WordPress powers 48 of the top 100 blogs online. More than that, WordPress actually powers 19% of the web as a whole.

Such a strong community of users and developers means that the platform is sure to evolve even further and provide us with lots of features that are yet to be developed.

Unfortunately, this creates some dangers as well. The cases where a blog owner loses complete access to their site are not uncommon.

WordPress as a whole (a website management platform) is very well designed. It doesn’t have any preposterous security issues that beginning programmers could exploit. The problems, however, arise when you try to tweak your settings of WordPress by adding new plugins or themes.

This doesn’t mean that you should settle for the default installation, not use any plugins, and only blog using the default theme. You need to be careful when installing new stuff on your blog, as well as when setting up your blog for the first time.

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Performance is the core ingredient of any successful website. WordPress is becoming more popular now, due to the availability of a numerous number of plugins which can be used to perform different tasks. But as the traffic on the website increases, the loading time also increases because of the time taken to load all the scripts and plugins. Here goes a few tips to improve the performance of your Wordpress site.

Upgrade

Always upgrade to the latest version of Wordpress. The latest versions are released with more advantageous features to overcome the drawbacks of the previous versions. So, when you get a notification in the admin panel that “An updated version of wordpress is available”, do notice it !!!

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YII is a free open source web application development frame work written in php5. It has the extremely optimized performance and it is a perfect choice for any kind of projects. Its high and impressive performance while comparing with other PHP-based frameworks immediately drew very positive attention. Its popularity and adoption continues to grow at an ever increasing rate.

YII is the fastest PHP frame work best for creating large scale Web2.0 applications. YII can be used for developing any kind of web applications. It is especially suited for high traffic web applications like portals,forum, social media sites and so on. The name YII(pronounced as ‘yee’) is the abbreviation of “Yes It Is”. Obviously it is the answer for the questions like:

Is it fast? … Is it secure? … Is it professional? … >> Yes, it is!

Why YII?

YII has the features like MVC,DAO/ActiveRecord,caching, authentication and role-based access control, scaffolding, testing and so on. It is light weight and has powerful caching support. Security is a part of this frame work. It includes input validation, output filtering, SQL injection and Cross-site scripting prevention.

YII is much faster because it is using lazy loading technique. It does not enable a functionality until or unless that has been invoked for the first time. For example it does not create an object unless the object is called for the first time. Other frameworks suffer from the performance hit because they would enable a functionality no matter it is used or not during a request.

1. Performance.

YII has the extreme performance compared to other frame works. The YII team have generated a statistics for the performance of different frame works based on “request per second” which describes how many requests an application written in a framework can process per second. From the graph given below the RPS is for “request per second”. The higher number shows the higher performance level of the frame work. The performance is significantly high when we enable the PHP extension APC.

2. Security.

Security measures like Cross-site Scripting Prevention, Cross-site Request Forgery Prevention and Cookie Attack Prevention are enabled. Also YII includes client side and server side validation. We can just enable or disable the validation rule. It is not required to write separate validation rule for the inputs like other frameworks. YII has built-in authentication support. It also supports authorization via hierarchical role-based access control.

3. Best Caching features.

YII provides various cache components to store cached data in different media. While comparing to other frame works YII has an excellent caching system. YII supports memcache, APC, XCache and DB based page and segment caching.

4. Friendly with third-party code

YII is also designed to work with third party codes. You can use code from PEAR or Zend Framework in your YII application.

5. Easy to extend / customize

It is very easy to edit or customize the YII based applications, since it has a very simple code structure. You can also use different kinds of extensions and widgets as per the requirements.

YII is purely object oriented, architecturally clean and very simple to extend it. If you are not experienced with the PHP frame works and want to develop some simple applications, then maybe you should try an easier framework. I recommend to everyone who knows object oriented programming should pick up YII and try it once.

About the Author :

Prasobh Balakrishnan works as a Software Engineer in Bobcares. He joined Bobcares in may 2012. He loves programming and listening to music in his free time.

Virtual Private Servers are the primary choice of customers who can’t afford to buy a Dedicated Server, at the same time need same amount of flexibility and control. This industry is facing a serious threat from Amazon and Windows Azure Cloud Platforms. This article is focused on running a VPS business which can compete with these cloud platforms.

A thorough understanding of the features that end customers looks for in these services and implementing them at much lower price tag is the key for running a successful VPS hosting services. Windows Azure is an open and flexible cloud platform that enables you to quickly build, deploy and manage applications across a global network of Microsoft-managed datacenters. The key features of Azure are:

* 99.95% monthly availability

* Supports different OS and frameworks

* Instant deployment

* Instant Scaling of resources

* Pay only for the resources used

* Quality customer support

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud enables us to create a computing instance in Amazon’s network. The main highlights of these platform are:

* 99.95% availability

* Instant deployment and scalability of computing resources

* Web interface for managing firewall.

* Easy deployment using preconfigured images

* Custom configurations using custom images

* Pay for only the resources used

* Quality customer support

A normal deployment of a VPS server may take days with its regular routine of customer chating with the sales team, then another few days for the technician to set-up the server. Your website should provide the customers an option to create custom configurations, generate its cost and order it instantly. Providing predefined configurations and proper documentation of their pros and cons will also delight the customer. Once the customer has ordered the VPS, you should be able to deploy the server within hours.

Your plans should provide high availability. This can be implemented using high availability configurations like Xen Clusters. A lot of virtualization technologies offers high availability configurations.

Another factor is instant scaling or resources. The customer may be anticipating high traffic in in the next day and he may need to scale up the resource instantly.Scaling of computing resource can be done instantly in most virtualization technologies. An experienced support team can accomplish it in a few minutes. The only requirement is that you keep sufficient free resources in the hardware node. If the hardware node itself runs out of resources, you will need the DC technician to manually upgrade the resources. This can cause considerable downtime for server.

A web interface which allows the customer to login and perform tasks like viewing resource usage of his server, ordering new resources or servers etc will be an added advantage. The billing portal used by most hosting providers can be customized to implement these services unless you are using any third party applications like WHMCS.

Integrating a high availability configuration which provides instant scaling of resources coupled with quality customer support and competitive pricing will make the customer think twice before opting for Amazon or Azure.

The above is a very rough outline on Running VPS business competing amazon & azure , if you have any questions, we would be happy to talk to you!

About the Author :

Dipin.D works as a Software Engineer in Bobcares. He joined Bobcares in October 2010. He loves reading books and listening to music in his free time.

Blog edited by :

Appu Joseph Xavier works as a Software Engineer in Bobcares. He joined Bobcares in April 2012. He loves to watch movies in his free time.

what is a VPS?

A VPS or virtual private server which works by partitioning a single physical server. The Physical node consists of only one root operating system. Using software such as Parallels Virtuozzo or VM-Ware the same operating system can then be installed over the top of the Hardware Nodes creating multiple Virtual Nodes. These Virtual Nodes use the same registry and system files to maximize efficiency and minimise both memory and hard disk usage. This all allows for independent execution of the virtual servers without interference from the other virtual servers connected to the same physical server.

Different Types of VPS Services

1.Managed VPS hosting service

In managed VPS hosting service the hosting company supply professionals who are well trained in solving numerous kind of hosting relevant specialised problems, able to administrate and handle issues quickly. They also guarantee that your world wide web functions are at safe hands and let you able to concentrate on the other important tasks at the same time. Managed VPS hosting service supply 24/7 service to help you regardless of the location where you are located and time boundary. Further, they guarantee that your server is working actively without any issues.

2.Unmanaged VPS hosting service

In Unmanaged hosting service the hosting company will not provide any support regarding the issues related with software , resource , performance , troubleshooting or need general help in understanding server applications. The user is completely responsible for the management and troubleshooting of the issues caused in the server. Only hardware related issues will be handled by the hosting provider.

Advantages of VPS over shared hosting

1.Security

In the case of VPS hosting your file system is not accessible or viewable by any other customer, your files are ensured full privacy and security.

2.Control

In the case of VPS hosting, you are able to modify server configuration files, install applications or modify system software With administrative or root access.

3.Isolation

In the case of VPS hosting, You are fully isolated from other users and actions on the server. No other customer can slow down or affect your service.

4.Performance

In the case of VPS hosting, Your resources may be guaranteed based on your plan, nothing else on the server will affect the performance of your VPS

Why Purchase VPS Hosting?

VPS hosting is a package that gives you a big part of server for a web project. Most online web companies provide VPS servers only to several companies, all located on one server. So the possibility of bad neighbourhood common for Shared Hosting is incredibly small in case of VPS. Along with server safety you get nice amount of disk space, serious bandwidth, control panel, and a dedicated support.

A VPS server is a good choice if your project is already quite big and in the foreseeable future your site will have to host big amounts of media. For instance, your users will upload audios, videos, images or other documents that take much disk space. All these documents will stay on your server, so you’ll need more gigabytes for it. Also, VPS hosting can process more users coming to your web page.

The prices for this hosting type are quite moderate, but we advise you to check the reliability of any company offering you cheap services. Low price can cover bad functioning, poor hosting features or unreliable customers support.

The above is a very rough outline on advantages of VPS hosting , if you have any questions, we would be happy to talk to you!

About the Author :

Karthikeyan.S works as a Software Engineer in Bobcares. He joined Bobcares in April 2012. He loves reading books and listening to music in his free time.

Blog edited by :

Appu Joseph Xavier works as a Software Engineer in Bobcares. He joined Bobcares in April 2012. He loves to watch movies in his free time.

We discussed Google analytics, and it’s basic features in the last blog. Lets now find out “How to setup Google Analytics”.

Setting up Google Analytics in three easy steps :

Step 1: Set up your Google account
To use Google Analytics, you’ll first need to set up an account with Google. Once done, you will be provided with a unique identifier to add to your site. Read the rest of this entry »

Server hacking is a common problem that webhosts face. The intrusion can be caused by several reasons like malicious scripts, vulnerabilities in the server etc.

It would be of real help, if we had a good tool to find such scripts running in the server. iScanner is one such tool. Read the rest of this entry »

How is it that some websites are always successful, while others never reach the glory? The reasons for this could be improper marketing of the web-site. I am not talking about giving ads and promotions here, but an insight into finding out more about your site’s visitors.

Gathering information about your visitors, their trends, volumes, and locations, all these help in guiding prospective visitors to your site. With Google Analytics (GA), gathering information and performing analysis is easier than ever. Read the rest of this entry »

Wouldn’t it be great if you could know the geographical location of people visiting your site/server? You can! GeoIP can be used to get this information and do lots more. There are many ways to use it, but the most preferred way is to use it as an Apache module. If Apache on your server has been set up to load dynamic modules, then you wont have to recompile Apache again. An Apache module for GeoIP mod_geoip can be installed to provide this additional functionality.

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Over the past few months Google has been releasing a number of tools to help site owners speed up their sites. All of which have been a part of their initiative to make the web faster. Even with all this work, they still know that one of the major causes of slow websites are images. To help tackle this necessary evil, Google has now launched a new image format WebP, that promises to significantly reduce the byte size of photos on the web, allowing web sites to load faster than before.

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