As we all are aware, web hosting solutions such as the dedicated servers, cloud hosting servers and VPS’s offer root access to the server hence the ability to do almost everything viz. right from its maintenance to configuration settings. A number of administrators encounter issues that may sometimes seem to be beyond control but with the right tools, one can try to figure out the issues and get to the root of the problem. Amongst the wide spectrum of tools used by server admins are the DNS tools that usually come-in handy with finding a basic information about the DNS of a particular server which may offer useful information for troubleshooting the server.

IP / Domain Traceroute – It basically is a computer network diagnostic tool that gives an information about the route (path) and judging the transit delay of packets across an Internet. It offers the ability of tracing the of a computer trying to connect to your server. At-times due to certain network issues related to Internet congestion or similar issues between the source and destination can be judged by using this tool. It provides a list of all the routers it passes through until the destination is reached or fails beyond a certain computer. Moreover, it gives the information about the length of each ‘hop’ from router to router.

Traceroute is enabled on most operating systems.

How to use Traceroute ?

If you have a Windows OS, Go to Start >> Programs >> Accessories >> Command Prompt.

Then, you must type tracert, give a space followed by the domain name

Results similar to something shown in the below figure would be shown on your screen :

IP Whois – Also pronounced as Who is, this tool is more often used to know information about the IP address of a particular domain, its location and the details about the registrar and owner. It basically is a query and response protocol used extensively to lookup to databases holding information about registered users of an Internet resource.

Reverse DNS lookup – Also referred to as the rDNS, it is mandatory to have it on your server. It is used for determining the association of a domain name with a particular IP address using the Domain Name System (DNS) of the Internet.

SPAM DB Lookup – This tool enables server administrators to look for the possible accounts on server to be included in the spammers list. Spam DB lookup enables them to check if the server and its IP’s have been added to the list due to a possible spamming activity carried out by someone using the server.

DNS Lookup – DNS lookup is used to determine various DNS records such as A, MX records, CNAME etc. for a particular domain. Using this simple tool, one can check where a particular site is hosted.

Some of these tools are pre-installed on a server while others are free and can be accessed online to suffice the specific requirements.

Related Posts:

• No Related Posts

Most webmasters often feel the grudge of finding the old articles written and forgotten. This is more often observed for the websites/ blogs that are updated regularly. The new posts often push the old posts deep within the heap of other posts hence tending to lose on traffic, though you may find some traffic coming from search engines, but it is more of an inconsistent form. There are few basic tips that may be followed to resurrect such articles for which you had put efforts.

Below are certain basic means usually used by webmasters across the Industry:

* Creating SEO-friendly and instinctive categories
* Simple Navigation Structure
* Logical Search Engine Optimization
* Inter-Linking the related articles across the website

Despite all, sometimes even this won’t be enough to suffice the requirements. When newer content is added, all your great work would eventually be buried underneath the new one’s. There are certain other means by which you can resurrect the older blog articles.

Putting things in a Different Format Altogether
Many a times a few articles are observed to earn liking hence fetching massive amounts of traffic, but usually happens only until it stays on the first page of your blog and starts to lose the heat eventually. In that case bloggers may rebuild the content in an altogether different format. You may try to put that in a video format or may be add a reader poll to it with a reference link to the original (old) article. This should not only keep the topic going but would also send readers to your old article hence helping to bringing it back to life.

Expanding the Topics
You may realize an enhancement for a certain topic that has been described by you in an older post, for example a certain technology that has been upgraded offering a better functionality, in that case you may draft information about the upgraded technology or a comparison based on the information stated in the previous article and the changes that the latest version includes. Have a link to the old post in that article, this should not only offer your readers with the latest information about an upgraded technology but would also make them refer the old posts allowing them to compare between the upgrades.

Having a Different Dimension
Incase you don’t manage to find any scope to enhance the previously posted information, you may adopt a different approach and present things from a different dimension altogether. If you come across a product that has been caught in competition you may write about the factors that differentiates it from the others. Products and feature comparisons are a topic that helps users decide about a particular product or service, hence making the information unique and help users build trust in you and your website. Include reference links to the other products, feature comparisons, specifications that you had described in your posts previously under the “Also Refer” title to get more page views.

Allow readers means to Communicate

Due to the increasing rate of spams, most webmasters prefer to turn off the commenting feature in their blogs. But, it also restricts genuine users to post a comment and share there views on the topic. What you may do is use a plugin that may close the ability to comment after a certain time frame. This would not only get more content added to the page but can also allow users to share the additional information that they have. The more the discussion the more richness the particular page achieves, furthermore, a new visitor would get to read almost all the information about the topic from different angles. Every new comment added to a particular blog would seem to the search engines as if some new content is added to the page hence making it fresh again hence making it to crawl your page again.

Segregate Articles Based on Topics

If there is a certain topic that you often write about, you may build a new article describing the topic and add reference links alongside the appropriate description. This can inturn help users finding all the articles on a topic at one place and enable bookmarking it for future references. This can further benefit you in terms of SEO and it’d improve the internal linking.
You may create a blog post listing the articles with reference links and some description about the same that had received liking in the past. This though seems to be a casual and a promotional approach, but would surely get some liking from regular visitors to your website as they would find the articles at much ease without wasting much time. Though the category links does the same thing, but the only difference is you cannot see the description for an article.

Promoting links over Social Networks

You may make a list of certain articles that describes about a certain which may be of use even today. You may then promote it over social networking sites, just make sure to mix it up with the new one’s. Moreover you need to be very sure about the relevance and whether it would actually be useful to the people in your network. This should make the article go viral again and bring it back to life in a relatively shorter period of time.

Using such simple tricks can help you achieve better traffic to the left-out web pages hence increasing page-views which can affect the overall views and bounce rates in a positive way.

Related Posts:

• Blogging Basics

The PEAR stands for PHP  Extension and Application Repository, which is a repository of PHP software code. Installing PEAR package for PHP is very simple. It allows you to install various PHP extensions without compiling the source packages.

Go to the command line and enter the following command.

pear
pear – command not found

If you get a message “command not found” as shown above, it means PEAR is not installed on your server.

In order to install it, follow the steps given below:

Visit the following link and download the installation php file:

http://pear.php.net/go-pear

To download it, enter the following command line:

wget http://pear.php.net/go-pear

Once it downloads rename the file to .php using the following command:

cp go-pear go-pear.php

Enter the following command to run the php script:

php go-pear.php

The installation will start and the binary will get installed successfully. You can also check if there are any existing packages installed. To check, enter the following command:

pear list-all

The above command will list all the packages that are already installed. See examples below:

PACKAGE                  LATEST                   LOCAL
pear/Auth_HTTP        2.1.6                       HTTP authentication
pear/LiveUser           0.16.14                   User authentication and permission management framework

To check whether a specific package is installed on the server, use:

pear list-all | grep [Enter Package Name]

If you want to check information about a package, use the following command:

pear info [Enter Package Name]

If there are no packages installed, it will show a blank output once you enter the “list-all” command.

If you wish to upgrade an existing package use the following command:

pear upgrade [Enter Package Name]

To upgrade all existing packages enter the following command:

pear upgrade all

The above command will upgrade all the existing packages.

If there are no packages installed, you can install various php extensions using the following command:

pear install [Enter Package Name]

To uninstall a package, enter the following command:

pear uninstall [Enter Package Name]

The above command will uninstall that particular package from your Dedicated Server.

Hope it helps!!!

Related Posts:

• Points to Consider Before Moving to Dedicated Server
• What might look like a good backup plan ?
• How To Choose Best Server Operating System ?
• What Type of Hosting Servers Would Be Better ?
• Tasks You Can Perform When Your Server Runs Perfectly

Usually, add-on services are those that adds value to the core web hosting product . These services are either offered to enhance sales or for promoting a product, and is  a common practice used in marketing. This way the product gets a much needed exposure hence increasing its demand. Many hosting companies would also offer such services to take a leading edge over the existing competition.

In the industry of web hosting, we usually notice companies offering domain names, backup space, website builder software, virus protection tools etc. as a complementary service with selected products. This not only encourage users with using these services but it also works as an effective marketing strategy which also adds to the word of mouth adding to the popularity of the company.

Many-a-times it is observed that despite offering add-on services for free, companies fail to attract the expected volume of potential customers. Companies may fail to encash such opportunities due to ineffective strategies of selling/promoting the services.  Here in this article we have tried to cover most of the common points that may be keeping you away from best utilizing the tool of offering Add-on services as a compliment over core products and services.

Refrain from Selling Products that are Contrast to each other

It is highly crucial to know that a certain add-on product/service offered for free, actually compliments the core/base product/service. For example : If you intend to promote a certain Windows based product, it would be senseless to offer Fantastico (compatible with cPanel) as a free add-on. In that case, the offering would be of no value to the customer, no matter if you offer it or you don’t, having such an add-on would be of no use to user. This may instead create a feeling of distrust about your company in the eyes of the customer, which can further destroy your efforts of customer service.

Hence, it is essential that you realize the responsibility and offer something with sincerity and with a pure intention of making the customer satisfied. Free post sales customer support and technical services or even backup space can be considered to be a suitable services to offer, irrespective of the base product. They are something that every customer would need and anyone would happily accept and sign-up with you. You may even think of offering something really unique which no other competitor offers, this can add greatly to the popularity of your company.

Affordable Costs

Many large hosting providers can afford to offer a combination of different services for adding better value to customer service. This would only work out well if the overall cost turns out to be affordable and turns out to offer the best value for money paid by the customer. A simple strategy is well applicable, Keep the costs Low and offer More benefits to customers.
Based on the same grounds, we recently doubled the webspace that was previously offered with our Reseller Web Hosting UK packages, but without increasing the costs. This has proved to be a good move as an increasing volume of sign-ups have been observed since the changes were made.
Please visit the following to learn more on this : http://www.eukhost.com/reseller-hosting.php

Offering a Combination of Server Infrastructure and Software

Offering a combination of server hardware and software can work out really well. One must make sure that the combination of services support one another perfectly.

For example, with our HyperV Cloud Hosting, the default operating system we offer is Windows 2008 (32 bit) Standard Edition which is offered at zero additional cost, while the customer needs to bear additional OS charges when availed with other products/services.

Implementing the right Marketing Strategy

Now that you’ve decided the add-on to offer with the product and the cost of the product decided, am  important factor that’d decide the success of it is, marketing. It is essential to design a perfect strategy that attracts the attention of users over the world wide web that are looking for the services you offer. Promote the products extensively across various mediums such as forums, blogs, press release sites, social networks etc. Once people get educated about the offerings, it wouldn’t take much time for the news to go viral. The word of mouth would do the rest of the task for you.

Adhering to these simple pointers can lead to huge success for the products and services offered by you, hence increasing the popularity of your company across Industry.

Related Posts:

• No Related Posts

Making a choice among the wide range of web hosting solutions offered by numerous companies these days can be intimidating at times. It is often observed that customers aren’t actually aware about their requirements or something the budget is low hence tend to opt for a lower package which ultimately results in shattered expectations. This is mainly happens when the sites and applications poorly perform over the web. Therefore choosing an appropriate plan becomes such a crucial aspect in web hosting. It might also be possible that you already host your website with a company who isn’t offering services suitable for your expectations. Certain pointers can help users realize the need for switching either to a better hosting package or a newer and better hosting company entirely. Below are such pointers that may force you to help you with deciding about a switch-over.

Sloppy Performance : Delayed page loads and long durations of downtime is a factor to be concerned about. If you have a web based business, frequent occurrences of such instances can disrupt your business entirely. Your hosting provider should understand the responsibility to offer good value for your money and atleast offer reliable and a reasonably fast web server which can ensure you maximum uptime. Despite frequent occurrences and upgrades, if the host is incapable of offering better performance, it surely can be considered to be the time when you should switch to some other host.

Incompetent Customer Service: Web Hosting is a service-oriented industry where the customer is given the highest stand, everything comes after that. Every hosting provider and the people working therein should be aware of this simple yet highly important principle. Therefore, while choosing a company to host your website/applications, make sure that they have a good reputation of offering high quality customer support. If you often observe a delayed response to the issues raised and are made to stay hanging on the chats for long duration of time, then maybe the host isn’t much serious about the importance of customer service. And what is the use of such a host who cannot assist you when you much need it.

Limited Privileges and Unaffordable Price : Every genuine company would have a well described TOS and an SLA page. At-times some hosts lay too many restrictions for using their services and servers wherein we may get a feeling if the partnership was worth the deal. If the TOS restricts your site from growing, the first action you must take is to find a host that should practically be able to help you with expanding your venture. Price too is an another important factor to consider, only an affordable web hosting service should be chosen and something that would offer a good value for your money.

Note: Before signing up with a host, it is necessary to go through the TOS thoroughly.

Choosing a reliable web hosting company that employs skilled labor and offers round the clock customer service and support should be considered. Above all, you must also check the server location and Tier Level of datacenter that house the servers. This can be a pointer about the quality of service that you can expect.

Related Posts:

• No Related Posts