Tuesday, May 27, 2008

How to choose a web hosting service

It might look trivial to choose a internet service provider. Most of us may end up choosing a hosting server based on price and languages supported. This selection process might work well in case of simple personal web sites. In order to make the selection process easier I tried to list down the criteria. The criteria may not be complete, so please comment in case you have an interesting list.

1. Price plan
2. Disk space
3. Limits on Bandwidth transfer per day/month/year
4. Uptime of the hosting service
5. Support by phone/email
6. Technology support (HTML/DHTML/PHP/ASP/JSP/Servlet/Perl/CGI)
7. Database support (oracle/MS Access/My SQL)
8. FTP support for uploading and downloading web site files
9. Control Panel
10. Support for blogging/wiki/RSS/Atom feeds/forums)
11. Domain name registrations and aliases for domain names
12. email aliases
13. Contract timeline (is it easy to switch to another hosting provider if the current provider do not provide a consistent quality in the service.)
14. web mail
15. Power backup capacity of the hosting provider
16. 24/7 network monitoring
17. Web site statistics
18. Bandwidth and disk space monitoring

Thursday, November 29, 2007

Custom vs Standard installers

I have seen products which use standard installer toolkits from OS and custom installers. Based on my experience on installers, I tried to summarize the differences between using standard installer and custom installer.
Standard installers can be RPM package mangers (in linux), SD-UX (in HP) and MSI (for Windows) etc., Custom installers can be in-house installers or any 3rd party installers or simple tar/zip package of the product.
The choice of using either a standard installer or a custom installer solely depends on following factors.
1. Multi-platform support. In case the software has to be installed seamlessly on multiple platforms customer installers can help to achieve that. This is the reason most of the open source software delivered in a tar/zip package. If the standard installer has been used one has to re-package the software on the new Operating system or use the package converters.
2. Multiple installations on the same host: If a standard installer has been used to package the product, it is not possible create multiple installations of the same software component as the product uses the same component name. In case of products packaged with custom installers, it is possible to create multiple installations on the same host as they are not registered to OS in its software registry.
While choosing a custom installer, one has to also evaluate whether it is worthwhile building a completely new custom installer or use the 3rd party installer. On the other hand while using a standard installer it is important to check whether a installer framework should be developed which can be used to help package products under multiple platforms.

References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Installation_(computer_programs)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Package_management_system
http://www.advancedinstaller.com/
http://www.thefreecountry.com/programming/setup.shtml


Wednesday, May 9, 2007

Favorite Firefox plugins

Here are my favorite firefox plugins. This list comes handy when you do not want to search the entire thunderbird plugin list. Please post or e-mail me if you have any other interesting plugins.

ChatZilla

ConnSets

Ctrl Tab Preview

Daily Dilbert

Dictionary Lookup Extension

Dictionary Tool Tip

GMail Space

GTD Inbox

GUtil

IE Tab

Last Tab

Remainder Fox
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1191

StartAid Online BookMarks


Stealther

Tab Counter

Tabbrowser Preferences

Torrent Bar
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/864

Undo Closed Tabs Button

Wizz RSS News Reader
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/424

iMacros for Firefox
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3863

Wordpress.com Sidebar
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2996

Yahoo Toolbar
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2032

Rest of the firefox plugins can be found under https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/


Tuesday, May 8, 2007

Favortie thunderbird plugins

Here are my favorite thunderbird plugins. This list comes handy when you do not want to search the entire thunderbird plugin list. Please post or e-mail me if you have any other interesting plugins.

Thunderbird Lightning:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/2313
Connection Sets:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/3452
http://ingoshome.org/mozilla/xpi/connsets/
Copy Sent to Current:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/2561
Contacts Side Bar:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/70
Skype Toolbar
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/3320
http://www.skype.com/download/skypeemailtoolbar/downloading_thunderbird.html
Event to Task Conversion:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/3736
Fox Clocks:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/1117
GMail UI:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/1339
Lightning Multiweek View:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/3738
Mail Tagger:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/749
Remainder Fox:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/1191
Duplicate Contact Manager:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/2505
Birthday Remainder:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/3680
Minimize to Tray:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/2110
Minimize to Tray enhancer:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/2831
Provider for Google Calendar:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/4631
Quick Text:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/640
Quick Note:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/46
Remove Duplicate Messages:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/956


Rest of the addons can be found under https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/