Hosting Nuggets

What is a CRM ?

2012-01-25T09:54:00.001+01:00

Working in a typical services business, you might already have heard your colleagues speaking about CRM. But what does it mean really? First of all CRM is an acronym which stands for Customer Relationship Management and is mostly associated to a software type. In fact it is a category of software which helps a company to manage all its interactions with their already existing or potential customers. As such you would often hear about CRM software which is used to simplify, organise and automate business processes, especially sales. A CRM application is not only limited to sales but can also be used to improve customer and technical support as well as marketing. The ultimate goal of CRM software is to win new customers and retain those which a business already has.

Depending on the exact need on the business as well as the business type there are different categories of CRM software. For example you have CRM tool which are more focused on marketing, analytics, social media or small business. The biggest market players in the CRM software industry are currently SAP AG, Oracle and Microsoft with their Microsoft Dynamics CRM software. Big companies in the retail or banking business usually all use SAP which is definitely the most well-known CRM software.

An iPad case just in case

2011-10-13T23:48:00.007+02:00

You just bought one of these fancy iPads from Apple? and you are maybe wondering what would happen if it falls on the floor? Because let's be honest here, who didn't already let his mobile phone or even laptop computer fall on the floor by mistake... Then it is now a good time to think about getting an iPad case, you never know. Nowadays there are even quite a lot of different styles available and you should for sure find one which matches your tastes. Your iPad will thank you!

You will find here many cool iPad cases ranging from the simple and slick cover to the ultra stuffed and protective case.

Carter seahawks mellon football

2011-06-12T17:35:00.004+02:00

Ticketamerica.com has tickets for carter finley stadium as well as the seattle seahawks football team and the mellon arena seating charts.

carter finley stadium tickets
seattle seahawks tickets
tacoma dome tickets

A social bookmarking alternative to del.icio.us

2011-02-01T23:15:00.007+01:00

As you might now, Yahoo! decided to get rid of its del.icio.us social bookmarking service sometime this year either by selling it or shutting it down. Delicous, was one of the first social bookmarking portals back in 2003 and was then acquired by Yahoo! in 2005.

Myself, I have been using the del.icio.us social bookmarking portal for quite some time now in order to bookmark websites I found interesting and worth to share with others. In fact, I think it's quite a pity to have to see it disappear sometime soon.

Luckily, there is an alternative social bookmarking website called diigo since 2006 which works pretty much the same as del.icio.us and even has a few extra features. So what I did is to export my del.icio.us bookmarks and import them in diigo. Unfortunately, I heard that the importing from del.icio.us into diigo doesn't always work as it should.

Web Hosting Nuggets now on Facebook

2011-01-25T22:23:00.003+01:00

Hosting Nuggets is now present on the famous social network Facebook. You can access our Facebook page through the following address http://www.facebook.com/hosting.web. Add us now as friend in order to get Hosting Nuggets' blog posts directly on Facebook and to catch up with the latest news about web hosting and innovative websites.

How to accelerate PHP enabled website

2010-09-18T16:51:00.008+02:00

Do you want to keep the load down on your web server and at the same time accelerate the rendering of your PHP web pages? Then eAccelerator is exactly the PHP module you are looking for! eAccelerator is a very simple and small module which you add to your PHP installation and that will increase the performance of your PHP code by caching it in compiled state either in memory or on your hard disk. Even better news, eAccelerator is open source so that it is free for anyone to use. I personally use it all the time and I must say that you really see a difference in the time used for PHP code compilation and execution.

Using this accelerating PHP module I can get up to 50% reduced loading time for a web page and the documentation mentions that it can reduce even more the loading time of your PHP pages. Quite useful if you are running a busy website or simply want a faster website which has quite some PHP code behind it. Furthermore it's easy to configure and just has a bunch of around 10 parameters to configure, whereas most of them can be left as default. For performance reasons, I would suggest you install it from source; there are very good installation instructions available on their website. Basically it's just about running the following commands once the package is decompressed:

phpize
./configure
make
make install

Then you enable the module via PHP's php.ini config file by adding the following parameter:

extension="eaccelerator.so"

as well as the little configuration parameters there is:

eaccelerator.shm_size="16"
eaccelerator.cache_dir="/tmp/eaccelerator"
eaccelerator.enable="1"
eaccelerator.optimizer="1"
eaccelerator.check_mtime="1"
eaccelerator.debug="0"
eaccelerator.filter=""
eaccelerator.shm_max="0"
eaccelerator.shm_ttl="0"
eaccelerator.shm_prune_period="0"
eaccelerator.shm_only="0"
eaccelerator.compress="1"
eaccelerator.compress_level="9"

Last recommendation: create a dedicated cache directory (eaccelerator.cache_dir) somewhere else than /tmp because anybody who has access to that machine can read the content of /tmp and give it read-write permission just for your web server's user (very often www-data or nobody). Enjoy your accelerated PHP website!

Hosting Nuggets has its own dot-com domain name

2010-09-03T20:31:00.003+02:00

You might have already noticed it by looking at the URL but Hosting Nuggets is nowreachable under its own dot-com domain name: www.hostingnuggets.com. It was quite fortunate that the hostingnuggets.com domain name was still free and I really like that name. So there was nothing else to do that just to buy it and enable it in the settings of blogspot. No worries, you can still reach the Hosting Nuggets blog through its old address hostingnuggets.blogspot.com. In fact the nice thing is that the blog will always be reachable under these two names...

Failed managed servers really make the difference - Part 2

2010-08-30T11:43:00.010+02:00

In my previous post of yesterday entitled Failed managed servers really make the difference, I was so amazed that a company could have failed servers showing on their special offer banner that I overlooked another problem with that very same advertisement: a typo in the text! So if you have a closer look at the bottom text of their banner, you will read: "* valid for singale server and new customers only." as highlighted in pink below.

So to summarize, there are three servers that show signs of hardware problem or failure and even the little text that there is contains a typo... Could it get any worse? Well, I hope not but I would really be interested to know how many people go for that special offer!

If you have a passion for technology, check out online it courses. This could really help avoiding such trivial errors in IT.

Failed managed servers really make the difference

2010-08-29T20:00:00.011+02:00

Imagine you are looking for a dedicated managed server with a hosting services company... How reassuring would you find it, if such a company would display a banner for their managed solutions with half of the servers on that ad showing an orange display as signal for a warning, fault or failure of the server's hardware?

Well well well, one american co-location and managed hosting services company was courageous enough to do that. In fact, that banner for managed solutions on their homepage shows 6 servers, among them 3 DELL PowerEdge 1950 or R300 with an orange display signaling a presumable hardware problem... The other 3 servers on the top, most probably DELL PowerEdge 1850 or R200 are fine (although not that sure because the last one hasn't got its LED turned on so it might be flashing orange which would again mean: hardware warning or fault).

One might simply not notice these three faulty servers and of course one has to know a minimum about DELL's hardware, but orange or red is pretty much always a bad sign for any kind of server... Of course it could just be that those 3 servers have 2 redundant PSU and one of the PSU is not connected, but is it really wise to take the risk and promote a service with hardware showing signs of warning?

Hosting Nuggets tweeting on Twitter

2010-08-28T08:34:00.004+02:00

Hosting Nuggets is now on Twitter! I will mostly use Twitter to tweet about interesting and novel websites I have found around the web as well as great articles from various technology related blogs which are worth to read.

The URL to the Hosting Nuggets Twitter is: http://twitter.com/hostingnuggets and I would be very glad to have you follow me or hear about you on that micro blogging platform.

Easily find websites related to yours using the google search engine

2010-08-07T21:55:00.008+02:00

Have you ever wondered who are your website's rivals? Or are you just curious to know what other websites have a topic which is related to yours? Or are simply looking for other websites with a related topic? If you answer yes to one of these questions, well you are lucky because one of the most famous search engines, google, provides you with a special function which simply enables you to do that directly in its search box. This special function is called "related:" and can be used by adding it before your website's URL in google's search box. Let me show you an example using the famous Swiss hotels booking and holidays in Switzerland website called go trotting: this website has the www.gotrotting.com address so if I wanted to see any websites with a related topic (holidays in switzerland, travelling portal or Swiss tourism) I would just enter the following query in google's search input field:

related:www.gotrotting.com

In that case it gives me about four pages with various websites with the same topic as what I am looking for. Isn't that great?

DELL PowerEdge R210 cheaper on internet

2010-08-04T17:11:00.003+02:00

What a discovery today... I called in DELL a few days ago to ask for an offer for the most basic and cheapest version of their PowerEdge R210 server. I received their offer and was amazed to see that it would cost me 962 CHF to get it from their sales agent. I could remember checking this exact same model and configuration on the DELL website and could get it there for just 634 CHF. This is a difference of more than 300 CHF! Usually going through their sales agent for a PowerEdge server would have the benefit of getting a small discount making it most of the times cheaper than ordering directly on the net but this has just been proven false for this very small configuration. The lesson is clear here: always double check the prices online and don't believe any sales representatives who promise you the best prices.

Back from relaxing and enjoyable holidays

2010-07-27T18:03:00.005+02:00

After some wonderful and relaxing holidays in an amazing and hot country I am officially back home and already working on some new fun projects. I hope that in the mean time you have found out my holiday's destination, if not there is an extra clue in the picture below.

Soon, I will post some new blog articles about interesting topics and as well as websites. So keep tuned for more...

Hosting Nuggets officially on holidays

2010-06-23T17:29:00.004+02:00

Yes, you will have noticed, we are now finally in summer and it is arriving although very slowly in our beloved country. After having spoken of holidays in Switzerland a few posts ago on my blog, it is now time for me to go on holidays with my wonderful girlfriend. I leave you the puzzling task to guess which amazing and sunny country I am going to. A small hint for you: it is right now 34°C there and it is full of water and sand, as you can see on the picture below...

Enjoy your summer holidays to all of you and see you again on my blog in three weeks!

The best quality price ratio server on the market

2010-06-18T21:47:00.009+02:00

Two blog posts ago, I was speaking about where to buy cheap servers and especially which server brand to choose. The conclusion of that post was that DELL would manufacture the cheapest servers for pretty much the same hardware as its adversaries.

Here I would like to bring your attention to the DELL PowerEdge R210 server which has, with no doubts, the best quality-price ratio (QPR). It is a new model from DELL which has a very futuristic black "terminator" look and has the best price ever for a server you can find on the market.

The default model only costs 574 CHF, which is amazingly low and even cheaper than a desktop machine. This default model comes with a 2.8 GHz Intel Pentium CPU (2 cores) and only 1 GB of RAM. That's not much you would correctly argue but on the other hand it is the smallest or better said shortest 1u server rack I have ever seen. Furthermore, it is optimized to consume very little energy so yes we can say that it is a green server. Of course if you desire a better configuration you can always customize it as you desire.

Last little disadvantage: you will have to shutdown and open the server if you wish to add or swap hard disks as there is no drive bays on the front of the server such as in the higher models.

Unfortunately, there are not many dedicated server companies with DELL hardware around, which is a pity. Most of the dedicated server hosting companies don't mention any brand for the server and this simply means that they use cheap no name and in most of the cases low quality hardware.

The internet marketing company behind some nice projects: towards

2010-06-16T19:37:00.004+02:00

In a few previous blog posts, I mentioned some very smart and nice internet portals or platforms such as go trotting (Swiss travel and tourism portal), Time Offers (internet auction bidding platform) and last but not least TooT (Swiss search engine). Well it just came out that all these three projects originate from the same internet marketing and promotion company called towards GmbH and based in Switzerland. This came up to my eyes as they just launched a first version of their corporate website. Amazing to read is that this company already exists since almost three years and never had a website before because they were simply to busy with their own projects!

So if you do the maths, towards have a new project of their own every year, let's see what's coming up next, I am already quite excited...

Where to buy a cheap server?

2010-05-28T21:37:00.004+02:00

I would like to buy two or three very cheap servers in order to create a private cloud system based on Linux. As it is for a cloud it doesn't really need to be the best quality but it should have a good CPU and plenty of memory. My other criteria is that it has to be a really cheap server. For that, I was surfing today through a few computer manufacturers, which also build servers like IBM, HP, DELL and Transtec to name a few. To my disappointment, I noticed that in most of the cases the no name servers are more expensive than the entry server from a well known computer company. So what's the point going for a no-name server, I thought. I'd rather go for a well-known manufacturer, where there is some serious company behind which would exchange the hardware in case it breaks down. Among the server manufacturers I have cited, DELL would be the cheapest with pretty much the same hardware inside than HP or IBM.

So to conclude, I have to say that DELL would be the price/quality winner in my case. What do you guys out there think? Any other recommendation for a cheap but good server?

The first living and self-replicating synthetic bacterial cell

2010-05-22T10:08:00.004+02:00

For the very first time and after 15 years of effort from the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI), Craig Venter and his team have managed to create a living cell which the genetic material is totally synthetic. It has been constructed using the four known chemical nucleotides (A, G, C and T) and a synthetizer. Until today, it was only possible to decode a genome and to transform it to a computer language, now it is finally possible to to the opposite.

If you have one hour time, watch the video below, which is the press release from JCVI. It is fascinating!

A new way of social blogging

2010-05-19T09:16:00.002+02:00

Are you bored of WordPress, Blogger or any of those well known and established blog networks? Well, there is some good news for you, that good news is a new website portal for social blogging called broadkast.me. broadkast.me goes over the frontier of other blogging networks by adding and pushing the social aspect of blogging to its maximum. Therefore you will find an ingenious network and community aspect on that portal where people can share ideas and in general communicate very easily. All this of course in a good sense to promote one's blog to the others on the community. This will guarantee you more visits than if you had just opened a blog on any other blogging network. It also makes it efficient searching for someone's blog or just looking for blogs with a specific subject. So let's say for example I would be looking for any blogs related with biotechnology, I would easily find this biotechnology blog. broadkast.me has very nice templates and is of course full-featured like other blogging networks including monetization programs, embedded help, adds, import function and many more. So why not have a try at it next time you are thinking of opening a new blog.

Deactivate bluetooth at boot on Ubuntu laptop

2010-05-18T22:00:00.008+02:00

If you are like me and have a nice netbook or laptop and never use bluetooth simply because you don't have any bluetooth devices, you might just want to turn it off when booting under Linux. My netbook, a wonderful and new Acer Aspire One, unfortunately doesn't have an option to deactivate bluetooth through its BIOS. This means that when the operating system has booted, in my case Ubuntu 10.04 (code name Lucid), you are left with bluetooth turned ON and of course consuming power for nothing... So I always end up manually turning OFF bluetooth either using the hardware switch (which doesn't remember its status after turning off the computer) or deactivating bluetooth through the OS. I tried in vain deactivating the bluetooth service or even blacklisting the bluetooth module but that wouldn't help, bluetooth was still ON.

Luckily, there is a command named rfkill, which nicely let's you control via software all your radio frequency (and hence the rf in rfkill) devices. For example the following command will turn off bluetooth:

/sbin/rfkill block bluetooth

Watch your bluetooth led, it will really turn off. So now, all you need to do in order to get bluetooth deactivated every time you boot, is to run this command automatically. Ubuntu has a file for this purpose and it will be executed at the last stage of its boot process. This file is called:

/etc/rc.local

Simply add the rfkill command mentioned above before the "exit 0", save it, reboot and you will never be bothered again with turning OFF manually your bluetooth device. Of course, this should also work with other Linux distributions but the file to run the command might be named differently or located somewhere else. As Ubuntu is derived from Debian, this will also work for Debian (or any other Debian derivate distribution).

Swiss search engine called TooT

2010-05-07T17:47:00.005+02:00

Imagine you are looking for a website, product or anything which has to do with Switzerland. For that you would just use your favorite search engine and type in what you are looking for, after some time looking through tons and tons of pages and maybe with luck you would find what you are really looking for, or not... Well you are lucky because there is an alternative, called TooT. TooT is a swiss search engine crawling any kind of websites which end with the .ch top level domain. As a reminder the dot ch top level domain is for Switzerland, CH being the latin acronym for Confederatio Helvetica. I've now taken the habit to always use TooT as soon as I need to search anything related to Switzerland and I must say that I am impressed with their results, which are for me in most of the cases relevant. In fact, I always find what I am looking for an much faster as if I were using another global search engine. The search engine is available in all the languages of Switzerland, which are German, French and Italian as well as in English for any other non-Swiss person. Unfortunately it looks like they have had some issues with looking for hardware sponsors, as I read from the TooT blog and they were not very active lately neither. Nevertheless, it is fast and easy to use so I even use it now regularly. My wish for TooT would be that they expand more and get active again, it would be really great to here some news from them soon!

Looking to buy cheap second hand on an auction website?

2010-04-28T09:54:00.003+02:00

If you are looking to buy cheap and second hand items from an auction website, well I've found the perfect alternative to eBay for you. The website in question is called TimeOffers Internet Auctions and has a wide selection of the best items from eBay presented in a nicely organized way. The design is very clean and it is really easy for anyone to use. Currently there are the following categories available: Antiques, Collectibles, Jewelry & Watches, Toys and Electronics.

Maybe you are just wondering what could you buy there? My generic answer would be anything... Just to give you an small example you will be able to find iPod MP3 players, Rolex watches, puzzles for your kids, pottery, antique clocks, arm chairs, and much more! So why would you pay more for something you don't need to be new? You could just buy it at least half of its price and get it shipped to you without even have to stroll through many shops and lose a lot of time.

Summer holidays in Switzerland

2010-04-20T13:28:00.007+02:00

Spring has finally arrived in Europe, although with quite some delay... Well, with all this nice sun shining and warming up our planet, it makes me already think about summer holidays. So what do you think about spending your next summer holidays in Switzerland ? Yes, that's that small little country in the middle of Europe, well known for it's famous mountains, cheese, cows and of course delicious milk chocolate. Switzerland is in fact not only known as a winter destination for skiing but also as a wonderful place to go hiking for example in the mountains during summer. There is also plenty of sports you can do there during that period including extreme sports.

Recently I have found a very informative website about Switzerland with many ideas on what places to visit, attractions or even restaurants and bars. This website is called go trotting and I guess this is just to motivate you to go trotting around that pretty little country. Just click on the link here and you will be transported to the fascinating world of tourism and traveling in Switzerland. What is there more to say, they have a collection of flabbergasting pictures of various places in Switzerland, a Swiss webcam page with panoramic views over some well known places and a very powerful hotel booking engine for Swiss hotels, which I can definitely recommend you. Hotel prices there are quite cheap in comparison to other hotel search engine I know on the internet and the prices of the rooms on go trotting are around 5% cheaper.

Have a look at go trotting, the Swiss travel platform, and see if it can convince you to spend you next summer holidays in Switzerland...

A simple, open and free website directory

2010-04-16T23:14:00.007+02:00

This time it's not about such an impressive website and blog as I mentioned in my previous post but about a small little open directory website named Directory Hub. I was actually looking for websites to publish my blog and encountered that one by chance. It looks very simple and doesn't have much links but that's exactly what seduced me. As most of you know, publishing your blog on a web page which has already thousands of blogs listed won't really make yours stand out. No surprise that this is also the way Google thinks about links on a web page...

About Directory Hub, well it is a collection of links of various kind of websites which are categorized by different themes such as Shopping, Internet, Travel and so on. It is very easy to use and I just added my blog in the Blogs sub-category of the Internet category and guess what? Well, I am the only blog there yet. Quite nice! Let's see how long my blog will be alone. Have a try and add your website there if you feel like, it's free and open as they state. You might be lucky and get some extra visitors on your website, so it's definitely worth a try.

More than just a festival search engine

2010-04-15T09:29:00.006+02:00

Since a few weeks I am following a blog about festivals, events and more which is called Around the World and I must say that I like it. Let me tell you why: it might be more about festivals taking place any where in the world but for me it gives me a nice insight into countries which I usually don't hear much about. There is also always nice pictures in each posts, which make me want to book a plane ticket immediately. A few countries featured in this blog are New Zealand, Switzerland, India, United States and France. On the technology side it's a WordPress blog with a very nice template I never saw before. The usability of the website is clear and I must say the whole website is very fast. Nice job! Not to forget to mention that actually the main purpose of the website is a search engine for festivals around the world and can be reached at www.festivesearch.com. I will add the blog to my blog roll so you can also easily find it here on my blog.

So to sum up, if you are bored and are looking for some original place to go for holidays or for any kind of festivals around the world, have a stroll through that blog with a nice cup of coffee, you will like it.

So what is Hosting Nuggets ?

2010-04-14T08:56:00.005+02:00

A Nugget is a valuable idea, fact or information. In that sense Hosting Nuggets is about sharing interesting nuggets from the hosting world. But that's not all, here I will also blog about websites which I think is worth mentioning in a blog and which I would like to share with all of you. You are more than welcome to leave comments about these websites or any of my blog posts, so feel free to express your opinion and have fun by doing so just as me...