Cloud Computing can be difficult to understand at first. I have written a few posts already about Cloud Computing, but the feedback I received from some readers is that the videos and content I posted did not make sense. I want to help you better understand what Cloud Computing is and help you visually see the benefits of the Cloud for your business. Recently, the professional CRM service SalesForce put together a neat little video that explains Cloud Computing and the benefits of it. The video is about 3 minutes long. Take a look at it here:

\n[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

I hope this helps. This video gives you an idea of what Cloud Computing is when it comes to 3rd party applications. But this Cloud Computing stuff also applies to people who want to use Open Source Applications. In many ways you can think of your web hosting account with a hosting provider as your “cloud” and the open source applications that you have setup on there. For example I have my Dreamhost web hosting account, and on it I can host a variety of open source apps from WordPress to Magento and so forth.

• Do You Know What Cloud Computing Is?

I’m sure you have heard of the new popular web term going around called Cloud Computing. You hear about it in the blogs. You see IBM commercials talking about things like “cloud computing” and working in “the cloud”. But what does all this really mean? What is Cloud Computing? What is “the cloud?”

I must admit that I am still trying to wrap my mind around the entire subject of cloud computing, but after hours of research and reading I am getting closer to fully understanding it. I thought I would share with you a video that helped me out in the beginning of my research to understand what cloud computing is.

Joyent.com put together a video during last year’s Web 2.0 conference where they interviewed many big name web people and asked them what they thought Cloud Computing is. This video is about 10 minutes long and I strongly recommend taking 10 minutes of your day, watch this video and prepare to take some notes.

\n[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

What did you think? Do you think you have a better idea of what Cloud Computing is? What questions do you have? I am preparing to write some more info that I have learned on the subject and i’m looking to know what questions you guys might have.

• Better Understanding Cloud Computing (video)

I was asked recently by a good friend of mine what the difference was between having your own web desktop and using Google’s web based productivity tools. It’s actually a good question. But there are 3 specific reasons why I am enjoying using the open source eyeOS and hosting my own web desktop, as opposed to using a 3rd party service like Google.

1. The data is mine - sometimes I work on confidential business documents, and the last thing I want is for those documents to be hosted by a 3rd party. Even if that 3rd party is Google as much as I trust them. With my own web desktop, hosted on my own server that I pay for, I know that my information is kept completely private.

2. Everything in one browser tab – one of my biggest pet peeves about Google’s web apps, is that they all involve opening yet another tab in my browser. There are times when I’m editing a doc, spreadsheet, reading RSS feeds, and checking Gmail all at the same time. Well this causes not 1 but 4 tabs to be open in my web browser. Enough to drive me crazy. With a web desktop, it’s all contained in one tab on the browser.

3. There are things I cannot do with Google or Zoho – as great as their services are, there are still a few things I cannot do, but I can do with a web desktop. These 2 main things are 1) the ability to have access to a FTP client from anywhere and 2) a file backup application so I can save documents, images, and other file types on the go.

All in all, this open source web desktop eyeOS is proving to be a huge productivity boost for me. Right now I currently host it on my Dreamhost server and am loving it. Here are 7 ways eyeOS is allowing me to work literally from anywhere.

1. eyeOS Word Processor

2. eyeOS Spreadsheets

3. eyeOS RSS Reader

4. eyeOS Contact Manager

5. eyeOS FTP Client

6. eyeOS Calendar

7. eyeOS File Manager

If you are interested in setting up eyeOS and getting your own Web Desktop I have created a set of instructions to help you install eyeOS on your own web server.

• 4 Steps to Minimalize Your Digital Life
• The Week in Review – 11/02/09
• How To Install eyeOS on a Dreamhost Web Server
• 8 Ways EyeOS Can Help You In Business

I wrote a while back about eyeOS, the open source web desktop and the benefits for web workers in a post titled 8 Ways EyeOS Can Help You in Business. In case you are still in the dark as to what eyeOS is refer to that page. In this post I am going to show you step-by-step how to get eyeOS installed, in this case on a Dreamhost server. It’s fairly easy.

1. Download the eyeOS application from eyeos.org

2. Unzip and upload the contents to your server

3. Now in your browser, go to the /installer/index.php file to access the Installation Wizard

4. Be sure to setup your root password to something you will both remember and will be difficult for someone to hack into.

5. That’s it! You should now have eyeOS working perfectly on your Dreamhost server. You are presented with a login screen. Remember that the main username is ‘root’ and the password is the password you just created.

As you can tell that was ridiculously easy! That’s because thanks to the team over at Dreamhost, all of the necessary pre-configurations that eyeOS requires are already in place on your server. This saves a ton of time and headache and makes eyeOS literally this easy and quick to install.

Have any of you setup your web desktop yet with eyeOS? What do you think?

• The Week in Review – 11/02/09
• 7 Ways eyeOS Allows Me to Work From Anywhere
• Special Dreamhost Promo Code for my Readers!
• 8 Ways EyeOS Can Help You In Business

Backupify.com, formerly known as Lifestream Backup is a service that provides backup of all your social media information. The basic idea is that through a Backupify.com account, you can have your Facebook and Twitter data backed up for you on a daily or weekly basis. There are of course other services that you can have backed up. These currently include:

• Twitter
• Facebook
• WordPress
• Delicious
• Basecamp
• Google Docs
• Gmail
• Zoho
• Flickr
• and Photobucket

This type of service is huge! In fact I wish I had thought of it myself. But right now as users with these 3rd party services like Facebook and Twtter, our hands are tied when it comes to the safety of our data. We spend hundreds even thousands of hours updating “tweets” on twitter, uploading photos on Facebook etc. And to imagine all that just to disappear because of a mistake. Ouch!

I don’t like the idea of losing my Facebook data!

I don’t like the idea of losing any of my social data. But my Facebook data is particularly important because it’s personal. The friend connections I have on Facebook are people that I am personally connected too. Many of them I have not talked too for years. And if it were not for Facebook I would have never had found them.

These friend connections along with the photos (memories) are extremely important to me. If I lost this data I would be pissed to say the least. I’m looking forward to using Backupify.com to help me keep this from ever happening.

My 1 recommendation for Backupify.com

The one service that I would like to see integrated into their system would be StumbleUpon. I would have to say that is the only big thing missing for me. I spend a ton of time bookmarking my favorite sites through StumbleUpon and would love to have that backed up with their services.

Pricing for Backupify.com

They basically have 4 different packages. The first package is free and they will backup your Twitter data for you up to 10MB. Not very much space. However “tweets” don’t take up that much space either.

The second package is $29/year and they give you 2GB of storage. Backups for all their suppported services (see above). But you can’t backup pictures and video.

The third package is $39/year and they give you 10GB of storage. All services can be backed up that they support and you can backup photos and videos with this package.

The fourth and final package (for you serious folks) is the Max package which is $109/year. Equivelent to a shared hosting account in price. You get 50GB with everything mentioned above in the other packages. This is probably going to be the one that I go for because I really depend on my social data.

FTC Disclosure: For your information I have written this post not only because I find this service interesting, but also because I have entered into a contest with Backupify.com and will be given a free premium account for writing this review on them.

• 4 Steps to Minimalize Your Digital Life
• Open Source Social Media Strategy Part I
• Aggregate Your Entire Lifestream To Your Domain
• Getting Paid to Tweet!
• Google + Twitter = Real-Time Search

Data Center Pulse’s posted a video on YouTube a little while back of some footage of Google Server Platform Architect Ben Jai explaining how Google deploys many of it’s servers. In particular they discuss the 12v battery that they attach to each server to  make the servers more efficient and “green friendly”. It’s actually quite the insight to see how efficient Google is with their web and storage servers. When you think about it, it makes perfect sense because these servers are literally the life blood of Google’s operations. Check out the video here.

video link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J139Aelaf0g

• Does Google See Your Domain’s Private Registration Data?
• Google + Twitter = Real-Time Search
• Why You Should Know The History of Google
• Feedburner + Pubsubhubbub + Wordpress = Real-Time Blogging
• 10 Things You Need To Know About RSS Cloud

I have a special promo code for all my readers for Dreamhost webhosting! Basically if you sign up for a Dreamhost account and use the code CHASESAGUMDREAM you end up getting 2 free domain names with your account! Not a bad deal!

Dreamhost is a solid reputable shared webhosting provider with thousands of trusted customers. If you want to learn more about what they provide click on the links above to learn more.

• How To Install eyeOS on a Dreamhost Web Server
• Stumbles for April 6, 2008
• Who is Hosting This Website?

I have for the past 2 years hosted the majority of my websites and web applications on a Hostmonster account. That’s where this blog is currently hosted. And although i’m planning on keeping this site on Hostmonster, I have decided to start moving the rest of my sites over to Lunarpages. There are mainly 8 reasons for this:

1. Much Friendlier

I have found the staff over at Lunar Pages to be a much friendlier bunch. Especially when things go wrong. Other hosting companies that I have worked with have an arrogant IT staff at times. This is not the case with Lunarpages.  They seem to have a family type atmosphere at Lunarpages. Instead of coming off “corporate” they feel more like a “ma & pa” business.

2. Gave Me Everything Hostmonster Has

I get the exact same service and features that Hostmonster is giving me. Same bandwidth, disk space, control panel, subdomains etc. If you did’nt know any better you would think they were the same company.

3. I can Upgrade to a Dedicated Server

This is a big thing that I cannot do with Hostmonster. I can upgrade my account in the future to a full on dedicated server with Lunarpages when the time is right. This is important for me as I like many of you have high hopes and aspirations for many of my sites.  The day will come when a shared hosting account will not be able to hold up against my traffic.

4. Only Paid $4.95/month

That’s actually $2/month cheaper than I paid with Hostmonster. That’s a big difference when you sign up for a 3 or 4 year account like I did. The low price made it easy for me to purhcase an account with them.

5. WordPress Worked Perfectly

Like many of you alot of my sites are blogs running on WordPress. It was important that I would be able to setup WordPress with no issues. I had no issues whatsoever with Lunarpages and WordPress and that made migration very easy on me.

6. Drupal Worked Perfectly

Same thing here with the Drupal CMS. I run alot of sites with it and needed it to migrate smoothly. No problems here at all with Lunarpages.

7. No Downtime in 6 Months!

I have quitely monitored my uptime with my Lunarpages account and in the 6 months that I have had the account my server has yet to have gone down. I don’t expect that my perfect streak will go on forever, but if my server only goes down once every 6 months I can definitely live with that!

8. Game me 999 MySQL Databases

This was very important for me. For some reason, Hostmonster limits you to only 100 MySQL databses. And although that may seem like a lot, it’s not. Because each blog and CMS run off either Drupal or WordPress take up a MySQL account. With all the domains, subdomains, and apps running in folders that gets eaten up pretty fast. I needed much more than this and I get it with Lunarpages. Web hosting Search ranks lunarpages in top 10 for their dedicated server hosting packages. Lunarpages is also known for their virtual private server.

• No Related Post

If you have a web hosting account with 1&1 Webhosting then this blog article will help you in installing the MySQL web based client PhpMyAdmin on your hosting account.

The following will show you how to obtain and configure phpMyAdmin for the administration of your MySQL Database on 1&1 server. We recommend that you obtain an SSH client called PuTTY

First get the following information from your 1&1 Control Panel by following the
FAQ: Where can I find the necessary information to connect to MySQL Database?
Database Name
User Name
HostName
Password

1. Use PuTTY to login to your SSH account.

2. Once in type in the following:
wget http://aleron.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/phpmyadmin/phpMyAdmin-2.5.3-php.tar.gz
Note: There are latest versions of phpMyAdmin available. Please check website http://www.phpmyadmin.net/home_page/
This will start downloading phpMyAdmin into your home directory. Depending on
network speed, this should not take long.

3. Once the download is complete decompress phpMyAdmin-2.5.3-php.tar.gz file. To do
this type the following command:
tar xvfz phpMyAdmin-2.5.3-php.tar.gz

4. You have to configure phpMyAdmin to recognize 1&1 server settings. To do so, change to the phpMyAdmin-2.5.3 directory and edit the config.inc.php file with
myShell:~> cd phpMyAdmin-2.5.3
myShell:~> vi config.inc.php

5. After the file is open press the insert key on the keyboard.

Only the following changes must be made:

$cfg['PmaAbsoluteUri'] = ‘http://justonedomain.com/phpMyAdmin/’;
Change this setting to reflect the full pathname and the directory where phpMyAdmin
is located. For example: 1and1.com/phpMyAdmin/

$cfg['Servers'][$i]['host'] = ‘dbxx.perfora.net’;
Place the host name here

$cfg['Servers'][$i]['auth_type'] = ‘config’;
Make certain this option is set to config. It may be there by default.

$cfg['Servers'][$i]['user'] = ‘dboxxxxxxxx’;
Your mySQL user name

$cfg['Servers'][$i]['password'] = ‘xxxxxxxx’;
Your mySQL password

$cfg['Servers'][$i]['only_db'] = ‘dbxxxxxxxx’;
Your database name

To save the changes, Type :wq. Now exit out of the directory by typing in the command:
myShell:~> cd ..

6. Change the name of phpMyAdmin-2.5.3 to phpMyAdmin by typing the command
myShell:~> mv phpMyAdmin-2.5.3/ phpMyAdmin

7. Protect the directory(phpMyAdmin) in Control Panel under
Web Space & Access -> Protected Directories. Select phpMyAdmin directory, create
a user name and password.

8. Now to view the contents of your database go to
www.yourdomain.com/phpMyAdmin

Note: Not all packages have SSH Access. If you don’t have SSH access, then you can set it up using FTP.

1. Download the file from http://www.phpmyadmin.net/home_page/

2. You can untar the file using WinRAR.

3. Then edit the file config.inc.php using any text editor (Notepad is fine).

4.
Only the following changes must be made:

$cfg['PmaAbsoluteUri'] = ‘http://justonedomain.com/phpMyAdmin/’;
Change this setting to reflect the full pathname and the directory where phpMyAdmin
is located. For example: 1and1.com/phpMyAdmin/

$cfg['Servers'][$i]['host'] = ‘dbxx.perfora.net’;
Place the host name here

$cfg['Servers'][$i]['auth_type'] = ‘config’;
Make certain this option is set to config. It may be there by default.

$cfg['Servers'][$i]['user'] = ‘dboxxxxxxxx’;
Your mySQL user name

$cfg['Servers'][$i]['password'] = ‘xxxxxxxx’;
Your mySQL password

$cfg['Servers'][$i]['only_db'] = ‘dbxxxxxxxx’;
Your database name

5. Save the changes.

6. Change the name of phpMyAdmin-2.5.3 directory to phpMyAdmin.

7. Upload this directory into the directory your domain is pointing to.

8. Protect the directory(phpMyAdmin) in the Control Panel under Web Space & Access -> Protected Directories. Select phpMyAdmin directory, create a user name and password.

9. Now to view the contents of your database go to www.yourdomain.com/phpMyAdmin

50% off of 1&1 Internet’s Beginner & Business Packages* (Linux & Microsoft). Offer ends 8/31!

• No Related Post

Over at webhostingunleashed.com you will find a very helpful article on 9 tips for not getting screwed by your web host. So far I have been lucky with Bluehost, Hostmonster, & Lunarpages. But some people have not been so lucky when it comes to web hosting. So if you are new to web hosting or have had troubles in the past with web hosting companies, these 9 tips are for you.

1. Keep Your Domains Separate From Your Hosting Company

The number one mistake is trusting a hosting company with control over your domains. We get around one review a day from a user whose hosting company is holding their domains hostage so that user can’t move to another hosting company. Keep your domains with a big company like eNom or GoDaddy. That way you only have to change your DNS servers in order to use a new hosting company. People who used RegisterFly found this out the hard way and now thousands of people are loosing their domains because RegisterFly ripped them off and wouldn’t give them access.

2. Diskspace and Bandwidth Are Marketing Terms

Too many people think they actually need 200GB of bandwidth and 50GB of diskspace to run their little blog. The numbers don’t matter anymore because hosting companies now offer more resources then you can actually use! They use these huge numbers to sucker you in and you just need to ignore them. You need to look at what really matter such as how good the hosting companies support is, their reputation, when and how their support is available, and what you need in terms of reliability versus what you are willing to pay. Don’t get suckered into a hosting company because they have bigger numbers then another.

3. Test Support Before You Signup

Before you sign up for a host call them and/or get on live chat and make sure they are available and that they can answer some basic questions. I wrote out 5 questions you can use to test support and you can choose one of these to quiz support with to make sure they know their stuff. Very easy to do and will save you some hassle in the long run.

4. Research The Host – Review Sites, Forums, and Blogs

It is amazing how many people don’t do this and just trust some top 10 site that is probably owned by the hosting company it is promoting. Some trusted review sites are us at Web Hosting Unleashed and WHReviews. The other great resource is to search forums for reviews by users. WebHostingTalk is the best resource but just remember that people there demand everything for nothing so some of the reviews are living in fantasy land when they expect perfect service for $10 bucks a month. Every hosting company is going to have some bad reviews so don’t let that ruin them for you. Some other good forums for hosting reviews are SitePoint, v7n, WickedFire, and DigitalPoint. Just use the search button and type in the name of the host you are researching to find posts about them.

Searching blogs is a little harder but still a good resource, just make sure you can tell when its a real blog post and not a fake blog post made to just promote the host. Just go to Google’s Blog Search and type in the name of the host to get some results or phrases like the host and then reviews. You should be able to find some good reviews by normal web masters on the service they are getting.

5. Save Money With Hosting Coupons

Lots of hosting company have coupons so why not save some money if they do. We have a hosting coupons section at WHU and you can also just search on Google for the host name and coupon, coupons, or discount. Might as well save some money on the host you have chosen.

6. Do Your Own Backups – Trust No One!

If your site is important or even generating you income you need to do backups. I don’t care if your host says they are doing daily backups to a bunker 100 feet underground don’t trust them. If you have recent backups it makes handling a major disaster easier and easier to move to another hosting company. Either download the site files and databases yourself or if your host is using cPanel you can use a service like cPanelBackup.com to have them automate and backup your site. I’ve been through a few disasters where my data was lost and having backups saved me from loosing years of work. This is especially important if you run an e-commerce site or any site that is making you money.

7. Use Paypal or a One Time Use Credit Card

If you follow the steps above you shouldn’t need this but it can’t hurt. Use Paypal or a one time use credit card number to prevent your host from charging you even after you cancel. We get a few reviews each week where a person can’t get ahold of their host who is still charging them after they cancel. Small hosting companies might disappear and keep charging you but if you use Paypal or a one time use credit card number you hold the power!

8. Avoid Really Long Contracts Unless You Trust The Company

If you have done the research on a host it is less of an issue but I always recommend avoiding hosts with a contract longer then a few months. You don’t want to lock yourself into a host for a year or more until you are sure they are good and even then I would avoid a long period of time. I’ve seen too many hosting companies sell to a new owner after six months and that new owner just disappears after a few months. Try to find hosts that offer month to month hosting or a generous cancellation and refund policy on months not used in a contract. I use HostGator and HostNine because they offer month to month billing so if they ever turn bad I can leave without having to mess around.

9. You Get What You Pay For – Don’t Stress!

If you are doing backups and have control of your domains don’t stress if your site has a few periods of downtime or problems. Cheap web hosting is not going to be up 100 percent of the time and that is why it is cheap. You get what you pay for! You might have grand plans for your site but its better to save some money until you can afford a VPS or a host that doesn’t oversell so much.

Sponsor:

• No Related Post