Assuming that you have a website which has been developed either recently or has been living over the web since quite sometime. It may be a personal site running a blog, portal, designs etc. or may it be a business site where your sell products or services. All seems to be going well and the site is being appreciated and shared by users across the web. There must have been serious efforts which you might have taken to get the site to a certain level. Not to mention the time and money you’ve invested in it. During this while you’ve been focused on making the site successful over the Internet, but have you ever realised what would happen if the site suddenly goes inaccessible without a prior warning, it may be due to any odd reasons this may happen. What if your server holding the web-pages of your site crashes and after investigation the support staff from the web hosting company get back to your saying the hard-drive has got corrupted and all the data that was held has gone. Disaster Strikes !What if I say that there is nothing to worry about. If you’ve chosen a host that offers managed hosting services, there is a wide possibility that a backup copy of the files in your account would be available with them. This backup can be restored and your site could be brought back online within minutes.

Consider a possibility where the hosting company does not backup their servers too often, it means nothing but your efforts, your time, your money, your business have all been wasted, and you need to start back from the grass-root level. I don’t need to say about the frustration and agony that you’d face. Moreover, the time and money that you’d need to reinvest in getting the site back live.

Now I suppose you might have realised the importance of having a backup of all the data required to keep your site running over the web. Accidents and disaster don’t offer a warning before striking, all you can do is to have a backup plan to recover from it in the least possible time without spending too much, I mean that’s business. Backing up your site regularly becomes extremely important in this fast paced world of Internet.

There may be various reasons to justify the need to have a latest backup of your website at any given point of time. Choosing an offsite backup plan from an affordable web hosting provider can keep you away from devastation to your website and your business. Following are a couple of reasons why you must opt for such a solution, it was something where I didn’t need much efforts, they just came spontaneously. There are multiple instances that have happened in the past which have caused serious losses to businesses.

It may be a human error where the delete button gets hit accidentally, usually seen in cases where more than one individual have an access to the account. So imagine the possibility of the human error that may occur, your files, contact details of your customers, emails, etc. etc. can all disappear in a flash. Recollecting it can be a nightmare, expensive and more importantly it may pose a threat to your reputation.

If you have a busy website and the content gets updated frequently, it becomes necessary to maintain a backup of the data, because if a disaster does strike all the data that the site is updated with would be lost. Whereas if you do have a backup in place, the loss can be kept to minimal. For example, if you run a social bookmarking site or even a forum board, loss of all the data posted by the users wouldn’t be too pleasing to you nor for the users.

A gist of everything is that, such situations can be avoided if you have your site backed up with possibly the latest content. This should not only save you money but your efforts, time, reputation can all stay intact, even the users can understand the unforeseen situations. Moreover, the backup plans comes at a much cheaper price as compared to the heavy losses which you may face if it isn’t there in place.

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Whenever a domain is switched between registrars or change an IP address, you are more likely to face delays caused by the DNS propagation. This can hardly be avoided, but its impact can be reduced to some extent.

The domain name server propagation is basically the time taken to update the DNS records across the DNS infrastructure around the globe. The DNS system basically helps in keeping the load on your nameservers low due to the caching feature it holds. It is due to the caching mechanism that gives rise to the DNS propagation, if it wouldn’t have been there, all the requests made to your domain would have flooded your nameservers for every lookup, which would have inturn put more pressure causing to malfunctioning or even non-functionality of these servers.

There are resolvers, a kind of servers that takes care of running the DNS queries for the web users, cache a copy of the zone files of any domain at the very beginning when a request is made for an information about a domain. Until the next cache update, all the DNS queries are served from the most recent zonefile that cached in the system. Such a mechanism helps in reducing the overall process load and bandwidth of a DNS nameserver.

The main reason for the propagation is basically the DNS caching. Consider a situation where a resolver has cached a zonefile for approximately 5 hours and the IP address has been switched to a different one and the records have been updated in the nameserver after sometime within this while, then the resolver would still exhibit the incorrect DNS information for approximately 5 minus the time at which the IP was changed. Only after all the resolvers from all across the globe are updated with the latest zone file, we say that the propagation has been completed.

At-times the DNS Cache gets poisoned or polluted, check more on this here – DNS Cache Poisoning

This was about the general procedure, but being an owner of a domain, you can set time within the zonefile called as the Time To Live (TTL). In there you must assign time in seconds which tells the DNS resolver about the applicable cache for a zonefile before it comes back asking for a new one. As a default value 14400 seconds ie. 4 hours are set. Though domain owners may make changes to these DNS settings, you must keep in mind that the changes would take effect in approximately 24 hours. Ofcourse, you must also check with your ISP whether they allow the TTL settings to be changed.

Not many are aware about the multiple uncontrollable factors that affect the DNS propagation time for a particular domain name. It may take anywhere between a couple of hours to approximately 48 hours for the propagation to complete.

What are the factors that affect the DNS propagation time?

TTL (Time to Live) Settings — As discussed above the TTL is set for every domain name server record which is help within the zone file. It is the period of time for which the servers cache the information for DNS records. Lesser the time set, causes to an increase in the number of queries to your nameserver, causing an increase in load resulting in a degraded server performance.

ISP (Internet Service Provider) — The ISP would usually cache the DNS records at their end inorder to avoid retrieving retrieving information from your domain name server everytime. This also helps them serve the requests faster hence increasing the surfing experience for users. Few ISP’s maybe an exception to this by overlooking the TTL settings and only update their cached records after fixed intervals of time.

Domain Name Registry — If the DNS’s are changed, the changes are forwarded to the registry after-which the new record updates is processed to the root zone. Different registries might take different times to update the records as their TTL setting are set high for the name server records. Moreover, even though recursive nameservers doesn’t cache the root NS records usually, though few ISPs cache the information anyway, further resulting in a delay in the propagation time.

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Search engine optimisation is important for a blog. Because that is, if your blog is small, the primary way to get visitors to your blog. It is evident features in blog systems such as tags and categories help towards search engine optimisation, and others as detailed below. But as many will stress, the most important thing of course is content. Content is king. It is important to have original and unique content and that your blog is updated regularly with original and unique content. If you don’t do this, Google is simply going to give another blog better search rankings that what your blog is potentially capable of being given.

Content is king

Content is king. So what sort of content are you going to write? The thing that works for my small blogs personally is writing about something unique and that hasn’t specifically be written by blogs that are more highly-ranked than my blog is. It all helps towards search engine optimisation and of course, getting valuable visitors, which is (mostly) the reason we have blogs in the first place – if, unless of course, your blog is for your own reference only.

So, talk about something original that may not be talked about by other blogs. If your blog is on sports, why not talk about something in sports that no one else is specifically talking about right now? Perhaps your opinions on something that isn’t being talked about by another blog that is more highly-ranked. Even though there is great competition between websites in terms of search engine optimisation because of how many websites are online and the amount of people using the Internet, if you think of the logical things you can do to help make your blog more noticeable by Google from an SEO perspective, then over time your blog will be ranked more importantly by Google bots.

Backlinks and deep links

Backlinks and deep links are important in order for Google to recognise your site as important. The obvious may well be submitting your site to relevant directories, but you can also do this by adding a link to your blog via your signature, especially on sites which you are active on. If you often post in threads that are related to your blog’s articles or main purpose, that is definitely a practical way of getting backlinks. And where you can, try and get deep links, too. Deep links are links of inner pages within your blog, and they are just as important as backlinks of the main page of your blog. Getting deep links is probably a little more difficult. I am sure if you post meaningful tutorials, articles or how-tos on your blog, perhaps others will link to that article if they find it interesting enough to provide a link back to it, perhaps on their own website or article on their own blog, or on a forum. For example, if blog post is on how to fix a particular issue, someone may find your blog post via a search engine and provide a link to your blog post on a forum topic to assist a particular forum member.

There are other ways of getting deep links, too; such as link directories that accept deep links or link submissions to articles within a blog or website. This can definitely help from a search engine optimisation perspective, so definitely consider this option too.

Of course, remember that Google’s algorithms are very smart and can easily and readily detect cheating and will penalise websites that cheat in the form of search rankings or out-right removal of a website from searches altogether.

There are many easy ways of finding relevant directories to submit your blog to, including this forum of the DigitalPoint forums that allows users to advertise their own directories.

Search engine friendly URLs

Most blog systems including WordPress allow you to have search engine friendly URLs. Instead of an article ID that is part of a blog URL to refer to the article itself, it is best to have search engine friendly URLs that perhaps display the title of the article as part of the URL, for example example.com/blog/2012/20/01/blog-post-title-here.

Use tags with your blog posts

Using blog post tags do help. Add relevant tags (not too many, though) that describe what the blog post or article is about. So if I was making an article on CentOS, I’d obviously use the CentOS tag but other tags more direct to what the article is about, such as Install CentOS, etc

I’m sure this is fairly obvious but also use categories for your blog posts. It does help from a search engine perspective.

Allow users to share your blog posts via various mediums

There are plugins for WordPress that allow you to add icons beneath each blog post allowing your readers the convenience of sharing useful blog posts with others; on Twitter, Facebook, etc. You may think, “Facebook? What?” but Google are now indexing Facebook comments!

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The httpd.conf file is a very important part and a configuration file which is utilized by the Apache HTTP server. Basically, the httpd.conf file is used to store data on several functions of the server, which is editable by adding or removing the “#” sign in the opening of the line.

In case if your httpd.conf file is damaged, probably you will have to create a new one of apache configuration in your cPanel. Creating a fresh new httpd.conf file will make your lose your existing configuration. With the following shell command you can easily rebuid the httpd.conf file.

Steps to Rebuild / Recover the httpd.conf file:

Step 1: Log-in to the SSH as a Root user.

Step 2: Enter the following command to recover the stable httpd.conf file, which will be created automatically via the cPanel shell script.

/scripts/rebuildhttpdconf

[Note: The httpd.conf file should be rebuilt only when it is edited in a wrong way due to which your apache web server have been prevented from starting.]

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Most of the webmasters uses GUI (Graphical User Interface) in order to manage their databases, though it is a web based tool such as phpMyAdmin or the MySQL Administrator which is a desktop tool. But, for a system administrator, it is much more convenient to use simple mysql commands via the command line interface.

Using the single mysql commands string a webmaster can easily add users and drop users from the MySQL database.

Step 1: Log-in to your server via SSH

Step 2: Enter the following command to login to the MySQL command interface.

# mysql -u -p  (For Eg: mysql -u joe_dbname -p password)

Once you enter the above command it will ask you for the username and password. Simply type the mysql username and password and hit the Enter button. If the login credentials are correct, the shell prompt will be replaced with the MySQL prompt:

mysql>

Step 3: In order to add a user to the MySQL, enter the following mysql command string:

mysql> CREATE USER user@host IDENTIFIED BY ‘password’;

Don’t forget to replace the “USER” by the username you wish to create and “host” by the server IP.

Step 4: In order to drop or remove a user from the MySQL, enter the following mysql command string:

mysql> DROP USER user@host;

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