Web Hosting Blog

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.

Plesk control panel was developed by specialized and experienced web hosting company and IT professionals for Windows Web Hosting. It contains almost every essential tool to manage the Internet activity.

Plesk is a control panel which is used only with Windows Web Hosting solutions, it comes with a capability to allow users to easily control the various tasks of a Web site. It enables the management of every necessary tool for the Windows web hosting. Its major usage can be seen in the Windows Dedicated server hosting solutions.

Plesk control panel provides users with web interface for databases such as My SQL and MS SQL. Users have the privilege to choose between SmarterStats, AWstats and Webalizer which are the traffic statistics tools, it also helps in viewing the traffic history. Users get SSL and non-SSL content served from the same physical directory. Users can automatically create new web-sites based on templates or as per the users requirements. Creation of DNS with Apache or FTP tool is simple with Plesk. The bandwidth used by websites, FTP can be monitored using Plesk control panel.

Auto-responders, E-mails and E-mail groups can be easily managed and created with the help of Plesk. Plesk also comes with a feature of Log Rotation Management. Users can manage and upload web pages with File Manager or FrontPage Web-Admin.

In Windows Web Hosting, Plesk enables users to create sub domains, manage site dynamic content. It comes with a new site Builder. Plesk helps in the management of dedicated IP’s, shared-IP and virtual IP domains, create standard/ frame forwarding domains and manage SSL certificate for domains.

Most of the Web Hosting companies offer Plesk with Windows Web Hosting packages. Plesk has gained reputation for its reliability and stability as a control panel.

Before transferring data from one Dedicated server to another, some of the following points must be kept in mind.

• Visitors to the web-site must be kept informed about the migration. The possible downtime too should be communicated. The migration should be done during sometime in the mid night when there is least traffic on the web-site. This helps in reducing the inconvenience to the clients.
• Preparation of DNS for the move: All the DNS record must be set to atleast an hour. It must be done 48 hours earlier to the move. This helps to ensure that when the website migration takes place and the IP address get switched in the DNS records, visitors would be able to quickly get the new location.
• The website owner should make a list of all things that needs to be moved.
• A web page must be created that only notifies the migration such as “Migration in Progress. The website would be functional in couple of hours” or anything of this sort. This web page must be kept in the place of the web directory. Care should be taken that no pages should be accessed this would avoid the risk of losing of any data.
• Once everything is fine, the website must be brought back up. This can be done by swapping the IP address in the DNS to the new IP address.
• Now the TTL in the DNS records must be changed after approximately 24 hours to what it previously was.

Migration of the dedicated server is one of the crucial process hence it should be done very carefully.

There is a simple way of checking the owner of a particular Domain.

It is a common and more frequent question that arises in the mind while surfing the internet that who owns the web-site. While starting a online business or starting a web site then knowing the domain names is essential. This is one of the necessary information required before initiating the website/business.
Several sites provide the service of “Whois“, one can get every information that the user is searching for. The Whois service is an internet username directory service. This service provides a list of domain names already present over the internet.With the use of Whois service one can get the contact number and e-mail address of the owner of the website.
Every computer has a unique address which is known as the IP adress.With the use this IP address one can search on a certain IP on Whois.
Whois has multiple uses.There are many sites where one can search domain names example: www.domaintools.com.This site offers everything from a search directory to DNS tools and domain history. This web-site also provides a service known as the mark alert, it alerts you when someone registers a domain name with particular term or phrase.A mark alert helps you keep track of your competition and trademarks can be proactively monitored.

At some point of time when the service offered by the current Web hosting service provider starts falling short of the requirements of the user or the website owner, users tend to seek some other Hosting company. But switching onto another Hosting company might be a little messy. So here are a few steps that might be helpful when switching to another service provider.

Taking Backup Is most Important:

Users should ritually taking back-ups, it always helps when they want to switch the service providers. Users should take the backup of every data on the server. It is recommended that two copies of back up should be taken and stored in different locations.

There is a possibility that the new service provider has a different control panel. Then a manual backup must be done by downloading all the files as a different control panel might not be able to restore the backups taken by the old host. They might or they do have different directory structures so it might be a messy job to get all the files with the new service provider. Also the old server configuration must be noted. This helps when as you make changes on the new host server. Users should make the correct transfer type as the download initiates. If the download does not happen, then there are wide possibilities that the website might not work properly or may not even work.

The server logs too should be backed up. The best thing to do is to download it and use a log analyzer on your computer to make references to later on.

Gathering Odds & Ends Is Essential

1. A Good FTP program you should have.

2. Get your new host server’s DNS
3. It’s also helpful to have a script that tells you the server environments installed on your new host server for quick reference.
4. Get the temporary URL on your new host so you can check your site before you make a DNS change.
5. If you have your host control the domain inform them not to change your DNS until you tell them to.
6. If you run scripts:
- Get a copy of the original installation guide and the script. Sometimes after moving the scripts just do not work right so you might need to install the script from scratch.
- Get a list of all the server paths such as Perl, Send mail and home directory on your new server.
- If your script needs special server modules or programs ensure they are installed and where. Even though these might be covered before you ordered the account with the host but sometimes your host has removed it or haven’t installed it yet.

Visitors Must Be Kept Informed:

This is always proven to be a very good practice of informing the visitors of the server move. This helps building trust and awaring them of the possible downtime. This results in retaining the customers with your web hosting service. There should always be an alternate e-mail id so that no mails get lost at the time of transfer. If the web-site is large then doing periodic update can be helpful as visitors can inform you if any part of the web-site isn’t functional.

Day Of the Movement:

The time of movement must be when there is least traffic on the web-site. Latest back-up must be taken just before the movement. The most visible parts of the site must be backed up. If the web-site is large and are moving to a new web hosting service provider then, the pages must be split and must be moved on different days with moving the critical parts first then the less. Take care of taking the back-up before every move. The temporary URL must be checked of the site.

DNS Change:

Once everything is fine, change the DNS. Usually it takes 24-48 hours so users have ample time to make some minor adjustments (If required). Make small changes onto the new page to differentiate between the old and new to help determine if the DNS has been resolved.

Now Comes The Part Of Monitoring:

After the movement is successful and the DNS is resolved, don’t release the old account immediately. Parallely keep it running for atleast two weeks. Check the activity on the old server. Checking the old e-mail account is always beneficial to see if any communication has been left unseen.

Once everything is in place, user can cancel the account from the old service provider.

When any user accesses Internet may be for sending e-mails or browsing, then without even realizing that s/he are using domain name servers. DNS is are very important but are hidden parts of the Internet. The DNS network is one of the largest and most active distributed databases. Without DNS, Internet is useless. The machines only understand IP addresses to refer to one another.

Domain name servers translate domain names to IP addresses. DNS system is a database, it receives many requests in a day.

Every computer machine on the Internet has an IP (Internet Protocol) address. A server too has an IP but it is static which does not change much often.

In a day, the name servers do two basic things:

1. It accepts requests from programs to convert domain names into IP addresses and
2. Accept requests from other name servers to convert domain names into IP addresses.

When a request arrives the name servers do four things :

1. It can return an error message as the requested domain name is invalid or does not exist.
2. It can contact another name server and try to find the IP address for the name requested. It may do this multiple times.

1. It can answer the request with an IP address as it already knows the IP address for the domain.
2. It can say, “I don’t know the IP address for the domain you requested, but here’s the IP address for a name server that knows more than I do.”
3. It can return an error message as the requested domain name is invalid or does not exist.

When a user types a URL in the browser, the browser converts the domain name and host name into an IP address so that the browser can request a web page.