Software

Question: The gallery software I want to install on my website says that it requires ImageMagick. What is it and why do I need it? Answer: ImageMagick is free and open source software that allows the user to create and edit over 100 different image file formats. Its tools are …

Question: I have a shared hosting account and need an easy way to manage my databases. What can I use? Answer: Chances are, if you are using a server that has both PHP and MySQL, your web hosting provider has given you some type of tool to manage your databases. …

Question: I downloaded a script that I want to install on my website, but the file extension is tar.gz. What is it, and what do I do with it? Answer: That file extension, .tar.gz means that the file has been doubly compressed with both TAR and GZIP. These are both …

Question: What is the purpose of a cgi-bin directory? Answer: CGI programs running on a server must be executable. While this allows the user to run server-side scripts, including convenient free ones found on the web, it also presents a security risk. Most virtual hosting situations restrict execution of Perl …

Question: My PHP content management program “X” needs more RAM. How do I fix this? Answer: Depending on your server setup and whether you have shared hosting or a dedicated server, you may or may not be able to change the allowed PHP memory usage. What happens is that PHP …

Question: What are Xen, Vmware, and Hyper-V? Answer: All three are popular virtualization software. Xen is a free and open source virtualization solution and is therefore included in some Linux distributions. Vmware is a commercial company with many virtualization products. Hyper-V, formerly known as Windows Server Virtualization, is a commercial …

Question: What is MRTG? Answer: MRTG stands for Multi Rounter Traffic Grapher. It is free and open source software that monitors and measures traffic on a network. It provides a graph that shows traffic load over a set period of time. Although it was originally developed to monitor routers, many …

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 …

Question: I’m starting my own custom web server and want to use a free web hosting control panel. Can you name a few? Answer: Unfortunately, the list of free hosting panels is not very long, but there are a few quality choices out there. Here they are in no particular …

When stepping into the world of web hosting, you will be inundated with abbreviations, acronyms, and recursive acronyms. Three that you should definitely know are: HTML, XHTML, and CSS. HTML is as old as the Web itself. It stands for Hyper Text Markup Language. It is the primary language of …