When you decide to have a hosting account, the first question is to decide which webhosting type you need to go with?

Technology has introduced various platforms for webhosting. They can be catagorised as follows :

Shared hosting
Reseller hosting
Semi-dedicated hosting
VPS hosting
Dedicated hosting
etc..

It is crucial to understand the differences among the types of hosting offered. As the Web hosting industry has matured, hosting offers have split into a few distinct categories, each with strengths and weaknesses.

* Shared hosting (sometimes called virtual hosting) means that you are sharing a server with other clients of that company. The host manages the server almost completely (though you maintain your site and your account). They can afford to charge you little since many clients are paying for use of the server.

However, companies other than yours use the resources of that server. That means heavy traffic to one of the other sites on the server can hammer the performance of your site. Also, you typically are unable to install special software programs on these types of machines because the host will need to keep a stable environment for all of the clients using the server.

Offering gigs of disk space with tons of gigs of bandwidth that too at a very cheap rate, is possible only with Shared hosting as resources are shared on a single server amongst hundreds and thousands of users.

* Reseller hosting enables you to resell the shared hosting to your end user clients. Here, the original hosting provider stays anonymous and to your end user clients you appear to be the primary hosting provider. This is good for those people who wish to start a hosting business. Later as your client number increases, the option to switch to VPS or Dedicated server hosting is preferred.

* Semi-dedicated hosting is similar to shared hosting, but here the number of users on a particular server is very less and limited as compared to the overfilled shared hosting servers. This is good for people who cannot afford dedicated hosting but still do not wish to face the cons of shared hosting.

* VPS hosting also known as Virtual Private Server, is an intermediate hosting between shared and dedicated hosting. VPS hosting servers are the small servers that are hosted on a main VPS server. VPS work on logically sharing of resources such as Memory (RAM), CPU, Disk Space, Bandwidth etc. VPS hosting is ideal for low resource consuming websites. The most attractive feature of VPS hosting is that you get root access to the server as if it was your dedicated server. You can install and run applications on your own (provided you do not run out of resources).

* Dedicated hosting can further be classifed into colocation, unmanaged and managed dedicated hosting.

* Co-located hosting means that you buy a server from a hardware vendor, like Dell or HP, and you supply this server to the host. The Web host plugs your server into its network and its redundant power systems. The host is responsible for ensuring its network is available, and you are responsible for support and maintenance of your server.

Good hosts offer management contracts to their co-location clients so that you can outsource much of the support to them and come to an arrangement similar to managed dedicated hosting. Most co-location hosts do not offer this service, however.

* Unmanaged dedicated hosting is similar to co-location except that you lease a server from a host and do not own it yourself. Some very limited support (typically Web-based only) is included, but the level of support varies widely among unmanaged dedicated hosts.

These days unmanaged dedicated hosting start from $69 per month. Support levels typically are provided only in general terms. Ask the host to go into specifics about what support it will provide — will it apply security patches to your server? — before signing up. This service is typically good for gaming servers (like Doom or Counterstrike servers) or hobbyist servers, but not for serious businesses that need responsive, expert-level service.

* Managed dedicated hosting means leasing a server from a host and having that company provide a robust level of support and maintenance on the server that is backed by quality guarantees. This maintenance typically includes services such as server uptime monitoring, a hardware warranty and security patch updates.

Ensure that your managed dedicated host is specific about its managed services so that it does not disguise an unmanaged dedicated offering as a managed dedicated server. This has been known to happen, which is why it is important to do your homework and ask the right questions.

We at http://www.rshosting.com offer UK and US based Reseller hosting, VPS Hosting, Semidedicated hosting, dedicated hosting (with fully managed servers).

MySQL is easiest to install on Red Hat systems using the RPM packages. To install MySQL in the same directory as the RPM packages use the command:
# rpm -Uvh *.rpm

Note: You most likely need to do this as the root user. Either log in or su to root.

After MySQL is installed you need to set the root password. To do this use the following commanding changing my_password to the password you want for the root user to access MySQL.
# mysqladmin -u root password ‘my_password’

Note: If the MySQL service is not running, you may have to start it by hand before trying to set the password. It should start automatically when the computer boots. The command to start MySQL is:
# /etc/rc.d/init.d/mysqld start

You can test the MySQL installation by doing the following:

# mysql mysql (connect to mysql database)
Enter Password:
mysql> SELECT * FROM user; (grab some data out of user table)

This should return the data in the user table. Type exit to leave.

This can be done with .htaccess, visitors must input username and password before they can access the protected directory.

Step 1.
Create the file “.htaccess” with the following content under the directory you want to protect, you can specify the password in any place as long as Apache can access it.

AuthUserFile /home/account/passwd/.htpasswd
AuthGroupFile /dev/null
AuthName “Title”
AuthType Basic

Step 2.
Generate the password file “.htpasswd” under the directory /home/account/passwd/ with the following command:
# htpasswd -c .htpasswd user_name

You will be reminded to input password for the user “user_name”, this command can be called multi times to generate multi users.

Step 3.
This step may not be necessary. If there is an entry about the directory you want to protect in Apache configuration file, make sure AllowOverride has the option authconfig.

For example, when protecting Awstats pages, the Apache configuration file should be modified as following:

Options None
AllowOverride authconfig
Order allow,deny
Allow from all

Restart Apache
# /usr/local/sbin/apachectl restart

Robots.txt file is a simple text file which is responsible for preventing crawling of your site’s pages. Suppose you have certain pages which are not SE friendly such as pages including repeated keywords, some hidden tags with keywords and some other bugs which may be responsible for getting your site banned from search engines.

The robots.txt file is a simple text file which can be created using Notepad.
It should be saved at root directory of your site. eg.http://www.yoursitename.com/robots.txt.

Format :
User-agent: robot or spider name
Disallow: files or directories.

If you want to exclude all the search engine spiders from your entire domain, Just use this tiny code, but be sure you need it.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /

If you want to prevent your certain directories, you can specify them in Disallow field.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /directoryname1/
Disallow: / directoryname2/

Similarly if you want to restrict specific files then type in the path of the files.
User-agent: *
Disallow: / directoryname1/filename.html

If you don’t want certain spiders crawling your site, which are not useful for you or are just eating up your bandwidth, you can specify them in User-agent. Eg. You don’t want bot of Alta vista (Scooter) from crawl your whole site use following code.
User-Agent: Scooter
Disallow: /

While using robots.txt file you should be careful, It may stop your specified pages from appearing in search engines.There are many hundreds of bots and spiders crawling the Internet, most of them respect your robot.txt file while some may not.

Note :

(*) You can include comments in your robots.txt file, by putting a pound-sign (#) at the front of the line to be commented.
(*) You can find the names of robots which are crawling around your site in your log file..

Sometimes we get some errors while using outlook express but we can’t understand what they mean and what could be the solution for that.

Following are the usual errors codes with their solutions ;

0×800CCC00 - Authentication did not load.
Solution :
*) Try closing and restarting Outlook express
*) If still getting same error, wait 20-30 minutes for a server reset of your account then try again.
*) It could be a corruption of the user account in Outlook Express. Try setting up a second identity and see if it works.

0×800CCC01 - INVALID CERTIFICATE CONTENT
0×800CCC02 INVALID CERTIFICATE DATE
Solution :
*) Get your certificate re-issued by your authority server.

0×800CCC03 - USER ALREADY CONNECTED
Solution :
*) Close all connections on all machines, wait 20-30 minutes and try again.
*) If you are not logged in on another machine or poplocked then someone may be using/downloading from your account or something is wrong with your account.
*) Sometimes due to improper disconnection your account gets ‘Poplocked’ so to get out of it either wait 20-30 minutes for it to time out or get somebody to shell into the mail server and stop the mail task that is running on the account.

0×800CCC05 NOT CONNECTED TO SERVER
0×800CCC0D CANT FIND HOST - Cannot locate server
Solution :
*) You may have typed wrong mail server in your account settings or the server may be down.
*) Reboot the computer and try again.
*) Data may not be moving across the network properly. Check DNS numbers, remove and then reinstall TCP/IP in Control Panel > Network.

0×800CCC0A MESSAGE DOWNLOAD INCOMPLETE
0×800CCC19 TIMEOUT
Solution :
*) This error may be due to corruption of pop3uidl file. Close the Internet connection and all programs. Search for the file ‘pop3uidl and delete it. Reconnect and it should work.

0×800CCC0F CONNECTION DROPPED
Solution :
*) may be modem or network cable was disconnected. If this happens frequently then try updating the modem drivers or adding an Init string.

0×800CCC10 INVALID ADDRESS - Address not known on server
Solution :
*) Check the spelling in the TO: field of the e-mail. Delete the old message from the Outbox and then try it again.

0×800CCC12 SOCKET READ ERROR - Unable to send Winsock request
Solution :
*) Remove the TCP/IP protocol and reinstall it. In windows, go into Network from the Control Panel. NOTE: You may need your Windows CD for this task!

0×800CCC16 INVALID ACCOUNT - User account not recognized
Solution :
*) Check the spelling of the account name and re-enter the password taking care to spell it correctly.

0×800CCC18 SICILY LOGON FAILED - Logon attempt failed
Solution :
*) Check account information, making sure account is not case sensitive, close Outlook Express, restart the computer and try reconnecting.
*) Create a different identity and see if it will logon on from this identity with the same information.
*) Make sure the account is still active with the ISP.

0×800CCC1A SECURE CONNECT FAILED - Unable to connect using SSL
Solution :
*) Your ISP may not require an SSL connection. Turn off SSL in the e-mail account properties and try again.