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Domain Name Overview

As long as you want to put up a website you will consider to purchase an excellent domain name. When your business grows and your website got more and more traffic, your domain name will be more and more valuable. If you got the domain name from a good registrar then there's no worry about your domain, however if you're dealing with a bad registrar, it's possible to lose your valuable domain name and get negative effect to your business.

For any reason, domain name is your top property besides website.

Tips on how to register a domain name

1. First and the most important thing is to find a qualifying domain registrar. Don't register your domain through domain reseller for any low price, dealing with the top level domain registrar is always recommended if you like to launch a successful website. Top level qualifying domain registrar could be found on this ICANN list. registration names not listed here are mostly resellers.

2. Be as short as possible. Short domain name will let people to remember it easily and surely will gain more traffic if people found your domain interesting.

3. Make sure to choose the name according to your business. For example if you're running a hosting company you should get a domain name related to hosting stuff. People would think your website is professional and search engine will give your website higher rank since some keywords are included in the name.

What's domain hack?

Domain hack is always mentioned when we talk about domain security, From wikipedia, domain hack is an unconventional domain name that combines domain levels, especially the top-level domain (TLD), to spell out the full "name" or title of the domain.

But something we experienced more is this, if you have a domain name for example webhost.com, some people when wants to gain traffic and popularity might register webhosts.com if it's available. We found there're many similar domains on the web but they're owned by different people or communities. It's highly recommended to register all similar domains if you're going to launch a branding webbsite.

Who's the best domain registrar?

When we say the best, it's actually referring to several ones but not a single registrar since there're too many top level registrars all over the world. For security and customer service, we highly recommend the following domain registrars.

Godaddy – It's known to almost every people who have dealt with domain name, godaddy is by far the largest domain registrar in the world and their domain registration frequency is counted per second. Good reasons to choose godaddy as your registrar – ICANN certified provider, User friendly management system, Full DNS control.. and more! Godaddy is also one of the largest web hosting providers for strong technologies in the industry.

Enom – This provider is almost recommended by every web hosting company. For reseller hosting company, Enom is always the only option for domain registration, The most famous web hosting company with Enom enabled are hostgator, greengeeks etc.

Networksolutions – It's one of the earliest companies certified by ICANN and capable of handling all Top level domain registration. The thing you need to note is, networksolutions is indeed qualifying for domain registration but their web hosting services are not so good, It's not recommended to host your domain with networksolutions if you have registered with them

Tucows – Another famous top level domain registrar. More and more people are dealing with this company for better services. It also has fantastic pre-designed API for resellers. We dealt with one of it's famous resellers before – webhost4life, although this company was sold but it did offer excellent service for both domain registration and web hosting.

NameCheap – A leading domain registrar that's recommended by many web masters, it's best for domain protection and fast services if you want to manage domain names professionally.

The above domain registrars are currently list on top by most webmasters including us. You won't go wrong by registerring your domain names with any of them.

Tips: domain registration and hosting are different things, when you got the right domain with the right registrar, you may have to make a research for qualifying hosting provider.

Coolhandle Introduction

Who's coolhandle? Coolhandle was started in 2001, in 2010 they're merged into ProNetHosting.net and formed a completely new group. Coolhandle is currently managed by experts from both companies. If you read some reviews about coolhandle before, most would be outdated. Our independant coolhandle review will help find out if it's a good web hosting company to deal with and how we can benefit from their service.

Coolhandle Company story

CoolHandle was first founded by a group of IT Professionals lead in 2001. Their goal is to offer stable and reliable web hosting services and achieve customer’s 100% satisfaction. Unlike many hosting companies who like to blow up their services, coolhandle always followed their restrict rules and offer honest hosting plans. What you see will be what you get with coolhandle service.

For the past years, coolhandle has been growing up quietly. Why quietly? Because they don't blow up their service, they serve their customer well and no much negative feedbacks on the web. That's why you can't get too much information about this company on various hosting forums. To offer better service and serve their client better, coolhandle and ProNetHosting.net got merged together(both the business and staff).

What's offered by Coolhandle Hosting?

Coolhandle is standard cpanel linux hosting provider and provides leading hosting features includes the following

• Unlimited space & bandwidth
• One free domain name for life
• Unlimited database and Email accounts
• Multiple domain names hosting
• Cpanel hosting will all add-on services
• 99.9% uptime guaranteed
• 30 days money back guarantee
• Price starts at $3.95/mon!

There're total of 3 shared hosting plans offered by coolhandle. They're limited with different offers such as parked domain, number of mysql database and email accounts etc. They just offer what you needed and keep their server healthy. You just need to pick up the perfect plan with your exact requirements.

Besides shared hosting service, coolhandle also gives out reseller and VPS hosting opportunity. With only $19.95/mo you get all necessary tools and service to start your own web hosting service. Coolhandle configured their web servers with cloudlinux which is the best choice for hosting server. Cloudlinux is deeply optimized for server performance and security according to hosting service requirement.

The difference with Coolhandle is they provide dedicated IP service independantly at $4.99/mo. The price is too high while we can get this service for only $2/mo from many coolhandle competitors.

Where is Coolhandle Datacenter located?

Coolhandle datacenter is located in the heart of Los Angeles, in the same building as 12 of the nation's largest Internet providers. CoolHandle also maintains multiple Tier-1 upstream providers to ensure the bandwidth health. When coolhandle is merged into ProNetHosting, their datacenter and the number of hosting servers are all double sized. definitely they have built up a long term relationship among their partners and clients.

Is Coolhandle Cloud Hosting Provider?

No, interview for their marketing director tell us they're still testing this technology and haven't put on live production yet. It's alright like they always did, they offer stable and reliable hosting services to all clients. The negative example would be sitecloud, it's rated as top cloud hosting provider for some periods but finally have to close service due to the lack of weak technologies.

How do we think about coolhandle?

Coolhandle is so nice when we request for a test account to check their services. The result is we're 100% satisfied, fast server + fast service, it's definitely qualify for our top 10 list. If you like to check how it's working, I put my personal blog master4life.com on coolhandle server, you can check how it looks like.

Visit www.Coolhandle.com and check hosting details now >>

DDos Attack Introduction

In short definition, a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS attack) is an attempt to make a computer resource unavailable to its intended users. During a DDOS attack your website may become unreachable since the server is being flooded with bogus requests and cannot process the valid ones. The purpose of ddos attack is to put down your service, your server and data are still in security.

As long as your website is online you will need to care about uptime end security. A Ddos attack protected hosting service is really needed if you're running a business site that requires extremely high online rates.

For anti-ddos attack purpose, you have to support your hosting server via leading datacenter service that's backend with powerful hardware/network equipments. There're several Excellent datacenters on the globe who is famous for ddos protection and high performance. The most popular one would be softlayer.

Softlayer – Softlayer is composed by multiple datacenters in USA including theplanet which is the most famous one before merging into SL. Softlayer is also the biggest datacenter in the world. Their most popular datacenters location for anti-ddos attack includes Dallas and Houston. The two DCs are actually the main network backbone of several big hosting companies such as Hostgator & Arvixe. To deal with ddos attack, softlayer is equipped with following advantages

• 24×7 monitoring over server/network
• Central traffic control and outage alerts
• Quick switch of attacking via DNS and hardware firewall
• Leading server structure to deeply protect web server

In order to deal with ddos attack, SL setup very complex management structure over hosting servers and networking. They do everything they can to lessen the impact on their service and try to speed up propagation as much as possible.

You can also check out the TOP datacenter list for other popular datacenters with ddosk attack protected.

Best dDos Attack Protected Web Hosting Provider

By understanding the best datacenters above we have learned that Hostgator and Arvixe are currently the best choice in our list. Both Hostgator and arvixe offer linux and windows hosting solutions with leading server production. If you're looking for best web hosting service with best server protection, hostgator and arvixe will be the best choice today!

How do they protect their server besides the datacenter advantages? They actually configured side by side protection from both hardware and software level besides datacenter specs. Their basic configuration includes the following

• Intrusion Detection System(IDS) – It's installed on every hosting server to detect any security vulnerability of your website
• Daily Rootkit Audits – All servers are scanned daily for any potential security weakness and hole and reports will be sent to admin for quick fix.
• Mod_security – It's default installation for all apache web server. They also introduced similar products for IIS server to prevent http attack

Their server and network admin are monitoring all servers from datacenters directly to ensure there will be quick response in case attacking happend.

Go to http://www.hostgator.com for ddos protection details
Visit http://www.arvixe.com for security hosting plans

More about dDos Attack

Ddos attack is to send numorous requests to server and create high traffic to lead it down. By understanding this we learned that the only method to deal with the attack is to prepare a lot of servers and bandwidth to balance the bad traffic and finally protected the production server. However since it will require many physical equipments to deal with the attck, it's not quite possible for a small company for monetary and technical reasons. When ddos attack comes, they have no good ways but to shutdown servers directly.

Of course, since there're ways of attack, the solutions are always more. In order to protect your server not to be affected by ddos attack, you must find the right ISP who has enough resources to drive away the attack. Once a DDos attack is detected and confirmed by the Network Operations Center they will have the service to reroute the bad traffic to the ddos protection system but allows the legitimate traffic to continue to its original destination. When the attack has subsided, the original direct path between the destination and the rest of the Internet is restored.

dDos attack resources

• How to do ddos attack
• How to stop ddos attack

URL Rewrite Introduction

In short, URL rewirte is to generate clean website URLs for better management and SEO. Mostly you would like to make long URLs short and dynamic urls to be static. As for URL rewrite engine, the most popular would be mod_rewrite with Apache web server and Rewrite module on IIS web server.

What's URL rewrite web hosting? Means the hosting server is compatible with your URL rewrite rules and ideally they will provide guidance on how to make full use of this advantage with their service.

Best URL rewrite web hosting

Best web hosting for URL rewrite support goes to Arvixe LLC. They created web servers with latest server production and leading technologies and fully compatible with asp.net and php scripting. You can upload your rewrite rules directly to hosting space and it will be working fine

How does URL Rewrite work?

Normally a specific resource can be accessed via multiple ways. If you have defined some URL rewrite rules for your website urls then once the website address is requested from client end the URL rewrite module will convert it to a URL that you pre-defined.

Why URL rewrite?

URL rewrite will clean your web URLs and let people easier to remember. More important, it's quite search engine friendly. For people who's doing SEO, URL rewrite is a must when they optimize your website. So basically, as long as your like your website to be known by many people on internet you should use url rewrite technologies.

URL rewrite rules for wordpress

Wordpress url rewrite should be used most frequently by people since wordpress itself is being used more and more and has default url rewrite settings. But wordpress rewrite rules are quite different under different web servers. Here I'd like to post the rules under Apache web server and IIS web server.

Wordpress url rewrite under IIS6 can be done via a 404 error page and it's the best way so far, code below:

<?
$qs = $_SERVER[‘QUERY_STRING’];
$pos = strrpos($qs, '://');
$pos = strpos($qs, '/', $pos + 4);
$_SERVER[‘REQUEST_URI’] = substr($qs, $pos);
$_SERVER[‘PATH_INFO’] = $_SERVER[‘REQUEST_URI’];
include('index.php');
?>

Under IIS7 web server, as long as the url rewrite module is installed and allow custom override, you only apply the "permalinks" directly from wordpress admin, the final codes generated is the following:

<system.webServer>
    <rewrite>
      <rules>
        <rule name="wordpress" patternSyntax="Wildcard">
          <match url="*"/>
          <conditions>
            <add input="{REQUEST_FILENAME}" matchType="IsFile" negate="true"/>
             <add input="{REQUEST_FILENAME}" matchType="IsDirectory" negate="true"/>
          </conditions>
          <action type="Rewrite" url="index.php"/>
        </rule>
      </rules>
    </rewrite>
</system.webServer>

The Rules under apache server is the cleanest comparing to IIS settings and you don't have to pre-define it. it will automatically generated to .htaccess file. The final rules like the below:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

Since I get many requests from people who's using IIS7 & IIS8 hosting for wordpress and ask how to make the url rewrite working. I just post the codes above. To reduce the time for the trouble shooting, you should find a qualified hosting provider who can support url rewirte. For IIS7 hosting with url rewirte support. We highly recommend Arvixe, arvixe IIS7/8 hosting is fully url rewirte compatible, you can define the rules as you like as long as it's correct.

Check out www.Arvixe.comfor plan details

read Arvixe reviews

asp.net MVC Overview

ASP.NET MVC is a part of the ASP.NET Web application framework. An MVC Application is designed and implemented using "Model, View, Controller"

ASP.NET MVC brings more power to ASP.NET development and make it more efficient to put out a live .net production. It gives you the following outstanding advantages:

* Complete control over your HTML Markup
* Enables rich AJAX and jQuery integration
* Allows you to create SEO-friendly URLs for your site
* Makes Test Driven Development (TDD) easy

Asp.net MVC3 advantages

ASP.NET MVC 3.0 is a framework for building scalable, standards-based web applications using well-established design patterns and the power of ASP.NET and the .NET Framework. MVC 3 is by far the newest version released by Microsoft. Asp.net MVC 3.0 is compatible with all older versions mvc frameworks. Json (JavaScript Object Notation) is a lightweight data-interchange format which is introduced into Asp.net MVC3.

Arvixe Asp.net MVC3 Hosting Features

Arvixe is awarded the best Asp.net MVC3 hosting provider with leading support for asp.net technologies as well as other windows applications. With arvixe you get dedicated application pools for each of your hosted website for the best guaranteed performance. You will get following leading features from arvixe asp.net mvc 3.0 hosting plan:

• Unlimited Space / Unlimite Data Transfer
• Multiple domains hosting
• One FREE domain registration for life
• 24×7 smart and knowlegeble tech support
• Fully compatible with all ASP.net MVC 3 applications
• Up to 60 days money back guarantee!

Read arvixe reviews

Asp.net MVC3 Hosting Requirements

The server must be 2003 at least and 2008 is the best, You're also required to have Asp.net 4.0 pre-installed on the server end. Since it's going to production, the MVC3 hosting server should be as powerful as possible, Server 2008 R2 is ideal choice.

What Makes up a Good Asp.net MVC3 Web Hosting?

A qualified Asp.net MVC3 hosting provider should have the following minimum features enabled.

– Server 2008 (R2 is the best)
– Unlimited Disk space
– Free Sql server database
– .NET 4.0 and older versions concurrent installed
– Silverlight 4.0
– Asp.NET Framework 4
– WebMatrix compatible
– IIS Manager Access
– MS Web Deploy
– URL Rewrite

So based on above rules, the search and research is finally located at arvixe asp.net mvc3 hosting plan. Arvixe is by far our most recommended hosting providers who can support both windows hosting and linux hosting.

ASP.net mvc 3.0 resources

• Learn more about MVC 3.0
• Mvc 3.0 release announcement