Behind domain names such as www.google.com or www.yahoo.com are numbers called IP addresses. These numbers provide three important functions:
- Identification of all computers that are connected to the internet. Domain names such as google.com are translated by special servers called DNS (domain name servers) into numeric identifiers such as 74.125.45.100
- It is also an address, meaning it indicates the computer’s location on the internet
- Addresses are the information used by the bits of information (packets) flowing in the internet to move from one computer to another. This function is called routing.
The designers of the internet decided that IP addresses will be a 32 bit number or 232. This means that there are 4,294,967,296 unique addresses available. The current implementation of internet addressing is called IPv4 (IP version 4). However, due to various historical reasons, less than 4.3 billion addresses are actually available and the number of routable IP addresses is rapidly decreasing. It was already recognized in the 1980’s that address depletion will be a significant problem for the internet and was foreseen that by 2010, the effects of address depletion will be strongly felt.
One way of alleviating network address depletion is to use shared web hosting. Web sites on shared hosts use the same server along with hundreds of other sites. These site all have the same IP address. Some important internet services are not available to sites that are running on shared hosts such as SSL (secure sockets layer)
Web host providers also provide dedicated web hosting where only one website sits on the server. The IP address of the server is not shared by other sites and this makes it possible to implement SSL on this kind of site.
When you are operating an e-commerce site, you must be able to process credit card transactions in a secured manner. This is where SSL is useful but this option is only available to dedicated web hosting. SSL uses some form of cryptography. Important information such as credit card numbers are encrypted using implementations of well-known and very secure encryption algorithms such as the Blowfish as well as its successor called the Advanced Encryption Standard.
Merchant accounts use SSL to process credit card transactions. If you operate a site that is shared by hundreds of other sites, the owner of an e-commerce site may opt to use an electronic shopping service that is hosted on some other site like PayPal. This is something that most on-line shoppers avoid because they do not want to be taken to another site just to close the deal.
When a website gets notorious for hosting malware, pornography or other offensive content, the IP address of that site is banned or red-flagged by search engines. When the offensive site is located on a shared server, it will be unfortunate for the other sites sharing the server because their content will become red-flagged as well. Dedicated sites will never have this problem
A great advantage of dedicated sites is greater control of the server which goes all the way to complete access to the operating system of the server.
Another important service available only to sites on dedicated web hosts is VPN or virtual private networking. Implementing VPN requires SSL to operate properly. VPN is a great feature for companies who need a geographically widespread, secure environment for a shared, read and write access to documents and folders over the internet.
When the successor of IPv4 called IPv6 starts to become the dominant addressing scheme, network address depletion won’t be problem anymore. IPv6 is a very, very big number (2128), it has been estimated that up to 296 addresses are available to entire human population (6.5 billion) living 1996. IPv6 has been designed to address several shortcomings of IPv4 of which mandatory network security has been seen to have the most impact for e-commerce sites. Whether this will impact e-commerce on shared servers still remains to be seen.
It seems like Google is hiring but put you have to crack their riddle to get information on how to apply. You can read the full story on techcrunch.com.
“In search of some beautiful minds, Google has been putting up signs around the M.I.T campus with a code that say, “If you can figure this out, you may have a future with Google.” If they crack the code, which is a fairly simple substitution cipher (or not), it reveals a phone number where they can leave their contact information.”
Here is the code that is posted on the posters at MIT:
8MLDQ6 T UI 67FML RH AA NRA6Q 8EFL DMQ86II2 O3 2S5J 13JXOJ
What are your thoughts on this kind HR marketing?
When you start a new website there are two major things that you would want to think about before choosing a web host, bandwidth and storage space. The bandwidth is basically a representation of how fast your website will load and the amount of information that is loaded with it. The storage space is the amount of space you will avail of when getting a web host to accommodate all your web page information.
Usually when you look for a web host, the most attractive option is to get one with the most storage space. There are many web hosts out there that offer unlimited space for your website. However, you must be careful in taking these offers and read the fine print that is involved in their service. More often than not, the monthly fees that you will pay your web hosting company may come with extra charges for your unlimited space or even get your website suspended for using too many resources.
There are several advantages and disadvantages to getting unlimited web hosting. Some of the advantages of unlimited web hosting are:
- In terms of storage space, you will never again have problems in thinking about what to put in the web host server because there is unlimited space! So whether you want 100MB pictures to load, or huge databases to put online, this should fit in the unlimited storage space that your web host will provide for you. What you may not realize is that 99% of the websites in the world will never use nearly enough storage to even have to think about storage space.
- You can test out all the different applications, content server managers, database programs, and other cool and useful engines and applications that you can use in your website without having to worry about removing stuff whenever you update your site. You can simply store everything there and not worry about the space it will take up.
There are also disadvantages to the ‘too-good-to-be-true’ offer of unlimited web hosting and these are:
- The offer may just be too good to be true. Web hosts may offer these great perks of using unlimited space, but eventually the space will run out at some point. Technically, unlimited storage space is impossible to have on any given server. Web hosts just offer it because they don’t expect you to use up more than the expected utilized space that is assigned to you.
- Bandwidth may not be too fantastic on a website with unlimited space. Remember, you usually have to pay for bandwidth depending on speed. When they offer unlimited web hosting, it doesn’t necessarily mean unlimited bandwidth where your webpage would load in less than 2 seconds! There is a limit to bandwidth just as there is to storage space.
So, when shopping for your next web host, don’t be taken in too easily by the unlimited web hosting services offers. Inquire about what the word “unlimited” covers and what exactly their in-house services, technical expertise, and standard procedures are that would cater to the security, back-up, and proper maintenance of your webpage space. It is better to pay for good technical services and proper processes than to pay for unlimited web hosting that only offers lost of space but little of anything else.
McKremie Web Hosting is now offering a free domain name with the purchase of any of our 12-month or 24-month web hosting plans. This is not a limited time offer; this will be part of our standard options going forward. The free domain name applies to the following extensions:
.com
.net
.org
.info
Most of our new customers are starting a website for the first time. This will help them by saving about $10.00 per year in domain registration fees. This is all backed by our 24/7 US-based customer support. If you are not failure with out web hosting features here is a small list:
- 24/7 US-Based Customer Support (Phone & Email)
- 99.9% Uptime Guarantee
- 90-Day Money-Back Guarantee
- #1 Control Panel – cPanel
- PHP, CGI, Ruby, Perl, MySQL
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More feature can be found here: http://www.mckremie.com/hosting.php
A zombie computer usually is part of a computer network (or botnet) that has already been compromised by hackers with their malware. Because of such an intrusion into the system, hackers can initiate attacks from the zombie computers onto any website of their choice. By doing this, the zombie computers attack the targeted website making the traffic on it so extreme that the website itself becomes inaccessible.
LiveJournal, Twitter and Facebook have been victim websites of such attacks. One such example is when the malware “Koobface” was launched by a cyber-hacker which initiated attacks on Facebook and started to spread to other social networks. The way Koobface works is that false messages are sent over the network through compromised user accounts which encourage other users to click on links that lead them to sites where malware will attack their accounts.
Not everyone can be a victim with the right advice. So if you don’t want to be the next one, you can heed some words of advice to keep you away from such hacker attacks. First, always practice caution. Don’t click on any links that look suspicious when you are logged into your social networking account. No matter how tempting the banner offer, restrain from clicking and just do your usual safe activities that you are sure of on your webpage.
Second, make sure your personal information is well guarded and that your settings on your social networking account provides you with the maximum security. Try not to post personal information on your profile to prevent identity fraud.
Third, your password on your account should ensure maximum security for your account. Pick a password that also contains numbers so that the password strength is high. Avoid using the same password for more than one site where you are a registered user.
Fourth, always update your antivirus software and make sure the signatures are up-to-date. Make sure your PC is equipped with an internet security program that can detect in-the-cloud threats before they can even enter you local system. Companies Identity Hawk speak in how important this is. Also install appropriate software updates on your system to keep your system well protected against the most recently released malware online.
Fifth, keep yourself updated on the most recent malicious software that is attacking computer systems. Read the online news like PC World and other sites and forums that can give you a clearer idea of what to look out for in threats and how to handle them.
The World Wide Web is just one of the services that utilize the internet. Electronic mail, ftp, and gopher were some of the earlier applications that were used over the internet but never gained massive appeal. It was the Web that created the surge of users online, from a low of 26 web servers in 1992 to more than 200 million in 2009.
Yet, Tim Berners-Lee’ initial proposal for a “large hypertext database with typed links” written some 20 years created little interest. Berners-Lee however was not discouraged by this misstep and with the approval of his supervisor at CERN, Mike Sendall, began developing what later became the World Wide Web on his NeXT computer.
Berners-Lee’s motivation for creating the Web was solving the problem of data sharing among scientists working at CERN who were using different computers running on different operating systems and using different software to view data. At that time, CERN was an organization of more than a thousand talented people whose stay at the facility averaged only two years. Because CERN and the Large Hadron Collider involved so many people, many wondered how to keep track of such a large project.
By late 1990, Berners-Lee already had the system for the Web in place at CERN. His team at CERN devised the HyperText Transfer Protocol; HTML which is the language used in building web pages; a browser called WorldWideWeb; and a web server which was running on his Next computer. The first use of the Web at CERN was for browsing the institution’s phone directory.
In 1991, Paul Kunz, from the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center visited CERN and became acquainted with the Web. Kunz bought a copy of the server software back to SLAC where the librarian at that time, Louise Addis ported it to an IBM mainframe running on VMC/CMS operating system. This is the first documented use of the Web in the United States.
By 1992, the Web was still exclusively used by research institutions and universities. Most web browsers were non-graphical except for the one Berners-Lee developed on the NeXT computer. It was only after a team from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) created the Mosaic browser that the web’s popularity exploded. Mosaic was the first browser developed by a team of full-time programmers who developed a product easy enough for novices to install and use. But it was Mosaic’s ability to display graphics and play multimedia inline that really started the explosion in web use. Earlier browsers had to open graphics in separate windows and it’s not difficult to imagine how excited users got when Mosaic made it possible to display both text and graphics on the same window. Of course, the fact that Mosaic ran on Windows meant that the millions of users of the operating system will eventually experience the web and not on the clunky way earlier browsers did it.
Another important contribution from NCSA was a web server called NCSA HTTPd. When its lead developer Robert McCool left NCSA in 1994, the development of the server came to a standstill and further development came in the way of patches via email. This is the primary reason attributed how Apache Web Server got its name. Its origin came from a patchy server developed at NCSA. By 2009, more than 100 million Apache servers were used to churn out web pages.
Today, the web is ubiquitous and the population online is greater than most countries worldwide. Web hosting is a 51 billion dollar a year business and is forecasted to reach 73 billion per year in 2014.
Print Screen key
The Print Screen key is often abbreviated to prt sc. For MS Windows computers, pressing the print screen key copies the entire screen to the keyboard. The alt-print screen combination copies only the selected window to the clipboard.
Command-shift-3, Command-shift-4
There is no print screen key on a Mac, instead users can use the command-shift-3 combination to save copy of the screen to a file. The command-shift-4 combination enables a user to save a portion of the screen to a file
Jing Project
Created by TechSmith, Jing Project is freeware and works for both Mac and Windows. With this nifty piece of software you can even make a record video of onscreen action aside from snapping a picture of your computer screen.
Grab
This application is created by Apple for the Mac OSX. This application can be located in the Mac Utilities folder which is under Applications.
Skitch Beta
Made for Macs, this app can capture a chat moment on your screen, snap a website, and share the image with your network friends. Record your everyday onscreen activities for quick filing and documentation.
Little Snapper
This is a paid application which lets you snap, collect and share your onscreen images. Created and distributed by RealMac Software.
iGrabIt
Made by Hidden Valley Software, this screenshot tool was made for Macs wherein you can capture whatever is displayed on your PC screen and save it as an MOV file.
Fireshot
This is a Firefox extension created by the Mozilla Company. This can take entire screenshots of both the visible and non-visible part of the webpage.
iShowU
This is a real time capture made for Mac by ShinyWhiteBox. It can instantly record movies and has USB camera support.
SnagIt
Probably the best screen capture software for Windows computers. It is available as a 30-day trial download. It is easy and very intuitive to use.
CaptureWizPro
Another screen capture utility for Windows computers available as a 30-day trial download. It is capable of capturing the entire contents of scrolling areas, drop-down lists, tool tips, mouse pointers and screen savers.
XnView
XnView is freeware that is a fast multiple format image browser and converter. It is capable of reading more than 400 graphic formats. Aside from screen capture, it also does slide shows and supports WIA and TWAIN devices.
ScreenHunter
Another well regarded and free screen capture software for Windows computers. The application is able to capture a full screen, an active window, the client window, or a rectangular area. User can set any function key (F1 to F10) for hot-key or delayed capture.
IrfanView
IrfanView is a simple, fast and free software that is capable of doing multiple image editing tasks like cropping, batch conversions, create panoramas and of course, screen capture.
PhotoScape
This is often downloaded free software for various image editing tasks. According to its maker, PhotoScape is a capable image viewer, editor, batch editor, animated GIF creator, file print, file splitter and screen capture.
Gmail is currently offline, for some reason or another and tons of people use it for business and personal. Try and remain calm as I’m sure Google is working on getting it up as I type this. It’s amazing to see how people on Twitter and Facebook freak out about Gmail being down.
Most common statement; “I thought it was just my account”
When this happens people panic and feel like something is wrong on their end. It’s not! Gmail is really down.
Here are some screen shots of some of the Tweets we found.
Here is some great advice from a tweeter that if everyone is so worried then they should invest into their own domain names. If you have your own domain name and hosting you can set-up your emails to go through your hosting account.
Update: People have tweeted that Gmail going down *could* overload other services like Twitter and Facebook.
It didn’t take long and Twitter is “Over Capacity”
Update from the Google Blog: (link)
