As the web hosting industry becomes more competitive, web hosting providers need to provide extra services and features to stand out from the rest. One common service that numerous hosts offer is script installation. Usually managed in the host’s control panel, users can use the service to automatically install content management systems, photo galleries, forums, and other web-based software.

Ideally, script installation should be fast, easy to use, and should be simple and direct, avoiding any hacks that make the installations incompatible with normal installations (in case the user ever needs to move their data to another server). But not all hosts are equal in these areas.

Go Daddy, for example, is a well known and highly advertised host, but their control panel scripts installation is mediocre at best. When a user sets up an installation of a script, Go Daddy’s control panel will queue it and make the user wait an undetermined amount of time before the script is actually installed. It is very slow and can be frustrating to a website owner who purchased an account expecting clean and fast script installation.

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The Russian division of business periodical Forbes has won a dispute over the name Forbes.ru. In addition to the name, a Moscow arbitration court has awarded the company $300,000 USD in damages. This is the largest compensation ever awarded to an American company in a Russian court case.

Because Forbes did not initially own Forbes.ru, it was forced to launch its magazine on ForbesRussia.ru last November. Grigory Punanov, chief editor, stated:

We fought for a long time for the legal right to use the domain name Forbes.ru… I hope the ruling will enter legal force and that our site will soon be available at that address.

Forbes will now be faced with the challenge of informing visitors and subscribers of its new web address. This could easily eat up all of its $300,000 settlement.

Source | The Moscow Times

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German airline Lufthansa has won a dispute over the domain star-alliance.net. The firm claims the name infringed on the trademark of Star Alliance, an alliance of airlines of which Lufthansa is a member.

The case was heard by a WIPO arbitration panel. The initial registrant of the name, Lord Oxford from “Top Banana Piggabeen,” seems a bit eccentric to say the least. In addition to demanding $50,000 from Lufthansa, he declared:

MY domain www.Star-Alliance.net is allied with www.UnitedSpaceAgency.com and www.Air-Alliance.net. and many other domains.
I’m a legend in my own mind, if not in my own time, which is the future. One a lot better than we’re headed for … see my ‘www.SavingThePla.net

Source | Domain News
Photo | Flickr

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It is always important to check your website logs. Many web hosting providers will give you access to them, even if they do not tell you they do. In a virtual hosting account, there will be a log directory with Apache server logs. Among other things, it will tell you the IP addresses of your visitors.

Sometimes you have pesky visitors to your site who just do not get the hint. It may be someone who constantly leaves nasty posts on your message forum or someone with even more malicious intentions. Regardless of the reason, a simple htaccess file can help you tremendously. In the root directory of your website, make an .htaccess file or edit the current one, entering the following information:

order allow,deny
deny from 192.168.0.1
allow from all

You can change the “deny from” to any IP address, and you can add more than one “deny from” line. This will give someone coming from that IP address an access denied error.

Photo Source: Flickr

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Question: I have heard of Unix and Linux, but what is BSD?

Answer: BSD commonly refers to the the UNIX-like operating system developed at the University of California, Berkley in 1977. It predates Linux and has been used in Unix server environments for decades, in response to the licensing issues of the original and much more expensive AT&T Unix.

Since the original release, several derivatives have emerged, including FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and to some extent, Darwin, which is the underlying backend of Mac OS X. All BSD variants are licensed under a permissive license, which allows for integration with proprietary software. As such it has become useful to both small businesses and large corporations.

Many web hosting companies use BSD-powered servers, and it offers the same security and stability that is expected from UNIX. Most Linux-based software has been ported to BSD, making it virtually indistinguishable to the casual observer. Moreover, BSD systems are known for their long uptimes, and some web hosting experts prefer them over other UNIX variants.

Photo Source: Flickr

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The Catalan language domain, .cat, celebrated its fourth birthday today. When the suffix was launched in 2005, critics argued there was not a sufficient market base for it to succeed. They couldn’t have been more wrong.

As of this writing, there are some 36,000 .cat domains registered and 80 million Catalan pages indexed in Google. The extension is so successful that it is preferred by speakers of the language over .com.

Catalonia is an autonomous region in northern Spain. There are 7.7 million Catalan speakers worldwide, mostly in Spain and southern France.

The success of .cat will likely aid proponents of other regional extensions like .nyc and .bayern.

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With less than two months of ICANN’s Joint Project Agreement with the United States Department of Commence remaining, two key House members are calling for permanent government involvement in the organization.

House Energy and Commerce Chairman Henry Waxman, D.-Calif., and Communications Subcommittee Chairman Rick Boucher, D-Va., made a statement regarding their views today:

Rather than replacing the JPA with additional JPAs or Memoranda of Understandings that expire every few years, we believe the time has come for a permanent instrument to which ICANN and the Department of Commerce are co-signatories. This statement of commitments and principles would ensure that ICANN remains perpetually accountable to the public and to all of its global stakeholders.

ICANN has previously declared that it neither wants government involvement nor a renewal of the JPA. The California organization has never really experienced any government oversight before, and it is unclear how the U.S. government could push itself into ICANN.

Personally, I think government involvement in ICANN is a good thing. Every other industry is regulated. Why the Internet has not already been made privy to federal oversight I do not know.

Source | eWeek

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A serious horse enthusiast has purchased the UAE domain horse.ae for Dh6 million (US $1.6 million). The Indian based firm The Ozone Group ran a vigorous campaign to sell the domain. UAE financial experts are hoping that this move will prompt others to push the .ae top-level domain into the global market. There have already been several high-profile domain disputes for .ae country domains, including baskin-robbins.ae.

No .ae domain had previously come close to the mark of Dh6. The .ae is just over a year old, and entrepreneurs like Munir Badr, are expecting this to be the beginning of something big.

“It’s a huge sum. This sale can’t be even compared to the recent two-character ad.com sale, which fetched just Dh5.1m,” he said.

“This sale is a true record and stereotype breaker and will surely boost the .ae market and its publicity.”

“People just grabbed hundreds and hundreds of domains like shopping.ae, store.ae, hospital.ae. They’ve already gone.” Most were held for resale.

To date, .com domains still rake in the most cash, with the highest being fund.com which sold for $9.9 million. To add more hype to the UAE domain craze, they will soon be adding Arabic-language domain names to the already sizzling pot. This will coincide with the new open gTLD policy that ICANN is expected to implement next year.

Source: The National
Photo: Flickr

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Earlier this week, we reported a series of attacks on key South Korean and U.S. government servers that took some of them offline. The attacks are still under investigation, but a blog post on the Washington Post’s website suggests that the botnet being used to deliver the DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack could self destruct.

An attack bot of this nature works by first infecting vulnerable computers around the world. The computer user is unaware of its presence and continues going about his business. Meanwhile, the bot uses that person’s computer to attack another, usually a server. With the coordinated effort of possibly thousands or even millions of computers, it easily disrupts service of the server or multiple servers. With some botnets, after the task is completed, they wipe the person’s hard drive.

According to security expert Joe Stewart, director of malware research at SecureWorks, this particular form of malware is a version of the Mydoom worm, includes a Trojan horse program that will overwrite all of the data on a victim’s hard drive. Microsoft Windows PCs are vulnerable to this attack, and experts believe that between 60,000 to 100,000 PCs may have been infected with the malware. South Korean government officials have also warned their citizens about this danger, saying that at least 20,000 PCs in South Korea are infected.

Source: Washington Post
Photo: Flickr

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