So you think .exe’s and other executable files downloaded from internet may have virus in them? As every kid knows about this, virus writers have become smart and now they spread virus through stuff which we can never imagine having virus/trojans in them.

Free templates, we love them because they cost nothing and make our website/blog look good without paying any money. Free wordpress templates are quite popular downloads and due to this now trojans are spread through these free wordpress templates. Some days back while searhing for free zen cart tremplates I found a site which had some very nice free wordpress templates instead, I was almost pinching myself that how can these be free (they looked like premium templates) and it was not from any warez or any kind of illegal download website either. I downloaded some of them and later on my antivirus software catches them as trojan during full system scan.

Just like most virus are made for Windows OS because its popular, popular CMS are targetted by virus wrtiers. Best will be to stick to reputed sites for templates downloads and design your own if you want a really good design without paying a premium price. Also keep your antivirus definition up to date and do full system scan periodically.

Hackers are smart but sometimes they are really funny. Websites face many hackers attack in their lifetime and our site too faced many in past. This time one hacker acted so dumb that I feel sorry for him. First of all he is a script kiddie who used some script to steal WordPress admin login and change it then used the new login to put some links in header file. Obviously these links appeared on the top of our blog and some other blogs which he hacked into. Next thing this hacker did was posting these blog links on traidnt.net forum telling people that he has arranged for text link ads on these blogs and will sell links on all the blogs for 300 riyal (about 80 USD). He also posted Google Page Ranks of all the blogs tempting many users and he gets lots of words of appreciation from forum members. As things were suppose to happen, almost every blog owners came to know about it and removed the links from header. He also placed a Trojan in 404 file which helped him regain admin password in case it was changed by admin again. Hope everyone removed that too.

Here things went bad for this hacker, the buyers of links started complaining of links going offline to which hackers excuse was that he is having some little disagreement between him and the company and he will compensate for the time the links are offline. Since the forum is in Arabic and Google translation is very bad, I cannot understand the conversation going on there but one thing is clear that people there on the forum are complaining and hacker is making tons of excuses. You can check out this poor hacker thread at traidnt.net here (translated page). Enjoy!

Does your host run out of juice and your site is down at the time when you need it most? Bloggers who spend time writing a great article do get rewarded by services like Stumbleupon and Digg in form of huge number of unique visitors which is only good if site is online for them to read your article. If the site link reaches in top ten of digg, what we get is called “digg effect” which only a dedicated server and VPS can handle. This dig effect is the huge number of hits in short span of time causing servers to stop responding for some time and this means your new visitors will not get your website content but an error page instead. This mostly happens to those who are on shared servers. Shared server as name suggest is shared between hundreds and thousands of sites and hence it’s not able to handle extra load. If we remove all the other websites and let your website only to run on these servers, it would load fast and perform well even in extreme traffic conditions and this is better known as dedicated servers were a server is dedicated to host single site only. However for every website owner it’s not possible and practical either to go dedicated. I will strongly suggest VPS hosting to those who need good performance and want their website to handle peak traffic load.

In vps hosts only CPU is shared while other resources like RAM is dedicated which means there is better traffic handling capability. It has Burstable memory which keeps resources always ready for any unexpected traffic. CPU can work efficiently even when they are shared because new generation server CPU’s are multi cores, multi threaded and are optimized to perform well in stressed conditions as well. So in general terms you can say that you will be getting almost dedicated like performance but at much lower price in VPS.

Usually Internet service providers have a team of qualified network professionals who keep a check on system for proper working, however BSNL which is India’s major ISP and also recently awarded as best ISP have no worries if their servers are effected with virus or do not respond normally. I have seen days when people are not able to login for whole day. Funniest thing I found yesterday night when many sites started showing 500 server errors and guess what, Google and Gmail domain was redirected to some landing pages!! While Yahoo, Bling and other major search engines work fine, BSNL always have problem with Google. Sometime you cannot open any Google site or it will open at speed of snail. Check the screenshots below and enjoy.

Yesterday I was working on my clients site transferring it from old tired and not so reliable hosting to new blazing fast and much more reliable host but my bad luck only half of the work was done and my internet connection conked off. I thought it’s a temporary problem and I took a break from work. Returned after few hours to see its still not connecting. Called up the ISP guys and they said they are fixing. Called several times and they kept assuring me that it will be fixed in few hours but day went and they could not fix it. Next day first thing I did was went straight to their office and lodged complain. Somehow in afternoon they were able to rectify the problem and I came online almost after 24 hours! Immediately I finished the transfer process and apologized to clients for the delay. Lesson learnt was when my work depends so much on Internet, I should have a backup Internet connection. I went to compare Internet service providers on various websites and found a site called saveology.com, which had the best information and actually helped me saving money that I would have spent on Internet plans which doesn’t match my requirements well. Because my current ISP provides good speed at down to earth rates but only problem is that its sometime not reliable, all I needed was a secondary net connection that is reliable and would bill me only for the use and no monthly bills. Also if this connection is portable like using Wi-Fi , 3G or any modern wireless technology then I can use this connection when I visit remote areas (which I do occasionally) where one can’t find cyber cafes. Also I am not comfortable using cyber cafes system as they are usually infected with virus and malwares. Using personal details on these systems means an open invite to trouble.

Lately I have observed then whenever I search for something in Google and on the very first page of results, the top ten sites are not much of relevance. Those on the right side of the page, which are sponsored listings, do match my query. Few days’ back I was searching for cheap hosting and only names I saw in search results were hosting review sites and some big names in hosting which are obviously not cheap. But I was looking for a cheap one. One look at the sponsored listing and I finalized; this was the cheapest I could find till date. Thing is people who deserve to come up in organic search results need to pay to get visible. Something is seriously wrong with Google now, people are easily able to optimize their crap sites to fool Google search algorithm and come up in search results. Taking example of someone like me searching for cheap hosting will like to see some really down to earth cheap hosting in top ten results and not hosting review sites which came up in result just because they had lots of relevant text in them but none of them will actually give you cheap hosting plan.