Choosing a web hosting company

First off I would be careful of the low price leaders. Think about what you want before signing up. It is much easier to change your mind before you sign up with a hosting company than after.

Make sure you own your domain name. It is very easy to register. Some place like directnic.com or godaddy.com etc…

Questions to ask yourself.

First: What features will I need now and perhaps in the future for both email and a web site?

For example do I want or will I want any dynamic content. Most people eventually end up wanting something dynamic. Even if it is a contact form that stores the contacts. If you think you will make sure they have some type of server side dynamic content engine like Coldfusion v7.0+, ASP.NET v2.0+, PHP v4.x+ and a database like MS SQL or MySQL.

Are you going to have ecommerce? If you are going to have a custom ecommerce system, ask your developers who they recommended. If they want to host it themselves make sure you get a copy of the source files. Most of the time this is a good option since they know their servers and can get to issues easily. 

If not, here are some things to look for. 

Can you use any company for a security certificate or do they only support one brand? This can cost you hundreds.

What payment gateways do they support? Can you pick your own?

Do I want to make up my own web site? Generally I do not recommend this but if you do look for a hosting company that has a wide variety of templates.

What is their customer support like am I just a number?

In email do I want to have access to my email in multiple locations? If so you might consider a provider that supports IMAP protocol.

Do I need web mail? Most have this.

Do they have a calendar option for the web mail?

Do they have shared calendar option?

Do they have a backup mail server in case the primary one goes down? You can check your hosting company for this by running a report at www.dnsstuff.com. Put your domain name (example yourdomain.com NOT www.yourdomain.com) and look for the section that says MX Record you should have two entrees. (example 10 mail.hostname.com and 20 mail2.hosname.com)

How much disk space do they give? I think as long as they give 500MB or more this should not be a major factor.

Rick www.epnetworking.com

CCS Layers (Cascading Style Sheets)

 If you have used them you know they are great, if you have not used them you have got to try.

 About a year and a half ago a company called me to do some web work for them. (No designing because I am very non-aesthetic I do not work on beautiful I work on function. However if the site is all laid out in Photo show then I can put it together but databases and dynamic are what I do.) He said they were looking for someone that could take Photoshop layouts and cut them up and put them into HTML with no tables. I said how can you format the page without tables. That is how ingrained tables have become to us.  So I wanted to know more about this CCS Layers. I knew what CCS were but now Layers. Now I refuse to work with tables with few exceptions. The precision, versatility and the ability to manipulate the layers with JavaScript makes page layouts so much easier. Sometimes that can take longer but you get a much better page.

 I work with a couple of designers that had a hard time moving over the CCS Layers. The biggest hurdle was the centering of the page. This is how I do it if anyone has a better way please post the comment.
These two tags go first.

<div style=”position:relative; width:760px; margin:0 auto;”>
    <div style=”position:absolute; left 100px; top:60px; width:400px;”>

Rest of the page content

    </div>
</div>

Check out this page on how you can use JavaScript to manipulate the Layers.  Link to page.

 One thing that is important do not rely too much on your WYSIWYG editor make sure you look at the math. Calculate distances in pixels not visually. As illustrated in the link above you can change the size, visibility almost any characteristic of the Layer with JavaScript.

 The last thing Layers can help you with SEO or search engine placement.

      Rick www.epnetworking.com

Firewalls

I deal with mostly small companies fewer than 50 employees. When it comes to firewalls I normally recommend 1 of two brands. Sonicwall and Fortinet. Until recently my preference was for Sonicwall. I had a company that needed to upgrade their Fortigate 60 they had just outgrown it. So as I do I recommended Sonicwall 2040. They had several web, a few mail servers and an accounting system they accessed over the internet. Their T1 line was getting over loaded so they got a DSL from Verizon 3meg down and 1meg up. Even though the Fortigate could handle 2 lines it was time to upgrade. What I had planed to do it have all out going trafic (Web 80 and 443 and the accounting system) go out the DSL line and have the rest of the traffic go out the T1 line. This was all fine and good but the Sonicwall 2040 kept dropping the DSL line. If I hooked up the DSL line to the Forigate or a computer it was just fine. I worked with Sonicwall for something like 3 months and they sent a new unit etc. etc. we were never able to get it to work.

They got a Forigate 200A and it has performed beyond my expectation with few exceptions. They have many web sites, 2 mail servers, site to site VPN’s, Dial up IPSEC VPN’s, SSL VPN, Content Filtering and more coming off the same unit.

To Sonicwall’s credit (this is the reason I may still use them) they let them return the unit to who they purchased it from and refunded all their money. Sonicwall still seems to have has a leg up on SSL VPN’s since they just purchased Aventail.

Just my options

     Rick www.epnetworking.com

Coldfusion, ASP.NET and PHP

I have used all of these and my personal favorite is Coldfusion. I know you have to pay for it but you get what you pay for. This is the most mature product out there. Enterprise class, cross platform feature rich development platform. Look at the operating systems it supports, Windows, MAC, Linux, Solaris and AIX. Flash-remoting, Flash Form (compiles the swf on the fly) clustering, PDF support, J2EE, XML form etc… Ok again you have to pay for it.

ASP.NET. Micro$oft what more can I say. But still I do like it some of the features and it is very expandable. There is a lot pre-made modules for like payment gateways. One that save me a lot of work was for Paymentech by nSoftware.

PHP. It is free and widely used. Many many pre-made modules for it. But in my option the hardest one to develop in. I think Microsoft is easier for me since I have worked with their other languages they have so it is not really a fair comparison.

Just my option….

           Rick    www.epnetworking.com

About me

 Just thought I would put down something’s I have learned over the years. I have been working with PC’s since the mid 1980’s and remember DOS 3.x, 5 and 6. What we used to do to get as much memory below the 640K mark. Anyone remember “memmaker”?

 I remember getting into Novell at the time. v2.15. Man was that a lot of disks. You had to put the first 5 disks in 20 time before it would build the kernel. The first server I set up at home had a whapping 4 MB of RAM. I got that because I upgraded a bunch of 286 systems to 386 40 MHz DX AMD. I got to keep all the left over parts. My first IBM Compatible PC had 1 MB of ram and ran at 12MHz with a 40 MB HDD. I was styling. 2400 B modem was a far cry from the 300 b I had with my Radio Shack COCO which had 64K of ram and no disk drives at all. Then there was the Radio Shack model 4 I got 2 180K disk drives.

 I had a job back in the 80’s and I used a 12 MHz 286 PC to manage a service department for a major windows manufacture. (real windows not software) I used a spreadsheet Lotus 123 v1.2 and I would make a new sheet each time the tech’s had a service call. Soon I ran out of disk space because of all the spreadsheets. I found myself looking for a better way. I came across a little product call dBase III by Ashton-Tate.  Aaaa Ashton-Tate they made some many mistakes…. But dBase III was a great product. The only problem was when you start it up all you saw on the screen was this without the quote marks. “:” At the bottom left hand corner of you screen that was all you saw. I though what am I supposed to do with this? It was either learn to code or die. I learned to write code. Thus start my love of databases and programming. Then I moved to FOXPRO WOW what a product I still have a customer today working off FOXPRO 2.6.

 Back in the day when a 14.4 B modem was lightning I still had my 2400 B modem. If you were a Sysop (system operator of a BBS) you could but it for 1/2 price. I saved my pennies and purchased my very own 14.4 modem for 1/2 price at $499.00. I got into USENET news groups through UUCP. I even connect to the internet through a local collage. I remember my first web browser. Mosaic… I was able to browse the WWW which was not so wide back then. I was not the easy nav we have today. But as time went on my boss wanted to get an internet connection at the office I told that would be too expansive but he insisted. They also wanted a way to sell their products on-line back in the mid 90’s. I found Cold Fusion (as it was called then now Coldfusion) v1.5. I match this with an Access database and then moved the MS SQL later. They are still using that original program to sell products using Coldfusion 5. I would love them to move to Coldfusion 8 but I do not think they will spend the money since I do not work there anymore.

Now and then I come across some neat stuff and I will put it down. Rick    www.epnetworking.com