Tag: internet

Minimal things to keep in mind while choosing domain name

aliencoders domain nameChoosing A Good Domain Name

Choosing a domain name for your site is one of the most important steps towards creating the perfect internet presence. If you run an on-line business, picking a name that will be marketable and achieve success in search engine placement is paramount. Many factors must be considered when choosing a good domain name. This article summarizes all the different things to consider before making that final registration step!

It should be Short and Sweet
Domain names can be really long or really short (1 – 67 characters). In general, it is far better to choose a domain name that is short in length. The shorter your domain name, the easier it will be for people remember. Remembering a domain name is very important from a marketability perspective. As visitors reach your site and enjoy using it, they will likely tell people about it. And those people may tell others, etc. As with any business, word of mouth is the most powerful marketing tool to drive traffic to your site (and it's free too!). If your site is long and difficult to pronounce, people will not remember the name of the site and unless they bookmark the link, they may never return.

 

Consider Alternatives
Unless a visitor reaches your site through a bookmark or a link from another site, they have typed in your domain name. Most people on the internet are terrible typists and misspell words constantly. If your domain name is easy to misspell, you should think about alternate domain names to purchase. For example, if your site will be called "MikesTools.com", you should also consider buying "MikeTools.com" and "MikeTool.com". You should also secure the different top level domain names besides the one you will use for marketing purposes ("MikesTools.net", "MikesTools.org", etc.) You should also check to see if there are existing sites based on the misspelled version of the domain name you are considering. "MikesTools.com" may be available, but "MikesTool.com" may be home to a graphic pornography site. You would hate for a visitor to walk away thinking you were hosting something they did not expect.

 

Also consider domain names that may not include the name of your company, but rather what your company provides. For example, if the name of your company is Mike's Tools, you may want to consider domain names that target what you sell. For example: "buyhammers.com" or "hammer-and-nail.com". Even though these example alternative domain names do not include the name of your company, it provides an avenue for visitors from your target markets. Remember that you can own multiple domain names, all of which can point to a single domain. For example, you could register "buyhammers.com", "hammer-and-nail.com", and "mikestools.com" and have "buyhammers.com" and "hammer-and-nail.com" point to "mikestools.com".

 

Hyphens: Your Friend and Enemy
Domain name availability has become more and more scant over the years. Many single word domain names have been scooped up which it makes it more and more difficult to find a domain name that you like and is available. When selecting a domain name, you have the option of including hyphens as part of the name. Hyphens help because it allows you to clearly separate multiple words in a domain name, making it less likely that a person will accidentally misspell the name. For example, people are more likely to misspell "domainnamecenter.com" than they are "domain-name-center.com". Having words crunched together makes it hard on the eyes, increasing the likelihood of a misspelling.

On the other hand, hyphens make your domain name longer. The longer the domain name, the easier it is for people to forget it altogether. Also, if someone recommends a site to someone else, they may forget to mention that each word in the domain name is separated by a hyphen. If do you choose to leverage hyphens, limit the number of words between the hyphens to three. Another advantage to using hyphens is that search engines are able to pick up each unique word in the domain name as key words, thus helping to make your site more visible in search engine results.

 

Dot What?
There are many top level domain names available today including .com, .net, .org, and .biz. In most cases, the more unusual the top level domain, the more available domain names are available. However, the .com top level domain is far and away the most commonly used domain on the internet, driven by the fact that it was the first domain extension put to use commercially and has received incredible media attention. If you cannot lay your hands on a .com domain name, look for a .net domain name, which is the second most commercially popular domain name extension.

 

Long Arm of the Law
Be very careful not to register domain names that include trademarked names. Although internet domain name law disputes are tricky and have few cases in existence, the risk of a legal battle is not a risk worth taking. Even if you believe your domain name is untouchable by a business that has trademarked a name, do not take the chance: the cost of litigation is extremely high and unless you have deep pockets you will not likely have the resources to defend yourself in a court of law. Even stay away from domain names in which part of the name is trademarked: the risks are the same.

Search Engines and Directories
All search engines and directories are different. Each has a unique process for being part of the results or directory listing and each has a different way of sorting and listing domain names. Search engines and directories are the most important on-line marketing channel, so consider how your domain name choice affects site placement before you register the domain. Most directories simply list links to home pages in alphabetical order. If possible, choose a domain name with a letter of the alphabet near the beginning ("a" or "b"). For example, "aardvark-pest-control.com" will come way above "joes-pest-control.com".

However, check the directories before you choose a domain name. You may find that the directories you would like be in are already cluttered with domain names beginning with the letter "a". Search engines scan websites and sort results based on key words. Key words are words that a person visiting a search engine actually search on. Having key words as part of your domain name can help you get better results.

Note: Check the grade of your website at  http://www.domometer.com/

For aliencoders.org, its showing A+ which manes it is very good domain name.

Source: http://faq.programmerworld.net/

Minimal Basics to know about bandwidth

BandwidthIntroduction

If you are an internet user and If you are the owner of any blog or website then you might have heard the common word “Bandwidth”. Either you go for internet connection or for web hosting plan they will sure deal in this term.

So what exactly this bandwidth is? 
In simple words, it is the amount of traffic that is allowed to you (web space allowed to you from the web hosting server) between your web site and the rest of the internet. The amount of bandwidth a hosting company can provide is determined by their network connections, plans etc. (Free, premium, golden etc kind of plans are there. I saw these in godaddy.com). Hosting on Windows or Linux platform may also depend while providing bandwidth.

Network Connectivity

The internet, in the most simplest terms, is a group of millions of computers connected by networks. These connections within the internet can be large or small depending upon the cabling and equipment that is used at a particular internet location. It is the size of each network connection that determines how much bandwidth is available. For example, if you use a DSL connection to connect to the internet, you have 1.54 Mega bits (Mb) of bandwidth. Bandwidth therefore is measured in bits (a single 0 or 1). Bits are grouped in bytes which form words, text, and other information that is transferred between your computer and the internet.

If you have a DSL connection to the internet, you have dedicated bandwidth between your computer and your internet provider. But your internet provider may have thousands of DSL connections to their location. All of these connection aggregate at your internet provider who then has their own dedicated connection to the internet (or multiple connections) which is much larger than your single connection. They must have enough bandwidth to serve your computing needs as well as all of their other customers. So while you have a 1.54Mb connection to your internet provider, your internet provider may have a 255Mb connection to the internet so it can accommodate your needs and up to 166 other users (255/1.54).

 

Traffic
A very simple analogy to use to understand bandwidth and traffic is to think of highways and cars. Bandwidth is the number of lanes on the highway and traffic is the number of cars on the highway. If you are the only car on a highway, you can travel very quickly. If you are stuck in the middle of rush hour, you may travel very slowly since all of the lanes are being used up.

Traffic is simply the number of bits that are transferred on network connections. It is easiest to understand traffic using examples. One Gigabyte is 2 to the 30th power (1,073,741,824) bytes. One gigabyte is equal to 1,024 megabytes. To put this in perspective, it takes one byte to store one character. Imagine 100 file cabinets in a building, each of these cabinets holds 1000 folders. Each folder has 100 papers. Each paper contains 100 characters – A GB is all the characters in the building. An MP3 song is about 4MB, the same song in wav format is about 40MB, a full length movie can be 800MB to 1000MB (1000MB = 1GB).

If you were to transfer this MP3 song from a web site to your computer, you would create 4MB of traffic between the web site you are downloading from and your computer. Depending upon the network connection between the web site and the internet, the transfer may occur very quickly, or it could take time if other people are also downloading files at the same time.

Ex: the web site you download from has a 10MB connection to the internet, and you are the only person accessing that web site to download your MP3, your 4MB file will be the only traffic on that web site. However, if three people are all downloading that same MP at the same time, 12MB (3 x 4MB) of traffic has been created. Because in this example, the host only has 10MB of bandwidth, someone will have to wait.

 The network equipment at the hosting company will cycle through each person downloading the file and transfer a small portion at a time so each person's file transfer can take place, but the transfer for everyone downloading the file will be slower. If 100 people all came to the site and downloaded the MP3 at the same time, the transfers would be extremely slow. If the host wanted to decrease the time it took to download files simultaneously, it could increase the bandwidth of their internet connection (at a cost due to upgrading equipment).

 

Hosting Bandwidth
In the example above, we discussed traffic in terms of downloading an MP3 file. However, each time you visit a web site, you are creating traffic, because in order to view that web page on your computer, the web page is first downloaded to your computer (between the web site and you) which is then displayed using your browser software (Internet Explorer, Netscape, etc.) . The page itself is simply a file that creates traffic just like the MP3 file in the example above (however, a web page is usually much smaller than a music file).

A web page may be very small or large depending upon the amount of text and the number and quality of images integrated within the web page. For example, the home page for CNN.com is about 200KB (200 Kilobytes = 200,000 bytes = 1,600,000 bits). This is typically large for a web page. In comparison, Yahoo's home page is about 70KB.

How Much Bandwidth Is Enough?
It depends (don't you hate that answer). But in truth, it does. Since bandwidth is a significant determinant of hosting plan prices, you should take time to determine just how much is right for you. Almost all hosting plans have bandwidth requirements measured in months, so you need to estimate the amount of bandwidth that will be required by your site on a monthly basis

If you do not intend to provide file download capability from your site, the formula for calculating bandwidth is fairly straightforward:
Average Daily Visitors x Average Page Views x Average Page Size x 31 x Fudge Factor

If you intend to allow people to download files from your site, your bandwidth calculation should be: [(Average Daily Visitors x Average Page Views x Average Page Size) + (Average Daily File Downloads x Average File Size)] x 31 x Fudge Factor

Let us examine each item in the formula:

Average Daily Visitors – The number of people you expect to visit your site, on average, each day. Depending upon how you market your site, this number could be from 1 to 1,000,000.

Average Page Views – On average, the number of web pages you expect a person to view. If you have 50 web pages in your web site, an average person may only view 5 of those pages each time they visit.

Average Page Size – The average size of your web pages, in Kilobytes (KB). If you have already designed your site, you can calculate this directly.

Average Daily File Downloads – The number of downloads you expect to occur on your site. This is a function of the numbers of visitors and how many times a visitor downloads a file, on average, each day.

Average File Size – Average file size of files that are downloadable from your site. Similar to your web pages, if you already know which files can be downloaded, you can calculate this directly.

Fudge Factor – A number greater than 1. Using 1.5 would be safe, which assumes that your estimate is off by 50%. However, if you were very unsure, you could use 2 or 3 to ensure that your bandwidth requirements are more than met.

Usually, hosting plans offer bandwidth in terms of Gigabytes (GB) per month. This is why our formula takes daily averages and multiplies them by 31 (total days in a month . Maximum is better always).

Summary
Most personal or small business sites will not need more than 1GB of bandwidth per month. If you have a web site that is composed of static web pages and you expect little traffic to your site on a daily basis, go with a low bandwidth plan. If you go over the amount of bandwidth allocated in your plan, your hosting company could charge you over usage fees, so if you think the traffic to your site will be significant, you may want to go through the calculations above to estimate the amount of bandwidth required in a hosting plan.

Source: http://www.findmyhosting.com/

Internet has been blocked in Egypt by its government

Egypt blocked social networking websites earlier. Now they have blocked he internet itself. the Egyptian government has cut its people off from the Internet.
This is the first time that a government has locked its population out of the world wide community of the Internet. I fear this will not end well.

Top 5 Browsers of year 2010/2011(predicted)

Browser imageIn internet world, we can’t get any info without web browsers. Isn’t it? Whatever we are looking for over internet, browsers will only display it. Right now you are reading this blog through some browser for sure. You might have used few different browsers and have rated according to your taste (requirements, comfort, efficient, add-ons support etc) . In 2009, Internet Explore was at the top. Mozilla Firefox at second position and Google chrome was at third position.
But in 2010, situation got changed. According to my observation/opinion (after doing some search on google and doing some analysis using Google analytics), browsers rank would be:

  1. Mozilla FirefoxFirefox

    • Well it’s my one of the favorite browsers too! I like its simplicity, customizing options, navigation speed, tabbed browsing (now common to every browser), integrated search engine etc.
    • It has more than 10 thousand active add-ons  which you can customize and enhance your web browsing experience.
    • It supports HTML 5 audio and video too!
    • It’s there by default in Linux Distros.
    • Its features are more useful and powerful but designed in very simple way, which I like in it.
    • Its much much faster now in comparison to version 3. Try to have Firefox v3.6+ and feel the difference
    • Firefox 3.5+ has integrated private browsing too that you can easily enter and leave the private mode, browsing seamlessly in complete stealth mode. I have tried it few times.
    • Lots of documents are there to support its features, where you can get in detail about its features and add-ons
    • Firefox is a FREE to download and most of the  add–ons are also free.
  2. Google Chrome Google chrome

    • If Google has developed something then how we can deny its greatness, name is enough to describe it. It uses complex features but have made it simple (but not so simpler like Firefox, as I felt).
    • It has also lots of updated features that you may need and tools are there.
    • Private more is also there, similar to Firefox. So security is there of course!
    • I liked its drag and drop feature (anywhere you wish)
    • I liked its another  unique tab feature that simplifies your browsing is “related tabs”. When a new tab opened, the new tab is placed next to the originating or parent tab, rather than at the end of your list of tabs. (This is not there in Firefox yet)
    • It uses “sandboxing”, which makes every tab to run independently in the browser. This is great because if a certain application crashes, it will stay isolated to that tab only, it will not affect any other tabs. Different processes run separately in their own tab. This technique helps  computer to stop  one tab from taking control of all others. Once you close a tab, that process is completely terminated.
    • It uses online task manager feature too, which comes handy for internet geeks.
    • Its also very fast and I have both browsers in my system along with other 3 browsers.
  3. Internet Explorer Internet Explorer

    • Although IE 9 is there in market, but still I like IE 7. IE 8 was a big flop, it seems. As most of the computer market has been captured by Microsoft’s Operating System which has Internet Explorer by default. That’s why, it is mostly used for browsing.
    • Its startup time is bit faster but navigation time is little slower than Firefox and Chrome
    • Now newer version is having add-ons, tabbed feature is also there and integrated search window is present too.
    • Internet Explorer 7+ has enhanced security features. It provides security for the entire family and offers extensive parental controls to protect children against web predators and inappropriate content.
  4. Opera opera

    • Another browser that enticed me towards it.  Best thing is you can configure Opera to fit your needs and your style. Arrange panels, toolbars and buttons and choose from several unique skins and various widgets.
    • Its everywhere, talk about any O.S. and mobile phone; it will be there J . Its one of the only browsers that has interactive voice commands. You can navigate the web by talking to the browser, and Opera will even read text to you.
    • Visual tabs, mouse gesture, opera turbo (double your speed in lower connection), Speed dial are some really amazing features in Opera.
    • Its free and more than 150 million are using it. I didn’t like its downloading features as it starts downloading my torrent files too L (not a big issue though)
  5. Safari Safari

    • Earlier when we use to hear this word, we thought that oh its only for Mac users but now not anymore, anyone can use it. Its look and feel is too cool. After all its apple’s product J
    • I like its colored progress bar on the toolbar that shows how fast a page is loading and how close it is to being complete.
    • You may feel tough at first site but its very user friendly like our top rated browsers
    • Its very fast and popular. Still I need to explorer its various features
    • Its secured too!

Other popular browsers are: -> Avant (UI effect is really cool and its user friendly too), ->Maxthon(It uses Internet Explorer engine internally and features lots of add-ons too. Very popular in China as it’s a Chinese product J ) and ->Flock (social networking website, so its popular because of Facebook, twitter and youtube integration)