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posted by Smirnovi4 @ 20:21 PM
January 8, 2010

Many of web hosting newbies bring up a question about differences between a reseller hosting and a VPS and wondering which one is best for their project needs. Unfortunately, it is not that simple to answer this question. There is a number of touches that require a closer investigation on the subject to give a decent answer. First of all, a lot depends on the initial aim, i.e. whether the account will be used to resell hosting, utilized directly to host own content, used as a test ground for products in development or all at once. Moreover, Skills possessed by an owner of an account matter a lot as well as the price differences. Let’s take a closer look at both hosting types to draw reasonable conclusions… Read the rest of this entry »

posted by Smirnovi4 @ 16:16 PM
December 30, 2009

Backups as precautions against data loss.

Every hosting account holder must understand the importance of backups. They play the same role in information technology, a car insurance plays in everyday life. Backups help you in case of unexpected issues with content on your account. Forums, blogs and similar projects take a lot of time to develop, but one serious spontaneous error in the system can damage all your information or even make it vanish entirely. This can happen due to numerous reasons: hardware and software faults, to name a few. Take into consideration such widely spread activity as hacking, and you will realize the scale of existing menaces. As a matter of fact, any WordPress blog, which is not updated on time, can easily fall victim to such malicious activity . This is also true for any kind of web software. Last but not least, you can accidentally make errors in data of your blog yourself, and then you need a point to roll back to. Backups enable you to do just that.

One of the easiest ways to make sure you can recover after most content related disasters is to make backups of your account from time to time. In case you run a WordPress based blog, having a backup of entire account is not necessary. It is enough to simply have a couple of healthy database dumps, which contain all important information, including your posts. Since posts are the most important part of any blog, having them in reserve archives saves you a lot of work in case of emergency restoration.

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posted by Smirnovi4 @ 16:16 PM
December 8, 2009

Virtualization is a widely used technology nowadays. A whole set of hosting plans is based on it – the so-called Virtual Private Servers (VPS). They allow steady transition from regular shared to the most powerful dedicated solutions. While big projects may require the power of an independent dedicated server, some personal and small-to-medium businesses may not need such resources at high costs at first. At the same time the needs of  such customers may not be satisfied with what regular shared hosting has to offer due its nature . Unlike shared hosting, V PS allows full isolation from other users on the host server. It provides full control over the account (i.e. root access), remote reboots and system restore.

Nowadays various approaches and implementations of virtualization exist. In this article we will compare two most widely used virtualization engines: OpenVZ and Xen. The main goal of the article is to provide basic concept, and outline the differences and similarities of the two engines.

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posted by Smirnovi4 @ 11:49 AM
November 30, 2009

As recently announced by well a known IT giant Microsoft, its Windows Azure Cloud Platform will be launched into production state on January 1 2010. Currently the platform is in its technical preview state, which in a way means that it is not widely available to anyone who wants to “taste” it.

So what is this Cloud Platform? To answer this question we need to answer a question of what a cloud computing is first. As explained by Wikipedia: “Cloud computing is Internet- (“cloud-“) based development and use of computer technology”. Simply speaking, this is an internet based environment aimed at providing software in a form of a ready to use service, with no need to worry about technical specification of the hardware required, installation and configuration procedures and maintenance. All this is being carried out on the side of the Host, on a so-called “Cloud Platform”.

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posted by Smirnovi4 @ 23:59 PM
November 15, 2009

Most hosts today offer server-side security, which means that they protect the servers including the OS and services that run on it. However this doesn’t mean that they guarantee protection of either content or software on your hosting account. There are two main reasons for this:

  • You possesses full login information to your account. This means that if a password is stolen from you the host stops being capable of protecting anything on your hosting account.
  • You are free to install software such as CMS, Ecommerce systems, Blogs, Forums etc. This in turn means that if you put an application that has vulnerabilities your entire site will be in danger. Of course hosts could track all installations on the server, but for a shared server this would simply mean existence of a whole army of administrators monitoring the server 24x7x365 and no such thing as cheap web-hosting would be possible.

As you see the responsibility for keeping your site up-to-date with latest security measures lies mostly on you. But why so much mess about this security thing? Because there are lots of hackers constantly looking for ways to take advantage of someone else’s information. There is no miracle cure for protecting from everything, but there are definitely a few things you can do to ensure better website security. In this article we will tell you about basic web site security measures.

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