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So, today’s article helps you understand basics of web hosting. The first word which we come across as soon as we think of website is “hosting”.

Basically there are three kinds of hosting:-

• Shared hosting
• VPS
• Dedicated Hosting

Shared:

As name suggest in shared hosting, large number of sites are hosted on a single server (generally with low traffic), thus sharing all the server resources. For example on  server 1 we can host multiple sites, site1,site2,sites3 and so on.



Basic features:

i)                 Shared Resources(RAM, Diskspace and CPU)

ii)                cheap , service starts as low as $4USD/mo

Disadvantages:

i)                 If the load on particular site increase, other sites hosted on the same server will suffer ; for example a college website, on the day of announcement of results, traffic will suddenly increase; eating all the resources(CPU,RAM,Disk) available on the  server. As a result other websites on that server would run slow with high latency.

ii)                No Control over server configuration; hence we can’t install or change software ouselves.

Dedicated:

It’s a physical server with real hardware. Basically for websites which have to handle high number of visitors.

Basic features:

i)                 The client allotted an individual server with all the resources.

ii)                Full control over server.

Disadvantages

i)                 It’s not cost effective as most of the server resources end up unused.

ii)                Since costs are high, not everybody can afford it

Advantages

i)                 Client’s website is unaffected by any other random website

ii)                No sharing of resources. Client has full rights over the server.

Virtual Private Server (VPS):

Based on the advancement in virtualization technology, VPS have been developed to provide the perfect ground between shared & dedicated servers. In layman terms, in a VPS a powerful dedicated server is divided in terms of resources (RAM, CPU, Disk) into small mini-servers which are called Virtual Machines. In Virtualization terms, virtual machines are referred as “guest” who has their OS with full control and base machine is called as “Host”.

Advantages:

i)                 Cost effective, Inmotion has vps web hosting plans starting $39.90USD with free Cpanel. Anyone looking for VPS should give them a try

ii)                Burstable Memory: VPS provides burstable memory, which is extra memory apart from your guaranteed quote.

iii)                Scalability: you can start small (1 small site) and further grow too many sites handling huge visitors without changing/upgrading machines. As long as host has resources

Suitable For:

i)                sites with large databases, E-commerce sites like EBay etc.

ii)               Sites with high traffic, but not high enough for a dedicated server.

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• Number of images were over 90,000 and size of about 95GB which rules of conventional method of first downloading everything from old server  on your own machine and then uploading to new server is not feasible.
• Shared hosting provider only gave FTP access. so it rules out rsync,scp,bittorrent or anything similar based transfers. host even refused to achieve the 90,000 files.

In short, you will have to move all files and database via FTP.  Here is how:

Get the Database Dump:

1. Download SQLBuddy, extract it & upload it to your old server via FTP. Download Link
2. Now open webbroswer, Now goto the localisation where you extracted it. For example, location for me was http://gaurishsharma.com/sqlbuddy(this is no longer accessible). yours might be similar.
3. Login with your username and password.Click on Export and follow on screen instruction. now a database dump file *.SQL will be create in ../sqlbuddy/exports/export.sql. Which you can use to restore database.

Moving All Files

1. Login to your new server via shell account.
2. For transfer we will use wget – which is available on all linux based servers. we will use the following command

wget -r -c -nH -l0 ftp://USERNAME:PASSWORD@ftp.domain.com/ --append-output=websitedownload-wget.log -b

Where:

USERNAME: username of old server
PASSWORD: actual password of old server
ftp.domain.com: is the URL or IP address of your old FTP server

Now, after you run its command. you get a output like this

Continuing in background, pid 16554.

-jailshell-3.2$

This means that wget is now downloading all the files from your old server in background, so you can go for sleep and check back. to check the process you can read logfile websitedownload-wget.log

Explanation of Options

-r flag: recursively download all files and directories.
-c flag: not re-download everything that’s already been downloaded (and continue everything that’s been half done).
-nH flag: to make wget not create a directory with the name of the host prior to fetching the files.
-l0 flag: to make sure wget goes down every directory and downloads. By default, wget only goes down 4 directories.
–append-output: it will save the entire download output to file, so you can read it later.
-b flag: it will run wget into background so you can close the terminal and the transfer will still be running.

I Personally tried this method and it works great! The biggest advantage of wget method is that incase transfer gets interrupted or the server goes down,can you can ‘resume’ from where you left.

Hope this help you when you are moving large websites

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Python is general purpose programming High-level language creating by  Guido van Rossum in 1991.It is open-source object-oriented programming language that offers two to ten fold productivity increases over other languages like C, C++, Java, C#, Visual Basic (VB), and Perl.

Why Python?

Because using python you can do more in less time.Its syntax is easy; almost english like. its flexible and extendable. And has huge libraries which you can reuse instead of writing your own.This is the major reason Python is gaining traction.  It used for scripting in enterprise environments and it’s used extensively by Google(youtube, App Engine), Even NASA uses it. It can be used for Web Development ,GUI Applications, Mobile Apps etc. In short, Python is good and you should learn it.

How to Learn Python?

Reading books is so boring! Instead you can watch video lectures on Youtube and learn python.Its free class for people with a little bit of programming experience who want to learn Python. The class includes written materials, lecture videos, and lots of code exercises to practice Python coding.

Get Python

If you are running Linux or Mac, chances are you already have python installed. Windows Users can Download it for free

Video Lectures

• Day 1: 1.1 Introduction, strings

• Day1: 1.2 Lists and sorting

• Day1: 1.3 Dicts and files

• Day2: 2.1 Regular expression

• Day2: 2.2 Utilities
• Day2: 2.3 Utilities urllib
• Day2: 2.4 Conclusions

After going thought this 2day python class, you will have basic idea about python. for Further learning read Python’s standard documentation

Further Reading:

• Google’s Python Class

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Recently, Facebook has enabled support for XMPP/Jabber protocol which means that now you can using standalone Instant Messengers like Pidgin(Works on Windows,Mac & Linux),iChat(Mac only).  This works on Windows,Linux and Mac on any application that support jabber protocol.

here I would demonstrate to do this on Windows with pidgin.

Step 1) Set your Facebook username by going here. if your profile url is facebook.com/xxxxx then xxxxx will be your username. please remember it, we will need in later steps.

Step 2) Download & install Pidgin: Pidgin is Open Source IM App which can be freely downloaded from Pidgin.im. Please visit the site and download & Install. Installation is pretty straightforward – typical windows style. Just keep Clicking Next,Next,Next and pidgin would be install automatically.

Strep 3) Configuration: now Launch Pidgin. you will be greeted with Account Dialog Box  click on “Add Account” to a facebook account

Step 4) Now in Add Account Screen, enter the following & leave rest to default:

• protocol: XMPP
• username: your facebook username . Its the same which you get in step-1
• Domain: chat.facebook.com
• password: <enter your facebook password>
• Check Remember Password

Step 5) In the Advanced Tab, Do the following

• Uncheck “Require SSL/TLS“
• Check “Allow plaintext auth over unencrypted streams“
• Connect port: 5222
• Connect Server: chat.facebook.com

Step 6) Click on Save and wait for few seconds while pidgin connects to facebook. If you have configured the settings correctly then you should be able to see this:

Congrats! you can start chatting with your friends rightway

Bonus Tip:Pidgin supports multiple protocols. so you can also add your GTalk,Yahoo Messenger or MSN accounts same way you added your Facebook account and chat on all of them at the same time. no need to install separate client program for each protocols.  Great Nice eh?

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• 256Kbps Unlimited Plan = Rs750/per momth
• 512Kbps Unlimited Plan = Rs900/ per month (earlier was 1350/-)
• 1Mbps Unlimited Plan = Rs1000/ per month ( New Plan)
• 2Mbps Unlimited Plan = Rs1100 / per month (New Plan)

Here the copy of Ad:

However, At this point its not known that its applicable all over India or valid only in Chennai telecom circle.also, it does not say if Fair-Usage-Policy is applicable or not. so readers are advised to confirm it.

[Update]

This plan has a fair usage limit applied on all plans, once you cross that data usage your speed would be reduced to 256kbps, which bad. So I would advise you against these plans

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Since ages ago, cdrtools was the default tool-set used for optical disc buring on Linux. Under the hood of those pretty GUI programs like k3b/brasero, was actually cdrtools which did the dirty work.it was being actively developed by a team led by Joerg Schilling.The whole code was licensed under GPL.

One fine Morning,

Mr. Schilling decided to change license to CDDL.This is where everything started to go wrong!

What is the issue?

CDDL license is incompatible with the GPL.The CDDL is intended to be GPL incompatibleso cannot be distributed along with GPL code. Hence, it became illegal for Linux Distributions to redistribute cdrtools.

Debian comes to rescue!

Linux didn’t have any alternative to cdrtools, hence debian project decided to fork last available GPLed code into Cdrkit. they dropped cdrtools and included cdrkit. every major distro like Fedora,Ubuntu,Mandriva supported debian and did the same.debian took the responsibility and start to maintain cdrkit.

Cool, everything finally settled.

No, there is one small problem.CD/DVD burning is a complicated business that needs a lot of knowledge and also requires a lot of development effort which debian does not have.lately, it has been seen cdrkit is not been actively developed (current to last stable was around a year).Addionatlly it is technically inferior to cdrtools.cdrkit still does not generate proper iso-level-3 file systems and has trouble with big file support(the famous 4.3GB data limit in DVD against the real capacity of 4.7GB) .
This is the reason creation of proper blu-ray in linux is so hard.
it seems the developers of cdrkit don’t have the resources/skills to maintain such a complex software.

Guess, we are stuck!

So Choice is what we have in this.If you face problems with cdrkit, there are two options:

1) Built and Install Cdrtools yourself.Source is available at its Home Page. ArchLinux users can get it on aur.

2) (Last Option)Switch to propertiery closed source burning suite:NeroLinux.. if everything fails then only you should go by this route. I would strongly advise you to try choose option 1)

What is the purpose of this post
The purpose of this post if to let the users know the actual situation/state of CD/DVD burning apps in Linux. And let them select which software they want to use.

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It is my adsense payment cheque, since its my first. so I am pretty excited about it. although, the amount is small but it means to me alot as it has been entirely generated by Gaurish Sharma Live & as you all might know this site has a special place in my heart .  I am thankful to all my readers who did read my random chatter and provided constant feedback so that I would improve.  here is a mandatory picture proof:

Lastly, I would wish you all A Very Happy New Year 2010, Have a great year ahead!

keep reading, there is more to come from my twisted mind.

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Looking current restrictive practices being followed in DTH industry
I wonder if its just me or every is not happy with the way things are?

Basically I have objections on two points:

1)  Lack of interoperability:when you buy DTH service, you locked into a operator for indefinitely period of time.if you decide to change the service, your current equipment(STB or Dish) for which you payed a steep amount can’t be re-used. you again have buy a new equipment from new DTH service provider to whom you are switching. again,its a consumer who takes the financial burden.

mostly likely, people would not switch service provider inorder to avoid this unnecessary expense. dth operators know this fact and often take undue advantage. they roll out services with lower tarrifs and increase it later on and their subscribers can’t do anything about it because they are locked into the service.

2) Contact terms and other bad practices: have you ever read how anti-consumer polices these DTH operators follow, two name a few:-

• • Blocking off all channels including Free-to-air(FTA) channels when customers does not renew their subscription. effectively, they are asking you pay even for Free channels which is wrong and unethical.

Terms from Sun direct’s Website, same practice is followed by all other operartors:
Free channels which are available on Sun Direct Platform. Sun Direct has the rights for modification and can remove these channels if they turn pay or charge separately for the same.

• • changing package cost or channels in your package without user’s consent.yes, you heard that right. DTH operators can remove your favorite channel from your package or increase the cost and the worst part part is they don’t need your permission to do so. lastly, you can’t do anything as you agreed to this as part of contract you signed when you brought the service.for example, see the below statements on almost all major dth operators websites.

Tata Sky Ltd. reserves the right to add or drop a channel/ package/ service from any package and/or change the package rates.

“DISHTV reserves the right to add / drop a channel / package / service from any package and / or change the package rates.”

Sun direct: “Channels lists and packages are subject to change without prior notice.”

• • closed source firmware and complete lockdown: DTH operators have made every effort possible so that customers cannot use third party STB like dreambox in attempt to maintain their monopoly. so customers are forced to use cheap Chinese STBs which result in poor video quality and the problem increase when you are using large screen LCDs.

What Is the Government Doing?

Nothing! because Govt itself is confused. as per law at present mandates interoperability between DTH operators, the same is not practically possible in today’s DTH marketplace. Currently, the two oldest DTH operators, Tata Sky and Dish TV are using the MPEG 2 technology for their regular set top boxes while the recently launched like ADAG’s Big TV DTH, Bharti etc are using MPEG 4 technology.The information and broadcasting (I&B) ministry wants the STB of DTH service providers based on the two prevailing compression technologies (MPEG 2 and MPEG 4) to be interoperable, a proposal not feasible. while shifting across DTH operators within the same technology is possible, and moving from MPEG 4 to MPEG 2 is also possible for a subscriber while retaining his set-top box, migration from MPEG 2 to MPEG 4 is not technologically possible. in essence,present Law cannot be implemented. so Govt is confused and sent the matter to Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS). BIS was asked to form a Indian standard for all STBs for DTH,IPTV,CAS etc but till date it has only managed to get a draft. as a fact, India does not have any Standard for DTH STBs. hence everything is left at operators, which give importance to their profits than bothering about consumer interests.

What it should be like

DTH market should free from any kind of contracts, one should be able to buy a STB and service separately. if you want to switch to a  new operator all you need to do is buy a new Viewing Card and existing installed equipment can be used. thereby avoiding the hassle of installation and saving cost of new equipment. this would increase healthy completion  among the dth players and would led to lower tariffs. for example, take Mobile industry, you buy a handset of your choice and then service which suits you the best; separately giving you a power of “choice”. this makes “customer the king”.And look how this practice has led to multi-billion telecom industry. this is the reason be have lowest call rates in the world.Infact I am proud how the telecom industry works, its more FREE than system in developed markets like US.

In short, we need a Indian standard which should be implemented, so that DTH industry be Free of restrictive practices. I hope BIS is able to form a standard soon and Govt abides all players to abide by it.

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Further, Downloading during Night Unlimited (200-800hrs) is no longer free on new plans. I sincerely hope that bsnl does not remove free night unlimited feature from its current plans.

And if you still want to see those “crappy plans”. see below :

High Tariffs + Limited Unlimited Plan + Slow speeds  = Sad State of Broadband in India Desperately hoping for some Change

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