If you’ve owned a website for any period of time, chances are good you understand the importance of hotlink protection. Thousands of leechers hotlinking can take down the fastest of servers and rack up huge bandwidth bills. I’ve always made sure to set up hotlink protection of my sites, but was surprised yesterday to find that one of my sites was gobbling up bandwidth.

This particular site, a Wordpress blog, normally uses 2GB of data transfer in a month, but had gone through 6GB and was using quite a bit of memory. As it turns out, I had forgotten to setup hotlink protection after switching server providers a few months ago. I was lucky to catch the problem before it became much worse. Lesson learned– it never hurts to double-check your hotlink protection.

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Do you really need 500 GB of space and a terabyte of bandwidth? What about that quad-core server you’ve been renting for the last twelve months? While web hosting needs often increase over time, they can decrease as well, often without you realizing it.

If you have a high-end web hosting plan or a large server, it might be worthwhile to double check and see if you are really using what you’re paying for. You might discover that while you needed a dual-core server a few months ago due to a high traffic event, things are back to normal and single core machine will suffice. Or maybe you overestimated your needs when you bought that $29.99 web hosting plan.

Either way, it’s a smart idea to double-check your hosting usage. You could save hundreds of dollars.

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The incident apparently began with the FBI monitoring certain web blogs for terrorist activity. Al-Qaeda is known to operate and spread their communication through the Internet, but the odd part about this shut down is that it was a community web service with many users.

The blogging service, Blogetery, reportedly hosted over 70,000 blogs, and most of those users had nothing to do with terrorism. Furthermore, the owner of the service is not being accused of terrorist activity either. The hosting company, Burst.net sent a warning to Alexander Yusupov to take down the sites but did not supply any official evidence of the FBI investigation. The FBI says that it did not order the service to be shut down and that Burst.net took that action on its own.

The sad part of all of this is that possibly thousands of blogs have just been erased from the Web with little regard for the innocent people who used them. The lesson to be learned, however, is that any website or service should have backups, even if the content is created by other users. Furthermore, with as many as 70,000 blogs, they also should have had some type of redundancy in place to prevent total data loss, even if it were accidental.

Source: Times Newsline

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If your website is dishing out a lot of files, you may find your bandwidth diminishing significantly. Particularly large file can add up pretty quickly when hundreds or even thousands of people download them. Here are some ways to reduce your network load.

1. File compression - This seems basic enough, but you can save tremendous amount of disk space, and in turn download bandwidth, simply by compressing your files. Try archive and compression like tar.bz2, tar.gz, or .rar.

2. P2P File Sharing - Peer-to-Peer file sharing is a great way to reduce load. Instead of every user downloading the file from you, all users share in the distribution of the file. BitTorrent has become particularly popular for use with large downloads.

3. File Hosting - There are many file-sharing sites that will allow you to host your files remotely and then share them with users. Many of these, however, limit download speeds for users who are not themselves subscribers.

4. Cloud Storage - If you know you are going to be send a large amount of data each month, you may consider using a cloud storage service, like Amazon S3. These are normally very inexpensive and will save you money over time.

Image Source: Wikimedia Commons

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If you own a business and don’t have a website, it’s time to get with the plan. You may already have someone to design your site and a domain, but what about business web hosting?

For most small business websites, shared hosting is more than adequate. If you have a simple HTML site and don’t plan on receiving much traffic, you should not pay more than £7 a month for a hosting plan.

If your site uses a content management system (CMS) or has a lot of Flash content, a VPS would be a good investment if you will receive more than 400 visitors per day. Busier sites might need a dedicated server.

There are many hosting providers out there that offer “business web hosting,” but any web host will work just fine. Just make sure you are comfortable with the level of support offered. Medium and large businesses often host sites in-house.

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If you’ve never been a fan of the cloud computing hype that has been bandied about the web lately, check out this video of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison bashing the technology.

As far as Ellison is concerned, cloud computing has been around for years. It’s just a computer connected to a network, he says. He also believes many of the people who push cloud computing have no idea what they’re talking about.

Although the CEO doesn’t use the kindest of words to make his point, his argument is very valid. Cloud computing hold a lot of promise for the feature, but too many people have “jumped on the cloud” without fully understanding the technology or its background.

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Nothing is worse for an Internet user than to get to a website and have to wait a long for it to load, especially if that long load time is the result of one seemingly tiny image at the bottom of the page. Here are a few tips you can follow to make sure your website images are actually ready for the web:

1. Use compression, either of the JPEG or PNG variety. PNGs will need to be crushed in order to not be huge file sizes. Your front page should not be filled with images over 10kb (aside from maybe the banner). If you have a blog, try to keep images under 50kb. You can have users click on thumbnails to see larger versions.

2. Use appropriate sizes. If your HTML declares an image to be 250×150, the image should actually be that size. If you resize a larger image, the visitor’s browser will still have to load the full sized image, which takes longer to load.

3. Use the appropriate alt tags. In order to be standards-compliant, all images on any page should be properly described in alt tags so that visually impaired visitors will know what they are.

4. For large packs of images, use a gallery. If you are going to be displaying images in bunches, use some type of gallery or light box (modal windows). People who see the initial page will still get fast load times, and if they want to see the images up close, they can choose to wait longer.

Photo Source: Wikimedia Commons

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Changing your web host is probably not something you do for fun, but if you are unhappy with your current host or have found a better one, there is no reason for you to suffer, when there is something better out there. If you have a Wordpress blog, you will need to move it and most likely want keep all of the posts. Follow these simple steps.

1. Login to Wordpress
2. In the left column, expand the “Tools” section
3. Click “Export”
4. Click the “Download Export File” button and save the xml file to your computer.
5. Install Wordpress on your new hosting account.
6. Login and Click “Tools”
7. Click “Import”
8. From the list, choose the last option: Wordpress.
9. Click “Choose file” to select the import file, and find it on your computer.
10. Finally, click “Upload file and import”.

With that you will have successfully moved your Wordpress blog. If you had a custom theme, you will also need to copy that separately. Otherwise, you are all finished.

Photo Source: Wikimedia Commons

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According to uptime service monitor Pingdom, social networking site Twitter had a June uptime figure of 99.17%. Although this sounds high, it is actually low by industry standards, especially for a large site like Twitter with so many resources at its disposal.

The 0.83% downtime figure equates to 5 hours and 43 minutes of lost Tweeting. Network configuration issues as well as spikes of traffic due to the World Cup and NBA Finals caused the downtime.

Unfortunately, Twitter fanatics will not be able to get the lost time back. Maybe the site will have better uptime this month?

Photo | Flickr

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It’s not uncommon that I hear someone say, “Sure, I have backups. Everything is saved on my computer.” Backing up your website files is important. While having copies on your computer is a smart idea, it’s not enough.

Computers fail too frequently to use them for your only backup. Of course, you can always download your site files from your host if your PC crashes, but that can take a while on some hosts. Additionally, it’s convenient to have an archive of every file you’ve ever edited. Pages under construction may not be available on your web server, either.

External hard drives and USB flash drives are very cheap these days. You can get a 4 GB USB drive for as little as £10. Most computers can burn files to CDs and DVDs as well. Considering how easy it is to make a second copy of your site files, why aren’t you doing it?

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