Icethunder.net
Icethunder.net – Your place for webhosting critique. The 1st hosting critique magazine online!
I am back, finally! What was I doing?
Feb 19th
I know it’s been longer than I said, but at least I could see the world of web hosting from a different angle 
Until now I was mainly interested in the shared hosting world, but in the past weeks I have made my first steps in the VPS world.
From what I have learned:
- You should not start with a VPS unless your projects really needs this kind of environment.
- If you think your project needs a VPS right from the start make sure you order a Fully Managed VPS if you do not know how to configure and secure a web server or if you don’t have an administrator to do it for you!
- Basic management and/or Unmanaged means nearly the same: You will need to do all the securing, setting up and configuration alone! Buy this sort of plan only if you know what you are doing! To read a quick tutorial is not enough!!!
- Always read the Terms of Service and Service level agreement!!! It’s even more important than by shared hosting! You are responsible for the virtual server! There might be high fees for re-installation or technical assistance with unmanaged VPS in the ToS!
- Do you wanna go the VPS way alone and despite all the aforementioned problems? Than start learning LINUX!!! Debian and CentOS are what have fond to be mostly used [Ubuntu, Fedora etc. are popular too]. Debian is stable and very mature. CentOS, on the other hand is more up2date, but don’t forget they both use different package managers and most importantly you will have to use a CONSOLE / TERMINAL and no GUI to help you! Knowledge of Gnu/Linux is thus a must! Read the rest of this entry »
Just a short break :)
Feb 11th
Hi there
I think you already realized I have not posted anything for quite a time, but don’t panic I did not decide to stop, but I am currently involved in 2 other projects and thus I have to prioritize and shift my attention between all of them. It should not take too long though and in a couple of days [Sunday or Monday] I should return to full time Icethunder.net
Until than I would like to tell you to really look carefully before you decide to sign up with a specific company, but at the same time you should not be too paranoid. Maybe you think you are not paranoid at all, but believe me, even I catched myself in a paranoid mood in recent days while searching trough tons of VPS plans to fit one of the projects needs… . It’s always good to be careful, but even being careful does not mean you should freak out and search for evidence for days… Sometimes it’s good to make quick decisions, but think before you make them if they are worth th risk!
Have a nice day!
PS: ICETHUNDER.NET should be back after some hard work on other projects, with tons of new stuff and new ideas on the Valentine’s day! Don’t forget to take a look!
When will people realize unlimited is just a marketing trick?
Feb 6th
Well, today it’s another day for an article to my WH_Reaction category… . I usually start my day with a walk trough some forums I am a member of and try to find something interesting to read there. You would not believe how much important stuff you can find on those forums every day. It gives you the much needed know-how. By reading some interesting posts you might get an image of what’s going around web hosting and hosts at the moment. How the companies treat their customers and most of all you see what problems people have. You don’t only see what problems people have, but you also see the replies from other members of these forums who try to help those trouble ones out.
Today I have stumbled on this thread about a guy who has been asked to pay for the excessive amont of bandwidth he used in the recent month. According to the info he provided he used something around 2TB of bandwidth for some kind of project… . That’s a lot of bandwidth as you know and you would need to look very hard to find a shared host able to provide you even with 1TB of bandwidth/month in a shared environment. And if you would be able o find such a host, than you would need to pay lot of money for this package… . Read the rest of this entry »
Me & Twitter :) Why to Follow…
Feb 5th
This one should be a relax post. I don’t wanna throw at you any phrases from web hosting, or related to web hosting at all. It’s Friday and people should start to think about the weekend and thus why should I scary you with work at this time?
As you might notice in the recent days I have started a small shift of attention to my Twitter account. I have started to post some of the clues and hints I have discussed here at my blog on Twitter, but I also posted there something more, too. It’s always very advantageous to follow my twitter account to don’t miss any of my ideas I might get in the middle of a day . Some of them will turn into standalone article at Icethunder.net, but some might not and thus you could miss something.
Rofl, I started to think about another nice hint, that you might find useful in the middle of this article A very nice way t find out how good a hosting company is – mainly how responsive they are, could be to follow them trough Twitter. This way you can see how many Tweets they actually did and at the same time you will see how helpful they are, how they deal with customers and much more. It’s only up to you how good you are at reading “between the lines.” You could start to follow 5-10 companies and make Twitter one of the criteries for your final decision. Read the rest of this entry »
Stay secure on the Internet while making a purchase!
Feb 3rd
I know this blog is mostly about shared web hosting and about tutorials and help manuals related to shared hosting, but I think that online security is a very important thing and it relates in some ways to web hosting. It relates to web hosting in the way you should not get yourself exposed to some fraudulent offers, fake review sites, fake hosting companies etc. . There are many ways how to protect yourself and your friends from those, but you must be willing to listen and use the techniques to protect your money an nerves 
Fake review sites
I would say, that a very easy way to determine whether a review site is fake or not is to look at their reviews… Too many great reviews, and reviews of only the biggest hosting companies is a good sign. Big hosting companies do have the money to pay high affiliate money and thus these “review sites”, as they like to call themselves, like to post reviews about these hosting companies. They make a good review, although they never had a package with them, and post a few “customer experience reviews/comments” after their review. It places very well in a Google search [they use SEO techniques to make the rank high] and then you read this review, click the link that appears just under/over/on the side of the review and they make profit… They most of the time don’t care about your bad experience after you buy a package… They have made money, this is what matters for them! Read the rest of this entry »
Email options for your hosting
Feb 2nd
The last time I was talking about how to upload and download files you want to add/remove to/from your server. This time I will try to explain E Mail aliases to you in more detail as it is another commonly found term when looking for a web host.
Imagine you have a web site. You get tons of traffic. In fact you get more traffic, than your package is able to accommodate. And than, one day your site is down. How does your poor visitor [me] knows, what has happened? Well, you can make a customer “error page” and inform them about a certain problem and include an email link for “emergency” contact.
Well, you say, that sounds good and I will include my own e-mail address. And I will do more, I will use my own – personal – gmail.com or yahoo.com email address in the contact area of my web site just in case. That’s all WRONG! It’s maybe the stupidest thing ever. In under a hour you would be overwhelmed with spam messages. Why? Because your email address would quickly become not a private one, but a public one! Every spam bot would copy it and than try to distribute spam to it. In a few weeks you would decide to make a new personal email address and close this one. Read the rest of this entry »
Well, I am back :)
Jan 31st
It has been a week since I last posted an article, but do not be afraid I just did not have so much time this past week and it resulted into zero articles posted, but I am back now and all the work has been done. In the meantime I just hope you did remember at least the basics of how to choose the right host
The most important things to know before searching for a web hosting company in a nutshell:
- You need to know how much web space your web site will need
- You need to know how much bandwidth your project wil consume
- You should decide whether you are fine with a Unlimited/Unmetered plan or you want to go the more sure way and go with a host clearly stating how much BW resources you are allowed to use
- You should make a decision on what Operating system fits your project better -Linux or Windows
- You should think about how many email/ftp accounts you could need
- You should make a decision what you are looking for – a cheaper price or a 24/7 live support… Read the rest of this entry »
The basic ways how to upload “stuff” to your webspace…FTP & more
Jan 31st
Well, in the last few articles I hopefully explained to you the most important basic terms from web hosting you will need when you start to look for a web host – bandwidth, disk space and operating system. Now we will move to more “generic” terms, like FTP, databases, E-Mail accounts etc. These are not the same by different hosts and most of the time they are not so crucial to your decision. What I want to say by “not so crucial” is, that it does not matter if you have 10FTP accounts or only 1 but it does matter whether you have 10GB of bandwidth or 100GB… . OK, let’s start with the first term I would like to look at, in this article.
The magical FTP account…
While you are searching for a new host you are overwhelmed by different features they offer. Different hosts do offer many kinds of features, but some of them are more important than others and FTP is one of them.
The reason why FTP is so important is, that you will most probably want to upload your web site to your server and to accomplish this you will need a mean to do it and FTP is the solution. Well, I would be more accurate if I would tell you it’s the simplest solution. There are other ways to upload your website online, but more about them later… . Read the rest of this entry »
How to start your search for a hosting company.
Jan 24th
I have been surfing trough all the forums I am a member of recently and I did came to one conclusion. Many newbies start their search for a web host in the very same way. They use Google and other search engines and just try their luck by entering a certain keyword or phrase and hope Google will give them a good [the right] result.
It is pretty good to start your search in this way[many of us started this way], but as a newbie you need more than just a few results from Google. It’s not that Google does not bring you quality results, but Google brings you indexed and SEO adjusted results. And these results are many times not what you are looking for. Many companies just buy keywords from Google, or use clever SEO and thus get to the top results, although their service is not on the level of some other companies with not so good SEO or not such a big advertisement budget. Read the rest of this entry »
Always check your website! Back up and monitor!
Jan 23rd
It has been quite some time when I last posted something into the WH REACTION category, but I could not resist today. There have been interesting topics going around on the forums, but none of them really made me feel it needed an extra article on my blog.
The issue I will discuss here did change this as this is a very common issue. In fact this is a very crucial one, because your web site is a very important thing to most of you. You regard it as a investment and you want it to be online 24/7/365. And still there are people who just put their web site online and do not perform two basic tasks. These two tasks could safe them a lot of problems if any issue would pop up somewhere on the road, but many times one of these two is not present or even none of them is… .
I am talking about Regular BACK UPs and Web Site MONITORING. These two actions can safe you lots of money, nerves and problems. And I did not mention that they could safe you a lot of valuable data important for your business/project/online life etc.
Regular back ups
Your web site is full of data and one day something bad happens. A disk gets broken or your host did something wrong during a server migration and all your data is lost, because they do not have a back up. And the first thing you do is to go to a forum and complain, right? No, because if you would really think your data is of high importance to you you would perform regular back ups. Read the rest of this entry »