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.

Internet Functionality

Internet or the world wide web (www) is a network of computers connected to each other. The companies that provide the service are known as Internet Service Providers (ISP). The file sharing is achieved by the web server software. The popular web server software’s are Windows IIS (Internet Information Server) and Apache.

Users send requests to the internet to view the websites. Web client software is used to make these requests. Examples of web clients are web browsers such as Internet Explorer, Opera and Netscape.

To make the website available on the internet the website files need to be hosted on a web server. The web server is nothing but a powerful computer which has the capacity to handle thousands of requests made to the website. The web servers need to be connected to the internet at all times for users to access the website whenever required. The Web Hosting service provider is the one that sells the server space for the website. A web hosting company provides high bandwidth connection for the ease of accessing the website by users. The website can be hosted by the website owner, but there are few following why it is difficult. Due to the following reasons why a web host is preffered.

• Setting up all the configurations which also includes mail server, DNS server and FTP server is complicated.

• Server software and Server are expensive (such as virus protection, web server, firewall, mail server etc.)

• Server maintenance requires special skills, knowledge and most importantly 24 hour support.

• The server needs 24*7 high speed internet connection which is costly.

Considering such factors the website to be hosted with a web hosting company is always a better option. Web hosting is cheap. There are few web hosting companies that provide free web hosting services, but its not recommended for professional and company websites. The free web hosting company recovers the costs by showing adds on the users website. Free hosting provides very less flexibility in terms of have own domain names and email addresses.But the website owner has the privilege of chosing between Linux Server and Windows Server.

Talk Talk an Internet Service provider is offering customers with faster broadband. The ISP has launched a new MyTalkTalk broadband package with a basic monthly package of £6.49 it includes a speed boost of upto 24 Mbps and some add-ons. Other offers are of half of the current call rates on mobile calls additional 40 Gb downloads and cheaper fixed line calls.

The boost can be activated anytime at a cost of £4 per month.

The new offerings have been introduced after realizing that communication needs are changing and the change should also reflect in the quality of service offered.

The new offer includes increase in the download limit from 40 Gb to 80 Gb (Gogabytes) on a monthly basis.

Talk Talk was launched in 2006 by Carphone Warehouse, it offered free broadband for customers that signed up to it landline service.

Though, the new speed upgrade may vary depending on the distance from the telephone exchange. But the firm expects that almost 10-15% customers will be able to experience the speed of upto 24 Mbps (Mega bites per second). Consumers can test the speeds, then according to the speed that they are actually getting can sign up for the offer.

The new service will be available from 18^th November.

Mozilla would soon release a Private Browsing version of Firefox, also called as the Porn Mode.

Private browsing Mode does not keep any traces of the web activities on the computer. Private browsing should not be misunderstood as being anonymous over the web or from the ISP’s (Internet service providers) neither does it keep users protected spyware or malware. What Firefox does is, it clears the data of users online activity.

Apple’s Safari, Google’s Chrome and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 Beta version 2 already have the Private Browsing Mode also know as the Porn Mode.

This update will be available publicly on Firefox 3.1 Beta 2, which is soon to be released. Users can download the current developer built version from Mozilla Developer Page.

Almost one million UK’s broadband consumes have either exceeded or almost about to exceed their broadband usage limits, according to a survey carried out by a consumer group named “Uswitch”.

The Internet Service Providers (ISP) limits the broadband bandwidth that a user can use per month. But most of the consumers are not very sure about the bandwidth limitations. Exceeding the usage limit results in disconnection of services. Use of broadband or Internet has become a lifeline for majority of us, hence facing the problem of disconnection of broadband can majorly impact on our lives.

The survey’s result states that 56% of the ISP’s that advertised “Unlimited” usage too imposed usage caps. Just two out of nine service providers declared the usage limits. Almost 80% of the consumers are unaware of the limits of the usage, though fair usage policies are mentioned in the terms and condition of broadband contract. But only one in four consumers take the effort of going through the terms and conditions.

Uswitch Survey results :

• 22% of broadband providers advertise the true limits of their packages.
• 6.2m customers thought they had no usage cap.
• 7.5m users are unaware of their download limits.
• One million have reached or on the verge of reaching the limits of broadband usage limits.

DHCP Short for Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol, a protocol for assigning dynamic IP addresses to devices on a network. With dynamic addressing, a device can have a different IP address every time it connects to the network. In some systems, the device’s IP address can even change while it is still connected. DHCP also supports a mix of static and dynamic IP addresses.

Dynamic addressing simplifies network administration because the software keeps track of IP addresses rather than requiring an administrator to manage the task. This means that a new computer can be added to a network without the hassle of manually assigning it a unique IP address. Many ISPs use dynamic IP addressing for dial-up users. This protocol reduces administrators workload which allows addition of devices to the network little or zero manual intervention.

DHCP is a way of managing network parameter assignment from a single DHCP server or may be a group of DHCP servers arranged in a fault tolerant style. Using DHCP any new machine can be added to the local network. DHCP can be used to assign addresses directly to the desktop machines or servers.

Technical Summary

DHCP uses two IANA assigned ports as BOOTP: 67/udp for the server side, and 68/udp for the client side.

DHCP works in four phases :

1. IP Discovery ,
2. IP Lease Offer,
3. IP Request and
4. IP lease acknowledgement.

After the client gets an IP address, he may start an address resolution (ARP) query for preventing IP conflicts caused due to address pool overlapping of DHCP servers.

Security

The basic DHCP does not have any feature of security hence is susceptible to two types of attacks.

1. Unauthorized DHCP Servers : One cannot specify the required server. Any unauthorized server may react to the clients request and send client network configuration to the hacker.
2. Unauthorized DHCP clients : An unauthorized client can gain access to the network configuration and IP address by camouflaging itself as a legitimate client.

RFC3118 introduced authentication information into DHCP messages to overcome these threats. Doing this enables the clients and servers to reject information from invalid or unknown sources.