Archive for May, 2014

Is CDN For You?

Thursday, May 29th, 2014

Content Delivery Networks (or CDNs) are very useful and can solve many problems for websites who value availability and user experience. However, they’re not exactly a requirement and whether or not you need one for your site depends on various factors.

But First, What is CDN?

NCDN - CDN

Single Server vs. CDN

CDNs are essentially designed to address problems with global availability, bandwidth constraints, and latency. If the server that hosts your website’s files are located in the US while the user browsing them is in France, the request for the data and the data itself will have to travel from the US to France. Data travels fast, especially now that we have fiber optic cables serving as the pathways, but the time it takes to make a roundtrip is still affected by distance and the number of data that must travel (it’s not uncommon for a single page from a website to contain at least 100 objects that need to be sent to and fro.)

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A CDN addresses the problem of latency by caching static resources in edge caches (or points of presence – basically distributed servers) located in various parts of the world, ensuring that the resources can be accessed in places that are nearer to the user, thereby reducing round trip time. (more…)

Migrate Your Site to a New Host Efficiently

Tuesday, May 27th, 2014

Webmasters should always be ready for the day when they have to migrate their site to a new host. Even if the current host is perfect, there’s no guarantee that they will stay the same forever. Or maybe a better host will come along, or maybe the current one suddenly goes out of business.

Regardless of the reason, you should be ready to move your site without undergoing too much of a hassle. If you want your migration to a new host be efficient and with minimal downtime, you should take the following into consideration:

Make Regular (and Full) Backups Of Your Site

You don’t want to be that guy who only makes a backup of his entire site at the moment he has to migrate to a new host. The really big migrations can occur as a result of a host suddenly disappearing or a host being so unreliable that their servers frequently corrupt your databases.

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If you don’t have any backups yet by the time you’re forced by circumstances to change hosts, you’ll find yourself with just bits and pieces of your old site available, which can be so difficult to restore that you’d find it easier to just start a new site from scratch. Additionally, really big, established sites take a lot of time to back up, so you don’t want to be rushing everything at the last minute. (more…)

Is Dedicated Hosting the Solution for You?

Wednesday, May 21st, 2014

When it comes to choosing a hosting solution, most people find it easy to choose between a dedicated host and a shared host because of the price difference between the two (the former costs more than the latter,) with people either choosing shared because they want to save money or going with dedicated hosting because they subscribe to the “you get what you pay for” mentality. However, the truth is that there are other factors to consider besides the price when deciding if dedicated hosting is the best option.

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Difference Between Shared and Dedicated Hosting

As the name implies, the main difference between dedicated and shared hosting is the resources they use. A shared hosting shares server resources with other accounts, while dedicated usually get its own server. Dedicated hosting is essentially akin to a web host leasing server hardware to the client, with some hosts also including software as part of the package. The client then has full control of the server, where he can have as much traffic to his website (at least, as much as the server can handle) without worrying about other websites. He can also install applications that he wants and doesn’t have to worry about security concerns normally associated with sharing space with other websites.

Half filled server racks

Benefits of Dedicated Hosting

Of course, you’re not paying more for dedicated hosting just for the sake of status. There are practical and justifiable reasons why a dedicated host costs more than shared, such as:

1. Flexibility – a dedicated host will allow you to use as many or as little of your server’s resources – be it bandwidth, memory, or hard drive space – provided that it remains within the limits allotted by your plan.

2. Greater Control Over the Server – since you’re not sharing the server with other users, you’ll be given much greater control and access. One great example of this is root access, which is usually not allowed on shared services.

3. Stability – this is easily the most important benefit of a dedicated host. The fact that you’re not sharing the server’s resources means that you don’t have to worry about your site’s performance being affected by other websites. You can also rest assured that you won’t be outgrowing your server anytime soon.

So Is Dedicated Hosting Really The Best Option?

Technically, dedicated hosting is the best hosting that your money can buy, but that doesn’t exactly mean that it’s the best solution for you. A Porsche may be the best car that your money can buy, but is it the car you should buy if you’re just going to drive it a few blocks to work every day?

Basically, if you have a personal site that won’t generate much traffic, a dedicated hosting might be considered as overkill. There’s no need to spend too much money on a dedicated hosting plan if you won’t need the kind of benefits it gives. However, if your site generates tons of traffic and requires utmost stability and security, dedicated hosting is the best solution for you.

Code Instrumentation Tips

Monday, May 19th, 2014

Many developers these days tend to neglect the importance of writing production-aware code, which could come back to bite them somewhere down the road. After all, programs are always written to run somewhere into production. We don’t want to delve too much into advanced topics such as aspect-oriented programming or aspect weaving, so we’re going to tackle four of the basic dimensions of code instrumentation, which also serve as examples of the best practices that should be followed by all software developers:

1. Tracing

Tracing is the first important element of code instrumentation. Adding traces to your code might be frowned upon by some developers because it could impact performance in some scenarios, but this is easily solved by adding different tracing levels that can be configured at runtime. Additionally, the benefit will outweigh the minimal performance hit.

Many developers favor debugging over tracing, but the problem with debugging is that the effort is rendered for naught once they close their development tool. Tracing, on the other hand, will allow developers to leverage the trace information and understand as well as address issues even well into production. Additionally, tracing’s benefits can be leveraged even by different developers who wish to contribute into a project somewhere down the line.

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10 Start-Up Screw Ups

Wednesday, May 14th, 2014

One of the most frequently asked questions about start-ups is “how do you make a startup succeed?” The answer to the question is easy, but completely useless: you make something that users want. Answering exactly what users want is the hard part because it changes over time and is affected by many factors. Besides, if it were easy, no startup would ever fail and everybody will be a startup millionaire.

The better question is “how do you make a startup fail?” because the answers are based on examples of past failed startups. Additionally, the answers can be used to eliminate things that wouldn’t work, making it easier to get a startup to succeed. Here are 10 of the most common (and easily avoided) start up screw ups:

1. Having Only One Founder – quick, think of a successful startup that was founded by a single person. Can’t think of one? Even companies that look like they were only founded by a single person, like Oracle, actually have more. This is not a coincidence. The thing is that having no other founder is a sign that the person can’t talk any of his friends to start the company with him, which shows that nobody except him is confident in the idea. Next, running a startup is hard work that no single person can do alone. The amount of work required and the pressures involved in getting the business up and running requires multiple founders that can help and support each other even in the lowest points.

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Google Web Designer: the Review

Monday, May 12th, 2014

Last October 2013, Google launched their WYSIWYG tool called the Google Web Designer, taking the market by surprise. The application is completely free and is targeted towards the development of HTML5 projects.

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Google Web Designer couldn’t have come at a better time. For starters, Microsoft has already dropped their Expression Web Suit, and then Flash seems to have hit an impasse despite being the de facto standard for many advertising banners. The fact that Apple isn’t feeling any pressure to allow Flash on their iOS devices is indicative of the API’s future. Adobe is currently promoting Creative cloud, but it’s a paid service that can easily become expensive for casual users.

Setup and Installation

It may sound surprising given Google’s preference for web-based applications, but Google Web Designer is an installable application. There’s support for Windows 7 and newer, as well as Mac OS X 10.7 and newer. Similar to Google Chrome’s installer, Google Web Designer’s client is only a few hundred Kb but only serves as a downloader for the main installation files, so make sure you have an Internet connection at the ready when installing the application. (more…)

Keep Your Website Safe from Heartbleed Virus

Wednesday, May 7th, 2014

NO HEARTBLEED 02The Heartbleed Bug is quite possibly the biggest security threat that the Internet has ever seen due to the fact that anyone who has logged on to any of the affected sites within the last two years is at risk, and could have had any of their private information – from passwords to credit card information – compromised by cybercriminals.o

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The scary part about the Heartbleed Bug is that it was completely out of the user’s hands; it didn’t matter if the user kept all of his software patched, used a strong antivirus suite, regularly changed passwords, and avoided shady websites – he or she may still be affected because the problem is in the open source set of libraries for encrypting online services, OpenSSL, which is used by many secure websites (ones that use “https” in the URL.) Big name sites like Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Pinterest, Instagram, OKCupid and many more were affected by this bug so chances are if you’ve been actively using the Internet for the past couple of years, your private information was left vulnerable by the bug.

How Do I Keep My Website Safe from Heartbleed?

Since the Heartbleed Bug is not really a virus, there’s nothing you can do from an end user standpoint to keep your website safe. It’s the responsibility of companies and services that were affected by the bug to deal with Heartbleed, and reports point to the fact that they have already patched things on their end.

The good news is that cybercriminals probably failed to discover the heartbleed bug before it was discovered by Google’s security team and the software firm named Codenomicon, so if your accounts have not been hacked yet, chances are it’s safe for now. The bad news is the fact that the bug allowed attackers to infiltrate servers and copy private information without leaving any trace, so there is no way to know if your account was already compromised and the hackers are just biding their time before they use it.

The best course of action? Now that services have already patched things, it is time to change your passwords. It may be a lot of hard work but you need to be thorough. The fact that services these days are interconnected means that you can’t leave one password unchanged – email accounts for instance can be used to gain access to other online accounts, as password resets usually send the new passwords to the email used for registration.

Besides, it’s good practice to regularly change your passwords so you’ll only be doing what you should already be doing religiously in the first place.

Make Your Web Site Readable By Visitors and Search Engines

Monday, May 5th, 2014

It’s true that a website’s main purpose is to be read by humans. There’s no sense in having a popular website if the content isn’t useful or even intelligible to people. However, to ignore search engines is equally foolish. Studies put search engine traffic as making up 90-98% of website traffic these days, so not ensuring that your site is readable by search engines is ensuring that you won’t get much human readers either. The proper approach is to treat them equally: make your website readable by visitors and search engines. Here are a few things you can do to ensure this:

To Make Your Website Readable to Humans:

1. Don’t use too many font sizes – the purpose of using differently sized fonts is to guide a reader’s eyes to specific parts of a text. If you have way too many differently sized text in your copy, a reader’s eyes will be constantly distracted and guided towards unnecessary directions. There’s no easier way of making a site look cluttered than by using differently sized fonts on the same page.

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