Who Is Hosting This

Web servers are a prime target for hackers, not to mention the risk of accidents and natural catastrophes. Even if you think your website is too obscure to attract attention, remember that viruses and bots scan IP ranges for vulnerable computers to infect. Even home PCs are under attack from the second they connect to [...]

If your site goes down at 1:00 in the morning, will you find out about it? If so, when? Though large corporations routinely have infrastructure that alert administrators to outages, smaller webmasters may not get any alerts at all. Even managed web hosts don’t always actively monitor connections, waiting instead for customers to report outages [...]

Do you know how to recover if disaster strikes your web hosting setup? In summer of 2006 I had just set up my site on its first VPS host. It had been a rocky start and it came with some adjustment. However, things had been moving fairly smoothly for a week or two and it [...]

Last week we took a look at why webmasters should consider hosting static files with a content delivery network (CDN). However, with so many options available, choosing the right one can be very daunting. Even the CDNs themselves make things difficult, with pricing and features that are alien to most webmasters, even those who have [...]

Getting the wrong kind of hosting for your site can be a very costly mistake. If you get something too powerful for your needs, you could wind up paying far more than you need, if you get something not powerful enough, you could be mired with downtimes and lost business. Though Web hosts talk about [...]

There’s no shortage of web hosting companies, but finding a good one can be a challenge. Sometimes web hosts have technical problems or make mistakes, but when should you stick it out and when should you cut your losses and move on? Here are the top six signs your web host isn’t up to the [...]

We’ve picked the brains belonging to some of the rising stars in online marketing and asked them to participate in a series of roundtable interviews. We just completed putting together their answers to our first question: “What do you know now that you wish someone had told you when you started out as a webmaster?” [...]

Uploading an entire site or script in a ZIP archive then decompressing via SSH is useful, time-saving, and increases your geek webmaster points by +5. Here’s how to do it: First you need the right tools and setup: Start by making sure you have Shell access enabled for your domain. You are also going to [...]

Making a custom error page with DreamHost is easy. DreamHost servers have built-in special file names that, if present in your domain’s root directory, will load automatically when a visitor gets a particular error message on your website. Here are the special file names: failed_auth.html – for Error 401 – Failed Authorization forbidden.html – for [...]

While Dreamhost offers it’s customers an easy way to prevent hotlinking via the web panel, that method is only suitable for basic websites and beginner webmasters that don’t already rely on .htaccess for URL rewriting and other applications often used in CMS / blogging software. Also the web panel method to prevent hotlinking doesn’t provide [...]