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.

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.

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.

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.

Tools: Image Viewer

Mirror mirror on the wall,
which is the best image viewer of them all
No two minds about this, its irfanview.

This killer app has everything that a non-graphic professional will ever need in his life. Support for every image format on earth, ability to convert between various image types, resize, resample, crop, batch resize, batch rename, reducing colours (changing to greyscale etc.), scanner support, all this and more packed in a meagre 800 Kb setup. Try opening any large image file, and you will know why this freeware gives any commercial tool like acd see a run for money.

Continuing on my purpose of blog post, I have decided to share information about some of the software tools I use that may be useful to others. This post is the first in this regards, All such posts will have a title starting with "Tools:"