Web Hosting Terminologies 101

Web Hosting Terminologies 101

Finding the right web hosting company can be a challenging task, but it can be especially challenging for beginners looking to host a website for the first time. Today I started thinking about the the terminology that I often throw around in meetings and I realized that many individuals may not completely understand the web hosting “lingo”.  To help those who may not be a expert in web hosting have a better understanding of the products in which they are purchasing I have decided to write an article explaining the sometimes misunderstood web hosting language. This article is written for beginners; I will explain each term to the simplest degree possible for an easy understanding you may can comment below. Bandwidth Controls the amount of traffic your website can handle – Tip:  The higher the bandwidth the better CGI A simple script that processes data submitted by a website visitor – Example:  Most online forms (enter name, address, phone, etc.) use CGI. CGI-BIN The place on a web server where CGI scripts are stored Cpanel The tool that allows you to control information on your web server Dedicated Hosting A more expensive form of web hosting.  Cheaper hosting plans share a web server with others who are hosting websites.  Dedicated hosting allows a user to have his/her own server.  Increased server speeds and less server downtime can be expected with a dedicated hosting plan. Disk Space See “Hosting Space” below Domain Name A domain name is the actual name of the website that must be entered in a address bar to access a website –Example:  www.inodecloud.com is our domain name. Firewall A security...
Top 5 SEO mistakes you may be making

Top 5 SEO mistakes you may be making

1. Choosing the wrong Keywords Targeting the right keyword is the most important when it comes to SEO. Many people make the mistake of not choosing the right keyword for optimizing their website. A keyword should be descriptive of your website content and related to what a user might type in the search box when looking for the website.Choosing the wrong Keyword Another common mistake many people do is that they assume their company’s name to be a keyword. This will be good for people who already know about your company and who are only looking to find you. Choosing a proper keyword is essential but it may happen that you are not able to come up with a good keyword list. In such a case there are many keyword generation tools available which will help you find keywords that are good for your site. 2. Title Tag Title tag is one of the first elements that a search engine spider sees on your HTML page. Ignoring the title tag can cost your dearly in terms of search engine rankings. Title tag is also a very convenient place to put the keyword that you have decided for your website. Another mistake is to have the same title for different pages. Every page on your website should have a different title and relevant to the content on that page. 3. Internal Links A website should not only have links to other site, but also to all the important pages within the site. All the internal pages within a website should be properly linked. Having internal links and a good link structure...
Bash Critical Security Hole – Explained

Bash Critical Security Hole – Explained

Yesterday we swiftly patched all of our customers web servers due to a critical vulnerability to Bash, aka the Bourne-Again Shell. but what damage could this vulnerability do? The flaw involves how Bash evaluates environment variables. With specifically crafted variables, a hacker could use this hole to execute shell commands. This, in turn, could render a server vulnerable to ever greater assaults. By itself, this is one of those security holes where an attacker would already need to have a high level of system access to cause damage. Unfortunately, as Red Hat’s security team put it, “Certain services and applications allow remote unauthenticated attackers to provide environment variables, allowing them to exploit this issue.” The root of the problem is that Bash is frequently used as the system shell. Thus, if an application calls a Bash shell command via web HTTP or a Common-Gateway Interface (CGI) in a way that allows a user to insert data, the web server could be hacked. As Andy Ellis, the Chief Security Officer of Akamai Technologies, wrote: “This vulnerability may affect many applications that evaluate user input, and call other applications via a shell.” That could be a lot of web applications — including many of yours. The consequences of an attacker successfully exploiting this vulnerability on a Web server are serious in nature. For example attackers may have the ability to dump password files or download malware on to infected computers. Once inside the victim’s firewall, the attackers could then compromise and infect other computers on the network. Aside from Web servers, other vulnerable devices include Linux-based routers that have a Web interface...
The Importance Of Backups

The Importance Of Backups

I have seen this one too many times with friends, families organizations over and over again. It’s happened to me in the past before, having a portable drive storing all my important document, photos and a whole heap of other files and thinking it would never happen to me. Then one day it crashes. I received a call today from a frantic friend who had just lost a chuck of important business emails for the last 6 months. Why? because they had gotten a new laptop and using Microsoft Outlook kept all their emails stored locally on their laptop, so while trying to export from the old and import to the new an option “overwrite existing data” was accidentally left ticked while they were mindlessly talking on the phone. Investigated for what was 3 hours using various methods in an attempt to restore the lost emails, it eventually came to a point where he had to cut his losses and accept that 6 months of his business emails were… gone. I told him this as i tell you now it is important to probably devise a plan on how you can backup your data so that in the event of losing your storage device, floods, theft you will still have access to your data. DO NOT keep your family photos, important documents, assignments in a USB or portable hard drive. The best method to always keep a backup and a method that i use are one of 2 ways. 1. Use a cloud based backup service 2. invest in a NAS (Network Attached Storage) My samsung galaxy S3 automatically...