This post was created because of the email from one of my webhosting account… They said that my dedicated server is ready and I can now set up my own custom name server. They even offer to help if I don’t know how to do it. I just need to give them my account info…. sure… NOT.

Here’s how to do it in GoDaddy:

GoDaddy
1. Login to your GoDaddy Account.
2. Click on My Account
3. Click on Manage Domains
4. Click on the domain name you want to modify.
5. In the lower left corner of the page, there is a Host Summary. Click Add.
6. Enter the ns1 and ns2 and IP addresses. Then click OK.
7. Click the Nameservers icon across the top.
8. Change the nameservers to the ones you just created.

Try it! Goodluck!

301 .htaccess redirect is the safest search engine redirect there is! This is also the friendliest method for web page redirection. Most web hosting company and web master out there will definitely recommend this method of web page redirection. The code “301″ is interpreted as “moved permanently”.

For websites hosted in either dedicated server or a shared web hosting server, you use 301 redirects in redirecting a single html page or an entire website.

Here’s and example of redirecting a single page/html page:

Redirect 301 /oldpage.html http://www.example.com/newpage.html

For a whole website, you can use 301 redirect in this manner:

Redirect 301 / http://www.example.com/

Personally on my shared web hosted site, I only use the HTML redirect. But there are other use of the 301 redirect on a web sites.

Here are other use of it:

1. Changed file extension
2. Redirect web site with ‘www’ to not having one.
3. vice versa of the previous example.
4. Redirect example.com/index.php to example.com/

So next time you moved your web site content from one web hosting server provider to another or moving your site to a new domain name, you can definitely use the 301 redirect.

If you do a quick Google search for ‘reverse IP domain lookup‘, you’ll see that there are more than a couple of websites that offer such a tool.

The specific website I’ll be mentioning here is The Same IP, which is also the same as the commercial type.

THE SAME IP

What The Same IP do basically is to check the multiple PTR record for a particular domain on it’s authoritative domain name server.

While most rDNS entries only have one PTR record, it is perfectly legal to have many different PTR records. However, having multiple PTR records for the same IP address is generally not recommended unless there is a specific need. For example, if a webserver supports many virtual hosts, there can be one PTR record for each host and some versions of name server software will automatically add a PTR record for each host.

Multiple PTR records can cause a couple of problems, including triggering bugs in programs that only expect there to ever be a single PTR record and, in the case of a large webserver, having hundreds of PTR records can cause the DNS packets to be much larger than normal.

This time, it’s about Shared Web Hosting.

What is Shared Webhosting?

We can define this in a super ‘made sense’ kind of way. Let’s first define what a web hosting is. Web hosting is a service you get (or buy) from an internet service provider or a web hosting company, where in they will give you a server for you to host your website/blog/forum or what-have-you.

The web hosting package usually includes many other services. Basic package of course is the amount of hard disk space your package has, and the amount of monthly traffic/bandwith it comes bundled with.

The above definition both describes the dedicated web hosting and a shared  hosting. The only difference is that in a shared web hosting, you share the server with other webmasters or their websites.

Another difference is that you will be the main system administrator of your server while in a shared web host, there is one common admin that manages all the accounts (which is an advantage if you’re not familiar with the technicalities)

In shared hosting, the provider is generally responsible for managing servers, installing server software, security updates, technical support, and other aspects of the service. Most servers are based on the Linux operating system and LAMP (software bundle), which is driven by the low cost of open source software.

On a future post, we’ll discuss the advantages and disadvantages of a shared webhosting service.

Till next time.

Apache is the most well known open source web server there is! Open source?? Make that the most wildly used webserver on the internet, period!

It is believed (and i know they made a survey or study about it) that Apache takes 90% of all web servers in the internet. Most web hosting company, and I’ve once worked in one, use Apache.

This post will talk about how to setup Apache for Virtual Hosting

Setting Up A Virtual Host in Apache

create a completely seperate document root, cgi-bin directory, and logfile directory for each host. You can place these beneath the standard Debian prefix of /var/www or you may use a completely different root

root@irony:~# mkdir /home/www

root@irony:~# mkdir /home/www/www.example.com
root@irony:~# mkdir /home/www/www.example.com/htdocs
root@irony:~# mkdir /home/www/www.example.com/cgi-bin
root@irony:~# mkdir /home/www/www.example.com/logs

root@irony:~# mkdir /home/www/www.example.net
root@irony:~# mkdir /home/www/www.example.net/htdocs
root@irony:~# mkdir /home/www/www.example.net/logs
root@irony:~# mkdir /home/www/www.example.net/cgi-bin

root@irony:~# mkdir /home/www/www.example.org
root@irony:~# mkdir /home/www/www.example.org/htdocs
root@irony:~# mkdir /home/www/www.example.org/logs

root@irony:~# mkdir /home/www/www.example.org/cgi-bin

NEt
Here we’ve setup three different directory trees, one for each site. If you wanted to have identical content it might make sense to only create one, and then use symbolic links instead.

The next thing to do is to enable virtual hosts in your Apache configuration. The simplest way to do this is to create a file called /etc/apache2/conf.d/virtual.conf and include the following content in it:

#
#  We're running multiple virtual hosts.
#
Nameserver *

NameVirtualHost *

(When Apache starts up it reads the contents of all files included in /etc/apache2/conf.d, and files you create here won’t get trashed on package upgrades.)

Once we’ve done this we can create the individual host configuration files. The Apache2 setup you’ll find on Debian GNU/Linux includes two directories for locating your site configuration files:

/etc/apache2/sites-available

This contains configuration files for sites which are available but not necessarily enabled.
/etc/apache2/sites-enabled

This directory contains site files which are enabled.

As with the conf.d directory each configuration file in the sites-enabled directory is loaded when the server starts – whilst the files in sites-available are completely ignored.

You are expected to create your host configuration files in /etc/apache2/sites-available, then create a symbolic link to those files in the sites-enabled directory – this will cause them to be actually loaded/read.

Rather than actually messing around with symbolic links the Debian package includes two utility commands a2ensite and a2dissite which will do the necessary work for you as we will demonstrate shortly.

Lets start with a real example. Create /etc/apache2/sites-available/www.example.com with the following contents:

#
#  Example.com (/etc/apache2/sites-available/www.example.com)
#
<VirtualHost *>
ServerAdmin webmaster@example.com
ServerName  www.example.com
ServerAlias example.com

# Indexes + Directory Root.
DirectoryIndex index.html
DocumentRoot /home/www/www.example.com/htdocs/

# CGI Directory
ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ /home/www/www.example.com/cgi-bin/
<Location /cgi-bin>
Options +ExecCGI
</Location>

# Logfiles
ErrorLog  /home/www/www.example.com/logs/error.log
CustomLog /home/www/www.example.com/logs/access.log combined

</VirtualHost>

ow we’ve got:

• Three directories which can be used to contain our content.
• Three directories which can be used to contain our logfiles.
• Three directories which can be used to contain our dynamic CGI scripts.
• Three configuration files which are being ignored by Apache.

To enable the sites simply run:

root@irony:~# a2ensite www.example.com
Site www.example.com installed; run /etc/init.d/apache2 reload to enable.

root@irony:~# a2ensite www.example.net
Site www.example.net installed; run /etc/init.d/apache2 reload to enable.

root@irony:~# a2ensite www.example.org
Site www.example.org installed; run /etc/init.d/apache2 reload to enable.

This will now create the symbolic links so that /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/www.example.org, etc, now exist and will be read.

Once we’ve finished our setup we can restart, or reload, the webserver as the output above instructed us to do with:

root@irony:~# /etc/init.d/apache2 reload
Reloading web server config...done.
root@irony:~#