The next accountable expense that fluctuates over a wide range is Web hosting expenses. There are businesses that prefer procuring and maintaining their own servers. Timely upgrades, software licensing, dedicated manpower etc are among add-on liabilities that come with self-managed servers.

Web/Database hosting costs can go pretty high if you really want to own your servers and maintain them in your own premises. But that’s not the requirement for any startup that has just taken off. Most web startups(99.9%) are far from attracting traffic levels which are unbearable for standalone hosting service providers.

Hosting providers serve all kinds of hosting needs, whether ‘shared hosting’ for low traffic websites or ‘dedicated hosting’ for high traffic startups. As web hosting market is turning pretty competitive, some of the best web hosting companies are now amongst the cheapest web hosting providers as well. For finding cheapest hosting providers on web, stumble over some hosting reviews of various service providers (such as this one for Web hosting hub) and choose the one that suits your budget and needs. Remember that shared hosting is not ideal for high traffic websites and one should immediately upgrade to dedicated hosting plans once the website starts attracting big traffic spikes more often.

Apart from regular hosting service providers, yet another way to accommodate web hosting needs for cloud hosted web apps is services like Amazon EC2. EC2 allows scalable deployment of web apps and users are billed according to variation in traffic levels. In other words, the users will only pay for the bandwidth consumed by the traffic their web app attracts, rather than paying some fixed rental which may not be as cost-effective to the users.

There are other hosting options such as App Engine, more suited to hosting enterprise applications. Looking at current trends, Cloud computing based options are picking up fast. And as you explore more, you will realize more such options catering to different needs. That’s all for now about hosting for small & medium sized web startups.

Img source

Note

Over recent years, businesses have been increasingly struggling with the emerging challenges of exponential data growth.

15 years ago, managing growing email storage wasn’t such a big problem. You could simply set maximum storage limits on user accounts, and enforce deletion policies to maintain small email archives.

But then, a few things changed almost simultaneously:

• Email became much more frequently used as a primary business communication channel
• Thanks to faster bandwidth & easier access to multimedia tools, the average size of attachments began to grow very quickly
• New laws required companies to store several years worth of historical email data in order to protect themselves from future legal action

All of these factors have combined to form a snowball effect.

Although the price of storage and processing power is steadily falling, it’s still not falling fast enough to accommodate for this rapid growth. As a result, email servers accumulate data more quickly, slowing down their performance.

And in the event that historical data must be searched, the average email server simply doesn’t have the processing power to quickly and effectively search through several years’ worth of archival emails.

By moving your email archiving to “the cloud”, you can help relieve a lot of these pressures.

Through Software as a Service (SaaS) email archiving, you can automate your archiving, retention, deletion and classification policies while ensuring that this data can be quickly accessed for disaster recovery or search.

These systems take inactive data off of your email server, which optimizes performance by freeing up resources. And if your users need their archives, they can gain access to this data through the third-party archiving service.

And in case of an ediscovery or search request, these SaaS email archiving providers have access to massive, powerful datacenters that can quickly retrieve whatever data you’re looking for… much faster than you could ever do it in-house.

Although email archiving doesn’t completely replace a proper backup process, it complements backup very well in a manner that can reduce your data management costs while improving the performance of your existing infrastructure.

If your company has been struggling with exponential data growth, you may want to consider looking into email archiving as a possible solution.

About The Author: Storagepipe has been providing online backup software, email archiving services and other hosted data protection applications since 2001.

Torrent

Users know what’s the core purpose of a torrent but they hardly have any idea about its actual meaning and fundamental concept behind it. Surrounding the word torrent, there are several other words being regularly used but the literal meaning is not yet clear.

This write-up sheds light over the most common keywords used in torrent world but hardly known in literal sense. Let’s get started !

What is a torrent ?

A small file that carries the necessary information, required by the BitTorrent Client, for downloading the desired file. Torrent files are generally obtained from a torrent indexing website, dedicated for the purpose of indexing torrent files.

Torrent Indexers do not host or generate the content being shared. They merely index the torrents, which enables BitTorrent Client download the content being referred by the torrent.

What is BitTorrent ?

A peer-to-peer file sharing protocol, which was developed by Bram Cohen back in 2001 and is now maintained by BitTorrent Inc. BitTorrent was developed for the purpose of providing end users with a pathway to transfer and share large sized files on the Internet in a decentralized manner.

BitTorrent, also known as Peer-to-Peer protocol, doesn’t follow the conventional Client-Server file hosting mechanism but actually distributes the responsibility of hosting and sharing files across all the connected peers(network nodes). Such a distributed mechanism reduces the dependency and network load on any single machine and helps distributing large sized files without any infrastructural need.

What is a BitTorrent Tracker ?

BitTorrent Trackers are servers that provide assistance in the inter-communication between peers, whenever data download through a torrent initiates and periodical communication during the downloading process as well. As more and more peers(leechers) download the data sections of the file from the original source, these peers start behaving like sources(seeders) for other leechers. Hence, regular communication with Torrent trackers ensures that newly added seeders are also utilized by the leechers.

What is a Torrent Indexer ?

Torrents indexers are websites that work as search engines for torrents. They keep looking around for newly created torrents and index them on their site, to get found easily by the end users. Again, similar to Torrent trackers, Indexers do not participate in generating the content being shared via BitTorrent. They merely play their part in P2P networking by providing an easy-to-access aggregated torrent resource.

What is a BitTorrent Client ?

Just like we need a desktop application(web browser) to access internet using http protocol, we need a desktop application to download and share data using BitTorrent protocol. This desktop application is known as BitTorrent Client.

What is P2P ?

P2P or Peer to Peer is referred to the networking configuration used in BitTorrent protocol, to enable distributed data hosting and sharing across multiple peers. Just like we have a Client-server configuration for data hosting and sharing via http protocol, there is Peer-to-peer configuration for BitTorrent protocol.

Here you will find some of the most popular torrent trackers on the web.

And the cause was DDoS Attack.

A couple of days passed by and most of us forgot that fatal attack which almost killed Twitter for a while.

Even after creating such a havoc, there’s hardly(barring tech minority) anyone who may exactly be knowing  what DDoS Attacks are all about.

In this write-up, we would explain everything about DDoS Attacks, how are they invoked and how are they can be counter-acted.

What is DoS Attack ?

Denial of Service(DoS) Attack is a fatal attempt by an external agent to cause a situation where the actual resource(victim undergoing attack) becomes unavailable to the actual visitors or users. This is usually done by overwhelming the target victim with illegitimate traffic in the form of  broken/unsolicited page access requests.

Distributed Denial of Service(DDoS) Attack is an advance form of DoS where the attacking agents are distributed over the huge network (or internet)

How DoS Attacks are executed ?

DoS Attacks are usually executed by flooding the target servers with unsolicited data packets in unprecedented manner. This may be done by misconfiguring network routers or by performing smurf attack on the victim servers. This results in ‘Capacity Overflow’, followed by Max Out of system resources, which makes the target service unavailable, either temporarily or permanently(In case of hardware targeted DoS attack) to the intended users.

In case of DDoS attack, the origin of unsolicited data packets (for the purpose of flooding the bandwidth/resource of the victim servers) are distributed over a large network(or internet).

The overall mechanism of DDoS Attack involves a huge quantity of compromised network nodes (computers connected to internet), governed by agent handlers, which are further controlled centrally by the actual attacker.

The massive number of compromised computers on the internet are then unknowingly governed by the source attacker to demand access to the targeted victim within a minimal time span, which further causes saturation of limited system resources and results in eventual shutdown of the targeted service.

The most common method employed to compromise massive amount of user agents on the internet (to actually execute DDoS Attack) is by plaguing as many computers as possible over the internet with malware/trojan, meant for that particular purpose.

Such trojans can either spread via email attachments or via Peer-to-peer networks. Whatever be the method of spreading out, once the intended trojan is silently installed on the uninformed computer agent, that user agent has actually been compromised, which is then called as a Zombie or Botnet.

Further, it becomes a prerogative of the source attacker to indirectly command some or all its Zombie agents(or botnets) for demanding access to the target service.

What are other variants of DoS attacks ?

There are many other attacks of similar nature and purpose such as smurf attack, nuke bomb, ping of death, banana attack, phlashing among many others.

How are they counteracted ?

The best way to defend a web service from faltering due to DDoS attack is to keep backup resources of the system intact. As the aim of such attack is to max out system resources, if the system resources are already abundant and well prepared to face that sudden peak of traffic at any moment, most chances are that your web service will survive DoS (or even DDoS) attack.

What implications can DDoS Attacks have ?

If the attack is only limited to overwhelming and resource consuming traffic, the implications are limited to service unavailability for couple of hours (or few days in exceptional cases). This not only stresses the website administrators financially but also results in loss of market reputation and puts a question mark on the reliability of the web service.

In case of hardware targeted DoS Attacks, financial losses can magnify to great extent as hosting infrastructure has to be replaced on urgent basis. This can also lead to critical data loss, if backup procedures aren’t up to the mark.

With more and more DDoS attacks happening these days, companies and Internet properties are using various types of DDoS Mitigation strategies to avoid any worst case scenario.

Update: For those who want to get expert information on DDoS attacks, here’s the recommended ebook you should buy:

Most of us know ”Wi-Fi” as something that lets us access internet without physically connecting to the LAN. But there’s a more to it.

Below are some basic facts and pieces of information related to Wi-Fi which will help you understand Wi-Fi much better and easier.

1. Wi-Fi is a wireless technology (following IEEE 802.11 standard) that lets digital devices such as PC,laptop,mobile phones to connect and access internet through a router without any physical association with the wired network(LAN).Interestingly,’Wireless Fidelity’,as such does not mean anything.It was actually a branding strategy by the governing Alliance to make their service a bit more catchy and “Hi-Fi”.

2. “Wi-Fi” was termed by  Wi-Fi Alliance,which takes the responsibility of overseeing tests that certify product interoperability.A product that passes the alliance tests is given the label “Wi-Fi certified“.

3. Wi-Fi hotspots are the access points through which wireless internet is accessed.Restaurants,coffee-shops,food joints offer free hotspots within their premises as a mode of attraction.More hotspots correspond to more coverage and heavy usage support(higher bandwidth support).

4. To establish a Wi-Fi connectivity,the two primary conditions are Wireless adapter at user’s end(within the laptop or PC) and a Wi-Fi router(externally placed).Most of new laptops and desktop computers come with built-in wireless adapter.

5. Wi-Fi networks are very limited in range.A typical Wi-Fi router might have a range of 30 m(~100 ft) indoor and 90 m(295 ft) outdoor.Range also varies with selected frequency band.Wi-Fi in the 2.4 GHz frequency band has slightly better range than Wi-Fi in the 5 GHz frequency band.

6. Wi-Fi is much more prone to security abuse than wired LAN.As the level of openness is quite high,Wi-Fi’s encryption methods face continuous failure in front of easily available softwares such as Aircrack.This is the reason why private Wi-Fi networks prefer employing ‘Whitelist IP Usage’ only.

7. There are future plans to turn entire cities such as San Francisco,Philadelphia and few others into big wireless hotspots.The Wi-Fi services will either be free(ad-supported) or subscription based.

8. Cities like San Francisco(U.S.) and Hong Kong(Asia) are even running buses with free and fully operational Wi-Fi services.

But the new generation website-building services have completely changed the old scenario.With technologies such as Flash & Ajax,the user interface has become very interactive and the outcome is as good as a professionally designed website.

So,here is our compilation where you will get to see four excellent website building services(for non-techies) that have greatly impressed with their features and functionalities…

One of these services called ‘Wix‘ has already been covered by us earlier.

1………………………………………………………..

Brief-up

It lets you build a website in three easy steps…Choose a template,add content & images and Publish !

Collection of templates

72 (free)

Freedom of expression

Low-medium

Ad publishing support(in-built)

Google Adsense

Editor usability(ease of use)

6/10

Unique features 

Picnik API integrated (Advanced image editor)

Website download option available

Non-flash website

Most suitable for…

those who want a decent looking website in Instant noodles mode and also want to download their website and use it elsewhere.

2………………………………………………………..

Brief-up

It provides you with a user-friendly editor(heavy use of Ajax and Javascript) which helps you build a professional website with no hassles  

Collection of templates

48

Freedom of expression

Low-medium

Ad publishing support(in-built)

Google Adsense,AdBrite(but it takes 50% of your website’s Adsense earnings)

Editor usability(ease of use)

7/10

Unique features 

Offers economical hosting+domain packages

Great UI(User Interface)

All-in-one support

Most suitable for…

those who want an All-in-one support for their pro website at one place(domain+hosting+editor+blog) and ready to spend min. $25 per year(good deal) for it

3………………………………………………………..

Brief-up

It facilitates a Flash Editor which is fun to play with.The templates look great from design point of view.

Collection of templates

35

Freedom of expression

Medium-High

Ad publishing support(in-built)

No 

Editor usability(ease of use)

8/10

Unique features 

Animation and special effects

Flash website with Search engine indexing

Exceptional templates

Most suitable for…

those who want a flash website with animation and special effects without shelling out any bucks

4………………………………………………………..

Brief-up

Create or modify templates with snappages editor.Add Youtube video,Google Maps,images and similar stuff to your site

Collection of templates

3(rest aren’t free)

Freedom of expression

small-medium

Ad publishing support(in-built)

No 

Editor usability(ease of use)

7.5/10

Unique features 

Final website in Flash+HTML format

Transitions within editor 

Most suitable for…

those who are ready to shell out around $50 per year for a self-developed professional website and want features such as Google Maps(for showing a particular location),Youtube videos etc with no hassles