Blog
June
Setting up a new domain name or changing where it points can be one of the most confusing aspects of configuring a new site for less experienced web masters. The most common question asked of web hosting companies’ support teams is: “Why is my domain name not working.” They’ve followed the instructions carefully, changed the records at their domain registrar so it’s using the right domain name servers, and yet, when they or other users try to visit the site by entering the domain name into their browser address bar, they get an error page.
Understanding why this happens requires a basic knowledge of how DNS works. The Domain Name System converts human readable web addresses like “www.example.com” into a set of machine readable numbers called an IP address that looks like this: “255.255.255.255”, or like this:“3ffe:1900:4545:3:200:f8ff:fe21:67cf”. It’s similar to how, in the old days, people used to look up phone numbers; they knew the name of the person they wanted to call and used that to find the number in the alphabetical list of a phone book.
DNS is a bit more complicated. When you enter the web address into your browser’s address bar a number of things happen very quickly.
June
Unresponsive Domain Name Services result in slow sites that are disadvantaged in the SERPs relative to more speedy competitors
Site speed is one among many factors that Google takes into account when it is deciding how to rank sites.
There are two major speed related signals that Google can use to determine SERP position. The first is the responsiveness of the site as measured by its crawlers. If Googlebot is often left waiting, that’s an indication to Google that the site may not offer the best experience for its users, even if the information is relevant to the query.
Secondly, Internet users are impatient: they want their requests for data fulfilled immediately and aren’t prepared to wait more than a couple of seconds. Slow-loading sites cause visitors to bounce right back to the SERPs to click on the next blue link. Google records the bounce as a signal that the searcher wasn’t satisfied with the results and adjusts the ranking accordingly.
June
Each month, we share the most interesting DNS, security, and enterprise IT content on our Google+, Facebook, and Twitter pages. We know you don’t always have time to read all that great material, so we’ve gathered the best content from May and brought it together in one convenient roundup. Enjoy!
DNS
- Your DNS Server Is Helping DDoS Attacks - In the first quarter of this year, it was reported that the Internet experienced a 700 percent DDoS bandwidth increase. As DDoS attacks force more bandwidth onto a target, it means that even the largest enterprise networks can succumb to over-utilization.
- Hacked DNS Servers Used in Linux/Cdorked Malware Campaign - The attack that employed compromised Apache Web server binaries is turning out to be more complex than originally thought, as researchers now have found that the attackers also are using Trojaned Nginx and Lighttpd binaries as part of the campaign. Read more..
May
Managed email services can help a business run self-hosted email solutions with the same level of reliability as cloud services without compromising privacy and security.
Many small businesses have accounts with ISPs that impose limitations on how they can use their bandwidth for outgoing services. Generally, the motivation for these limitations is a good faith attempt to prevent misuse of services – blocking port 25 to prevent spam email messages being sent over the ISP’s network, for example.
However, in many cases, small businesses have legitimate reasons for wanting to run their own email services. Having control over email and how its stored can be more reliable and secure than depending on third-party cloud-based email providers, particularly when high availability is required or sensitive information is communicated through email. A business taking responsibility for its own email service is often the best way to ensure that sensitive information stays where it’s supposed to and is reliably backed up.
May
This post has been contributed by Martin Jensen of Future Hosting. Martin is a technical writer for Future Hosting, a specialized VPS and dedicated server hosting company. Follow Future Hosting on Twitter at @fhsales, Like them on Facebook http://www.facebook.com/futurehosting, and check out all the services they offer on http://www.futurehosting.com.
A US laboratory recently revealed that it has been running a network encrypted with quantum technology for several years. Quantum cryptography has the potential to provide perfect encryption.
Traditional cryptography relies on the inherent difficulty of carrying out certain mathematical calculations in a practical amount of time. For example, encryption algorithms like RSA are based on the difficulty of factoring primes. If we take two very large prime numbers and multiply them, there is no quick mathematical way of getting back to the original prime numbers from their product. It can be done, but it typically takes hundreds or thousands of years to do so.
May
The Domain Name Service is a crucial aspect of maintaining a stable and reliable web presence. No matter how solid a business’s web hosting might be, how well-designed their site, and how effective their search engine optimization, without a properly managed domain name service, the connection between revenue generating users and a business’s site cannot be relied upon.
In the Unix developer world, there is a prevailing philosophy that a tool should do one thing and do it well. That’s both because it’s an extremely flexible approach, allowing collections of tools to be used in combinations that could never have been thought of by the original developer and because it allows developers to cultivate a deep knowledge of the problems of a particular domain and the best ways to solve them.
It’s a powerful way of thinking about developing software, and it’s equally applicable to other areas where a combination of functional units can be organized to contribute to an overarching goal.
May
We know that summer is approaching and the weathe
r is getting warmer. Luckily, while you were away from the computer, we continued to scour the internet for the best DNS, security, and enterprise IT content from the last month. So, without further ado, here’s April best.
DNS
- ICANN gTLDs: When Names Are Borrowed from an Atlas - When names are borrowed from an Atlas, things happen. Use of Geographic names have always caused some problems for two reasons; one they are in the public domain so anyone else can use them and two they connote that business is confined to just that geographic area. Like Paris Bakery, Waterloo Furniture or London Bank.
- HTG Explains: What is DNS Cache Poisoning? – DNS cache poisoning, also known as DNS spoofing, is a type of attack that exploits vulnerabilities in the domain name system (DNS) to divert Internet traffic away from legitimate servers and towards fake ones. Read more..
May
This post has been contributed by Graeme Caldwell — Graeme works as an inbound marketer for InterWorx, a revolutionary web hosting control panel for hosts who need scalability and reliability.
When businesses are planning their infrastructure deployment strategy, there are a couple of high level ways they can think about preparing for future expansion.
Vertical scaling is the addition of extra resources to the servers in a network. For example, perhaps a business runs up against storage capacity limits, so they choose to add extra or larger hard drives to their existing servers.
Vertical scaling is the old fashioned approach, and it tends to be significantly more expensive than the horizontal scaling we’re going to look at below. If a company expects to be vertically scaling their existing hardware, then that hardware has to be built with the possibility in mind. It has to have excess capacity, extra drive bays, and so on, that will end up sitting idle until the moment of expansion comes. Such hardware tends to be significantly more expensive than commodity hardware: hardware prices don’t scale linearly.
April
We’ve previously discussed the recent massive DDoS attacks that were directed at the Spamhaus spam monitoring service, and which used open DNS resolvers to amplify their available bandwidth. We issued a call for ISPs, hosting companies, and others in the industry to do all they can to reduce the number of open recursive DNS resolvers on the Internet, but there are additional steps that can be taken to severely restrict the potential means of attack available.
DNS amplification DDoS attacks work by prompting open DNS servers to direct large amounts of data at a domain that isn’t the same as the originating domain of the request. To do this, packets are crafted so that the originating IP is spoofed. Responses are sent to the spoofed target address, and so, with a script and a relatively small amount of bandwidth, attackers can direct overpowering floods of data at their target.
Cutting attackers off by removing the open DNS servers is the optimal solution, but preventing packets with spoofed IPs ever from entering target networks will also help mitigate attacks.
April
Click fraud is the bane of the advertising industry. Publishers depend on display advertising to generate revenue. By displaying relevant advertising, they hope to encourage their users to click through to the advertiser’s landing page. Each such click is registered by the advertising network, and the network and publisher share the advertiser’s payment between them.
Determining whether a click on an advert was generated by a human is both difficult and essential. Advertisers don’t want to pay for clicks from sources that are never going to purchase their products. For advertising networks and the publishers however, there exists the incentive to increase click-through by whatever means they can. One of the most popular methods of generating fraudulent clicks is through the use of botnets, and in a recent announcement, Spider.io, an analytics company, related their discovery of one such botnet that was targeting a group of 200 sites.