Linux server blog

As there are many companies offering you good deals on Linux or Windows platform for hosting, you may be having a little dilemma to choose Linux or Windows platform for hosting. To make a better choice the two platforms can be compared by various factors such as performance, price, ease of use, functionality and stability. Before opting for the service you should have some idea about these platforms.

Linux was first introduced in 1991 by Linus Torvalds, as an extended form of Minix. Initially Linux was used by many universities as an operating system. Wide popularity and demand made the hosting service available for free distribution with General Public License. Linux supports a large number of script and programming languages.

As there was a great demand and need for graphic user interface, Windows platform was introduced as MS-DOS add on and its subsequent releases were widely accepted by the people. Windows Server 2003 was considered as very successful commercial server software and recently Server 2008 has been launched. The functionality of XP is very familiar.

The price of the platform depends on the services offered by the hosting company. Linux is available as a version, due to factors such as free licensing and availability which are not held by Microsoft products. As Linux is developed to cater to the multi-user environment, it takes some time to enable its stability, compared to Windows environment. Linux platform is considered to be more secure and stable than Windows. Both Linux and Windows platforms are very easy to use. Many people are familiar with windows processes. With a Linux Server you can upload content easily to your website by enabling FrontPage extensions. Windows Server system has very attractive functionalities with Access database support and is associated with MySQL. You can easily integrate off-line and online system by using ASP.net. While Visual Basic scripts and Windows Media files are supported by Windows servers, Real Player media is supported by Linux. Both the platforms offer you script support such as CGI, XML, PHP, etc. Linux offers the functionalities at a cheaper cost and a stable environment, compared to Windows due to the license cost of Microsoft.

You can find that many hosting companies offer a wide range of Linux and Windows hosting plans. While choosing the hosting company you have to evaluate your realistic and pre-determined needs for a reliable and secure service.

Filed under: Guides, Tips by Linux Admin
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One of the most ignored factors when picking out a dedicated server is the physical location of the server versus the location of your websites visitors. By not choosing a location near the people you are wishing to target you can hurt your sales and popularity of your website. First let’s talk about why the physical location is still a factor and especially important for online ecommerce.

The Internet has gotten a lot faster but it is still limited by the data lines running around the world. A person in Texas requesting a site hosted in Japan is being send data from around the world and thus the page will load slower. As you get closer this is not as noticeable but a page hosted in Texas will still load faster for Texas residents as opposed to those in California. So why is this important? You could be loosing sales and prospective customers if your pages are not loading fast enough.

I live in the United Kingdom and I see this situation every day at work. I work for UK2 and we offer dedicated servers in both the USA and United Kingdom. We get calls from customers who are seeing low conversions on ecommerce store landing pages or showing us complaints from their visitors about slow load time. The problem is they are hosting a store for UK residents in the USA, or a site for US visitors in the UK. The time it is taking data to go back and forth is adding to a slightly delay which can have an effect. One of the many ranking factors for PPC at Google Adwords is the speed your landing page is served. This is why it is key to host your site near the geographic region you are targeting.

So what is the fix? Just keep in mind who your perspective customers are when choosing a location for your dedicated server. If you are targeting the entire United States a location in Chicago or Texas should work great. If you are targeting residents in the UK get a server there. The physical location of a server is still important so please keep it in mind!

Published by BEN (non-staff member)

Filed under: Linux by Linux Admin
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As of April 2nd, 2008 we are fully supporting SUSE Linux Enterprise and OpenSUSE platforms, including remote server administration, OS tuning, network stack tuning, patching and full maintenance services.

Filed under: News by Linux Admin
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Caching is the key to success - the more content you cache, the more visitors on the same hardware you can serve. Many Wordpress owners run wp-cache plugin to cache blog pages in files, rather than generating content on the fly - querying MySQL database. If you have a low usage that is fine, but if you have a medium load blog or getting Dugg/Slashdot effect - only tuning, optimization and proper caching will keep your blog up and running.

wp-cache will need to regenerate cache file every time a blog post receives a comment - performance is lost if the post receives heavy commenting. You can hack wp-cache plugin to expire cache for particular page only when cache expire time expires, not with every new comment.

Open the WP plugin directory - wp-cache plugin file: wp-cache-phase2.php

and comment out line:

add_action(’comment_post’, ‘wp_cache_get_postid_from_comment’, 0); 

// add_action(’comment_post’, ‘wp_cache_get_postid_from_comment’, 0); 

And you are set.

Filed under: Guides by Linux Admin
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Most of the Linux distributions specify local port range from 16384 to 65536 and this may be too low for very high bandwidth and busy boxes, let’s say SMTP, Hosting, POP3/Imap and Proxy servers.

You can adjust this setting by editing /etc/sysctl.conf file and replacing the default:

net.ipv4.ip_local_port_range = 16384 65536

with

net.ipv4.ip_local_port_range = 1024 65536

Filed under: Tips by Linux Admin
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Some users report problem when backup is performed using mysqldump command line utility under the Linux OS. The version affected in our tests were 4.1.20.

mysqldump: Got error: 1044: Access denied for user ‘root’@'localhost’ to database ‘information_schema’ when using LOCK TABLES

To quickly fix this problem use the following switch when running mysqldump for MySQL database backups.

mysqldump -u root -p –all-databases –single-transaction > all.sql

Filed under: Tips by Linux Admin
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We are proud to offer high quality and reliable managed web hosting services for Wordpress blog owners.

We offer various plans for Wordpress blog hosting, including blogs hosted on our Wordpress cluster (powered by high-speed BGP network- Internap and many other network providers), Wordpress managed blog multi-architecture cLuster technology with multiple front-end and back-end servers, as well as custom server management and tuning of your existing dedicated server that runs your Wordpress blog.

More information: http://www.linuxadmin.org/blog-managed-hosting.php

Filed under: News by Linux Admin
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We are offering remote FFmpeg utility set-up for Red Hat Enterprise, Fedora and Centos servers. The price is $40 for each server.

What is FFmpeg? It’s a set of programs that  can record and convert various digital audio and video formats. For example, you can covert .mpeg files to .avi.

Filed under: News by Linux Admin
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Everybody of us who are specially the internet users must have opened web pages where we get to watch many videos and multimedia contents but will someone tell me what format is it or how the websites integrate these multimedia applications so that we are able to see and use it? Yes, it’s mainly a Flash video. It is a standard file format which is used to cast videos and multimedia movie contents in the web. Now this is a streaming video which is done by a particular standard host in the web world. This article takes you to that arena.

What is Streaming media?
A series of moving images that needs to be casted on a web page in the internet which is decompressed (file size is reduced) for accommodating it in the web page. This is known as Streaming media (video). When an internet user opens that particular page he gets to see that streaming video scene after scene.

Streaming flash video
When a streaming video is in form of a flash video it is called Streaming flash. A flash video has always an .flv extension just like the well known .mpeg extension of windows media. These videos are generally entrenched in an SWF file. Naturally to play that video the user needs some compatible players (flash video playing software). These video players are available for free from Adobe Corp. or Macromedia website. A user without having this software’s installed in their PC’s will not be able to view the videos of a webpage.

Standard hosting
When we say the word Hosting we generally mean one which hosts some occasion or event or anything. Just as we need a host to present an event similarly we also require a host to present these streaming flash media on the respective web pages. There are several websites that does this job.

Today every thing has gone digital. Everyone desires to appear at the foremost position. Many people who have opened their personal web pages on the net may need to put on some of his personal videos. Many companies desiring to make the people aware of their promotions, meetings, tie-ups, product launches also opt for this streaming flash hosting. This is because the costs of hosting these videos are very cheap. They ultimately help them to save on their advertising and marketing campaigns.

Today this type of standard hosting is employed by various television, news channel (like BBC) and entertainment websites (like YouTube). Many users log on to the net for watching news, TV serials or programs missed by them or even trailers of forthcoming movies. This means it helps these companies to earn good revenue each and every time the users log on to the web sites.

That is it can be said that streaming Flash contents using a standard host can add to a good amount of publicity for a company in a very cost effective approach.

Filed under: Streaming by Linux Admin
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We have been doing FTP hosting for some time now and I would like to share our experience.

At the beginning we started with different FTP servers and quickly we found out that vsftpd is lightning fast and secure. So we chose to run vsftpd on all our FTP server hosting nodes and so far the experience have been really outstanding.

One of our busiest FTP node runs easily at 80-90Mbps and performs well with 500+ users connected. The hardware is kinda low-end, a Pentium 4 with one CPU and 2GB RAM, the hard disks are SATA. Server has full-duplex 100Mbps uplink and we are quite happy with it!

In one month it usually transfers around ~23 Tera bytes (23,000 GB’s) of outgoing data and around 7TB of incoming data for file uploads. We do not run any RAID technology on this low-end and cheap Linux server.

Filed under: Content Distribution by Linux Admin
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