New Blog FAQ

We have a new page up devoted to blog hosting on our main site. It incorporated a bried blog FAQ to encourage more bloggers, which will be adding to. What is a Blog? Blog means a "Web Log." A Blog is really on online journal. They are fairly similar to web forums except that a blog is an individual journal and a web forum is more of an interaction between many like minded individuals. Is it hard to start a blog? Do you have to be a bit of a Geek to maintain a Blog? Not at all it's all very simple. The software can be pre-installed by Weycrest and the popular blogging tools are very user friendly. Every day, there are lots of new bloggers. Indeed once your favourite blog is installed, the main task is to create content for your blog. Standard hosting usually requires some HTML skills in putting togethor a website. With blogging you are freed from that. Can I use my Weycrest webspace in conjunction with Google's Blogger? Absolutely. Signup for Google Blogger here. Choose "Advanced Blog Setup" and give Google your FTP username and password, Blog URL and FTP path, all of which are provided in your Weycrest hosting setup email. Blogger is a good introduction to the world of blogging but lacks some of the advanced features of the more popular blog tools. You may want to install Google Blogger in a sub directory or create a subdomain (ie: myblog.yourdomain.com) if you already have a website installed in your hosting space How much does it cost money to start a blog? It depends. There are several established sites that can set you up a free blog. These are blogeasy.com, weblogs.us, blogsource.com, blogstream.com, bloxter.net, blogsky.com, blogger.com, amongst others. The problem with free blog host space is that they have no contractual obligation to you and they can remove your blog at any time. What are Splogs? These are Spam Blogs. This is another problem for the free blog sites especially if they have an automated setup. Spammers create literally thousands of "spam blogs" on free networks containing hundreds of links to fool search engines and to artificially create advertising and affiliate revenue. This can put the free blog networks and servers (as well as their support staff) under some stress. Worse than that, if someone accidentally or maliciously flags your legitimate blog as a "splog" if might suddenly be deleted. It's also possible that search engines might rank your blog lower for being in a "bad neighbourhood." This happens a lot with free hosting. Can I install blog software in existing hosting space? Of course if you already have hosting and a domain name, this might be the cheapest and most reliable way of starting a blog. Most blog scripts require PHP and often a MySQL database. Some blog software such as MT (moveable type) require additional perl modules, but these are already installed onto Weycrest servers Can I make money out of my blog? Yes. Though this isn't the main motivation of many personal bloggers it is possible to monetize your blog. This can be achieved by incorporating a google adsense campaign into your blog (easily done - just cut and paste the javascript code provided by Google into your site) or by writing about a service or product and including affilate text links in your writing. Embedded text links can produce the most response. With these methods its relatively easy to recoup your hosting costs. How do I promote my blog? Whats all this "pinging" business? There are a number of services you can ping when you update your blog though trackback posting is more productive. More frequent posting will increase traffic as the search engine spiders will crawl and index your blog more often. Additional promotion methods include RSS feeds and submitting to Blog Directories and by exchanging links with other bloggers. What is Podcasting? Podcasting is a combination of the terms "ipod" and "broadcasting." Though infact you can create and listen to a podcast without the need for an ipod device. Podcasts can be retrieved using a standard web browser or podcast client software such as Podcast Amp. Listen to podcasts using standard media or audio software (Real Player, Windows Media Player, or Winamp) or transfer them to an mp3 player. Creating a podcast is easy. It requires a PC or laptop with a microphone. Firstly record and edit your podcast with audio editor and recorder software. Audacity is free software and support's Windows, Linux and Mac OSX operating systems and can be found at http://audacity.sourceforge.net. Upload your podcast to your Weycrest blogspace and distribute it via your blogger software's RSS feed. Also submit your audio blog site to the various Podcast Directories. Tags: weycrest podcast blog blog hosting

Move Up To a VPS Hosting?

Traditional Shared Hosting Most people are familiar with "shared" web hosting accounts. A shared hosting account is where you rent disc space on a server which is shared among many other users. This is a cost effective way to getting started as a webmaster but it has some disadvantages. Firstly you may encounter email delivery problems if someone else with a site on the server decides to run a large business mailing. Also abuse of web hosting providers service may result in a torrent of spam clogging the shared mail queue, causing a "denial of service" attack. You will find your website slowing down when someone else with a datebase intensive website (such as a forum or bulletin board). Another disadvantage of shared hosting is that you very rarely get administrator or root access. This can make setting up dynamic sites more tricky. Also you can't install your own software and will have to put up with software libraries (such as Perl or PHP) that the web hosting provider has installed. Security There are also security issues to consider of using a shared file system. Could other users access your files and data with an appropriate script? This is of critical concern if you are considering ecommerce hosting and in particular storing credit card information. Certain credit card payment processors may wish you to have a more secure arrangement than a shared hosting server. A shared server introduces many more security vectors and someone elses unpatched phpBB script may result in lost business anddowntime for you. Enter the Virtual Private Server How can you avoid this problem? A few years ago you would have had to consider a dedicated server. However there has been a relatively recent development in web hosting - the virtual dedicated server. These are often known as VPS's or Virtual Private Servers. A virtual dedicated server lets you run your sites as if you had your own "dedicated" server, except it is cheaper because you are really just using part of a server that has been split into multiple virtual dedicated servers. The most important distinction to shared virtual hosting is that you have "root" or admin access and you control your own background processes, such as apache (httpd), qmail (smptd) and MySQL (databases) So someone elses buggy application or script is not going to crash or interfere with your own processes. Furthermore you have filesystem security as it effectively jailed or "chrooted" from other users and processes, and you can install your own libraries and software. Where to Find a VPS Hosting There are now plenty of VPS Providers. You can find many by searching Google for "virtual private servers" or "vps hosting" or looking in one of the many web hosting directories or forums. Virtuozzo by SW-Soft is the main commercial software that web hosts use to run virtual hosting services, but there are others. For instance vserver is similar in principle to Virtuozzo but is not as well used. Open source vps systems exist in the form of OpenVZ ( a subset of Virtuozzo) UML (User Mode Linux) and more recently Xen. It's highly likely that you will be hosted on a Virtuozzo system. VPS hosting used to be the prerogative of the smaller web hosts primarily looking for a more geeky market but recently the bigger mainstream web hosts have moved into VPS's. Virtual Dedicated Server hosting starts at just £30 a month. You'll get a much more generous bandwidth allowance compared to shared hosting, and none of the problems that go with a shared host. Usually you get multiple IP addresses that are exclusive to your sites, which you will need for SSL certificate hosting and for running your own nameservers if you want to register domain names. So what's the catch? Apart from the price there isn't one. You'll be spending a lot more on hosting each month but not as much a for a real dedicated server. The main drawback of upgrading to virtual dedicated hosting is that you will need to be more technically proficient so that you can administer the server. You might think this requires a lot Linux skills to make sure your server runs smoothly but most VPS hosts provide a control panel such as Plesk or CPanel to make administrative tasks a cinch. Many hosting providers will offer "premium" or managed support which includes a bit more hand holding - this is definitely recommended if you don't have much experience with Linux, and are not confident about keeping your VPS updated. It's worth talking to your web host about updating and installing software. If its a Virtuozzo system, the web host will have pre-installed templates for common applications such as Coldfusion which can be rolled out across many VPS's thus cutting down on disc space inside your VPS and well as saving memory and resources on the "hardware node" it runs on. Quite often the VPS provider can roll out operating system updates and bugfixes across all their VPS infrastructure. With the increased speed and bandwidth that a virtual dedicated host offers, and none of the shared hosting headaches, the move is one you will never regret. Paul Lee has over six years experience in the web hosting industry and was formerly Senior System Administrator with Simply.Com Limited. He currently lives and works in London and runs his own consultancy and hosting company Weycrest. You are free to copy or redistribute these articles provide you attribute the original work to us and retain the anchor text link back to weycrest.co.uk.

A Guide To Web Hosting Jargon

If there is anything that isn't clear please don't hesitate to contact us so we can improve on our documentation. Disc Space The amount of physical space devoted to holding your "content." This will be manly your website files, but can include stored email and databases. Monthly Traffic When people visit your site, data is sent from our servers to their computer. This data can be composed of web pages or anything else on your site that can be viewed or downloaded by visitors. It also include email received and downloaded to your PC. Every month this requested data is added up, to give your total data transfer. POP3 Email The "pop" in POP3 stands for "post office protocol." It's a client/server protocol for collection email on a server from individual mail accounts. You can configure the users and passwords from a straightforward online control panel. Email Redirects This is sometimes known as "Email Forwarding." Rather than collecting your email off our server, you can arrange for mail addressed to your domain to go to mailboxes hosted elsewhere (perhaps at your ISP). Mail Responders The ability create automated responses to incoming email. This is quite handy when you are out of the office, or on holiday and can't respond in person immediately. MySQL Databases MySQL (pronounced "my ess cue el" ). An open source relational database management system (RDBMS) that uses Structured Query Language (SQL), the most popular language for adding, accessing, and processing data in a database. MySQL is noted mainly for its speed, reliability, and flexibility and usually used in conjunction with PHP scripting to create exciting dynamic websites such as bulletin boards and content management systems. CGI and Perl Perl is a high-level programming interpreted language originating fromLarry Wall. It derives from C and to a lesser extent from sed, awk, the Unix shell. Perl's process, file, and text manipulation facilities make it particularly well-suited for tasks involving quick prototyping, system utilities, software tools, system management tasks, database access, graphical programming, networking, and world wide web programming. A CGI script is a program written in Perl that is stored on the remote web server and executed on the web server in response to a request from a user. PHPHypertext Preprocessor (PHP) Is a popular general-purpose server side scripting language that is especially suited for Web development and can be embedded into HTML pages. It works particularly well when used for database driven applications using MySQL. Many popular CMS systems, such as Drupal, Mambo and PHP-Nuke are based on MySQL and PHP. FTP Stands for File Transfer Protocol (part of the TCP/IP protocol stack). It is used for transfering files between networked servers and clients and it will allow you to upload your website files to your virtual hosting account. You will need to install an FTP client on your PC to do this. Windows comes with a very basic command line FTP client. We would recommend a graphical client such as SimpleFTP, CuteFTP or WS-FTP. Frontpage 2002/2003 Microsoft Web Site creation and publishing platform. Weycrest use Microsoft's implementation of Frontpage Server Extensions for Linux. This gives full support for all Frontpage products, up to and including Frontpage 2003. Our hosting plans allow you repair and re-install the extensions from the control panel, in addition to creating subweb. Not to be used in conjunction with FTP (above) which can corrupt the server extensions. IMAP and Webmail IMAP stands for Instant Message Access Protocol. It differs from POP3 in that it allows remote clients to access email stored on a remote server, rather than downloading it. Webmail allows you to view these stored emails. This is quite handy especially if you are on the move and don't have access to an email client. Also as the mail is centrally stored you can always access your mail from your home or work PC, laptop or mobile device. Additionally Outlook, Outlook Express, Mozilla Mail and Mozilla Thunderbird all have IMAP support.