You have enough of shared hosting and/or the costs for bandwidth are too high? OK, the next step is your own dedicated server, but with a limited budget it’s hard to find a good and cheap managed server.

For all beginning server administrator is this guide about how-to setup the DNS for a server with a DirectAdmin control panel.

Why DirectAdmin (DA)?
I like this control panel at most, it’s fast, frequently updated and there are updates also for the latest PHP and MySQL version. I’m sure there are much more pros and of course there are more powerful control panel systems.

If you buy an unmanaged dedicated server, the operating system and DirectAdmin should be installed. If not, you need to do it by yourself (check the DA website for further information). I guess this is a hard job for a beginner, if you need to start from the beginning try to use Ubuntu, this Linux distribution works great with DirectAdmin. (more…)

When you are setting up a website for the first time, one of the more important considerations is the domain name you will use. Probably as important as the domain name you will use for your website is the company that you use to register the domain. Here we will explain how you can choose a domain name that matches the needs of your business as well how to choose a domain name registrar that will be suitable for your type of business.

Choosing the domain name

There are two ways to choose a domain name for your website; a branded name or a keyword focused name.

Keyword focused domain names

Keyword focused domain names are exactly what they sound like, choosing a domain name that incorporates the use of keyword phrases, or terms that you would like to rank for in search engines. Let’s say, for instance, that you want to offer writing services on your website. If going the keyword focused domain name route, you might look for “writingservices.com”, “freelancewriter.net” or the like.

There are two benefits to choosing a keyword focused domain name: (more…)

There are a number of different ways that you can save on web hosting when it comes right down to it and because of that there are cheap web hosting solutions available to you all over the internet. The most obvious type of low price web hosting available on the internet today is probably Cpanel hosting.

Cpanel is a software program that people use to facilitate the construction of their websites and it is very popular in the internet world today. You can facilitate a lot of different things with the Cpanel software; everything from normal web hosting all the way up to php web hosting if you want to be able to do some server scripting on your web site. Below are some of great features of using the Cpanel software:

• Easily setup and manage email accounts including web mail and pop access.
• Manage files, ftp and different level access effortlessly
• Detailed stats about your visitors
• Pre written cgi, Perl and other software available for easy install
• Manage sub domains, add on domains and parked domains simply.

The use of Cpanel to drive down hosting costs is something that has been known for a very long time now and ultimately that is what people primarily use for that purpose.

After a period of several months of uptime this weekend two of my hosting partners having some problems with their network or web servers. Actually nothing special if the down-time is very short. With one of the partner the problem was solved within 30 minutes but for the other one its was solved after almost 12 hours.

Next you ask you how to prevent your websites for this long down-times; changing the hosting provider? Setup a dedicated server? Or start your own hosting company? (more…)