WhoIsHostingThis

If your website is running slowly or inconsistently, it can be very frustrating trying to understand why. Tools such as Pingdom’s full page site test, which provide a very thorough and detailed overview of site performance, can be a bit overwhelming. There’s also the risk that, to the inexperienced eye, the results can be misleading.

Stella takes a very different approach to testing, monitoring and debugging of website performance. With a “less is more” attitude, Stella focuses on giving you the information you need without bombarding you with data that may or may not help you improve your site.

The service also offers some very compelling free tools and a useful free account that helps you get started with site testing. Let’s find out if this is the right service for those who want to improve their sites but don’t really understand where to begin. Read the rest of this entry »

Switching hosts is a tremendous pain.

Even if you’re fortunate enough to be moving between two hosts that have the same control panel, meaning that you can simply backup and restore your entire hosting account, you have the hassle of waiting for DNS servers to propagate your new site’s information and that means that comments, posts and other information are out of sync between the two versions of your site.

If you don’t have that benefit, then things get even worse. You have to manually download your files, including your core files, plugins, themes, etc., backup your database, and then transfer all of that to your new server, tweak your settings and hope that it works. At best, you’re in for a few hours of headache and nail-biting – and that’s just for one site. If you have more you get to repeat the process each time.

However, 23press thinks it may have found a better way. It’s developed a new system, entitled “Move That Blog“, that is designed to make it easier to move WordPress blogs from one server to another and can even handle the DNS issues common with all site moves.

So how does it work? Surprisingly simply.

How Move That Blog Works

The basic principle behind Move That Blog is that WordPress is capable of updating and maintaining itself, so it should be able to update itself when moving to a new host.

To use Move That Blog one first registers for the service and then receives both a download link for the plugin and an API key. After setting up a default WordPress installation on the new server, you then install a copy of it there, being sure to select that it is the “receiving” blog.

You are then instructed to do the same thing with the current server, being sure to select that it is the “sending” server – it’s a simple click to then start the transfer.

Everything should begin transferring automatically. This includes the database, plugins, themes and even settings. The result, if it all goes well, should be that the new server is automatically populated with all of the old server’s required content; it should become an exact mirror, all without any user interaction.

However, Move That Blog actually goes one step farther. Because it takes time for the DNS servers to update, which means that different visitors will be directed to different servers for a time, Move That Blog keeps the two sites synchronized, ensuring that a comment or a post at server A also appears at server B – nothing gets lost!

Move That Blog is currently only for WordPress, although 23press is planning new versions for Movable Type and other blogging platforms. They even plan to make it easy to move between blogging platforms (IE: Moving a Movable Type blog to WordPress or vice versa) in the near future.

Move That Blog, however, is not ‘cheap’. One move costs $10, or there’s a $30 “All you can eat” plan that lets you transfer as many sites as you want.

Is Move That Blog Worth It?

Move That Blog is undoubtedly a great tool, but it’s worth depends on whether you have a better option for moving your site.

Many hosts offer free transfers. The majority of hosts that don’t offer this, use CPanel, thus making CPanel to CPanel transfers very practical. It’s easier than ever to move from one host to another, regardless of the type of site you run. While DNS problems are irritating, if you are able to schedule your move you can easily time them out so that the impact is limited. For example, you could start the move on a Friday night so the DNS servers update over the weekend.

In many cases therefore, the $10 just isn’t worth it. Using your new host’s free transfer is easier and, most likely, faster.

However, if neither a host transfer nor a control panel-based transfer is possible (for example, if you need to move between hosts with different backends), Move That Blog will more than likely pay for itself many times over. Even if you value your time only at $5 per hour, Move That Blog will more than pay for itself considering most moves, to get right, take much longer than 2 hours.

Most bloggers would probably benefit from the $30 unlimited plan. When moving hosts, it’s common to move more than one site and, if I had to make such a a move using the service, I would be moving at least half a dozen blogs, making it foolish not to get the more expensive plan.

The real benefit, however, may be in 23press’ plans for the Move That Blog service. If they are able to add other blogging platforms and make it easy to move a blog between them, that could prove to be a boon for webmasters who feel “trapped” on their current system.

Bottom Line

I think it says a great deal about a service when its biggest drawback is that you have to reset the password on your admin account. Considering the amount of time Move That Blog can save, it’s a very small price to pay.

That being said, moving between hosts is easier than ever and, with so many hosts offering free transfer services, $10 or $30 is a hard sell for many bloggers.

But that doesn’t mean that host transfers are, by any means, a solved problem. There’s still plenty of room for improvement and plenty of situations where a tool like Move That Blog may be incredibly useful.

Even if you understand that “unlimited” hosting isn’t actually unlimited, it can still seem like too good an offer to be true. Hosting for multiple domains and sites for just a few dollars per month – is it possible?

There has to be a catch. There seems to be no way a host can provide storage, bandwidth, CPU, RAM, software, maintenance and support all for just a few dollars per month. Even if no one tries to abuse the system, the cost of keeping a website online 24/7/365 would seem to be more than the few dollars charged.

So how are hosts able to charge so little and turn a good profit while doing so? The answer lies in the economics of shared hosting. When one takes a closer look at the nature of the business, it’s easy to see why shared hosting is both incredibly cheap and incredibly profitable at the same time. Read the rest of this entry »

In 1999 the record industry had a serious problem and its name was Napster. The upstart file sharing service was gaining quick traction, especially among college students with fast Internet connections (rare at the time). Millions of files were being swapped illegally and this prompted legal action from both the RIAA and various artists.

However, Napster would turn out to be the industry’s least impressive foe. The network, which used centralized servers to coordinate searches and user interaction, was easily shuttered. Once Napster the company pulled the plug, the entire network came crashing down.

But even before Napster’s closure, others were already working on more resilient file sharing networks. Two of those networks were the Gnutella network, for which Limewire was its best-known client, and Bittorrent, which has many famous trackers including The Pirate Bay and Demonoid. These networks were much less centralized, either completely decentralized, as in the case of Gnutella, or with only one central tracker that can be easily replaced, as with Bittorrent.

These new networks ushered in a new era of file sharing; one that both the record and the movie industries are still wrestling with. Despite legal successes against Grokster, Limewire and even The Pirate Bay, file sharing has continued largely unabated, in large part due to the decentralized nature of modern file sharing.

However, this game of cat and mouse has also had an affect on the hosting industry. Anyone with a hosting account needs to be aware of how piracy has affected hosting and, equally importantly, how those changes are affecting piracy. Read the rest of this entry »

For webmasters and those setting up hosting accounts, the issue of security is an ever-present problem. There are so many security holes to watch out for, both easy mistakes and serious risks. Those running websites have to be constantly vigilant to keep their sites as safe as possible.

This causes many hosting customers to scrutinise their accounts and at the stock software that is installed on it, including the operating system, the Web server and the database software.

However, one of the more common pieces of software to be placed under the security microscope is the ubiquitous cPanel/WHM control panel. Nearly every host either uses it or a competitor to manage their shared hosting accounts, installs it by default on their VPSes or, at the very least, offers it as an addon to their customers.

But how secure is cPanel? Is it a risk or does it actually help improve security? Read the rest of this entry »

Like most things on the Web, hosting and hosting technology is constantly moving forward, improving every year and every month to be faster, more reliable and cheaper.

But it is one of those technologies where, if you don’t stop and look around from time to time, you might miss some of the big changes. If you’ve been too occupied with the day-to-day operations of your sites, especially if you haven’t been setting up new accounts, you might not have seen what’s been happening all around you.

On that note, here are five ways that hosting has changed over the past half decade, and what you can expect from these changes moving forward.

Not all of these changes will be affecting you today, but will the next time you go shopping for a new host or help someone else look for a new hosting account. So it’s well-worth the time to be aware of them and know exactly how they are impacting the hosting game. Read the rest of this entry »

The Westboro Baptist Church is best known for its controversial picketing of military funerals with anti-gay slogans and its recent contentious victory at the Supreme Court.

The church has made a lot of enemies online. One of those is a “hacktivist” called “The Jester” or “th3j35t3r”. The hacker took it upon himself to silence the Church’s famous “God Hates Fags” website and, on February 21 launched a denial of service attack. The site went down and has not been back online for any length of time since.

According to Jester, this is new type of denial of service attack. He hasn’t shared the details, but claims that it can keep virtually any site offline for as long as he wants.

Though many may cheer the closure of the Westboro’s site, the DOS attack, its success and its longevity raise serious questions about hosting security. Read the rest of this entry »

A friend of mine called me early in the morning: “Hey, can you check on my site? I think it’s down?”

I had recently set up a new domain for him and was hosting it on my VPS. I’d shown him the ropes on how to maintain it. However, the request seemed odd. When he called I was working on my site, hosted on the same account, and knew there was no problem with the server. Likewise, none of my monitors went off indicating there was any trouble with my domains.

I tested the site and it worked fine. However, I texted my wife to ask her to try it from her office. She did and found the site offline as well. Confused, I checked DownForEveryoneOrJustMe and it reported it as offline as well. I immediately cleared my cache and tried again, only to find the site still pulled up fine for me and worked well from several other services I checked.

All in all, I checked 12 services and found the site to be up at nine locations and down in three. However, the three reporting an outage didn’t have a great deal of useful information to tell me.

I immediately suspected a DNS issue but didn’t know if it was a) a problem with the DNS setup, meaning that the outages were an early warning of worse problems, or b) if it was a propagation issue and would eventually sort itself out.

I began to do some research and ran across some very helpful tools along the way. Read the rest of this entry »

Everyone who has set up a website is familiar with the process of configuring their nameservers. They are the pair of subdomains provided by your host that directs those wanting to visit your domain on where to visit.

Setting up nameservers usually only takes a few seconds and is, for the most part, a cut and paste job. Most nameservers provided by hosts look something like ns1.yourhostdomain.com/ns2.yourhostdomain.com and registrars usually walk their customers through this process, making it very simple to do.

But what is the purpose and the function of these namerservers? There is a lot of power hidden away in those two (or more) subdomains. Nameservers aren’t just an essential part of getting your site online, they’re a critical part of how the Web works and may have an even deeper impact on your site than you realize.

So, in this article, we’re going to take a look at nameservers, why they are important and how you can use your domain as one. Read the rest of this entry »

The recent disaster in Japan has highlighted two things: the vulnerability of infrastructure and just how critical it can be during difficult times.

The Internet has become a vital means of getting information out to the masses, but it’s also a critical part of the economy of almost any modern nation. Internet access and Web hosting are therefore critical services to maintain and, if necessary, repair during disasters.

However, restoring Internet access can be very challenging, especially from the hosting side. In times of disaster, datacenters and the sites stored in them are particularly vulnerable.

This is because Web hosts are fragile operations, often requiring a large number of variables to work properly. If just one of these pieces is missing, access is lost and critical information can be denied.

Consider for a moment what it takes to keep a host online and it is easy to see why hosting a site during a major disaster can be incredibly difficult.

1. Physical Location

All datacenters exist at a physical location and, if that location is damaged, the sites in it won’t work, especially if there is damage to the servers. Fire, flooding and structural damage can all easily stop a datacenter and, in some cases, can completely wipe out the information stored in it, including backups.

2. Datacenter staff

Datacenters are not autonomous operations and require a large staff of people to keep operating. If staff are unable to get to work, operations will quickly fall apart at a host, especially if any equipment is damaged.

Unfortunately, one can’t solve a host’s personnel problem by simply finding replacements. Datacenter staff have specific knowledge and skills and, even if suitable candidates can be found, each datacentre is unique and will require time and training before services can be restored.

3. Datacenter Power

Servers need electricity and, in most locations, that electricity comes from just one source and is often carried by fragile wires. Though smart hosts attempt to put large server farms as close as possible to power plants to both improve reliability and lessen environmental impact, power outages are still a major problem.

To combat this, datacenters usually have sizable backup generators that can keep their sites up during power outages. This are effective but are still limited in how long they can run.

4. Datacenter Internet Access

Amazingly, Web access is probably the least vulnerable point for a Web host operation. Most large datacenters have multiple connections to the Web, giving themselves a great deal of redundancy. Those networks also have a great deal of redundancy making it difficult, without some kind of damage at the physical location, to completely cut off the host.

The structure of the Web is part of what makes it such a reliable service during these times, even if datacenters caught up in the disaster have such a difficult time staying online or recovering.

How to Improve Hosting During Disasters

Three things become very clear from this list:

1. During disasters, the redundant nature of the Web means that access can likely be maintained, thus providing useful information to those who are stricken.
2. However, physical locations caught in the disaster zone are highly vulnerable and may not be able to recover quickly, if at all.
3. The best way to offer hosting stability during disasters, or other challenging times, is to offer redundancy in physical locations as well.

In short, it’s important to ensure that your data exists in at least two physical locations. Whether via a content delivery network, which may enable a site to stay online even if one datacenter is stricken, or off-site backups that enables quick recovery.

To be clear, Web hosts can survive natural disasters while remaining online. For example, the New Orleans host Zipa survived Hurricane Katrina without any downtime. However, its physical location was spared the worst of the disaster.

However, the vulnerability of physical locations, which has been so tragically highlighted in recent days, makes it clear that to keep online during the most difficult times, the more redundancy the better.

Fortunately, this can be achieved easily on the Web and the costs of such redundancy are dropping steadily, helping to make the Web a much more reliable tool, even during trying times.

Bottom Line

It might seem somewhat petty to worry about the infrastructure of the Web during a time of great disaster. However, the Web has come a critical part of our lives, often in ways we don’t see or recognize.

The Web is a near-perfect way to get information into the hands of those who need it, making it a powerful tool during a disaster. It’s also crucial for personal communication, letting those affected by the disaster communicate and update each other.

However, it’s also critical for economic recovery and, considering how much the simple joy of visiting a site can mean during an emotional time, it can be important for personal recovery as well.

But none of this is possible if we can’t keep sites online and that can be a major challenge when datacenters are in the path of the disaster. Fortunately, the Web provides a solution for this problem, if we are willing to plan ahead and be ready.