If you’re using the popular blog tool WordPress, you’re probably looking for th best possible Wordpress hosting provider. Choosing a host might be hard becaise the are a lot of them. I advise you to take your time and make sure you’re choosing the best option. WordPress doesn’t require a lot of “special” server features, one reason more why most hosting provider will offer to host your blog. You don’t need one at the top-of-the-line and don’t go for the cheapest plan you can find.

For the beginning blog a shared hosting plan should be enough, be sure an account upgrade is possible at any time. This is because you never know how fast your site is going to grow or how big it is going to get, and it’s always better to be well prepared. Check also the possibilities to move your account from a shared hosting plan to a VPS or dedicated server. You also want to avoid the smaller, lesser-known hosts. Go for the companies where a lot of people talk about, don’t host by some new company from a guy you met on forum for example.

Don’t forget, if you blog has frequent reader and traffic a hosting failure can ruin your blog site.

User and file permissions

Wordpress has great features to maintain the core system, any plugins and your Wordpress themes. While for the download and update from external files an build-in FTP function act as a kind of fall-back feature, you need the ability to edit your files right on the server. The last one requires some permissions to edit files thought the Wordpress backend. A normal webserver is configured that files have a 0644 permission and directories have a 0755 permission. Most PHP/Apache powered webserver using one user ID to process the PHP files. This permission is okay for most PHP functions but not for file based functions used to edit template or plugin files. A few hosting provider offer services where PHP scripts are executed with user ID from the web hosting account. Providing hosting accounts this way is more secure than raising the values for the file/directory permissions to 666/777. If the PHP scripts are executed by the host account user Wordpress doesn’t need the FTP fallback feature and all updates and downloads are served much faster. The file upload tool from Wordpress back-end works without any problems if PHP scripts are executed with user permissions.

Important features you need

• Your host has to provide daily backups, ask them how long each backup is stored (several days are a must to have feature, more than a week is nice)
• Host your blog in the country where you except to have the most visitors. This way most of your visitors will see your site very fast.
• Check if the database and mail service is not hosted on the same machine as the website service. Most of the the mail server can slow down a server if mail related service have to fight back a lot of spam.

More PHP related requirements

These features are not required by the Wordpress core system but many plugins: cURL, safe_mode=off, simpleXML, Socket support

WebFaction, smarter web hosting

Now that you know what to look for in a host, it shouldn’t be too hard to make a decision. If you’d like to go the fast way and skip researching, I recommend webfaction.com hosting, we use it for this blog site. WebFaction fits all of the discussed requirements, and it’s very affordable overall. It’s literally perfect for hosting WordPress sites, and if you know for a fact you are going to be a webmaster for a while, you can save a significant amount of money by pre-paying for 2-5 years. WebFaction has hosting plans ranging from 10GB to 60GB, and from $5.50 to $34.50 per month. There’s a great selection, so you can find a plan that’s perfect for your budget and your wallet.Similar Posts:

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There are so many possibilities why a website went off-line, all of them have one in common: Your visitors can’t access your site and maybe they will never come back!

Possible problems why a website might be off-line:

• Web server or network is down – A very common problem, there is so much computer technology used…
• Some web service has stopped working – It might be just one of them; MySQL, Apache or Named/Bind and your website doesn’t function for 100%
• Too much traffic on your site – Most web servers doesn’t have the capacity for a high traffic website. 500 visitors at the same time might be enough to make your site slow or that a web server crashes.
• External serving problems; a name server or DNS server is down – this one is nasty; if your DNS zone is down, it’s possible that you see the problem a day later, while others see your site down since hours.
• A script stopped working properly – If a script is written and tested everything looks fine, but what if you get some external content via RSS or by user input? Sometimes a simple, but not standard, text character can break your website.
• At last but not least “the hacker” – there are so many people on the web trying to bring a website down.

Even if you try to do anything to protect your website or application against all the trouble above, you’re not safe for a failure. You have to monitor your website and hopefully a problem is notified fast enough before you loose a lot of visitors.

Some of you will say:

“I don’t need to pay for a service, because my hosting provider is doing this for free!”

That’s right many good providers will monitor the server you’re hosting on and/or they provide tools which will monitor your server or website. If you use them, check if these tests are done by a server outside from the network where your website or server is hosted. If there is a problem in the rack or router where the monitoring server and your website is located, you will never get a message about the down-time.

Some other important feature for international websites, is the ability to do test from different locations around the world. A problem might exist for only people from some continent, if your business has to take care about this, you should know about problems happen far away from your websites location.

Website monitoring is not a protection against failures but the following features will help you to “tackle” problems very fast:

• Monitor from different locations – if one fails the bot has to use the next one
• Multiple notification options – SMS/text messages and email are required, if you can send a downtime message to more than one person, do this!
• Tests for specific content – Just a ping or HTTP header is often not enough, test for specific text on your site
• Adjustable values for a timeout – Some websites need more time than others to get loaded.

(Screenshot response times Site24×7)

If your website and server is working fine, the number of downtime messages should be very low. If you need to spend several dollars a month for SMS/text messages, it might be usefull to spend this money for better hosting. Website monitoring is to get warned if something went wrong.

Website Monitoring Service Provider

In this article we review three website monitoring service provider, all of them offer a great service product and you find them in a lower price segment. That will say, these services are acceptable for most of the websites on the Internet.

I used Site24×7 since they started offering services a few years ago. They offer anything you need to monitor your server or website; Tests on websites or server ports (you can monitor every server port) are only a view options. Visit their website for all the features they offer. They offer a free account and  15day trials for their paid services, if you use the standard or premium service you pay for each single test period  and location. If you need multiple test locations, you should use the premium plan because this plan includes 6 free locations for each test. If you need more than one website tested from multiple locations, than is this provider more expansive than others.

Hyperspin is monitoring provider who offers a lot of features and also a great reseller program. If you’re looking for a way to monetize your websites traffic, by offering your own monitoring service, you should try them. All test features are available and they have multiple locations and you can setup four of them as a global setting for all your tests. They don’t charge you for using all the locations. They offer discounts if you buy more or if you pay in upfront for a whole year. I stopped using them because their control panel was several times not accessible from my laptop (using different IP addresses).

Pingdom is the current servuice I’m using to monitor all my websites. Their control panel and website looks very modern and they offering a great plan with five tests for only $9.95/month. They offer e-mail, SMS/text message notifications and a some great integration with Twitter. Multiple test locations are included without any additional charge. I like the fast and clear interface and off course the price. I’m sure I will keep using them the next years.

While most of the features for these three website monitoring service providers are the same, is the pricing very different. I’m sure all three working great, just try them.Similar Posts:

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Several weeks ago I was looking for some alternative hosting for Media Temple and found WebFaction. While searching the net I found a few reviews and all of them are very good. Because their shared hosting package look different from others, I took an account.

Why Webfaction?

Webfaction is a 100% web hosting provider offering shared hosting plans and managed dedicated servers. Very special is that a shared hosting account has advanced features you didn’t find by other providers. The most important feature is that you get full SSH access to your Linux user directory and processes like PHP and HTTPD are executed as the same user. Having that kind of user accounts gives you much more possibilities like using a reserved amount of memory for a single process or the ability to setup new stuff in the user directory. I think WebFaction doesn’t provide a shared hosting account for a beginning webmaster, because their control panel is very basic and is mostly used to create new website, applications, email and database accounts. That will say that other functions like protecting directories or creating CRON jobs must be set via SSH and the command line. They create backups for all your website accounts and all databases. That is for the most users enough, but I like to have real time access to a copy to all my files.

Creating backups for your websites and applications

While this tutorial is based on my experience with the hosting account by WebFaction, it should work for most other Linux accounts or servers. All you need is full access to the user’s home directory. In the past I used the backup function provided by the DirectAdmin control panel for all my hosting. Those backup function (similar to other control-panel types) creates one zipped file from all the user data which is stored on a local or remote location. This type of backup will generate a huge server load if sites becoming bigger. In this tutorial we backup our databases to a local location and we are using rsync to backup our websites and databases.

Creating backups from your database

First we need one database user which has at least the rights to select an lock tables.

GRANT SELECT, LOCK TABLES ON database.* TO 'yourdumpuser'@'localhost'

If you like to have a single user with full rights for easier database access, you can use this query as an alternative:

GRANT ALL ON database.* TO 'yourdumpuser'@'localhost'

Using the rights for the dump user we’re able to create database backups from the command line like:

mysqldump -uyourdumpuser -hlocalhost -pyourdumppassword database | gzip --best > yourmysqlbackup.gz

This command creates an already gzip compressed database backup file. If you have have many databases you need a lot of commands it would be easier to run a bash script like this one:

#!/bin/sh
DBUSER="yourdumpuser"
DBHOST="localhost"
DBPASS="yourdumppassword"
BACKUPDIR="dbbackup"
DBS=`mysql -u$DBUSER -h$DBHOST -p$DBPASS -e"show databases"`
for DATABASE in $DBS
do
if [ $DATABASE != "Database" ]; then
FILENAME=$DATABASE.gz
mysqldump -u$DBUSER -h$DBHOST -p$DBPASS $DATABASE | gzip --best > $BACKUPDIR/$FILENAME
fi
done

This small script will read all database names (where the user has access to) and creates files for all of them. Add this code into a file and save it under the name dbbackup.sh in your Linux home directory and create also the directory dbbackup for the files. The new script need to be executable, use chmod 775 to do that. Test the script with the following command within the directory where the script is located.

./dbbackup.sh

Backup your files using rsync

Next we need a remote backup location to store our data on a safe place. This can be a second server you own or an external service. Important is that you can access that location via SSH. I’m using EVBackup from ExaVault. They are not very expensive and they offer a great service. They have also a great tutorial on how-to configure your account to access their servers using rsync via SSH. There is also Ubuntu One, they offering free accounts for the first 2GB.

After you setup you SSH connection between you server and your backup server we can start using rsync.

Note! We followed the instructions on from the EVBackup site and created a SSL key to access the remote location without providing a password. It’s strongly advised to do the same, otherwise the next steps will not work for you. You can use the instructions from their website for your own server if you change some parameters and values.

The following example will copy all files within the webapps directory from your local server to the remote location (directory backup-1):

rsync -avz --delete -e "ssh -i /home/username/backup/ssh_key" "/home/username/webapps" someuser@someuser.exavault.com:backup-1

/home/username/backup/ssh_key is the location of the ssh key you have created before
/home/username/webapps is the directory with files you want to backup
someuser@someuser.exavault.com:backup-1 is the remote location (in this example an account at exavault.com/EVBackup) where all files are stored

Note the parameter –delete will delete files on remote if the didn’t exist on the local location and -i will create a incremental backup. For additional information about the parameters used with rsync run this command via the command line: rsync --help.

Run backups using CRON

If you have multiple directories to backup you should group them in one bash script:

#!/bin/sh
rsync -avz --delete -e "ssh -i /home/username/backup/ssh_key" "/home/username/webapps" someuser@someuser.exavault.com:backup-1
rsync -avz --delete -e "ssh -i /home/username/backup/ssh_key" "/home/username/dbbackup" someuser@someuser.exavault.com:backup-1

You can add as many rsync commands you need in that script, save it in the user’s home directory with the name data-backup.ssh.

• We need to run the database backup script to store the current data into the dbbackup directory
• If this backup is finished we start the rsync backup script ( give the first CRON job enough time)

An alternative is to merge both bash scripts, but this is not part of this tutorial. Our entries for the crontab file are (use this command: EDITOR=nano crontab -e)

0 10 * * * /home/username/dbbackup.sh
0 11 * * * /home/username/data-backup.sh

These CRON jobs will run the first script at 10:00AM and the second at 11:00AM.

That’s all to backup your websites and databases using rsync and CRON. If you like to try Webfaction use finalwebsites as promo code, they offer a 60 days money-back guarantee.Similar Posts:

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Since a few days domain names with the .tel TLD are available for registration. After a sunrise and landrush period it’s possible to register your personal .tel ID for less than $20.

Why buying a .tel domain?

A .tel domain is not like other domain names. These domain names are hosted by “special” .tel hosting providers and a .tel website looks totally different. Since this domain is released for mobile devices, it’s not possible to create your own custom website. What you get is a kind of personal profile page where it’s possible to add personal (contact) information, links and custom text.

Next to this information it’s possible to show “private” information which is accessible only by “friends”, yes there is also a soialc idea behind the .tel domain. People can send messages too each other and become Friends. All communications are done though the .tel control panel or the interface from telfriends.tel website (you need to join that site too). The idea is that people are able to access your personal site on a mobile phone with the ability to choose the way how to contact you (Phone call, e-mail, SMS, MMS, Skype, etc.)

How does it work?

If you register a .tel domain the name server point to the .tel hosting platform from your registration provider or his partner. I guess a domain transfer is not that easy because all data on your .tel website is stored inside the DNS. To enter your data you have access the control panel provided by the .tel hosting provider.

It looks like that a lot of domain names are already registered and there is also a lot of endorsement about the .tel domain. While peope using more and more mobile devices to access the Internet, has this way of communication maybe a market. Telfriends is working now but need really more functions for socialmedia sites like MySpace, facebook Linkedin etc. I’m sure if more people will register a .tel domain the whole idea has a future.

Register your personal .tel domain

Several ICAN credited registrars offer the .tel domain for registration (Dynadot, Name…). Check also the cheap offer by dotster.com below (please send us a comment if the offer is expired)

Dotster: Limited time only $11.95
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We hate this: A website which doesn’t load. What if this is our own website?

There are many reasons for an websites outage, the following problems are very common:

• Server, network or DNS problems
• The limited web space in your shared hosting account is totally used and the database can’t store any more records and became corrupt
• Errors in your website or application

So what if you have one of the problems and you don’t know about for days? Sure often you will notice a downtime in changed income as an ad publisher or because Google Analytics shows less visitors. A better solution is to use a website monitoring service. Since there are many companies offering their services it’s up to the webmaster which one is the best.Here are a few tips based on my own experience:

Don’t try (free) services from companies/websites where monitoring is not one of the core business. Every owner of a web server is able to run CRON jobs which will check your website once in a while. Those services are mostly very limited: only one website for each account, no other tests than monitor a website (port 80), no off-line warning via SMS… Sure this kind of monitoring services are nice offers most of all if they are free, but your website deserve more.

Professional Website Monitoring Service

Since a while we work with a monitoring partner which offers these great features:

• Multi-Protocol Support like ping, HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, SSH, SMTP, DNS, POP3, IMAP, MySQL…
• Downtime Notification via email and SMS.
• Global Monitoring Locations.
• Uptime & Performance Reports
• Maintenance Scheduling
• support many languages (reports and e-mail messages)

Check this list of monitoring features for more information and take a look on our demo account.

Website or server monitoring starts with $2 a month for a 15 minute check and sending an SMS is only $0.20. There are discounts if you have several websites.

Hint: If you have several similar websites on the same server, you don’t need to monitor all of them. One is more than enough.

Who should use monitoring services?

Actually most of the website owners should think about monitoring. If you own a dedicated server, you should monitor at least all important port numbers (HTTP, FTP, SMTP, MySQL…). If you own a high traffic website you can monitor the site to get an idea about the load on different times a day.

Still not convinced?

Just sign up for a free account an try it right now. Nothing to install, no credit card needed, absolutely no risk!Similar Posts:

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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.

First of all you need to login to your DirectAdmin control panel, click “IP management” and enter the two IP addresses (we use the IP addresses 12.34.56.78 and 12.34.56.79 for our example) you got from your hosting provider (the first server IP address should be already in the list)

Next from the admin panel, switch to the “User level” and click on “DNS Management”. Enter here the DNS records you need for your domain name / host. Don’t forget you need to enter also the two name server entries (there is a trailing dot (.) behind the value).

To setup the DNS and name servers for your server you need use the domain name you have used in the local DNS setup before. Configure the domain with your “global” DNS (domain) provider as follow (these are the two IP addresses you have configured within DirectAdmin):

ns1.domain.com -> 12.34.56.78
ns2.domain.com -> 12.34.56.79

These name server entries need some time to populate to the internet (up to 24-48 hours).

In the meantime we need to add some more setting to the web server. Login to DirectAdmin and click “Administrator Settings”. Enter a server name within the field “Server’s Hostname”, I used serv01.domain.com. Enter the name server entries you have used before for the fields NS1 and NS2 and leave the DA control panel.

Now connect to your server via SSH (use Putty). Login as root (sudo) and enter:

nano /etc/hosts

With this command you enter the file “hosts” with the text editor Nano some distro’s may not include Nano in which case you may wish to use Pico or the adventurous Vi, add this row (check the Linux MAN pages how to insert text with teh editor Vi):

12.34.56.78 srv01.domain.com srv01

And save the file via ctrl+x (confirm to save the file) or :wq if you edit the file with Vi.

That’s all, you’re done!

I know there are much more distributions and also other cool control panel systems and I hope this guide will help you even if your system is different.

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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:

1. When somebody visits your website or finds your website from performing a search in their favorite search engine, they will likely know exactly what your website has to offer.
2. In terms of search engine optimization (SEO) purposes, having a domain name focused on your target keywords will automatically help you to achieve higher rankings for the words used in your domain name. You should take note that even if you go the route of a keyword focused domain name; this does not imply that you will achieve top rankings for these keywords, only that this can help considerably with other optimization methods in place.

Branded domain name

Opting for a branded domain name is recommended when you are looking to establish yourself as an “authority” on the group of people that you are targeting. The real benefit for using a branded domain name is that if you have worked to brand yourself then people will automatically associate a certain product or service with your brand name.

Some examples of branded names, though not all necessarily domain names are Dominos, Subway, eBay, Google, Yahoo, Digg, etc. When you hear some of these names, you automatically associate a certain product or service with the name. When you hear Google or Yahoo, you think of a search engine, when you hear Dominos or Subway, you will likely think about pizza and sub sandwiches and so on.

Choosing a domain name registrar

Possibly more important than choosing the domain name itself is choosing a registrar for your domain name. A registrar is more or less the records keeper for your domain registration information, and registrars hold the physical “address” of your website so that it can direct visitors to your website, somewhat similar to the way that the post office directs your mail to your physical address.

Arguably, the most important aspect of acquiring a domain is being sure that you have complete control over it. Some web hosting companies will register your domain name for you, though in most cases this is not the recommended course of action. When you take an interest in a particular domain name, you want to be certain that you have full control over this domain name at all times; sometimes when a web hosting company registers your domain name for you, you lack the element of full control, something that you might end up regretting later on down the road.

Popular domain name registrars

There is one domain name registrar that is exceedingly popular on the internet today:

Godaddy.com

Undeniably, Godaddy.com is the most popular domain name registrar on the planet. With nearly three times the amount of domains registered than their closest competitors, Godaddy.com is licensed to offer domain registration for .com, .net, .biz, .info, .name, .mobi, .jobs and .asia domains. Because of the popularity of Godaddy.com, you can find a plethora of coupon codes for domain registrations with Godaddy; even though their pricing rather competitive even without the use of coupon codes.

Namecheap.com

Namecheap.com offers domain registration services as well. Though Namecheap is technically a domain registrar offering services through enom.com, they are a popular alternative to Godaddy for many webmasters and we thought that they deserved a mention due to their continually increasing popularity. Namecheap.com offers competitive pricing on domain registration as well.

Finding a domain name that is best suited for your business will help you in the long run with your website’s marketing, and choosing the proper domain name registrar will work to protect your newly acquired asset (your domain name). If you’re new to the idea of running a website of your own, making these important decisions before you decide to purchase can not only save you some money later down the road, this decision can save you some headaches as well.Similar Posts:

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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.Similar Posts:

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