My Hosting Experience

My Hosting Experience

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Let us share our hosting experiences with you. When we started with web hosting our website was a collection of static HTML pages and we chose a window based host known by name of stafi.net in India and they provided us with a first web control panel of our life, The Helm. We use to create static pages and use to upload and download them to STAFI with the help of cute FTP, our first ftp client suggested by one of our team member, who is currently working as a web marketing lead. But as our business was growing on the website, there was a requirement to add more pages and in this way hundreds of HTML pages were collected. Finally situation occurred where we were looking to make changes to footer and hence we got stuck. Now how to make changes to hundreds of pages. So, we were looking for solution, so that we could distribute pages into various modules and use the same module for all hundred pages. As we were the part of an e-commerce company, one person came to us with a solution known as PHP-Nuke. And then we studied and understood the power of dynamic website. With a dream to start working on dynamic website, we started from scratch, and find out that we need a server machine where we need to install apache, php and mysql to host a website. So we took hardware and installed fedora core 4 linux distribution by burning ISO image into DVD and running it. After installing fedora we configured apache to host webpages, mysql daemon to host mysql databases and PHP 4. We downloaded PHP-Nuke source code and added it to the document root and then installed it by adding database connection details. Vikash was the name of person who was working as a system administrator, who assisted me in performing the task. And finally I got PHP-Nuke live on that server machine. After the whole development process, I came to know that we need a DNS to set name into IP address record for our website. In addition, the IP address we were using was a private IP. We got stuck there as our knowledge level was not permitting us to go for in-house hosting for dynamic website. So we chose a host, which was providing dynamic website hosting as a nominal cost. Still we were were working on the static websites doing search engine optimization, designing activities for those hundreds of pages. With completion of an intranet setup by configuring FTP using vsftpd, I came into the world of Networking and Telecommunication as a web project leader and got my first dynamic host as Net4India for managing a dynamic website and shifting it from Indiatimes server. Using my expertise in embedded development and Intranet development skills, I setup and developed dynamic corporate website. Developed several automation tasks to sync databases, performing them using CRON. In additional time of nights, learned routers and firewall configuration which was required to publish machine on private IP to public static IP provided by our ISP. So after learning, port forwarding and network address translation on the gateway devices, we configured intranet server again, this time using Redhat Enterprise Edition. Configured almost all the services required to setup a complete hosting server like sendmail, dovecote, PHP 4/5, MySQL 4/5, Apache, Named, Squid, phpmyadmin and after putting the mirror of dynamic site on it, I published it on static public IP. As DNS was running on the same machine, I configured it to set A, CNAME, NS and MX records. Sendmail was running as SMTP after lot of RND with sendmail.mc configuration file. In between, we shifted from Net4India to 1and1.com as most of our domains were hosted there, so called number 1 hosting of world. Published the server including DNS, by configuring firewall objects and policy routes, forwarding ports and unblocking firewall for several ports like 21 for FTP, 53 for DNS, 25 and 110 for SMTP and POP3, 80 for webserver. The dynamic website was live, after few minutes with everything working fine and under control. As there was a bandwidth issue, and there was requirement to host several applications that needed server side customization, so we shifted to a dedicated server account on 1and1 that provided us PARALLEL PLESK control panel with CENTOS 5 OS, in addition to the 1and1 brand cpanel. There were some additional features on the server like setting up reseller accounts so that people interested in hosting business can sell our packages to their customers and manage them themselves. There was an Anti spam control features like setting up SPAM score for email accounts on parallel plesk. All we have beared with 1and1 was their TCP/IP fault issue at the server, that was making the live site to go up and down that day.

About the Author:
Puneet verma is web consultant with more than 4 years experience in Telecom & Networking, ECommerce Industry.You can connect to him on skype id: puneet6565 OR mail him at puneet6565@gmail.com. He is currently running www.extranetworld.com and a green blog www.greentechdelhi.com .



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