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How Was That Web Site Made?

Oct/22 in All Posts, Online Tools, Web Hosting Tutorials

Built With It happens from time to time.  You see an amazing web site, and you ask yourself, “How was that web site made?”.  Now, instead of hunting through the web site source code you can plug the domain name into this simple tool – and get all the information you need.

BuiltWith.com is a perfect companion if you want to do a little spying on how a web site was made and what is running behind it.  From the web site, all you need to do is type in the domain name and hit the “Lookup” button.  For an example, lets spy on thewhir.com to see what it was built with.

Under server information, we can find out it is using IIS 6.0.  So that would tell us they are using a Windows-based server to host from.  For tracking, we can see they use Google Analytics – which is never a bad thing.  Under framework, they are running Adobe ColdFusion and ASP.net.  As you can see – this gets pretty interesting for those of us who are geeky enough to have the desire to see what is going on “under the hood”.

From the BuiltWith.com web site, you can also get quick and easy access two two more tools, AboutUs.org and WebsiteGrader.com.

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Find Secret Data Center Locations!

Oct/21 in All Posts, Online Tools, Web Hosting Tutorials

datacenter-map

Not all tools have to be useful, that can just be fun to play with too.  DataCenterMap.com is one of those geeky hosting tools you may just want to play with on a Sunday afternoon when you have some free time.  As you can see, it is a big Google mash-up map with a ton of datacenter located on it.

All you have to do to see more is zoom in.  You’d be amazed by the number of data centers out there.  Once you find one you want to know more about, just click on it’s spot on the map and you can pull up the actual location as well as the profile on it and their official web site link.

Here is a little more about the project from the developers:

Data Center Map, is a free web service for companies around the world in need of housing / co-location space, whether it is just for hosting of one server, a rack cabinet, a cage or a dedicated room. I created Data Center Map because I, as co-owner of a hosting company, felt that there was a need for such a service in this constantly growing market.

If the map isn’t doing it for you – you can also use this list to navigate datacenters by country:

http://www.datacentermap.com/datacenters.html

At the present data and time they have indexed 980 co-location data centers from 50 different countries.  To play with this tool yourself, go to DataCenterMap.com.

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Free Performance, Availability and Traffic Monitoring

Sep/19 in All Posts, Online Tools, Web Hosting Tutorials

There is a company out there providing for free, performance monitoring, availability monitoring, and traffic monitoring?  Yes, there is.  Mon.itor.us might have a silly name, but it delivers awesome and free monitoring tools for your web site.

Here is how the web site describes the services they provide:

We provides a “24 x 7″ network and web site monitoring service to help its users quickly identify faults and deficiencies to ensure continuous operations of their IT infrastructure and maintain business operations that provide the ultimate web experience.

From within an Ajax-powered dashboard, you can check server performance and availability, generate uptime reports, track visitors, CPU, memory and other system resources you need to know about.

Mon.itor.us is currently monitoring over 134,000 web sites right now, and I am sure there will be many more to come in the future.

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Best FeedBurner Analysis Tools

Sep/18 in All Posts, Online Tools, Web Hosting Tutorials

So you want to gain a little more information about your FeedBurner powered feed?  There are several free tools from around the Web that will allow you to do just that.  Here are three out there that Google hasn’t provided to FeedBurner users yet.

Blog Perfume’s Feed Analysis

With the toolset that Blog Perfume is providing, you can see some details statistics on just about any FeedBurner feed.  You can see the number of subscribers per month, the hits, subscribers and views from a day to day basis, the number of subscribers depending on the day of the week, and more.

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Yoast’s Feed Circulation Graphs

Yoast takes a simpler approach and just gives you a graph based on the number of subscribers that you have.  Type in your feed name (what follows after the feeds.feedburner.com/) the time frame and the width of the graph.

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Example: Web Hosting Show’s Subscription Number Graph for 6 Months

Feed Compare

This one might be my favorite of them all.  Feed Compare takes your subscription numbers and compares them with anybody else who uses FeedBurner to power their RSS feeds.  You can give it up to four feeds to compare too.  You can view stats for up to 1 month to 24 months, so there should be no concern about getting the big picture when it comes to this alternative FeedBurner stats tools.  For example, you can see the Web Hosting Show’s RSS feed and The WHIR’s RSS feed are pretty close in comparison.

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Example: Web Hosting Show’s RSS Feed vs The WHIR’s RSS Feed

For many of these tools, you must have awareness API turned on for your feed in question.  If your trying to look at data from somebody else’s feed, and you get an error – this is probably the reason why.

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Web Site Monitoring with Site24x7.com

Sep/12 in All Posts, Online Tools, Web Hosting Tutorials

With both paid and free versions, Site24x7.com looks to be a great web site monitoring package.  They do monitoring of uptime and performance of your web sites, online services and servers.  They also promise to deliver instant alerts the moment something goes wrong.

You can set the monitoring tools to check the web site in question you wish to monitor in intervals ranging from 5 to 60 minutes or above.

If the worst might happen, and you need to be told, here are the various ways they can alert you to trouble:

  • E-mail
  • RSS
  • SMS Messages

For those of you just wanting to beta test the service; when you first sign up, you are given a fully functional, 15-day trial account. At the end of 15 days, your account will be downgraded to free unless you upgrade to either Standard or Premium account.

Check out the screenshots, then give them a shot at Site24x7.com.

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4 More Ways to Search Rapidshare, Megaupload and More!

Sep/09 in All Posts, Online Tools, Web Hosting Tutorials

After the popularity of the first time I talk about some of the search engines for the most popular file hosting solutions out there (such as Rapidshare and Megaupload), we got a demand for people wanting more.  As a man who like to deliver to people what they want, here are five more ways to search these free file hosting solutions.

filefieldnet

FileField.net gives you a ton of tags to start out with, and a pretty simple interface to go by.  There is a search box of course, and the results were pretty easy to figure out.  They say they search rapidshare.com, megaupload.com, sendspace.com, yourfilehost.com, badongo.net, mediafire.com, zshare.net, 4shared.com, depositfiles.co, and milefactory.com.

oplahol

OplaHol.com gets at least the award for the funniest name.  The standard search box interface is there.  What is nice about this one is it also gives you social bookmarking links and video thumbnail previews on the right side.

filecrop

FileCrop.com offers searching for both Megaupload and Rapidshare.  It works a little differently than most.  It spiders pages, looking for links to free file uploads and then adds them to it’s database.

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RapidshareData.com is our last one for today.  From the top of the page it lets you choose what type of file you are looking for (audio, video, docs, pictures and more) and then the regular ol’ search box.  Quick and easy to use, but nothing much to separate it from the competition.

Word of warning, some of these links may contain links to adult material.  So as always, be careful what you click and with anything you find Online where you can’t verify the source, be sure to scan the files with your anti-virus to make sure there is nothing bad inside.

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Import POP3 Accounts into Gmail

Aug/28 in All Posts, Online Tools, Web Hosting Tutorials

For those of you who have your own POP3 e-mail account that came with your web hosting for your web site – would you like to import that mail into Gmail?  Using Gmail’s Mail Fetcher, you can download messages from up to five other email accounts, centralizing all your e-mail in Gmail.

First thing you must do is login to the Gmail web site, and then Click Settings at the top of any Gmail page, and open the Accounts tab.

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Now on the Account web page, scroll down to the Get mail from other accounts section, click Add another mail account. Now Gmail will walk you though a wizard (like with any other e-mail client) to gather information about your e-mail account.

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Now personally, I would make sure you check not to keep your messages on the server.  This way all your messages are sent to Gmail and stored there, and you don’t have to worry about cleaning out your server side mail from time to time.

Once you have finished with the wizard, hit click Add Account.  Now you can use your e-mail from your web hosting account with Gmail.  If you are a fan of Gmail, this will keep you from having to jump from client to client to get your e-mail all checked.

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LinkedIn Group Connects Hosting World

Aug/13 in All Posts, Online Tools, Web Hosting Tutorials

1218376496 Connecting the massive amounts of people, from the server grunts to the high dollar CEOs of the hosting industry isn’t such a bad goal.  Sure, it might be a big one but that is what the Hosting Industry Organization is looking to do.

Based around what started as a group on LinkedIn.com, this project has flourished into an organization to connect people in the web hosting world.  Around the end of July, the Hosting Industry Organization setup a member directory, classifieds, a job posting board, and a hosting companies for sales section.  They are also looking for suggestions, just in case you have any other big ideas to pass to them.

Just looking over the directory section of the web page, they have listings for:

  • Brokers/M&A for the Hosting Industry
  • Datacenters and Rack Space
  • Marketing Services
  • Job Resources
  • Server Hardware Providers
  • and more!

Right now membership stands at over 2,000+ with, I’m sure, more members joining every day.  Want to sign up?  Use this special link to do so now.

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Joyent’s Connector for Online Collaboration

Aug/01 in All Posts, Online Tools, Web Hosting Tutorials

I have always had a soft spot in my hosting heart for Joyent’s services because they are not afraid to try something outside of the box.  One good example of this would be the Connector service they provide.

It is a collaboration suit the provides cool features such as searching, tagging and RSS feeds they they say will make your life easier.

bookmarksOthers

The purpose and point here is to have a one place stop for a team of people to meet together and post their work and ideas Online in the same spot.  Here is a little more about the product from Joyent’s web site:

The Connect app ties everything together. It’s a place where items from any of the other parts of the system — mail messages, contacts, events, files — can be collected into related groups. Smart groups in the Connect app pull in items from any of the other apps on the system, from any users, allowing you to easily manage the items related to a project.

They do provide a free service if you want to just try things out, and then they go up from there in features.  The set of tools they provide is well worth checking out for any team of people who want to collaborate online.

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Live Chat Providers for Web Hosts

Jul/31 in All Posts, Online Tools, Web Hosting Tutorials

Best Live Chat Providers Live chat, in one way, shape or form seems to be a perk that many web hosting customers are looking for.  If you are a web host though, how do you know which live chat tools are the best?  Here are some of my favorite live chat providers out there that seem to get a lot of love from the web hosting community.

Kayako Live Response – When it comes to live chat support, Kayako is one of the best.  Not only do they provide the web interface for it, they also have a desktop client to interact with the service too.  Other nice features include desktop sharing, quick responses and a VoIP softphone add-on.

ProvideSupport.com – This tool is one of the cheaper ones out there, but don’t let that fool you.  They too provide some visually appealing tools as well as chat transcripts, multiple chat support, and easy integration into any web hosting site.

LiveZilla – For those web hosts out there on a budget, I do have one free live chat support option for you.  LiveZilla might have a few less frills than the paid for applications, but still deserve consideration.  The fact that it is free gives it a big green check mark in the “good things about it” column too.

What live chat solutions do you use?

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