Here at MUO, we’ve covered a lot about creating a mailing list and a newsletter. James described a useful online service called Zotero for using a mailing list. Steve offered two great online services that you could use to distribute a newsletter. However, In all of these cases, you are dependent upon another online service – most of which are not usually free.

Enter PHPList. You’ve heard of PHPList on Directory – at least the hosted option anyway. Once again, this is an online service that you pay for, where you can set up a mailing list on your website. Someone else hosts the service and the list, and you have to pay a monthly fee. But you can actually download PHPList for absolutely free and install it on your own web server. The folks at PHPList will charge hundreds to install and configure the service for you, but in all honesty if you’ve ever installed WordPress or other PHP apps on your server before, this one isn’t a whole lot different. You can do it yourself.

Installing PHPList On Your Own Web Server

What’s the benefit of installing the script on your own server? Well, number one, your entire list and everything associated with the subscriptions and newsletter are stored somewhere that you control. It’s also free.

First, download a free copy of PHPList, and save it to your PC.  Just as when you install WordPress, using phpMyAdmin, or whatever utility your web host uses to create a new SQL Database, add a new database called “phplistdb” and then add a new user “phplist” with password “phplist“, and grant all rights to the phplistdb database.

In the downloaded Zip file, you’ll find a “public_html” folder with an index.html file and a “lists” folder. Upload these to the sub-directory on your web server (in the public folder) where you want to store your PHPLists script.  Before you upload, go in and make sure to edit the config.php file in /lists/config/.

The important settings are toward the top of the config.php file. Just make sure that the database name, user ID and password are the same as the ones you used when you set up the database. Another important setting is $pageroot and $adminpages – make sure those point to the correct directory where you uploaded the “lists” directory.

If you’ve set up the database and the config file correctly, when you open up “http://<your-domain>/subscriptions/lists/” , the script will open up the page where you can run the PHPlist install script. I’ve used “subscriptions” in this case, but you’ll use whatever sub-directory where you uploaded the script.

Click to install PHPList, and you’ll see the script populate all of the tables in the PHPlist database you created.

Once that’s done, click on “main page“, and then click on “Setup phpList” on the next screen.

This next screen makes it ridiculously easy to set up phpList to run on your server. All you have to do is go through each item on the list. The procedure walks you through everything.

On the page configuration pages, you can customize just about everything that the users see during the subscription process.

Customizations include the general formatting of the “subscribe me” page, as well as where people are forwarded after successfully subscribing – allowing you to offer a “thank you for subscribing” page that you’ve built yourself.

As you can see above, nothing is set in stone. Want the header of the subscription page to look just like your own site, go ahead and edit the “header” code to your liking.

Keep in mind that you don’t have to do all of this customization. You can install, set up and run phpList right out of the box without any customization.  All you have to do is create a “subscribe” link on your site, and send visitors to the /lists/ directory – they’ll see the sign-up page where they can enter in their email address to subscribe to your newsletter.

All information gets stored on your server, not some service where everything gets stored out on the “cloud” somewhere. They subscribe and get forwarded directly to the “thank you” page.

There is one caveat to keep in mind – the script needs the ability to send email on your server. It can use SMTP if you configure it in the config file, but it can take some work to get it to send if you don’t use the standard port 25. There are lots of help forums out there that can help with this setup, but just keep it in mind if you hit a brick wall. You may also need to work closely with your web host service so that your account has the appropriate permissions to send out mail. Or you can set up the system on your own web server and open up the right port yourself.

So, give phpList a try and see what it’s like to control your own subscriber list. You’ll never have to worry about losing the list that you worked so hard to build – you can export and save that list so that you’ll always have it. Let us know what you think of the service, and whether you know of any similar newsletter scripts that work as well on a web server.

Today, we are going to look at some free image hosting alternatives to host your WordPress blog images on external servers. These solutions might not be as top notch as dedicated CDN’s, but I think they are good enough for the regular everyday blogger.

The First Alternative - Loadtr

The easiest alternative I can find is Loadtr because all you have to do is add a WordPress plugin. The problem is, not everybody feels comfortable hosting their images on an unknown image hosting service. To be honest, I’ve never heard of Loadtr before, so I can’t tell you whether or not this service is good or bad. Even though a quick web search told me that Loadtr is a well-known service in Turkey, the name is not a familiar one in the rest of the world.

Anyway, if you think you can trust Loadtr enough to use the service to host your blog images, you can start by going to the “Plugins – Add New” side menu in your WordPress installation.

Then search for and install the Loadtr WordPress plugin.

You’ll then find an additional upload menu in the post editing mode. It’s the colorful small icon next to the other upload icons above the writing field.

Clicking on the icon will bring out Loadtr’s Image Upload tool. You can choose the image file you want to upload, pick a language, give a short description, and select the size you want.

After the image is uploaded to Loadtr’s server, you can insert it into your post by clicking the “Send to Post” button.

Then you can publish the post, and the image will be displayed without a problem in your blog post.

The Second Alternative - Dropbox

Another place you can use to host your images is Dropbox. There are several plugins which will help you connect your WordPress blog with your Dropbox account, but I think the best one is Pressbox.

After installation, go to the “Settings” sidebar and choose Pressbox.

You will see a set of instructions to get a Dropbox API. Both the “Key” and “Secret” codes are needed to connect your blog to Dropbox. This step is needed to prevent unauthorized access to your Dropbox account. Follow the instructions to the letter and you’ll be just fine.

After acquiring the codes, press the “Connect your Blog to Dropbox” button and you can start using images in your Dropbox folder for your blog posts.

But why go through all that trouble if using images from the Dropbox public folder is as easy as copying and pasting the public URLs (as discussed in this article)?  Well, first, Pressbox allows users to use images from any folder within your Dropbox account. Second, users don’t have to go back and forth between their blog and Dropbox account to fetch the image’s URL. Instead, you can easily add images using Pressbox’s code.

Pressbox also allows users to set their default path for a file list and favorite folders. You can use the “/Photos” folder as the default, but I’d suggest you go one folder deeper. Create another folder inside Photos and use it as the default.

If everything is set, you can easily put your blog images inside your chosen folder and add them using “[pressbox path=/Folder/imagename.extension]“. So if you want to add sunset.jpg inside the Pictures folder, you will write [pressbox path=/Pictures/sunset.jpg].

You can also browse and insert the pictures you want via the new “From Dropbox” menu in the “Add an Image” pop-up window.

The only thing you should consider if you choose to use Dropbox is the storage limit. With a 2GB storage limit for free accounts and an average 100KB image size, you can store up to 20,000 images. It’s a good idea to create a new Dropbox account specifically for this purpose.

The Third Alternative – Hotlinking

If you prefer neither Loadtr nor Dropbox, then you can choose the more traditional (and manual) approach – store your images in one of the available image hosting services – such as Photobucket and Flickr – and hotlink the images in your blog posts.

To do that, you have to make sure that the image hosting services that you use allow hotlinking. Then acquire the image link, and insert the link via the “From URL” tab in the “Add an Image” window.

This third alternative might not be as convenient as the previous two, but you get peace of mind from a trusted and reliable free image hosting service that you love.

Will you host your blog images externally? Which one is your preferred alternative? Do you know any other alternatives? Share your thoughts and opinions using the comments below.

Here at MUO, we’ve covered a number of free Wiki tools you can use to accomplish these tasks. Saikat covered a list of four Wiki tools that you can install locally for when you need the Wiki solution offline. Tina offered 3 online Wiki tools you can use to help with your studying needs. The solution that I’d like to cover today offers what I believe is the best solution – a Wiki tool called Tiki Wiki that you can host on your own web server so that you can decide exactly how it looks and functions, and at the same time you can access your Wiki from anywhere in the world.

Using Your Own Hosted Wiki

Why would you want to host your own Wiki site? That’s an easy question to answer. If you host it, then you own it. You can choose the appearance, manage the users and the content, and you can decide what features are available. This is especially true with the self-hosted Tiki Wiki, which offers far more features than most other Wiki platforms out there.

Also, the beautiful thing about Tiki Wiki is that the setup process is just as easy as installing a self-hosted WordPress blog. Just download the files to your PC, unzip them, and then FTP them up to your web host account under a subdirectory called something like /tiki/.  You run the setup procedure by going to the /tiki/ subdirectory on your site and the installer will automatically open. Just follow the steps, including setting up the database connection (hopefully you’ve already created the MySql database with an admin user that has full permissions.

Once the installation is complete, you have the option to choose from several pre-made profiles, depending on how you choose to use Tiki Wiki. These profiles are basically configurations where a certain segment of features are enabled depending on whether you’re using the Wiki as a collaborative blogging platform, as an internal company portal, or as a public collaborative community.

If you’re not sure exactly what you want to enable and what you don’t, then choosing the manual Administration option is the best way to go. In the Administration area, you’ll find the configuration menus for every feature that is available on Tiki Wiki, including importing RSS feeds, managing comments, managing the wiki pages, and much more. To choose the features you want to enable for your Wiki, just click on “Features“.

Trust me, the first time you look around in here, you’ll be blown away. This isn’t your typical Wiki – the platform extends far beyond simple Wiki pages. You can activate blogs (multiple blogging pages for your users), articles, a file management area, integrated Google Maps, Surveys, Quizzes and a whole lot more.

Another fun section to explore is the “Experimental” area, but keep in mind that these are features still under development, so there could still be bugs. One thing that’s apparent is that Tiki Wiki has an active programmer base – there are so many “add-ons” to choose from!

In my opinion, one of the most unique things about Tiki is that you can integrate Facebook and Twitter right out of the box. You will have to register the domain where you are running Tiki Wiki as a new application for each social network, but once you’re done, your Wiki users will be able to use the connectivity between your Tiki Wiki platform and their social network accounts.

Individual Wiki pages, if that’s what you’re using Tiki for, are very simple to edit. Just use the WYSIWYG editor and you’ll be pumping out multiple pages in no time.

The collaborative spreadsheet area is also pretty cool. This is pretty similar to the Google Docs spreadsheet app where you can share out multiple spreadsheets. Here, anyone can create a shared spreadsheet, and all of them are listed under “Spreadsheets” in the side menu.

Then there’s the useful collaborative calendar (think GTD), which will show up in the menu as well, so long as you’ve enabled the feature in the settings menu.

Unlike many Wiki systems where navigation can feel a little bit complicated, navigating at Tiki is just a matter of clicking on the side menu and then drilling down to where you want to go. If you’re logged into an admin account and click on “Admin“, you’ll see all of the Admin tools available to you.

One last feature I wanted to mention (there are far too many to cover them all in one article) is the RSS feed tool. Using the RSS feed tool, you can have Tiki read and import content from external RSS feeds and bring them into the Wiki environment for all users to read. This is a very cool way to create a news area with news stories that serve the common interests of your Wiki users.

Overall, the ease of installation and the huge variety of available add-on features for Tiki Wiki really make it one of the best self-hosted Wiki platforms I’ve ever seen. The large and active developer base is always a strong bonus.

Give Tiki Wiki a shot on your own server and see if it offers everything you need in a collaborative group environment for your team. Make sure to offer feedback or tips on ways to make use of it in the comments section below.

The one thing I don’t really like about a cloud storage solution, like Dropbox, is the fact that the architecture includes the online storage of your files. Yes, it can sync up with your laptops, desktops and mobile devices, but what if you really aren’t comfortable having those files stored somewhere other than your local PC?

For people that are a little bit wary about such a setup, I have an alternative for you. Instead of syncing your files with the online storage space that you’ve purchased and have to pay for, what if you could simply turn your local storage – like a USB stick, a directory on your computer, or a portable hard drive – into a storage unit in the “cloud”?

Turning Your Local Drive Into An Online Drive

What you’ll basically be doing is assigning part of your drive (or your entire USB memory card, if you like) to serve up files and media via the Internet.  The perfect service for this is an application Kaly covered briefly called HomePipe. In this article, I’d like to cover the application in a lot more detail, and show you how you can configure your own cloud storage network with this software. You’ll never have to buy another gigabyte of online storage again.

The beauty of this program is that you can install agents anywhere and everywhere you like. If you own a Linux computer, a Mac and a Windows desktop – you can install an agent on each of them and create an entire network of online storage – sharing out a directory from each device. When you install the agent, you’ll see that HopePipe will block your computer from “sleeping” so that it can continuously serve up the files to your new online drive in the “cloud”.

You’ll see that the free version of the software allows for 10 “uses”. A use is basically a connection session. So, for free you can hook up to your cloud and use it for as long as you like – so long as you do not disconnect or go idle from the connection for longer than 30 minutes. If you do, you’ll have used up a single connection. For occasional users, this solution is a perfect way to access all of your systems from anywhere there’s an Internet connection. If you need to use it more often, there’s also a plan for under $25 a year, unlimited – which is nearly free!

When you click on “configure shared folders“, you’ll have a chance to configure which folders on your local PC you want to share out to your personal online drive in the cloud.

Once you’ve created the “hosted” drive with the local agents, you can access those drives anywhere on the web. Just log in at HomePipe and you’ll have instant access to all of your “online” storage. The beauty here is that you don’t have to pay extra for additional online drive space. Your drive space is only limited by the actual drive space of your local drive. Of course, the drawback is that you’ll need to leave these systems running all the time if you want to access them on the Internet. For people like me that leave their systems running all the time anyway, this isn’t a concern.

As you can see on the right side of the screen, you can easily upload and download files to and from your virtual online drive, and you can even instantly upload any of the photos you have directly to your Facebook account. Uploading files from your local machine to your “online” virtual storage drive is as simple as browsing to the local files and uploading them. This is one of the easiest ways to transfer files to any of your computers right over the Internet – no FTP or complicated remote logins required.

Clicking on “Settings“, at the top of your dashboard, you can see how many times you’ve accessed your online drive, and how many sessions you have left for the month.

Don’t forget, you also have access to the mobile HomePipe app as well – for either iPhone or Android phones. This app gives you access to your virtual online drive right from your mobile device. When you open HomePipe on your mobile phone, you’ll see all of the drives that you’ve added to your virtual cloud, as well as the local storage of your phone.

Exploring your virtual online drive (which is essentially exploring your remote drive), is as easy as using Explorer. Remember, all of this takes place right over the Internet. When you upload a file to the online drive, you’re basically uploading it to your remote system.

I love this setup, because it combines the concept of “cloud computing” with the safety and security of keeping those files stored on your own machines – not some server located who-knows-where. Only people with the password to your HomePipe account will have access to your files – no one else.

So give HomePipe a shot and try different setups, like hosting a portable USB drive to your new cloud network, or mounting your Android SD card and sharing that out to the cloud. You can be as creative as you want when you build your cloud network – it’s completely up to you!

Do you prefer this setup over traditional cloud computing? What do you like or dislike about it? Share your thoughts in the comments section below!

Here at MUO, we love auctions, and we love bringing you cool auction tools. For example, sniping tools like Gixen and goSnipe.  We also brought you SoLow for mobile auctions. Most of the auction tools are based on eBay of course.

For all its value, eBay isn’t much help when your needs are a little bit smaller. There are many cases when non-profit organizations want to create their own online hosted auction site where they can list items for auction – with proceeds going to charity. Or maybe you’d like to host an auction site on your own website that’s focused on niche items related to your site. Whatever your need, you can install a really useful script on your web server called WeBid that lets you host your own fully-functioning auction site.

You can download WeBid at SourceForge for free, and extract all folders and files to a sub-directory in your public hdocs folder. Configuring and installing WeBid is actually a whole lot like installing WordPress, and like WordPress, the system is based on PHP and MySQL.

Installing WeBid On Your Web Server

After downloading everything to the auction folder (in my example I used /hdocs/WeBid/) locate “config.inc.php.new“. Open this file and edit it with the name of the MySQL database you created for your auction site, as well as the userid and password you created with full privileges.

Don’t use “root” – this was run on my local test web server, so I’m not very concerned about security. In your case, you’ll need to set up a secure user using PhpMyAdmin. Save the file and rename it “config.inc.php“. Next, just open up your site and go to the directory where you placed the WeBid files. If your domain is “mysite” then it would be something like “http://www.mysite.com/WeBid“.  When you open this in your browser, you’ll see the installer configuration.

Fill in all of the fields according to where you placed your files, and the name you gave your database. If everything is correct, you’ll see the following confirmations shown at the bottom of the install configuration page.

If you’ve got everything green, then go ahead and click “Install“. After the install script runs through its routine, you’ll be prompted to delete the install folder. Once you do, the next time you visit the WebId folder with your web browser, you’ll be logged into your admin account.

The admin panel is where you will customize and manage your entire auction site. It’s where you manage users, how auctions are set up and run, and everything else to do with what your auction site is like. The main admin page shows you all of the current settings for your auction site.

As you can see from the tabs, there is a lot about this hosted auction site that you can customize to make it unique for your own use. You can change the fee structure, what the user interface looks like, and more.

You can customize the user experience by enabling or disabling authentication, how accounts are activated (whether you want to be part of the process), and you can also customize the message the user sees when they first submit for a new user ID for your auction site.

The fee structure can look however you like – from absolutely no fees, to fees for everything the user wants to do. Or, in the case of a charity, you may not even set up any fees at all.

Once new users set up their accounts, adding a new auction is pretty simple. In the case where you are running a charity and most users are buyers, then you’ll just set up one seller account and you’ll be the only person in charge of entering auction details. In either case, the entry process is all on one page. First, you’ll fill in all of the details about the item.

At the bottom of the form, you submit pictures, add pricing and select features like highlighting, and then submit. The auction becomes active immediately (or whenever you’ve scheduled it to activate). The format of each auction is pretty slick, and not a whole lot unlike the eBay auction formats that you may be used to.

There are plenty of auction sites out there where you can list your items for sale, but wouldn’t it be pretty cool to have your own hosted auction website? All you need is a web hosting account and about 30 minutes to an hour, and you could set up this system and host your own auction site for your small group, or for the entire world. How you use it is completely up to you!

Do you have any ideas for your own auction site? Give WeBid a try and let us know how easy it was for you to set up and what you used it for. Share your experiences in the comments section below!

cc licensed flickr photo shared by bloomsberries

Here are 3 ways in which you can make use of Amazon S3 web services today.

Introduction & Amazon S3 Costs

S3 operates on a basis of paying only for what you use, with separate fees for storage, data transfer and data requests. Ignoring data request fees because the cost is minimal, the fees break down as follows:

Storage

5GB free, then $0.15/GB per month (100GB = $15)

Data Transfer (Upload)

$0.10/GB

Data Transfer (Download)

$0.15/GB

As an example then – if you used it to store 100GB of data – it would cost you $10 to upload it all, $15 per month to store it, and a further $15 when you decided to download it all again.

So what can you do with all that cloud storage?

Backup Your Computer Files

The most obvious use is for cloud-backup of your important files. While I don’t suggest you spend the next 6 months uploading your entire 4TB video collection to S3, they do claim to achieve 99.999999999% file durability, which means anything you upload will most certainly not get destroyed. For critical files you couldn’t stand to lose, it is the most cost effective and secure way of ensuring you have a solid backup.

To make the backup process simple, you’ll need some software to automate the process. Arq is the best option, but the price tag of $30 may be off-putting for some. However it does offer some fantastic features like being able to set a monthly backup budget. JungleDisk is a pay-monthly reseller ($3/month) that provides similar software. On the free side, S3BackupSystem is a capable utility for Windows.

Check out this site for 35+ more S3 backup and sync tools.

If you want to back up large amounts of data (more than 40GB), Mozy may be a more cost effective solution with their unlimited plans. However many users say that the speed is much slower than Amazon.

Backup Your Online Life

With the recent news of the possible demise of the Delicious bookmarking service, many of us realised that social feeds and online personas are something we might want to back up – but how do you back up your data when it’s stored in an online service? The answer is with Backupify and S3. Backupify, which offers a free 2GB/5 account plan, takes the data out of various social networks and online services, and stores it on an S3 account. If the thought of losing your Twitter feed makes you wince, it might be worth a look.

Store Large Downloads For Your Site

If you have large files that users can download from a website, like a podcast or videos, it works out cheaper to host them on Amazon s3 which means less stress on your server. In case you didn’t know, all of our fantastic free MakeUseOf guides are hosted on S3.

The Amazon s3 WordPress Plugin makes it super-easy to upload the files and make links from within the standard WordPress editor.

Host An Entire Website On S3

As long as your website consists only of static files, it’s actually possibly to host the whole thing on Amazon. The speed will be relatively fast compared to a shared hosting, and you’ll never have to worry about downtime. As a cost estimate, a 20-page website with about 10MB of files with 200 visitors a day would work out at about $5 a month to host on Amazon, and you’ll need to do a little editing of your domain name configuration to get it working. Unfortunately this won’t work for a dynamic database-driven website, such as a WordPress-based blog.

In terms of reliability, S3 offers perhaps the best uptime of any online service provider, no matter what you choose to use it for. The goal of Amazon S3 Web Services is not to offer a complete packaged product that you can just use though, but rather to offer the tools and services to build products on top of. It’s exciting to see what has been done so far, not just with S3 but with the entire range of services they offer that we will explore at a later date.

For now, let us know if you have other unique uses for S3 in the comments, or if you already make use of another cloud storage facility.

If you’ve been meaning to start a blog, but find the choices overwhelming and the jargon mind-boggling ““ or maybe you just want to satisfy your technological curiosity about how the Internet works ““ then read on.

What Is Web Hosting Anyway?

A website host is really just a computer that is on all the time and connected to the Internet. When you visit a website, you’re downloading some files from the machine that stores that particular website. The truth is that any computer can be used to host a website, even the one you are using now – but the computers used by professional hosting companies are incredibly powerful with lots of hard disks and memory, highly optimized to deliver the website files to thousands of readers simultaneously. The machines are stacked up high, and there are no keyboards, mice or monitors to be seen.

So – You Need A Website Host?

There are various ways of hosting your website, so let’s take a look.

Hosted Services

The first and simplest kind of hosting is creating a sub-website within a larger site, usually for a specific application like a blog. There are so many hosted services on the Internet, but here are some specific blog examples, all free:

WordPress.com – Free, but your blog will be hosted at a URL such as myblog.wordpress.com (unless you pay a premium for your own domain). You will get to choose from a restricted set of blog themes and plugins, and generally can’t do anything beyond the basic setup.

Blogger.com – owned by Google, Blogger gives you a little more flexibility with regards to writing your own theme code, but the plugin selection is limited and the Blogger branding is everywhere. Frankly, there is a reason WordPress is top – but it’s good to have a choice anyway.

Advantages:

• Simple to set up and get started.
• Generally good speeds as the company is specialised and good at what they do.

Disadvantages:

• Very little control over the technical side of things. Non-approved plugins not supported, although Blogger is a little more flexible.
• Portability: If your blog does get popular and you have a subdomain from a free hosted service, then moving to your own host later becomes difficult and you’re liable to lose some of the fans you’ve built up when the domain changes.

Self-Hosted

If you want to go the DIY free route, then it is in fact entirely possible to host your own website at home, on your own Internet connection – but you should be aware that most ISPs don’t approve of this and it may be in violation of your terms of service, so do check first.

We’ve written a few guides before on how to self host a website on a spare computer, or even within Windows on your main computer.

Advantages:

• As much computing power as you have to throw at it.
• The ultimate in freedom to do whatever you want with your site.
• Free.

Disadvantages:

• A fairly high level of technical knowledge, or the patience to learn.
• The speed of your website will depend upon the upload speed of your internet connection, which is both slow and very limited. Bear in mind that any upload traffic you use to host your site will also count toward your ISP’s monthly quota, if they have one.

Shared Hosting:

So called because you share a hosting server with thousands of other websites that are also stored on the same computer. Shared hosting is the budget option – prices and packages vary greatly – most will come will a free domain name registration and so called “unlimited bandwidth and storage”, but don’t be fooled. Shared hosts rarely allow anything other than basic web files – so you can’t use that unlimited storage to backup your computer, for instance.

Perhaps the most famous budget shared host is GoDaddy, with plans starting at $3 a month. There are also lots of free shared webhosts, but you really do get what you pay for.

Advantages:

• Budget, and a great way to start out with your own custom domain.
• Easy install options for popular blogging and forum web apps that mean you don’t need a lot of technical knowledge.

Disadvantages:

• Incredibly slow.
• Anything beyond a basic blog will get warnings from your host regarding CPU and memory overusage.

Virtual Private Server & Dedicated Servers:

These are the top 2 levels of website hosting, and mean you get the whole server to yourself. The difference between Virtual Private Server (VPS) and Dedicated Server is that a Dedicated Server is a single, physical system which you essentially “rent” inside of a data center. A VPS is a single, virtual machine – similar to the way you can use Parallels to run a virtual machine inside of your OSX install. MakeUseOf is hosted on a dedicated server.

My personal recommendation for a VPS or Dedicated server is Media Temple. Their VPS starts from $50 a month, while dedicated servers start at $750 (yes, you did just read that right).

Advantages:

• (Nearly) Unlimited domain hosting.
• The fastest hosting available (just to illustrate, I recently moved my iPadBoardGames site from shared hosting to a VPS, and the page load time dropped from an appalling 10 seconds to under 2.5 seconds).

Disadvantages:

• High level of technical knowledge required.
• Expensive.

Starting Out

If you’re serious about starting a blog, I really suggest you skip the free route and head straight to a shared hosting account. Yes, it may cost a little, but it will save you so many headaches down the line – and there is a psychological effect that if you’re actually paying for it, you’re going to put more effort in. When the time comes to upgrade – then you can easily migrate to more a more professional solution. The learning process is one hell of a ride, so what are you waiting for?

Image Credits: Shutterstock 1 and Shutterstock 2

For a new website, that’s great. You might have a few visitors trickling in at first. Maybe you went for the economical approach and opted for the cheapest hosting plan you could find. During those early days, you can withstand an occasional hour or two of downtime when other users consume all of the bandwidth – no one will scream at you.

However, once your traffic starts taking off and you establish a certain level of readership and a regular following – you’ll find that people depend on you for regular content. They depend on your uptime. You’ll also find that you’re more likely to get attacked by hackers looking to either sabotage your site or, even worse, hijack your domain – you need secure web hosting and to protect your domain.

If you haven’t seen Aibek’s interview on Foundora, check it out. He describes how the MUO domain was once hijacked and held hostage for $2000. Seriously. So here at MUO, we are now really big into security. You can check out Saikat’s list of browser security checks or Damien’s list of WordPress security plugins. However, what I want to touch on a bit today is your domain and hosting security.

Protecting Your Domain

At first, that domain name that you’ve registered seems ridiculously cheap considering that it represents what should eventually become your brand. The domain name is how people are going to learn about you, link to you, and recognize you. In time, it will represent everything that your website stands for. It’s going to serve on the front lines of your SEO battles. As your site grows, your domain name becomes the single most critical element of your business.

Private domain registration is your first wall of defense against domain hijacking. The problem with the early days of domain registration is that you had your private contact information tied to the Whois record – meaning anyone that searched for the registration records of your URL could identify where you lived, your phone number and your email address. With your email address, hackers may start to send phishing emails with the hopes that you’re gullible enough to bite.

By now, you should know better than to click on such emails. Never, ever log into your domain account from a link within an email. Always go directly to the registrar’s website and log into your domain account directly. Even though it might double the yearly cost of your domain, private domain registration will also cut down on telemarketers. Before I started using private domains, I had SEO companies constantly calling to ask whether I wanted to use their services for my website. Avoid the hassle – hide your identity with private registration.

Protecting Your Website

There are a number of areas within your hosting account that you’ll need to double check to verify that you have a secure web hosting account. The most important is obviously the password that you use to log into the hosting account itself. Go into the account settings and change your password.  Most hosts now feature a gauge that tells you how strong your password is.

Choose a password that has capital and lower case numbers, letters, and even a special character or two thrown in for good measure. Try to follow the guidelines below for the best security.

• Never use the same password for your host account as you used for your domain registration.
• Never use the same password for domain registration as you use for your email account.
• Use a unique, strong password on all three systems – just make sure they are all different.

By avoiding the same password on different accounts, you significantly reduce the risk that if one account is ever hacked, the hacker will not have access to your other systems.

Another security concern to review on your site is folder permissions. Check folders within your public_html folder to ensure that they are either 755 or 644 for www readability. You should not find any folders that are set with 777 for permissions.

Also, take some time to review the security tools that your web host offers. Sometimes there are some pretty cool utilities that you can use to further lock down your hosting account and private directories or files from prying eyes. For example, I’ve discovered that my hosting account offers a useful password protection feature on any select web directory that I choose.

Finally, go into your admin panel for your MySQL databases and double check all of the passwords there too. They shouldn’t match any of your other passwords, and they should be ultra-strong passwords, just like all of your others.

In the end, the ultimate security in protecting your domain from being hijacked comes from the private domain registration service. For a small additional fee, you’ll have tremendous peace of mind knowing that scammers, spammers and other criminals can’t see or even hope to access your personal information. Beyond that tool, make sure to lock down your hosting and email accounts as well, and you’ll enjoy years of trouble-free website ownership.

What other tips do you have for protecting your domain from hijackers or hackers? Has your domain ever been hijacked? Share your advice and experiences in the comments section below.

Image credit: IngerM

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Full results and this week’s poll after the jump.

As you can see, most people reading MakeUseOf have been reading the blog for a while.

This week’s poll question is: Which Is The Best Budget Web Host?

We know there’s some great web hosts out there. However, most everyday people are looking to find the best host they can within a modest budget. Let’s find out which of these are the best!

Please feel free to add your favourite hosts to the comments, as well as sharing your horror stories and praise for the ones we’ve mentioned!