Which Web Hosting should I take?

Thats the most frequent query that I see in most startup forums. No wonder it is, as setting up a domain is the first thing that any tech startup needs to tackle. Hence I decided to write a post on this, giving my answers. This post will help you with the following:

• Registering a domain.
• Understanding different types of web hosting.
• Setting up email

Registering the Domain
While many hosting providers provide free domains, I believe it is always better to buy your primary domain individually rather than tied to any hosting plan. That ways even if you have to switch your hosting provider anytime, you need not worry about the domain. And with domains costing around $10/year, this is a pretty cheap investment.
There is not much of customer service needed from any Domain Registrar, so I simply looked for the cheapest I could find and registered the domains I needed. I used www.domainsearchindia.com, and while the website looks unprofessional and I had to call them to get things done, it got the job done at pretty much the cheapest prices I have seen so far. Lots of registrars would offer you Email Forwarding or Managed DNS hosting services, but you would not need them. The only thing you need after buying the domain name is an ability to change its nameserver to point to your hosting provider, and that comes for free.

Web Hosting
Web Hosting is a different beast. Here you need reliable servers, high uptime, good customer service and cheap prices on top of that. My first advice is to look for hosting in US. 2 reasons for that - first, bandwidth is cheaper in US and hence you can find a cheaper deal. Second, in general the reliability of US hosting providers and their customer care is better than the Indian ones.
There are 3 kinds of hosting - Shared Hosting, VPS Hosting and Dedicated Servers.

Shared Hosting - The cheapest option available and is around $5-10 per month. Basically the server hardware on which your website would reside would also have 400-500 other websites hosted. Such a setup is in general used for hosting blogs or simple sites with low traffic. The hosting provider would offer huge bandwidth and harddisk, however there would be no promises on website loading speed. You can start with this for initial testing as well as till your traffic is low. A lot of people recommend Dreamhost for this. We used Lunarpages, and their service wasn't all that great but it was kind of okay. One piece of advice - look for SSH access. The web admin interface they provide isn't meant for techies.

VPS (Virtual Private Server) Hosting - The server hardware is sliced into 4-5 virtual servers using a virtualization software. So effectively you have your own machine with root access. Internally all the slices still use the same hardware but there are some gurantees on your share of CPU and memory. My friend Prateek suggested an excellent VPS hosting provider VpsFarm. Check out his blog post on why he recommends it. This type of hosting costs around $40 per month and works of medium traffic. A lot of people recommend buying multiple VPS slices for horizontal scaling as your traffic grows.

Dedicated Hosting - You own the whole server hardware. Costs start around $160. We have been using SoftLayer and have been pretty satisfied with that. We moved directly from Shared hosting to Dedicated hosting, primarily because I didn't know abt VPS hosting at that time. My website on Indian Tourism serves quite a lot of static content and VPS may have worked out well for us.

Another advice - Most US sites give out discount coupons/special offers from time to time. Do look out for offers and you may be able to get a good deal.

Setting up Email
Use Google Apps for your domain. Thats free and simplest way to setup your own email@domain-name. You would need to put some CNAME records and MX records in the DNS entries of the Web Hosting provider. If you are on shared hosting, you would need to ask the customer support to do the same for you.

This should solve some of the basic pains of setting up your own domain. One thing to notice is that cost of initial setup is pretty low. A domain name with shared hosting would set you back around Rs. 3000 for an year. That would give you enough time to test your new idea :-)

AVG Antivirus 8 doesn't update

I recently upgraded my AVG 7.5 to 8. I have been using and recommending AVG for home users since a long time now primarily due to two reasons:

• It is free.
• All major antivirus solutions are trying to become all-in-ones with integrated firewall, anti-spyware etc etc. While this is beginner friendly, it also makes them pretty resource hungry. While Avg Pro is in the same race, I still see Avg free as much lighter on resources.
  

Having said that, I also feel that an average Avg user needs to be computer literate.

I didn't face any issues with AVG 7.5 other than the update server being down sometimes. However, I ran into an issue as soon as I installed AVG 8. After a few auto-updates that went fine, it suddenly stopped updating, giving an error message - "Invalid CTF file". At first the AVG update server was down, but this went for longer than I would expect the server to be down.

I googled around a bit and found this. The solution was straight-forward

• Goto C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\avg8\update\download
• Delete the 2 .ctf files there.

And it worked. No issues with AVG 8 after that. However, I am pretty surprised by that AVG has not understood the gravity of the situation and have failed to provide an automatic patch. I agree that this is a free product, but how do you expect your free users to convert to pro if your free product will fail to provide the security that it promises. Issues like these can single-handedly kill a product.

Human Test

Lot of sites ask you to type the characters you see in an image in their form submissions. For example, to put a comment on this blog, you need to do the same.
This test is called CAPTCHA. Its a technique to test for humanity, i.e. it makes sure that a human is filling the form and not some computer bot (automated code).

However, my experience with CAPTCHAs so far is that most of the times it is a test for humans with a 20/2 vision and IQ > 200. Most of these images are done so badly that I am unable to figure out what the text is supposed to be.

Don't believe in what I say? Check out this link for some of the unreadable CAPTTCHAs out there.

Port Forwarding in Airtel Modem Beetel 200BX

Ever since I wrote the article to setup wireless router with the airtel modem, lot of people have asked me to help them with port forwarding. So here is the post to do the same.

When do u need port forwarding:
Typically when you want computers outside your LAN to access your computer. Some examples can be when u set up a ftp server on my machine for other people to access, or you are running a bittorrent client such as utorrent, or when you want to play Age of Empires on the network.

Steps:

• Put an internal static IP on your machine.
  
  
  
  • Open Network Connections. Right click on Local Area Connection and select Properties.
    
  • Now select TCP-IP and click on Properties. Put values as shown. The DNS Server values I have put are that of opendns. You can also put 192.168.1.1 to use the airtel dns.
    
  
  
  
• Configuring the Airtel Modem.
  
  
  
  • open url http://192.168.1.1/main.html
    
  • Advanced Setup -> NAT -> Virtual Servers
    
  • the Server IP would be same as the IP Address above, which is 192.168.1.10 in this case.
    
  • If you want to play Age of Empires, you can just select this from the dropdown (it is pre-configured). Click on Save/Apply and you are done.
    
  • In case the service isn't pre-configured, such as utorrent. Click on Custom Service. Put name utorrent (anything, doesn't matter)
    
  • You would need to put which port to forward. utorrent typically runs on 19556, so put 19556 in all the four text fields i.e. External Port Start, External Port End, Internal Port Start and Internal Port End.
    
  • Choose the protocol. In case of utorrent, and in most other cases, it would be TCP. Click on Save/Apply.
    
  • Thats all. Port Forwarding should start working right away. As always, please write a comment if you reach this step :-)
    

Please note that these steps are applicable only if you are not using any other routers (wireless or otherwise) with your modem.

Update: Yogi has described the process for Beetel 440 TX in comments. Thanks Yogi.

Blog backup service and an error

I just found out that I haven't completed 100 posts yet. The error came in because my Blogger dashboard currently shows "103 posts", while actually its 99 posts and 4 drafts.

So this is the official 100th post. For the record, I have also wrote 9 posts on Technical Advice.

I discovered this error when I was checking out this new service for backing up blogs. BlogBackupOnline looks pretty promising, and it backed up this blog in a breeze. It showed only 99 posts backed up, and thats what gave me the clue.
Check out its review by download squad here.

Setting up Wireless Router with Airtel modem Beetel 200BX

I just bought myself a Netgear WGR614 wireless router. I have heard that configuring wireless routers are pretty easy these days and any non-techy home user can do it easily. While this is a correct statement for most of the cases, unfortunately setting with a wireless router with Airtel broadband in India isn't straight-forward. Also, Airtel customer care helps you with installation the router only if you buy the router from them, which is of almost double cost of what is available in the market and also not of a standard company like Netgear or Linksys.

Without any further comments, here are the steps to make any DSL wireless router to work with Airtel modem Beetel 220BX.

• Make sure that you know the user name and password for the airtel ISP. This is the username and password that the airtel customer care filled in when configuring your router for the first time and asked you to write it somewhere. The username is your phone no (including the std code).
  
• Setting up Beetel 220BX in bridge mode.
• Open url http://192.168.1.1 in browser.
  
• Login using your airtel modem's username and password. Default login and password are admin and password.
• Click on link LAN in the left screen.
• On the right screen, click on disable DHCP server. Now click on save.
• On the left screen, click on WAN.
• On the right screen, you see a single service listed called PPPoE. Click on Edit.
• Now click on Bridge Mode (the last option). Click Next few times and then save.
• Now you will be back to the first screen with the service listed as bridge. Click on Save/Reboot. This will reboot your modem. Wait for 2 mins for complete reboot to happen.
• This completes the configuration for the modem. Now the regular steps as per the wireless router follows.
  
• Now switch off your modem, your wireless router and your computer.
  
• Connect the LAN wires as described by the wireless router manual. Basically the modem's LAN output goes into the router's input. And router's output goes into your computer's LAN card.
• Switch on the modem. Wait for 2 min until its fully started up. Now power on the router. Wait for it to fully start too. Finally turn on your computer. This order is very important. If you are not able to open the url in the next step, this is where you might be at mistake.
  
• Open the url of your wireless router configuration as specified in its manual. In case of Netgear, it's http://192.168.1.1/basicsetting.htm. Default login and password are admin and password.
  
• It will detect your connection as PPPoE. Put the username and password that you saved in the first step above (the airtel ISP). Keep service name as empty. Keep idle timeout as 0.
• Configure your wireless settings and switch on the wireless service.
  
• Setup is complete. Enjoy :-).  And now that your wireless internet is working, why not check out my venture mustseeindia.com - One stop travel guide to India :-)

For more technical people, the airtel modem acts as router and DHCP server too. Putting the modem in bridge makes it only act as a modem and not as a router and DHCP server. Your wireless router is now the new router and DHCP server. So 192.168.1.1 now points to your wireless router and you will not be able to access the modem's admin screen any more.
Also in case, you have done port forwarding or created any virtual hosts or any such stuff on your modem, you will need to do them in the wireless router now.

Update 12/12/2006: This tutorial and my answer pertaining to setting up wireless router with airtel has been chosen as the best answer on Yahoo Answers.
Update 5/2/2007: In case you get stuck, check out the comments of this post, particularly this and this. I haven't verified these though.
Update 12/6/2007: On popular demand, I have written an article to configure port forwarding on the airtel modem here.

Yahoo Messenger nsl school virus

Recently, yahoo messenger is been hit by the W32 Sohanad.B worm. Once it infects a computer, it uses the yahoo messenger of logged in user to send messages to friend list containing a link. Most of these links are for sites nsl-school.org or mytermex.com. If you ever get such a link from any of your friend, don't click on it or your system will be infected too.
As a practice, to safeguard yourself from any of such yahoo messenger viruses, always ask your friend first whether he has sent you any link before clicking on it.
If your system is infected with this virus, you would see frequent sign in/sign off or automatic status change to invisible. I have found few links to help you with removing this.
http://www.geocities.com/avsharath/Removing_W32_Sohana.B_Worm.htm - This seems like the most easy way of removing it. Download and merge the reg file, then delete the offending exe(s).
However, if this does not work for you, you can get a more comprehensive detail for removing it here or here.

P.S. I have found out that these nsl-school links that the virus spreads do not infect your computer if you open them in firefox. Looks like they exploit some IE vulnerability. I have always found it a good idea to make firefox my default browser :-).

Upgraded to Blogger Beta

Blogger recently launched a new beta version with new features like Labels, New Layout etc. As you might have noticed, this blog is now running on it.

The switching process was a breeze. The whole process including updating to a new layout based template took like 30 min, during which I played around with all the new things I could do with it.

The most important feature that compelled me to switch to this beta is the labels support. Now I can label my posts and clicking on a label takes you to all the posts with the same label. There is a labels box in the left hand sidebar which lists all the labels I have created. Hence readers interested in philosophical posts can find all of them together and need not be bothered with the tech posts. This feature was long overdue as most other popular commercial blog services provide it.
This feature also eliminates the need for me to maintain a separate tech blog. Its really difficult for me to maintain a separate tech blog, and hence I would not update the other blog anymore.

There have also been some changes in the template. There is a hierarchical blog archive on the left sidebar which provides much better navigation to the old posts.

Another change is the change in the feed url. In case you use a rss reader, please subscribe to this new feed url. There is also an option to subscribe to all comments on the blog. Or to comments of this individual post.

Overall, I'll give Blogger thumbs up for incorporating some long due changes which brings it at par with the commercial services out there.

Update 2/11/06: Looks like their is some issue with Blogger Beta feeds. The feeds do not show the date and time of the post when it was published. Instead it shows the last updated time of the post. I don't know whether its a feature or a bug but I liked it the earlier way.
Also, I have migrated my feeds to feedburner and updated the feed url links.

Chronic Downloader

Check out this article at downloadsquad. Despite the length of the article, I associate with almost every line of it. Yes, I am a chronic downloader. I also have better names for the same thing - "Freeware Tools Guru" for one ;-)

Back to the unblocked state

So this hasn't been as bad as earlier. Around 2.5-3 years ago, Indian govt. had asked the ISPs to block a certain yahoo group, and the ISPs ended up blocking the whole yahoo groups website itself (deja vu anyone). That block lasted for more than a month. Thankfully this time around, its been only a few days.
While most people do not even remember the above mentioned event, it was good to see that this time around, people used legal ways (one guy asked for clarification under RTI act, another one filed a PIL) to counter this irresponsible step.
Also check out this satirical post by greatbong.

At the same time, another point that one of my friends raises is the indirect effects of terrorism. How many times has it happened that you go to a mall/theatre and get annoyed by the extra security checks. Or talking a walk late at night and constables start questioning you about your intentions. Or this particular case, when thousands of blogs got blocked in India. Several of those blogs would have been revenue sources for their owners. Lots of those blogs had technical articles that help me in my work. This shows how blasts in mumbai can effect work of a software engineer in delhi or revenues of an american guy in California.
I am yet to see terrorism providing any tangible benefits to anyone.

This blog is blocked !!

So here's the story ... Yesterday, I completed 1 year in my current company. I thought about writing a post, but somehow this blog wouldn't open. Then I tried opening gullu's blog but that wouldn't open either. Neither would Anurag's.

Looked like blogger has been down for maintenance. I checked out Blogger Status, but that doesn't show any planned outages/network down for maintenance. Day ends, I come back home, try opening my blog again but it still doesn't open. How big can be an outage?

Today I get to read about this on newspaper (It rarely happens that I get to know technical news via newspapers). But what!!! blogspot is banned in India. What the !@#$%^&. How could this be true???

So India is now in the proud league of Pakistan and Iran. Check out Pkblogs It asks on top

Is your blog blocked in India, Pakistan, Iran or China?

Yes it is. Well, is there a lawyer out there who can tell me how to sue the govt. for its irresponsible actions?

For the time-being, access this blog via this link(I know it's a catch 22 situation, but there is nothing much I can do). I would soon write a complete post on how to circumvent all such situations.

Technical Advice

I have always been one of those computer guys out here to help friends with their daily computer problems. I have seen over time that most of these problems are repetitive in nature. And solving the same problem for 20 people giving them the same instruction set isn't my idea of fun. I could make my like easier by writing the instruction set somewhere so that everyone can access it and get help from it.

Hence I have started my own Technical Advice column where I would be writing my advice for various issues people face with regards to computers. I would also be suggesting techniques to improve productivity/make life easier using software.

I can be contacted at goel.shakti+tech@gmail.com for all such queries.

Computer Guys

"Shakti, my network card isn't working, please fix it."
"Sorry man, I don't know much about hardware."
"kya kahe raha hai Shakti, tu to compu stud hai, theek kar de"

If you are familiar with such conversation, chances are that you are one of those people proclaimed computer guys out there. I was reading this article today and found this real good corollary.

"Did you watch the Raiders game?"

"No, I don't follow football ------"

"What do you think of the new quarterback?"

"Really, football's not my thing. I don't know."

"I thought that you said that you're a sports fan?"

"No, I said that I watched tennis."

"Right, so what did you think of the penalty called in the Raiders game?"

"I watch tennis."

"Why would they call a penalty like that?"

Um.

Interesting Read.

Update 01/02/2006: Check out today's dilbert.

Yahoo opens dot addresses

Yahoo email addresses, like gmail, can finally have dots. Even better is the fact is that you can create an alias to the existing account. So all you 2001, 2002, _delhi, _iitd people out there, grab one here. I already grabbed one you can guess.

Spot the messenger

I absolutely hate MSN messenger, and I use it only because of friends and office colleagues. I am just waiting for the day when msn and yahoo collaboration is complete so that I wouldn't have to use the stupid msn messenger.
Why do I hate it so much? As an example, today when I booted my PC, I saw this:

But I hadn't launched the messenger yet. How come I got logged on to msn without my knowing? Clicking on the popup, I got:


Trying spotting the messenger now in the taskbar/system tray. There is no icon of messenger. I didn't launch it. But still I am logged onto msn, the chat window is open. Knowing the looks (and checking the version), I know its Windows Messenger 4.7 that comes pre-installed with XP. The question is, first, why doesn't this Windows Messenger gets uninstalled when I installed MSN messenger 7.0? Why does MS windows keeps 2 copies of the same program. Second, if it will not uninstall automatically, why its there a manual way of uninstalling it. I have tried using "Add/Remove Windows Component" and what not, but the fact is, it will not uninstall itself, it will log you on without your knowing as soon as you get connected to internet thereby wasting your bandwidth and invading your privacy, and it will make you and your PC susceptible to chat and advertisement attacks.

This is the exact reason why I hate it (and why I haven't upgraded to msn messenger 7.5). So I found this great tool to remove Windows Messenger (though it still have msn messenger 7.0 installed due to friends/colleagues) .

BTW, http://messenger.msn.com doesn't work on firefox due to poor conformity to web standards.

Firefox 1.5 review

Okay, I installed Firefox 1.5, looks good and most of my extensions worked as well. And the ones that don't work, it is showing them as disabled so that I don't lose track of them. There is also an find update option on each extension so that if a future release of the extension is compatible with it, it would be downloaded and installed. I also found this useful link to tweak Gcache extension to work with it.

First impressions, I didn't find much difference between the older version and this. The options screen has changed and it has this really cool setting of "Force links that open windows to open in new tabs". I always find it annoying when clicking on a link opens up a new Firefox window. I liked the way opera had everything contained in itself. Now firefox supports the same feature.

Other than this there is nothing tangible that I can point out, and I still have to figure out some of the extensions stuff, but the web surfing just seems cooler ;-)

Update: Jus tnoticed that upgrading made it lose the search engines that I added. Also, there is no direct way of deleting those search engines (there is an extension though, but I am feeling lazy to google right now)

My Firefox Extensions

This is my last post using Firefox 1.0.x. Firefox 1.5 is out and I will waste no time to install it. Only thing I am skeptical about is whether all the extensions I use will work. So I am listing all the extensions here for now. I'll update the post to add descriptions of each extension later.

1. Flashgot - recommended. I use it with Free Download Manager.
2. Disable Targets for Downloads
3. GreaseMonkey
4. View Rendered Source Chart
5. View Formatted Source
6. Google toolbar for Firefox - recommended.
7. Tamper Data.
8. StumbleUpon
9. Gcache.
10. BookmarksHome
11. SessionSaver - heavily recommended.
12. Yahoo Toolbar
13. ScrapBook - recommended for offline users.
14. FasterFox
15. BugMeNot
16. Web Developer
17. FlagFox.
18. Adblock Plus

I have added recommended to extensions that I simply can't live without. This list and descriptions are likely to change though. Firefox 1.5, here I come.

Sites that should go ajax

Ajax is the latest buzzword in web based applications and after watching the wonder applications created out of it, I fully understand why. I still remember when I first saw google suggest and gmail, I had long discussions with my tech friends trying to figure out how they did it.
While there are lots of products getting developed on this from Web based IM clients to Complete Web Based Office suites, I have a few sites in mind that would be ideal candidates for getting re-designed using ajax.

1. Live Cricket Score sites - Site gets refreshed after every ball being bowled and millions hitting the site and refreshing their browser trying to view the latest score. The kind of load these sites handle can be guessed by the fact that corporate internet connection is much slower on the cricket match day and companies like infosys have an intranet site to display the score (even that overloads) ... My point is ... If its just the score and a 1 line commentary that is updating every min, why refresh the whole browser and fetch non-changing information? If the request that currently fetched 100 kb from the server is made to fetch only 30 kb, the load would be much less.


2. Admin Consoles of Application Servers like Weblogic - Such console provide lots of thick client type functionality and also refresh the browser a lot for showing the current status of various stuff. All those refreshes can be avoided and the interface would be much more better


3. Siebel type applications - Avoid all that java stuff. Clean interface is the key

As and when I get more ideas, I would be posting it here. As of now, try Meebo, a web based IM client.

Firefox extension: Session Saver

It was december 2004 when I first said that "Firefox Rocks". And its still rocking. In this same post, I mentioned the need of "saving the last open windows on exit" feature that I so much loved in Opera. Finally there is an extension that does exactly what I want.

SessionSaver restores your browser -exactly- as you left it, every startup, every time. Not even a crash will phase it.

Though still in early phases, works pretty well. Make sure to install from the forum link that is given at the end of the page. Only issue is that I had to disable LiveHttpHeaders extension. I don't use that extension anyways.

24 hrs of non-internet bewilderness

Due to heavy rains (37 inches) in mumbai in the past 24 hrs, most of the mumbai based ISPs were unable to provide internet services yesterday.
Sitting in office for the whole day without internet can be frustating to a software engineer. It is days like this when you get to know how much connectivity and networking the internet has bought in our lives. Bill Payments, Bank transactions, giving and taking tech/non-tech consultancy to friends, and college style timepass in case one is getting bored :-).

I have not yet been able to write a post on the merits/de-merits of messenger and my take on it getting banned in software companies, but just to think how many phone calls it saves me everyday and how it non-intrusively works as a phone, voice mail, sms service alongwith capabilities of virtual meetings, discussions ... non-intrusive being the keyword, it certainly brings lots of buisness value to a software company.
Just to counter the point that messenger decreases employee productivity, think how much productivity is lost when you are in a meeting and the phone rings every minute. Cause phones are intrusive, there is no way out but to pick them even if they are low priority.
Of course there are downsides, but that is analogous to the dialogue by Om Puri in Maachis "maachis ki tili, khana bhi paka sakti hai aur ghar bhi jala sakti hai"

internet in its full form is a necessity in today's world and some company cannot simply take it away from an employee on security/bandwidth or "employee productivity" concerns.