HostEntrepreneur

For a while now we’ve used other Brother P-Touch printers for labeling equipment… and they worked. But figuring out how they’re going to look with a simple lcd screen was never fun. Then I got my hands on this handy little printer, the Brother PT-1230 “PC Connectable” printer. By PC connectable they mean it has a USB port.  Of course some program needs to be run to design a label, but for PCs with Windows prior to Win7, you can leave the switch on the back in basic mode, and the software’s on the device itself. For Windows 7, you need to download the enhanced version (which you probably want to do anyway for the extra features like barcodes), and throw the switch in the back.

The list price on this little sucker is a bit unrealistic at $79. But it’s often at half that at buy.com  ( Buy.com link ) and sign up for thier daily emails, and every so often (3 or 4 times a year maybe) it will go on sale. It was on sale a few weeks ago for $16.99 with free shipping.  If you want one decide beforehand and wait for the sale. Once you see it, don’t hesitate or it will sell out on you. It happened to me twice, once I “thought about it” and when I went back it was sold out, and the other by the time I read the email it was gone already. But as they say 3rd time’s the charm.

For anyone sending equipment to colo centers this can be a life saver. Label your equipment with hostname, main ip, contact name and phone number. It can really help them find you server in racks of dozens of servers… Also if you have multiple drives label each drive, for example, use /dev/sda1, /dev/sda2, etc.  This way if a drive fails, it makes them determining which drive to swap pretty painless. After all you’re paying for their time usually, you want them to be fast about it.  I also suggest using the brother “Extra Strength Adhesive” series of tapes. Be aware that there are multiple sizes (widths) of tape. The largest this will use is 1/2″, so the TZS231 gives you the largest printing area for black on white labels. I don’t recommend the TZS131 (black on clear) as they can be hard to read unless your surface is a light color.

So you want to start your own webhosting business… Should you choose “reseller hosting”? And what is it? Numerous options exist to get started selling hosting as a side or primary business. But like everything there are trade-offs, things to consider, and “gotchas” to watch out for… In part 1 of our new Getting Start series, I’m going to talk about what is “reseller hosting”, who it is right for (and not), and what to look for.

Reseller hosting is a shared server setup, meaning your accounts will be placed on the same server as others from other customers. This is probably the number one thing to watch out for with reseller hosting. Since you have no control over the other customers, or their customers, you have to be able to trust that the provider is setting things up properly, securely and and monitoring/maintaining the server and network properly.  Things could go wrong if not done properly… insecure setups can lead to others getting to your data, a spammer could get onto the server leading to blacklisting, or an account could suck up all the bandwidth or cpu resources. These are just a couple examples of what could go wrong. Since you’re not in control of the server, you need to be able to rely on the provider to watch for it and fix it quickly should it happen.

Leaving the server administration is also one of the biggest advantages as well. This is especially true for new hosts who probably don’t have the experience or manpower to administer servers on their own. It is also considerably cheaper to go the reseller route. A decent reseller account can be had complete with control panel, possibly some billing software to handle collections from your customers, installation script, etc. for $10 to $15 per month.

When looking for a reseller account, be aware of the disk space and traffic (often incorrectly call bandwidth) that are included. Some reseller accounts can get so large in these stats that they rival small VPS accounts. When choosing you want to selection on that meets your needs and provides some growth room. You also want to make sure that the provider will upgrade the account without having to migrate and without penalty.

A nice feature, if you can get it, is a dedicated ip address or two for your accounts. This does a couple things for you. One it limits the impact if a spammer gets onto the server. Blacklists usually are at the single ip level unless it’s so rampant on a network that they block the whole network. It also does something else… The larger hosts probably have multiple physical servers.  By having your accounts to a single ip address, migrating the account, say for load balancing the servers, becomes significantly easier WITHOUT changing ip address. If your account shares ips with other accounts, that option is out the window…

If you’re serious about growing your business, a reseller account is a good way to get started with minimal cost.  But be sure to check with the company that they will support you should you need to move up to a vps or dedicated servers. That dedicated ip address can help there too. Once the vps is up and running they can copy the data over and move the ip to the new server. We’re talking minutes of downtime… a lot easier than if you had to backup the accounts, download the backup, upload to the new server and then change dns, and potentially wait hours for dns cache to die.

If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment here to ask or email me at rob -at- lagniappeinternet.com

Webhosting entrepreneurs spend a lot of time online. We work weird hours, day and night, to get the job done. Western Govenors’ University works well for people like us. With WGU it’s all about results. How long you sit in a classroom doesn’t matter. What matters is understanding the material and can you do the work?

Online education has been steadily growing. But you need to watch out… Many of the names you’ve heard are for profits (nothing wrong with that in itself), that worry more about selling courses. There’s the problem… a typical large name accredited (we’ll talk more about that in a minute) online school that’s not part of a state university system charges upwards of $40 to $50 thousand dollars for a undergrad degree.  Let’s take the University of Phoenix, most courses run 3 credits $ 530 per credit hour plus a $85 fee for online ‘resources’, or $1675 per course. To satisfy the 120 credit hour requirement (124 in Kansas), that means 40 course… or a grand total $67,000 assuming you came into it with no credits… That’s a chunk of change.  The value of a degree is substantial, but that’s a big hole to dig out of from the start.

And there’s the time requirements… Usually you can’t take more than 16 hours or so at a time. That will take years to complete the degree! And if you’re working at the same time, it’s even slower.

But there’s another way… the WGU way. I’m currently enrolled in their IT – Software Development program. I started last October 1st. To date I have completed 41 comptency units (their equivalent to the credit). I’m working on another 17 before the end of my term at the end of February. If you were paying attention, you noticed that’s a long term – 6 months. WGU is a continuous enrollment school. Terms start every month on the 1st and go for 6 months. Since you’re working on your courses individually with the help of others in the course as well as course mentors, you get to set the pace. WGU requires you take 16 credits and pass 12 of those every semester to maintain “Satisfactory Academic Progress” or “SAP”. You have to also pass 2/3rd of everything you take… Fortunately, you can add courses as you need. So you start out with the required 16 CU’s at the begining of the term (which figuring in breaks and such as almost twice as long as a normal semester), then as you complete courses you add others in.

Courses are divided up into ‘Objective’ and ‘Performance’  Assessments. For objective assessments, you will take a final exam after completing the course work (or are able to show you are ready). You will go to a testing facility  available at Prometric, most universities, and many libraries  for proctoring.  You will be given a certain amount of time to complete the exam and take it online under the supervision of the proctor. If you’ve ever taken an industry certification exam, that’s what these are like. Actually many of the IT courses use industry certifications as their assessment from known names like Microsoft, CompTIA, CIW, Sun, etc.  A quick word about industry certs at WGU… WGU has decided to place a limit of 4 attempts on an industry cert (1st 2 tries are included in tuition:) !) afterwards, you will need to choose another degree program. I support this move. It prevents people from going over and over until they pass, in something they apparently are prepared for…  but some others were upset about it.

Performance evaluations are another matter… it’s all about the work. You will be given a set of tasks to complete. For example, you may be asked to complete a slide presentation, write a paper, and perform an experiment complete with journals, etc. and submit that to graders. They will use a rubric to evaluate your work and tell you if any revisions need to occur. There are 2 types of tasks, the ‘required’ tasks are more like course-work and can be submitted multiple times. You’ll do this as you go through the course text. Then after you’ve completed those, the final task(s) will be opened for you. These are the what you’re actually evaluated on… You can only revise them once. So you have to pay attention to what you’re doing. Afterwards, a different task is used for the course.

One of the things you need to pay attention to in looking for online college degrees is the school’s accreditation. There are too many ‘degree mills’ out there, and you won’t be well served by them. Others, like the big names, do have accreditation from the DECT – a nationally recognized accreditation authority. There are also many other accreditation bodies, many of whom have no authority to do so see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unrecognized_accreditation_associations_of_higher_learning  … The “gold standard” though is “Regional accreditation” (the same you’re local state university uses) see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_accreditation. WGU is DETC AND regionally accredited through the Northwest Commission. Additionally for teachers and nurses, WGU holds NCATE and CCNE respectively. Actually WGU is the first and only exclusively online university to hold NCATE accreditation. The CCNE accreditation helped me getting approved for tuition reimbursement actually… Just be careful when choosing a school, get DETC at a minimum and preferably regional.

Lastly, let’s talk about cost… WGU has a fixed cost of just $2890 per 6 month term, plus a few fees for library, etc. So figure about $3000 a semester – it varies a little with lab fees, etc. To use me as an example, I’ve already completed 41 CUs, so my cost per CU (credit) is already down to ($3000/41)  under $75. And if I complete the others in time, it will drop to just over $50/credit. I’ve found no other university that even comes close…  Not to mention my goal is to go from zero credits (it’s all too old to count anymore really) to done in a year to a year and half. So my total cost will be $6 to 9 thousand, instead of $50 to $60 thousand! And I’ll have TEN industry certifications to boot!

If you decide you want to apply, email me at rob -at- lagniappeinternet.com and I can get you the application fee waived… Disclosure: I’d also get a Amazon credit for $50 or so (I forget the amount) as well towards books… BTW, most books are included or eBooks. If you want printed copies you have to buy them, and for a couple (2 I think in my case) you will have to buy books period. Those are not included in tuition, but that’s pretty normal.

Just a quick tip today…

eBay is a great source for most anything… especially for computer releated items. For example, we’re often looking for a particular RAID controller, type of ECC memory, or other part that you won’t find down at your local computer shop. BUT eBay’s search function leaves something to be desired, at least until you start learning some of the nuances.

For example, we’re always on the lookout for deals for certain series of Xeon processors we use. For example one of the servers will use several of the X3000 series quad cores. eBay has a nice feature that you can save searches and it will email you the results daily. But the search itself takes some practice. In  our example we’re looking for a Xeon X3210, 3320, 3350 or 3360 processor. But if you type “xeon x3210 x3320 x3350 x3360″ into the search box, ebay will politely tell you “Your search returned 0 items.”  But we know ebay has some of these on there, so how can that be. It’s the Boolean logic that eBay uses. It is searching for an item that has ALL of those terms in it, and there aren’t any.  What we really want is “xeon” AND ( “X3210″ OR “X3320″ OR “X3350″ OR “X3360″) and may want to narrow down which categories we search under, but we’d be pretty close to right on with just that alone. So how do we tell ebay to use “or” logic?   We put a “,” between them, but we also need to separate them out from the term “xeon” we do that with parentheses.  The resulting search string becomes “xeon (x3210, x3320, x3350, x3360)”  which as I write this results in 15 auction and 37 store items, of which all but a dozen of which are what we’re looking for. The others happen to be IBM X3350 servers which use xeon processors (but not the xeons we are looking for).

To get eBay to email you, use the “save this search” feature near the top. Sign in if needed, and tell it how often and logn to email you.

http://www.mysql.com/news-and-events/web-seminars/display-485.html

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Join us for this informative technical webinar with Connectage.com and a member from the Joomla core team, which will explore the benefits of an open source Content Management stack based on Joomla and MySQL.

This webinar describes how Joomla offers excellent content management and distributed authoring capabilities as well as reliable data security through MySQL. It will detail use case examples of organisations who have adopted Joomla as a highly visible content management platform in publishing and public sector healthcare where data security was a paramount consideration.

Joomla provides a flexible, extendable content management platform and runs on an open source stack and comes embedded MySQL as the default database.

Connectage.com is a specialist Joomla development and integration company with many sites delivered on the Joomla/MySQL platform and a range of essential Joomla extensions for e-commerce, e-learning, taxonomy and search management.

WHO:

• Phil Doyle, Connectage.com
• Wilco Jansen, Joomla

WHAT:

Joomla – Web Based Content Management and Data Security – EMEA web presentation.

WHEN:

Wednesday, January 27, 2010: 10:00 Central European time

The presentation will be approximately 45 minutes long followed by Q&A.

http://www.mysql.com/news-and-events/web-seminars/display-489.html

This ‘straight from the horses mouth’ webinar aims to teach attendees how to back up MySQL databases with ZManda Recovery Manager (ZRM)

Thursday, January 28, 2010

MySQL databases are increasingly used by high volume, high transaction applications that support businesses running full throttle 24×7. Backup and recovery operations need to be conducted in such as way that is non-disruptive to users and applications. In this webinar, we will show how Zmanda Recovery Manager(ZRM) backs up the most challenging MySQL installations, including those running on the cloud.

Zmanda supports all storage engines and provides point-in-time recovery for MySQL.

In this webinar, we will demonstrate the latest ZRM enhancements so that you can build a robust, flexible, and easy to use backup and recovery solution.

WHO:

• Chander Kant, CEO, Zmanda, Inc.

WHAT:

Zmanda and MySQL: Backup MySQL Applications, including those running on the Cloud web presentation.

WHEN:

Thursday, January 28, 2010: 10:00 Pacific time (America)

The presentation will be approximately 45 minutes long followed by Q&A.

You can install SSL certificates on both Windows as well as Linux Dedicated Servers. SSL (Secure Socket Layer) certificate is used for the e-commerce websites. This is generally done for the security of the website. It is highly recommended for the websites where money is transacted or the website which needs some sort of security. You can install SSL certificate on your domain through Plesk control panel with the help of the easy steps which are given below :-

1) First login to your Plesk control panel.

2) Then select the domain on which you wish to install the SSL certificate.

3) Then select the “certificates” icon.

4) Then select the icon “Add New Certificate”.

5) Give the certificate a name. This is for your reference only.

6) Then generate a certificate request which you will submit to the Certified Authority (CA).

7) Once you are done with it, come back to the previous page.

Then select the certificate 1 which is given below the page.

9) Copy the CSR (Certificate Signing Request) and the Private key. You will need to submit these in your application to the Certified Authority (CA).

10) Once you have done that and submitted the CA your SSL certificate will be installed on the domain you have selected.

If you do not wish to get into all this, your web hosting provider can provide you with the SSL certificate on the domain you wish to. You will have to pay some charges to your web hosting provider for the SSL certificate. It might be possible that your web hosting provider does not provide SSL certicates and if this is the case, then you will have to do it on your own with the above given steps.

Note : You will have to purchase a Dedicated IP for the domain you wish to have the SSL certicate on both Windows as well as Linux Dedicated Servers. You cannot install the SSL certificate on the domain if the domain does not have a Dedicated IP.

Money is one of the most important thing which everyone thinks about while considering to use a dedicated web server host, no matter what business they own. Cash is the most important factor of al the businesses. The best Linux Dedicated Server statistical distributions is having a good advantage that you don’t need to pay extra amount of money for any software package that Microsoft introduce. So this can help you to invest your budget on the hardware or any other important thing which can help you a lot in your project.

The most important thing that comes to my mind and you should also know about it is it’s trustworthiness and safety are really well documented when having a talk about Linux Dedicated Servers. They are well known to keep running for months, giving consistent performance and you need to forget only one thing, that is maintenance.

When you are thinking about normal servers that run on normally used servers or even thinking about coded software, one thing you should always keep in my mind is that, Linux always performs much better and longer than other and this is the most important think you need to think about when it comes on something that will stand the test of time. For people who are working from home and using a in house server, crash occasionally and need to reboot is not a big deal and what to keep in mind is that when it comes on talking about some one who is running a business online, this can be terrible and they may loose thousands of dollars on a single day when there website goes down.

They occasionally route the problem by having a ghost server running an exact duplicate of website on the same server but with different hardware, and what will happen if the main web host and all its channels are affected, and if your ghost server is build on a same hardware and what if there could be a universal crash and loose all the data that is inside together with any transactions or any type of financial information as well and this is really very important. So you need to have a server that are reliable, provide some security to the customers on who are running a e-commerce site.

These are all the reasons you should think about “Why you should use Linux Dedicated Server?” One more thing that you should know is that Linux Server is able to communicate with a host of operating systems pretty easily and efficiently, and this a good when you need to connect the server with other platforms to configure a network where business can really operate.

We’ve been busy lately… we’ve installed SolusVM and have been integrating existing OpenVZ nodes into the system. Overall the process went fairly smoothly. We installed the management console into a VPS primarily for backup reasons. We could if needed take the dump and place it on another node and bring it back up pretty quickly. This adds slightly to the cost ($2.50/month) but is well worth it in our opinion. Otherwise, you install the management console on an full server and it becomes a node.

We did have one issue with an existing node, that had long ago been a HyperVM node. I placed a ticket with SolusLabs and within 30 minutes or so had the initial response. After trying a few things, their support person logged into the node for me and did the setup. The problem was with  compatibility between lighttpd and a library iirc.  Strangely enough that server did a kernel panic a few hours later after acting “wierd” for a few minutes.  Since it was brought back up, it’s been stable. I suspect it was all of the loading and unloading of various components that led to the problem.

One of the features is the pricing… It is $10 per month per node. The number of vpses per node doesn’t matter. You pay just for each physical server. The downside is that some providers will use this to justify placing more vpses per server. But those that think that way will be doing that anyway because of other per server costs like power, rack space, etc.

So far we’re pretty impressed. Of the VPS management consoles that have been brought to market since the demise of HyperVM’s founder and developer, this one seems the most solid.