message elements
  commonly found in spam (e.g., “MAKE MONEY FAST” or instructions on how to be
  removed from future mailings)-in several languages.
  –> The headers and body can be looked up in several online databases that
  track message checksums of verified spam messages.
  –> The sending system’s IP address can be looked up in several online lists
  of sites that have been used by spammers or are otherwise suspicious.
  –> Specific addresses, hosts, or domains can be blacklisted or whitelisted.
  A whitelist can be automatically constructed based on the sender’s past
  history of messages.
  –> SpamAssassin can be trained to recognize the types of spam that you
  receive by learning from a set of messages that you consider spam and a set
  that you consider non-spam. (SpamAssassin and the spam-filtering community
  often refer to non-spam messages as ham. )
  –> The sending system’s IP address can be compared to the sender’s domain
  name using the Sender Policy Framework (SPF) protocol (http://spf.pobox.com)
  to determine if that system is permitted to send messages from users at that
  domain. This feature requires SpamAssassin 3.0.
  –> SpamAssassin can privilege senders who are willing to expend some extra
  computational power in the form of Hashcash.
  Spammers cannot do these computations and still send out huge amounts of
  mail rapidly. This feature requires SpamAssassin 3.0.

  Most of SpamAssassin’s behavior is controlled through a systemwide
  configuration file and a set of per-user configuration files. The per-user
  configuration can also be stored in an SQL database.

  How to Configure it ? : -
  ——————-

  You can easily customize how SpamAssassin tags and identifies spam by
  creating a spamassassin/user_prefs file. You can customize the number of
  “spam points” required to identify a message as spam, create new rules, and
  re-weight existing rules. Here is a sample user_prefs file. It raises the
  threshold for identifying spam from 5 to 6, disables including spam warnings
  in the subject and body, reweights a known rule, and adds several blacklist,
  whitelist, and header rules.

  Listing 1. A typical user_prefs configuration file

  ================================================================

  #How many hits before a mail is considered spam?
  required_hits 6

  #Don’t mangle the messages so badly
  rewrite_subject 0
  use_terse_report 1

  #whitelist and blacklist
  whitelist_from *@www.zzzzzz.com
  blacklist_from annoying-person@xyz.com

  #reweight an existing rule
  score BASE64_ENC_TEXT 3

  #add some new rules
  header KNOWN_LIST List-Id =~ /a-mailing-list-i-like/
  score KNOWN_LIST -3

  body EVITE /This invitation was sent to you by .* using Evite/
  describe EVITE Looks like an eVite
  score EVITE -3

  ================================================================

  Enjoy..

• 24Sep

  What is Spam Assassin ?

  Email Hosting, Web Hosting Articles, cPanel Hosting 1 Comment

  What is Spam Assassin?
  The SpamAssassin system is software for analyzing email messages, determining how likely they are to be spam, and reporting its conclusions. It is a rule-based system that compares different parts of email messages with a large set of rules. Each rule adds or removes points from a message’s spam score. A message with a high enough score is reported to be spam.
  Spam Assassin is a e-mail spam filtering system that sits side by side with account with us to help block, mark or filter out mail you don’t want.

  How do I access Spam Assassin?
  First thing you will want to do is log into your cPanel. From there, under the “Mail” box look at the nine a link that reads “Spam Assassin”. From here it will tell you if Spam Assassin is currently enabled or disabled. Clicking the boxes to enable or disable Spam Assassin is how you can turn it on or off. To configure the Spam Assassin settings click the button that reads: “Configure Spam Assassin (required to rewrite subjects)”

  How do I configure Spam Assassin?
  If you do not know what it is you are looking at, the next screen could be a little confusing. To help you understand here’s a break down of what you should see on the screen and what do do with it:

  required_hits - The number of e-mails received before marked as spam.
  rewrite_subject - The tells Spam Assassin if it should rewrite your subject line or not as you define. (1 is yes and 0 is no)
  subject_tag - What the spam is marked with in the subject line. (usually ***SPAM*** or something else that could be picked up by your own mail filters on your mail client of choice)
  blacklist_from - An e-mail address you definitely want to be marked as spam. (you could also use *@something.com to get every email from that address filtered)
  whitelist_from - An e-mail address you definitely do NOT want to be marked as spam. (you could also use *@something.com to get every email from that address NOT filtered)

  Once you’re done, just hit save and whatever you defined on the earlier page will now be in effect. If you picked to rewrite the subject, then you could now go into your mail client and write a new “rule” that would filter all mail with “***SPAM***” to go into a SPAM folder so that you could check it from time to time making sure you did not get any false positives.

  How do I use the Spam Box?
  You can turn your spam box enable and disable from the same page as Spam Assassin. It’s just that easy! With the recent upgrades to cPanel, the TotalChoice Hosting team has been paying more attention to the users of Spam Assassin.

  In the previous build you would need to use a imap client to get to your spam box.
  Well not anymore. You can create a “new” e-mail account that has precisely the same settings as your e-mail account, but add: “/spam” to the end of the e-mail account user name. This will retrieve only your Spam Box mail.

  In order for this to be useful, you will want to set up your e-mail client to deliver this Spam Box mail to a special folder (perhaps called spam?) automatically.

• 26Aug

  QMAIL Tips

  Email Hosting No Comments

  qmail is an alternative to sendmail. Plesk servers use qmail, and it may be installed on other Linux web servers as well. Here are some tips and other general information on how to use and maintain qmail.

  * The author of qmail, D. J. Bernstein, has a web page at http://cr.yp.to . Links are provided here to software Bernstein has written, including qmail, djbdns (an alternative to BIND), daemontools (programs for supervising persistent processes such as network daemons), and ucspi-tcp (an alternative to inetd and xinetd).

  * The most-accepted method of installing and running qmail is defined by “Life with qmail”, or LWQ. Visit http://www.lifewithqmail.org for more details. Plesk generally has its own way of installing qmail, but LWQ will still be an excellent reference even for troubleshooting qmail on Plesk servers.

  * Other qmail tips and tools are available at http://www.qmail.org/top.html . Also provided here are links to searchable archives of the qmail mailing list.

  * To see how many messages are currently in the queue, use /var/qmail/bin/qmail-qstat (/usr/local/psa/qmail/bin/qmail-qstat on Plesk 2.5 servers).

  * For more detailed information about the messages currently in the queue, use /var/qmail/bin/qmail-qread (/usr/local/psa/qmail/bin/qmail-qread on Plesk 2.5 servers). This command is similar to the sendmail mailq command.

  * qmail’s configuration files are kept in /var/qmail/control (or /usr/local/psa/qmail/control). Together these files are equivalent to the sendmail.cf file (but much easier to read IMNSHO). LWQ provides an explanation of what each of these files is for, and so does “man qmail-control”. You may need to add the qmail man directory to the MANPATH environment variable for this man page to be found; if so, the directory is usually /var/qmail/man.

  * The qmail queue directory is typically /var/qmail/queue (or /usr/local/psa/qmail/queue). Do NOT manipulate the files in this directory UNLESS you know exactly what you are doing, and UNLESS qmail is not running! Otherwise, you WILL break the queue! There are several programs listed at qmail.org designed to allow safe manipulation of the queue. In particular, Charles Cazabon, the author of memtester, has also written a qmail queue repair program, available at http://www.qcc.ca/~charlesc/software/queue_repair/ .

  * Cazabon’s queue_repair program is particularly handy for wiping out qmail queues of servers being abused by spammers (usually courtesy of Plesk’s “open relay” option). The general steps are: stop qmail, move or delete the queue directory, run queue_repair with the appropriate options, then restart qmail. On Plesk 5 and 6 servers, the queue directory is /var/qmail/queue and qmail_repair should be run like so: “qmail_repair.py -c -s 23 -b”. For other web servers, the queue directory will most likely be /var/qmail/queue (/usr/local/psa/qmail/queue for Plesk 2.5 servers), and qmail_repair will be run as either “qmail_repair.py -c -s XX -b /path/to/queue” or “qmail_repair.py -c -s XX -n /path/to/queue”. XX is the number of subdirectories within the queue’s info and mess directories; the “-b” option is used if there are subdirectories within the queue’s todo directory, and the “-n” option is used otherwise; “/path/to/queue” is optional if the queue directory is /var/qmail/queue.

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