Articles

This article was published February 2004 in Parkland Life Magazine

If you have turned on a computer lately, chances are good that you have encountered the latest computer risk, dubbed “spyware”. A recent government-backed study conducted by the National Cyber Security Alliance revealed that nearly 80% of all U.S. household PC’s are infected with spyware. 

I was sitting at my desk one day researching FreeBSD hosting control panels, when I noticed the icons in my favorites list. It occurred to me that this feature is neglected far too often by developers as well as Microsoft themselves - the bookmark or favorites icon (commonly called a "favicon").

When you say "I need a hosting company", do you know what you're actually saying? In a sense, you are saying you intend to entrust your entire online presence, your profits, and even your customers sensitive billing information to (in most cases) a complete stranger. Here are some tips on making sure you get exactly what you need (and nothing you don't!)

The robots.txt file is a file placed in your web server's root directory (meaning it should be accessible by typing www.yoursite.com/robots.txt) that contains specific details about your site, making a search engine's job much easier, as well as telling it what NOT to index. This is called the 'Robot Exclusion Standard". 

I feel it is important to discuss one of the most distracting, amateur, (and potentially illegal) mistakes people make when creating websites. Now, before you respond, I know lots of people use them on their personal sites, and that is their choice. People are free to enjoy background music in the privacy of their own web space.

Earlier I was trying to set up a scheduled backup using the Windows Backup service, but I soon realized my FTP server wasn't among the allowed backup destinations. This particular limitation has frustrated me before, too.... why can't I natively backup to an FTP server, or more specifically, map an FTP site to a drive letter to save from applications? 

Ok, so you haven't been doing regular backups, but you've never had a problem yet. So you probably won't have a problem soon, and if you do, surely you'll get some kind of warning. Well, basically that's entirely false and you're playing with fire!