Archive for the ‘Website Maintenance’ Category
You probably have seen the “Cron” term in the list of services and features while searching for a new web hosting provider for your website. Of course the experienced web users (especially Linux fans) and web developers know the meaning of this term, and today we are going to present some sort of a beginners guide for those who don’t know much about Cron but still do want to take advantage of it.
In ducks and bunnies, Cron is a tool allowing you to automatically carry out the repeated tasks. In other words, you won’t have to do the boring job manually. Even though the idleness is the root of all evil, this time laziness was the reason why the cron has been invented. The number of tasks that cron can do for you is really impressive and the technology that stands behind this tool is quite simple, that’s why almost anyone can manage this tool after reading some comprehensive tutorials. There are many web hosting companies that offer cron jobs feature in their list of services. Now let’s get to the point and dig deeper, cron is a scheduling daemon (daemon is a computer program in Unix that runs in the background). So, cron allows scheduling commands to run periodically on certain dates.
How it works?
The core of the crone is a cronetab – a configuration file which specifies shell commands and periods. A user without experience can be easily frustrated by editing the cronetab, which is why most of the web hosting services provide a simple and intuitive interface for managing the crone’s settings. Here is a table of formats available for the current version of cron – basically this is a set of all possible time formats that you can use in cron:
- Minutes (0-59)
- Hours (0-23)
- Day of month (1-31)
- Month (1-12 or JAN-DEC)
- Day of week (1-7 or SUN-SAT)
- Year (1970 – 2099)
To handle timezone issues most of cron implementations have “TZ=
What You Can Do with Cron
There’re a lot of websites that have a lot of visitors daily, and basically the more visitors a website has the more difficult it is for the servers to handle the crowd – this whole thing slows down your website. There are multiple ways the website owners can handle this situation, one of them is by using the CDN technology (CDN stands for Content Delivery Network). The number of websites using CDN service grows every year and this sort of positive trend once again proves that CDN is a very promising and useful technology which helps you improve your website’s performance.
So, why should you use CDN network for your website? Frankly speaking CDN networks are the only perfect solution for the website with a lot of traffic and for the projects that care about global availability of their website content. So, the first reason is speed. Yes, it helps you to save priceless seconds that are so rashly wasted while your page is being loaded from the originating server. Secondly, CDN gives you the ability to have a huge network of servers all over the world that deliver your page faster and in a more reliable way according to their geographical proximity to the respective users. And the third reason is the bandwidth – if you own a blog or some popular project that receives tons of traffic, CDN servers will help you stay online and keep your content actually visible to all of your priceless users. But these are just a couple of major advantages that CDN technology gives you, now let’s take a closer look at it.
Content delivery network (CDN) is a simple system of computers that stores copies of various content (images, audio and video files) to maximize the odds that the users will freely access the data. The technology that stands behind CDN is placing geographically dispersed “caching servers” for covering maximum of various locations all around the world. The point is that when you host everything only on your own hosting servers (html files, scripts, images) it increases the number of times the files are being addressed on your server, which slows down your website and increases page load time. But by creating a number of sub-domains for images, videos and scripts and placing all these on CDN edge servers you’ll receive a very good result due to the parallel download effect.
Types of services
- Streaming – it is not a secret that video streaming requires a lot of bandwidth, and if you are going to deliver a high quality video content CDN will be the best solution for you.
- Downloading – for those websites that offer various types of software and other heavyweight content it would be reasonable to upload the content to CDN servers which will increase files’ download speed.
- Acceleration – CDN technology is using a huge number of backbones that naturally accelerate content delivery. The most popular method used by many websites is delivering graphic files via CDN servers and HTML files via the customer’s server.
- Server-Side Processing – some large web projects also use CDN servers to deliver their scripts (Java, ASP etc.) which is also a great method to reduce the numbers of times that the customer’s server is being addressed and therefore decreases page load time.
- Peer-to-peer Processing – the first P2P project was the famous Napster, and now bitTorrents are using peer-to-peer file sharing protocol. So, as you may have guessed this type of processing requires you to have a software installed on the user’s computer (like Torrent clients).
CDN Providers
Commercial CDN providers
Free CDN prodivers
Website monitoring is a very routine thing and obviously you can’t handle it with bare hands because sitting and staring at your website 24/7 is quite uncomfortable. Fortunately there is a bunch of various tools and services that can go through that heavy cross for of you. Needless to say that any downtime issues may cause huge problems for your projects. Conversion rates, number of pageviews, reputation and other important factors and rankings which are vitally important directly depend on your uptime performance.
While stating the fact that your website is currently down is a of course a useful thing, but still it’s not enough because you have to know the exact reasons for that downtime and possible ways to solve this unpleasant situation. So, here are some tools that would immediately tell you when, for how long and why your website is down and would as well suggest you how to fix the downtime. Of course this list is not full and we are glad to receive any feedback from you concerning your personal experience of working with similar tools and services. By the way, most of these are paid tools but you can try out their free trial versions.
1. Host-Tracker
Monitoring period: every 1/5/15/30/60 minutes
Alert methods: HTTP
Error notifications via: e-mail address and SMS
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2. Uptime Robot
Monitoring period: every 5 minutes
Alert methods: HTTP/HTTPS-methods
Error notifications via: e-mail, SMS, RSS and Twitter.
This service will be free until 01 August 2011
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Being a real headache for the website developers, the cross browser testing is in fact not that much of a painful procedure nowadays because you can find a bunch of efficient and comfortable-to-use online tools to help you in that. Testing is vitally important for any website and you should never ignore it, especially if it’s a serious website you’re planning that will have a lot of traffic from different audience. Otherwise, for example if that’s a website for developers, you may be sure you won’t need your website to be very much compatible with IE6, while a news website does have to be compatible even with the oldest versions of crappiest browers.
Testing helps you to predict problems that might occur in the nearest future, if they do occur while your visitors are browsing the best case scenario is that the irritated users will assault your wishbox with angry complaints about bugs and broken codes, worst case is they’ll just quietly give it up and won’t come back to your website. So, you’ll agree that testing saves your time and even might save your website/business project from the fatal disaster. Below you’ll find some useful and advanced online tools that would ease the testing processes and will help you to be sure that your website is compatible with all popular web browsers.
1. Browsershots
This online tool provides you with screen shots of your web page from just about any browser from all of the common operating systems. You have to submit your URL and wait in the queue till you receive results. You can use paid option and skip the queue line for instant results.
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2. CrossBrowserTesting
Another awesome online tool that helps you to test your website. Just pick an OS, select browser and start testing. Free trial is available, also you can purchase a monthly subscription for this service.
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Do you like fast websites? We’re sure you do just like search engines and metrics companies that use website load time as a parameter in their rankings. For website visitors waiting is one of the most annoying things on the web. And if in real life speeding is dangerous for you, in virtual world speed is essential for successful website – lack of speed means death for your website.
Nowadays such factors as user experience and user-friendliness are really important and may determine whether your website will succeed in future or not. We should never forget about our big brother Google which considers website load time as a part of their ranking algorithm.
Below you’ll find some tips and tricks that will give wings to your website. Maybe you’ll be confused about some specific terms but we believe that after spending some time on Wikipedia things will become clear for you. Of course we are always glad to discuss this topic in our comments section.
Parallelize downloads across hostnames
Use URL paths instead of hostnames
Optimize images
Actually smart usage of this method can give you amazing results. You should remember that most static resources can be parallelized and the main task is to create a balance between all hostnames for all static objects. Anyways the main rule here is that any of your hosts must not serve more than 50%. Remember that the optimal number of hosts is between 2-5 hosts, so don’t misapply it.
The main trick behind this problem is that you need to control the number of multiple properties that are hosted on the same domain. The best solution that will help you to unload these properties is assigning them to different URLs but not hostnames. For example if you need to host your blog than make it website.com/blog instead of blog.website.com. This will help you to minimize DNS lookups and allows more efficient use of TCP reconnections that will reduce the number of round trip times.
Everything is simple here – you should choose appropriate type for your images (choose wisely between PNG, GIF and JPG) and don’t forget to use image compressor. Also correct specifying image dimensions (width and height) allows browser to perform faster rendering
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