Linux Community Magazine

Usually Windows Web Hosting described as the most famous earlier framework and the most primary level web hosting service because everyone is well familiar with its environment. It all started with a small static Website in HTML with a few photos and a simple scripting language. The site gives users to gain access, even it allows a good interaction with the site and some online stores of goods and services. It was previous or you can say earliest idea of the Windows hosting.

With the coming of multimedia applications, and concrete way for the public on the Internet in the world. Web hosting companies listed in the evolutionary process, to make room for freedom and web hosting business increased unimaginably. Even it is as simple as it never before and in present situation it is the best online business. Aside from technological progress, today many hosting companies are also include the environmental-friendly existence and many of them offering different types of the hosting packages which are easily available on their site.

Windows Hosting has been greatest demand in market, but all the costs to the hosting is bit more than other forms of hosting. However, the Windows operating system has an important role in the practicability and quality of web hosting services. Those companies who have the windows operating system, usually prefers Windows web-hosting plan.

Even so, in the web hosting world the second most important hosting feature is Linux web hosting. It is as much strong and reliable as Windows network and also it is an open source operating system so user get the high quality hosting with low cost. It is difficult to compare the difference between the Windows operating system, and other operating system, but you can feel more user friendly environment with Windows hosting.

The Linux-based web servers are great for PHP and MySQL features. To carry out all coded PHP web site you can find it is compatible with Windows systems as well but it is certainly requires the Linux support for the sophisticated operation of this act. The tags and codes used in it are quiet similar to HTML, but user can includes applications and scripting on the server side as well. In addition, these dynamic pages that store data, and changes to restore the data in this table might be useful.

It depends on your skill and comfort with the operating system. Many web designer and programmers have different requirements depending on their areas of expertise. If they are familiar with Linux-based web hosting, because of their experience and expertise in Linux-based operating system they will surly choose Linux hosting. In addition, the expert in ASP, ASP.NET will choose Windows Web Hosting because it is compatible with IIS. With Windows Web Hosting you can experience greater freedom relative to your Website. It offers many ways to develop your web pages to upload on your site. These web pages you can send through FTP, as well as the costs are very low cost.

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Before you start searching for a web host, you must familiarize yourself with the terminology used in this field. The following terms are also considered key factors in deciding the suitable hosting plan that meets your requirements. You can start learning what does each term mean and how does it affect your selection.

Web Host

A web host, also known as web server, is a computer connected to the internet. This computer is more powerful than normal PCs and is set up to serve up websites. Your website content will reside on this computer, which will give people who surf the internet a way to access your website.

Web hosts can be categorized into three main categories based on the price range and common features for each category:

1. Free Hosts: limited in space, bandwidth and other features. Suitable for personal websites or for temporary usage. Usually enforce pop-up, text or banner ads. They do not provide the best performance and/or reliability. They provide minimum or no customer support. If you register for a free host, your domain will be something like yourname.freehost.com or [/yourname].

2. Shared Hosts: most websites are using this type of hosting. Suitable for personal, small and medium businesses. Prices range from $1 to about $25 a month. Features also range from very limited space/bandwidth to semi-dedicated servers. Your website has its own top level domain (e.g. []) The number of websites on a server affects its performance and availability, more websites usually means less performance. Servers hosting less number of shared websites are more expensive, but more reliable. Some companies allow customers to host multiple websites with different domains under a single account.

3. Dedicated Hosts: A full server dedicated to a single customer. Usually used by large businesses and very active websites with thousands of daily visitors. The customer will have full control over the server, and can create as many websites as he likes. Customer can have his own hosting company run on a rented dedicated server. Prices depend on the specifications and services provided with the server, starting from about $100 up to about $800 dollars a month.

4. Colocated Hosts: very similar to dedicated hosts, but the customer owns the server hardware instead of renting it. The server will be housed in provider's data center. Prices are a bit higher than dedicated servers.

5. Reseller Hosts: providers offer web server storage to customers, who then resell the web server storage to their customers. Providers usually offer resellers a discount price.

6. Other Hosts: there are few other types of hosts such as email hosts, media hosts, data hosts, etc but these are out of the scope of this article.

Domain Name

[] is an example of a domain name. It's a name that points to where your website is physically located. The actual address of your website is a set of numbers that looks like (70.86.135.242). This address is unique for every web server. Domain names are just pointers to the real addresses. It's easier to remember the domain names than the IP addresses.

Space / Storage

The amount of web server's disk space available for customer's website files, images and databases. It can be as small as 5MB in some free hosts and as big as 300GB for some dedicated servers. Space prices reduced significantly during the last few years. Customer can find hosting plans offering 3GB of space for less than $10 a month.

Bandwidth

Bandwidth is the amount of data transferred from web server to clients' internet browsers. Each time a person view a page data is transmitted from the server to that person's PC. Audio, video and images contents consume much more bandwidth than text. Bandwidth can be as low as 100MB a month in some free web hosts and as high as 2000GB a month in some dedicated servers. Customer can find hosting plans offering 75GB of monthly data transfer for less than $10.

Server Type

Usually means the operating system than runs the web server. Common types are Windows, Linux and UNIX. Server type determines the server side scripting and database types. Windows usually runs ASP and ASP.NET with Access or SQL Server databases. Linux/UNIX servers usually runs CGI, PHP or JSP with mySQL or Oracle databases. Windows servers are usually more expensive than Linux/UNIX servers.

Databases

As you have seen in server types, there are different types of databases. The most commonly used is mySQL because its an open source GPL (free) software and can serve a lot of online applications' requirements such as forums, content management, mailing lists, etc. MySQL, however, has some limitations in its features. Complicated large business sites will need more powerful databases such as Oracle or SQL Server.

Server Side Scripting

Most new users prefer to use PHP as server side scripting. The reason is that there are hundreds of open source (GPL) PHP scripts that can meet a lot of webmaster's requirements. Similar to mySQL, PHP has some limitations in features required by advanced websites, which makes some senior web developers prefer to use ASP.NET or JSP. Other developers still prefer to use Cold Fusion, CGI, ASP or PERL.

Email

Most hosting plans include the feature of having some email accounts with customer's domain (e.g. ). The number and size of email accounts depends on the hosting plan. Free plans do not usually have this feature, small plans give about 10 accounts where big plans do not limited the number. Those email accounts are usually web based and accessible through POP3 clients as well.

File Transfer Protocol (FTP)

A standard way of transferring files across the Internet. Most webmasters upload and download their websites contents using FTP. The upload or download processes are usually performed using FTP client software. To access their web servers, webmasters need FTP username and password. Some hosts give more than one FTP account to their customers. FTP can by anonymous as well, but its not recommended for security reasons.

Control Panel

Most web hosting companies provide their customers with a control panel, a web based application that helps in managing websites. Common functions in control panels are: managing email accounts, providing statistics, managing FTP accounts, managing domains and subdomains and managing databases. The most commonly used control panel application is cPanel. Some companies develop their own control panel application.

Uptime

An important feature of web hosts is their uptime, which is usually measured in percentage. A server that goes down for an average of 30 minutes a day will have an uptime percentage of about 99.98%, which is acceptable for most small to medium business websites. Anything less than this percentage is not suitable for a business website. Mission critical sites cannot tolerate frequent outages, thus they may use web monitoring services to notify web administrators immediately when an outage happens.

Price

With the wide range of options available for customers, the price is also ranges from 0 to $1000 a month. Most personal, small and medium websites shouldn't cost more than $15 a month. It's not recommended for business website owners to go for very cheap plans (less than $5) because this price usually means a compromise in the quality of support and reliability of the server.

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Do you need a good alternative for your Windows operating system? If yes, you can consider Ubuntu Linux. Based on the Debian GNU/Linux distribution this os is distributed as complimentary. This means you don't need to pay hefty amount for buying this operating system like that of Your windows program OS. There are plenty of stunning highlights of Ubuntu Linux that make it one of the best operating systems available in the present days. Ubuntu Linux is but not just much secure than Your windows program OS, but it also includes free apps and makes safe and fast online browsing. This operating system is super-fast and great-looking. Whether you have a new netbook, desktop or laptop, you can easily install this OS. Ubuntu Linux is also perfect for servers. If you want the perfect technologies straight to an individual's desktop, Ubuntu Linux is the pick for you. Would you like to install this operating system on your hard disk? You can consult your working personal computer re pair company for Linux Installation. Working on Ubuntu Linux can be described as very pleasing experience. Since the operating system includes plenty of stunning features, you can get your livelihood done without paying for alternative software. You can seamlessly make professional documents and reports with OpenOffice. org that comes utilizing this type of OS. This software is fully suitable for Microsoft Office. This software is very user-friendly and uncomplicated and you can generate professional documents, spreadsheets and presentations. When it comes to be able to picking any software, the Ubuntu Software Centre is right there for you personally. It allows you instant results to thousands of open-source and additionally carefully selected free applications. You can explore application categories like, sound and video, graphics, education, games, programming and office and find the one according to ones own need. According to The Mom or dad, "In terms of software Ubuntu is actually the iPhone. Almost anything you'd care to carry out, there's an app with the. "You can enjoy social media very easily with this os in this handset. There is a new Me Menu which allows you to access your Facebook and Twitter accounts right from the desktop. Here you get an opportunity to connect to all your favorite chat channels and make updates. And the most interesting thing is you get all these through just one window. Ubuntu Linux integrates computer software like Pitivi video editor, and Movie Player which enables you to watch all your favorite contents from YouTube, iPlayer, and MSN Player. Not only watching, you can also revise your videos with Pitivi training video editor. There are also a lot of apps that allow you to fix and share their photos while using world. Apart from the aforementioned features, there are many alot more. Considering all these, it could easily end up said that Ubuntu Linux works miracles operating system for your computer.

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How I Went From Angry Windows User To Delighted Linux User In Ten Minutes!

About 18 months ago, I had another disastrous crash on my PC that caused me to loose a host of photos, music and documents. Luckily I had a backup of most of my documents on an external disk. So I wasn't too concerned by this. I had experienced many crashes on Windows before and usually I was able to recover most of my documents and restore the system back to normal without too much effort.

This time was different however and to my horror, I discovered that Windows had somehow corrupted my external disk as well. I had lost everything and was pretty angry about it.

I tried a number of data recovery programs but most of the files wore gone. Forever. What a disaster!

At that point I decided that I would look for another alternative to windows and I thought I would give Linux another try.A few years earlier I had experimented with RedHat Linux but had no real success with it as it had problems detecting my usb keyboard and mouse. Which was obviously a bit of a non-starter for me. I knew that big advances were being made in the Linux world so I decided to do a bit of research.

Linux is an operating system that is free. That is, it can be downloaded and copied and distributed without a fee. It is free in a deeper sense too. Most of the software is written under a license called the "GPL" which effectively means that source code is available to everyone for each and every component of the Linux Operating System. If you have access to the source code for a piece of software then you can change the program to fix bugs and make it better. Once you do this you are under obligation to make your new source code available to others.

This has worked extremely well and Linux is being developed by programmers all over the world to make it better and better. The progress is amazing!

In my research I discovered a website: This website keeps a list of the most popular distributions of Linux. A distribution is a collection of Linux software that together makes an operating system. Each distribution contains different software and has a different focus. There are so many to try... Fedora, Mandrake, Puppy, PCLinuxOS, Debian, Knoppix, and the most popular, Ubuntu Linux. I downloaded the ISO of Ubuntu Linux from the Ubuntu website / and burned it to cd (an ISO file is cd image that can be recreated using a cd burning tool such as Nero).I placed the cd in my drive and booted up my computer.

I was astounded!

Within 10 minutes my computer was running Ubuntu Linux without even having to install it! This was a "Live-CD" and it can be used without installing to hard disk - it can be run from a cd without affecting your computer at all.

All my hardware was detected and within minutes I was surfing the web using Firefox and getting my email using Evolution, chatting to friends in messenger and yahoo chat using Gaim, writing documents and opening spreadsheets in Open Office and listening to Internet Radio with RythmBox.

I was delighted with the easy to use and gorgeous looking desktop. I decided to install it straight away and since then I haven't looked back.

There is an abundance of free open source software just waiting for you to experience. The package management system - Synaptic, allows you to search repositories of software and download them. The quality of a lot of the software is incredible.

Linux is written from the ground up to be a secure operating system. This means that you won't have to worry about getting viruses, spyware or any other kind of malware. My system is as stable as a rock. Of course, there are downsides to running Linux. The main one is that there is a learning curve that can be quite steep. It is not windows so If you are trying to get something working, your windows knowledge will not help you.

You might need to troubleshoot problems using the Command Line Interface - similar to windows DOS, but many times more powerful. Fortunately, help is at hand on the incredibly friendly and helpful forums at

I have been running Ubuntu Linux now for 18 months and can't see any reason now to return to windows. Once you get past the mind set of using closed source software a whole new world opens up before you and you realise that amazing things are possible with linux.

I hope you found this article helpful and I hope it inspires you to try out Ubuntu Linux as I did. You won't regret trying it.

Here are some resources:

Distrowatch - News on the latest Linux distributions.

Ubuntu - Download the Ubuntu Linux operating system for your computer

Forums - Go here for help and advice

/wiki/LinuxLinux on Wikipedia

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Big news for all Linux lovers! The latest version of Ubuntu, the Ubuntu 11.04 is going to release today. Ubuntu is one of the most famous Linux Distributions, which is best known for its speed, simplicity and forum support. Canonical's Ubuntu 11.04 "Natty Narwhal" is designed to be a real replacer of Microsoft Windows.

1. Unity Desktop as default UI

2. kernel 2.6.38

It is one of the 4 great news of Linux in April, 2011.

Ubuntu will release Ubuntu 11.04 on April 28.

Yahoo has been official accepted to enter the Linux Foundation on April 21.

Linux releases the new kernel 2.6.38.

The leader of German Insurance, LVM Versicherungen had signed an agreement with Canonical to install Ubuntu Linux in its 10,000 new computers.

Users upgrading from Maverick can expect a great deal of improvements in the overall performance.

3. Improved Software Center

The Software center is one of the major highlights of Ubuntu. One of the reasons why Ubuntu becomes so popular worldwide is its simplicity. Unlike others, users can run the Software center to install or uninstall software easily instead of typing in the complicated codes, which is rather annoying for beginners. The new Software center has integrated with Dash. Users now can comment and vote for the software and thus makes it more convenient for others to choose the right software.

4. Firefox 4

5. Entertainment

In Linux, there aren't so many video games as Windows do. One of the prides of the Linux users is their passion toward the desire for new technology. They may spend much more time on the program work. However, users can fully enjoy the entrainment with Linux for a long time. Music and movies can be played as good as Windows. In Linux, users will need OpenOffice or LibreOffice to make a PowerPoint. To view Microsoft PowerPoint on Linux, a PPT to Video Converter will be helpful.

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