I think you all know I am only writing reviews about web hosting companies I have really been a customer of, or had an account with for more than 3 months. This is to keep my reviews trustworthy and this blog very transparent.

I have chosen to become Ramhost.us customer in January 2010, but I did not sign up ‘till late March as I was short on “test projects” I could use with Ramhost.us. The reason behind this has been the good reputation this web hosting company has build over 2009 when they started their operation. They only needed one year to become a respected and reputable VPS hosting company and I wanted to try them out and see if they are really as good as many people state at webhostingtalk.com.

Sign up process aka First impressions

It’s not easy to sign up with this company as they are very often out of stock [this shows how well rated they are]. Thus I can count myself very lucky to get a VPS server with them as one week after my sign up they were out of stock for several weeks…This should change once their new location is ready to serve customers. Right now they are present in two data centers and a third one should be available late 2010/2011.

The sign up process went nearly smoothly with only one minor problem – my country has not been included in their country list, but after contacting Ramhost.us at mail they promptly added it and I could sign up in a couple of minutes

They offer several VPS packages, but due to me lacking a good project I decided to use them as a Proxy [VPN] and a testbed for my needs. The set up of my server has been pretty quick and I got an email with all the necessary information in a couple of hours.

One thing to note is that they are using their custom made control panel for server management, but despite it looking not as a high-tech solution it gives you all the most important options you need to manage your VPS server [some hosts want you to pay for server reboots etc...]. You are able to get from the VPS Ramhost Control panel to your customer control panel simply by clicking a  link. From there on you can manage your invoices, add new add-ons [no addons ar present except IP's...] or packages and request cancellations of currently used features. The control panel really works very well and you will most probably not need it as the VPS runs smoothly and there is no need to reboot or boot the system

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I will talk a little bit more about Ramhost.us in my next article as my reviews are multi-part ones Have a nice day and see you next time!

the Educational Way of setting up Google Apps

In this scenario  your domain name registrar does not provide you an easy link to install Google Apps and thus you will need to do all the configuration changes yourself. You do not need to worry as I will guide you trough the whole process with images and text

There are some examples of set up steps on this Google web site and you might use it if your domain registrar is on the list

The steps to Google Apps

PART A. of Google Apps Set up

1. You need to familiarize yourself with your domain name registrars control panel. Click on a few links and find out what they mean. After you feel quite comfortable with the interface you can go to point 2.
2. Go to the domain name you want to set up Google Apps for. If you have only one domain name under your account you will not have lots of choices. On the other hand, if you have more than one domain be sure to select the right domain name as you do not want to mess something up on the wrong domain name.
3. You have selected [clicked] the right domain name you have been taken to a new site. It is the site you can manage various settings of your domain name.
4. Select DNS settings or DNS Set Up or DNS Configuration or equivalent option from the menu. The name can vary, but the effect should be the same
5. You should be able to edit your DNS settings.
6. Stop right here and continue with PART B.
7. Now you will need to create a few MX records to make your Google Apps Email service working.
8. Go to this web site and create MX DNS records according to the table!
9. If all records are created click SAVE if there is such an option. If not probably your registrar uses an Auto-save function and you should be safe.
10. Create a CNAME for mail.your_domain.tld, sites.your_domain.tld, calendar.your_domain.tld all pointing to ghs.google.com -> This will come in handy when you want to access your services more easily! I will talk about it in an article dedicated to Customization.
11. That’s all and you should be set up properly If you want to access your new Google Apps services go to:
    1. www.google.com/a/your_domain.com to get to the control panel. From here you will be able to
       1. add new features
       2. create and delete users
       3. change passwords
       4. change access methods and addresses [e.g. create a mail.your_domain.tld instead of the ugly google.com/a/... address ]

PART B. of Google Apps Set up

1. Open a new Tab in your browser.
2. Navigate to https://www.google.com/a/cpanel/domain/new
3. Choose which option applies to you – I think the majority of you will choose ADMINISTRATOR
4. Fill in your domain name [e.g. I would fill in www.icethunder.net]
5. you will be taken to the next screen
6. fill in the Administrator information and Organization Information
7. Click CONTINUE and you will be taken to the verification page. Now you need to verify that you are the domain name owner! You can use either of the two methods. Each of them will bring you the same result. But if you do not have a web host so far use the CNAME method!
   1. To create a CNAME to verify your domain name go to the tab where your domain name registrar web site is open and create a CNAME record with the appropriate string as seen on the Verification screen.
   2. Click Save
   3. Go to the previous Tab [the Tab where you are setting up Google Apps.]
8. Click on VERIFY when you are ready!
9. Your domain name gets verified in the next couple of hours, but you can start configuring your Google Apps account right away.
10. click the Tab where you have your domain name registrars web site open and Go to PART A.

Final thoughts

I think both described methods are pretty easy to follow and execute. You do not need a degree in IT to set it up correctly, but you need to be patient and not run away on the first sign of trouble Have a nice day and see you next time as we will move on to another scenario

Scenario number 1.

Where are you?

You are a guy who freshly registered a new domain name and wants to received and sent email in a few seconds. You are not so keen on getting your web site online in under 5 seconds and you might not even need one as of now. you might set up one in the feature, or the next day, but you want to use a “redundant” solution for your email to not get into trouble if your web host encounters downtime or problems

What do you need to do?

Well, first of all you need to calm down and although you are excited about your first domain name registration you need to start to breath and look around your domain registrars control panel. This is very important as two possible scenarios could apply right now:

• your domain registrar is a good one and they included a Google Apps easy installation link somewhere [the Easy Way], or
• your domain registrar is good, but they feel it’s not worth to give this feature to their clients… [the Educational Way]

the Easy Way

As you can see from the picture my domain registrar has the Google Apps link. If your domain registrar has this feature [or add-on] you can use it and click on the button and the install script will take care of everything. You will not need to configure anything and you will be ready to go in a few seconds

It is a great thing to have this as it saves time and makes things simple for you. If you only want to use some of the Google Apps features than delete the appropriate DNS entries you do not want to use.

I need to point out you will need to wait for some changes to take effect for 24-48 hours as the DNS update takes time. If you are new to web hosting this is a pretty standard thing when changing DNS related settings.

Later, in a separate article dedicated to customization, I will even tell you how to change the DNS and Google Apps in such a way you will be able to use your own custom domain names to access specific Google Apps features like mail trough an easy to remember address mail.your_domain.com instead of the default one google.com/a/your_domain.com .

The next time here at Icethunder.net I will cover the Educational Way of configuring your domain name with Google Apps. Have a nice day and see you next time!

• security – access by using valid SSL certificate
• spam and virus protection
• huge email account [7GB...no hosting company will allow you more than 2GB for all of your accounts!!! Google gives you 7GB/account ]
• 99.9% availability
• easy configuration after you configure your first domain
• features like Calendar, Sites, Docs and more from the Apps marketplace which you do not find anywhere else

to name a few…

Let’s start our Apps configuration journey

I hope this guide will help you to get more easily from a point when you do not have an email solution or are using a default hosting solution to a pint when you will be using the solution provided by Google Apps and be happy with it.

First thing to do it to have a domain name of course. I hope you do have a domain name registered. If not go to a domain registrar and buy one, because else you will not be able to use Google Apps, right?

There are two possible scenarios with setting up a Google Apps account:

• Your domain is already hosted by a hosting company and your name servers [NS1, NS2...] are pointing to it and you are using your hosts email service.
• Your domain is not hosted with any web hosting company and it is still at your domain registrar with default name servers [e.g. ns1.your_registrar.com ..]

I will cover both these possible scenarios in this guide and at the end of this guide you should have no problem with configuring and setting up any number of domain names with Google Apps.

But before I actually start to get into lot of detail you need to know Google is offering  a very good tutorial themselves [a help section]. Plus they have a Youtube channel dedicated to configuration and usage of Google Apps and thus you should not omit these resources
How the Guide is organized?

All scenarios will be divided into three main sections named:

• Where are you – this section will give you a short summary of what scenario is being described.
• What do you need to do – this section will guide you trough the process of setting up google Apps for your particular case
• Final thoughts - this part will try to answer some of your questions you might have or it will hold more information i find valuable or important to share with you.

Today I will take this category one step further and provide you with a nice guide about how to move to Google Apps and get rid off less stable, not very spam protected default hosting solutions you get every time you sign up for a hosting package.Web hosting companies try their best, but they are in no way email companies and thus Spam is still a problem…

What is Google Apps?

I think everyone know who or what is Google. It’s the giant web search engine, but searching the web is not all they can do. they are also selling advertisements, offering you analytics tools to analyze your web site traffic and they even offer you a great solution to host your emails with the by using your own domain name.

This solution is called Google Apps and it is not only about emails. It is a full sweet of product aimed at providing you the best possible experience. One thing to note here is Google size and their expertise. It might seem a little bit scary to move your emails or files to Google’s product, but you are doing the same when you are using a web hosting company, but Google is a huge brand thus you can rest assured your data is very safe.

Google Apps consists of many features, but the basic ones you will see for sure after you sign up and configure everything up in the correct way are:

• Google Mail
• Google Docs
• Google Sites
• Google Calendar
• Google Groups
• Google Video

As you can see Google offers you lots of features and at the same time you do not have to pay anything in return! There are basically two different program levels. The free level is called Google Apps Standard Edition and you do not have to pay a single $$$ for using it. At the same time it lacks only Google Groups and Google Video, but these are not a problem as you might have not used them if you only want to use the Apps instead of your Email server

There are two more limitations in the standard Edition. The first one is about a maximum of 50 users per domain and the second one is about the maximum size of your inbox which is set to 7GB – much more than any web hosting company could or would ever offer to you!

The second level is called Premier Edition and it basically terrs down all the limitations and gives you 25GB of Email storage per account plus Business support and Google Groups/Video on top of it. This edition is more suitable for businesses than for normal ordinary people who just want to make their life easier by not using a default mail solution provided by their web hosting company.

Why to use Google Apps instead of your web hosts email solution?

First of all your web hosting company sells hosting packages and while they really try to do their best they are not about email hosting. They give you a configured server and an account on it. They configure it as good as they only can. Protect it from spy-ware, viruses and spam, but do you really think they can cope with a company which is X times bigger and absolutely about Email, search, advertisement, collaboration and protection? I do not think so.

With Google’s acquisitions of best software companies on the market Gmail has already proved to be the most secure and spam free service on the market! And you really get the same level of experience with your web site using the Google Apps, because you will be using Gmail

It is easy to configure after you read a few tutorials and some domain register companies even offer you the ability to automatically configure your domain with Google Apps

You are in full control of your Email and data as it is always owned by you and this is guaranteed by Google! I do not know if this can be said about some small 1 or 2 people hosting company.

And this great variability is what I think causes the confusion most of the time. For people who come from Windows Desktop/Server environment it is very hard to believe that they are all the same, but differ only in minor things.

The true fact is, that the Linux kernel is always the same. It can differ in version, but it is the same kernel used across all the Linux/GNU distributions. And when you are in the world of servers you really stop seeing so many differences between the various distributions. The reason for this are the facts like that servers do not use

• desktop managers
• windows
• etc,

because they are here to serve web pages for visitors and not for writing documents for your work And these are the reasons why they are not full of not needed software.

What you get when you sign up for a VPS

Most of the time what you get when you sign up for a VPS plan is a bare Linux distribution image installed. You end up with a clean Debian or Fedora Linux system [or any other distro]. You need to install all the software you want to use on your server yourself.

Some VPS providers do give you default Debian or Fedora with some software on it, but most of the time it is the default and it holds lots of not needed software and you’ll get rid of it right after you log in, because it makes your system less secure, slow and it eats up disk space

Are there any real differences?

Each Linux distribution can offer you something special. Most of the time it is not very important and the difference is not visible at all. Linux distributions differ in the way how you install software or update the whole system. There are differences in how they are organized, but even in this way there are no big differences and you should be fine when jumping fro one Linux distro to another.

The maturity is the most important factor distinguishing Linux distributions in the server world. You choose one distribution over he other when you need the most up to date system on your server. And you choose the mature one when you need stability and security.

The most advanced and cutting edge would be Fedora Linux and the most mature one Debian. These are both on different poles of the Linux universe. All the other distributions are somewhere between those two

Which one to choose?

This depends on several things as mentioned before and you should choose carefully. I would suggest you choose according to:

• your knowledge of Linux
• how secure you want to have your system
• what web site will be served on the server
• what VPS specification you have available [RAM, CPU, virtualization technology ]

While on a VPS you can always recreate your VPS and use another Linux distro, but be sure to make proper back ups! Have a nice day and see you next time!

Well, if you want to get attention you do have it But it would be very nice if you would be able to describe your problem in more detail while trying to find help on a forum. It’s because you do have the attention, but with no relevant data to start with no one will be able to help you.

Include as many information as you only can when trying to find help in web hosting. People are willing to help but they need info to get started.

When searching for help try to append these information:

• your domain name so others can check if they can see your web site or the Error message
• what have you done before this problem started to show up
  • what did you install
  • what did you uninstall
  • what did you allow
  • what did you disallow
• how long do you know about the problem [to estimate a time-frame]
• what control panel you are on
• what operating system you are on
• what php version you are using
• what mysql version you are using
• other software and version you are using [only relevant...]
• what technology the web site is build on [it’s a CMS, php site, html site etc.]
• try to be descriptive and do not mix your thoughts with the supplied data to make it easy to read

I know web site problems are not the only ones, but they are common. This small guide can be used as a template for any other server service you might think of like Database server, mail Server, DNS Server etc. It is always about the information you give – more information = a higher probability someone will help you out!

I tried to make this one a very easy and quick guide to help you start searching for help related to web hosting and your web site online Have a nice day and see you next time here at Icethunder.net

PS: Some reason why your web site might not show up:

• DNS is still propagating
• Your domain name does not point to the right directory
• Your database is down or has a problem
• Your home IP is blocked on the hosting server
• The port is blocked by your ISP
• and many more…

• there are two different TLD groups as explained in the first article [generic tld's and country specific tld's]
• first level tld’s can not be registered by normal humans [you can not register a .your_tld ]
• second level domain names can be registered trough a domain registrar
• some TLD’s can only be registered under very specific circumstances
• prices between different tld’s are not the same and can vary really a lot

Domain name registration

If you want to register  a domain name you need to first find a domain name registrar. It’s a specialized company which sells domain names to its clients and can even provide them an interface to manage DNS settings for their client domain names. I would say it is very good to find a company offering full DNS management with a descent DNS control panel. The reason is you will mostly like to change your DNS settings from time to time. One simple example would be when moving between web hosting companies. You would need to point your name servers to the new web host.

First thing to do is to find a name registrar. You can use multiple domain name registrars, but it is very convenient to have all your domain names at one company. And thus it is very important to choose the right one. Some points to take into consideration when searching for the right registrar:

• pricing – different companies offer you different price for the same domain name tld!!! You can save a lot or you can loose if you do not read carefully. Be patient and look into all possibilities – it will pay big in the long run.
• privacy protection – if you feel like the Internet is a big and scary place or you do not feel like you want to get all the spam messages from the Internet it is good to use  a Privacy Guard or WhoIs Guard. Some companies offer it for free or a symbolic price. I would not recommend spending $10 on this feature as there is nothing really worth $10 and there are tons of companies offering it for very good prices
• addon services – some registrars offer you some add-ons you can use when you register the domain name with them. It can be a free basic hosting, place holder, email hosting, Google Apps and these are only some of them and there are many more out there…

What do you need to register a domain name?

You should know what is the name you want to register. Find the company you want to register the domain name at and register for an account. You will be asked to fill in your personal information. Name, address, phone number are just a few of the mandatory fields you will have to fill in. You do not need to register right away. You can perform a search for your desired domain name and if it’s free then just hit the “BUY” button and you will be asked to register.

If the domain name is not free you can still order it with a different TLD, but this is up to you to decide. You can even try to even buy an already registered domain name, but this is beyond this article and I will cover it in a future article.

What’s a domain name?

As said before it is a name for your web site, but it is a compound “thing”. It is made up of several pieces. Let’s explain this on a simple example:

www.icethunder.net

• www – you are accessing a web site and it is a CNAME [a DNS record...we will talk about DNS a little bit later]
  
• icethunder – is you actual name you want to use
• .net is the TLD you have chosen to register
• icethunder + .net together make a domain name you are able to register at a domain registrar.
  

TLD’s or Top level domains

It is  the highest domain name in the domain name hierarchy. It is not possible to register those – as long as you do not have really looots of money There are two kinds of TLD’s out there:

1. country specific e.g.  .DE, .FR, .RU, .AT
2. generic tld’s e.g.  .COM, .NET, .ORG

Country specific domain names tld’s are specific to a single country and are mostly used by web sites and organizations from this country. They are mostly used to identify yourself as coming from the country or doing business in the specific country. Even though these are mainly country specific domain name tld’s there are some exceptions which came with WEB 2.0 and many country specific TLD’s are used as e.g. .FM which is used for online radio stations and services a lot, but in fact it is the TLD of Federated States of Micronesia or .ME which belongs to Montenegro.

Generic TLD’s are as the name suggests generic and they do not belong or describe any specific country. They are most widely used on the Internet and mainly the .COM is a very common one and I would say it is the standard domain name every surfer is using first when trying to find a domain name he has heard about somewhere They do no cost as much as some of the national specific tld’s and thus they are very commonly registered even instead of a national tld.

Main goals…

The main goal of this VPS basic guide was to teach you at least the basics. But not only to teach you what commands to type to the console, but to teach you THINK. This is much more important than knowing all the commands. When you are able to think you will come to the right solution sooner or later, but if you only know the commands and do not know how to think than you will not come to it at all I gave you some useful command and I know there could be even more, but I only included the basic ones and added some links to get more help, commands and clues

What did we learn in our VPS guide?

In this basic VPS guide we have learnt:

• how to initially set up our VPS server
• that there are more than one operating system available and we should choose the one we like more for our VPS server
• how to add users, software and update our system
• how to secure our VPS server [iptables, rkhunter, clamav etc.]
• how to test the security of our VPS server [open ports, software we are running  etc.]
• where to look for help on our system [log files]
• and we’ve learnt some more useful commands on our way as well

This has been a long journey, but it’s only the beginning and I will cover a more advanced topics in the coming weeks. It may seem like we have covered everything possible, but I would like to give you a little more insight into servers running on Linux. Maybe some of the stuff will be more useful for real dedicated servers, but at least you will fell like you have been given something more

As always you are welcomed to ask questions in the comments section or by email  You can as well use one of my other accounts on one of the social networking sites like Youtube, Twitter etc. Have a nice day and see you next time!