Trev's place

Category: Web hosting

  • New better Internet – 200Mbps symetrical bandwidth

    New better Internet – 200Mbps symetrical bandwidth

    The earlier days of the Internet here in Adelaide, we had quite good internet. Starting with SENET we progressed quickly from 14,4kbps to 28.8kbps, then 56kbps. We where paying $1/hour which was common among many. It was also true local with Camtech, Internode, Edge, Boldweb, Kern and a few more.

    When we moved into our house in Banksia Park, we moved to Internode’s ADSL but that was not to good as we where a long way from the exchange meaning at best we had 1.5mbps but normally closer to 900kbps which was still faster than 56kbps.

    It was about 2 years and we connected to Telstra’s cable internet which gave us 10Mbps. One thing to note, it was symetrical, ie 10 down and 10 up. After about a year we dropped the Internode ADSL connection as Telstra was quite reliable at the time.

    Anyway not long before NBN, Telstra increased the speed of the cable where we would regulary get 120Mbps down and 55Mbps up. Once NBN took over our cable went down to 100/40 with Telstra. Then Telstra really mucked up, they quitly changed the upload in thier T’s and C’s to what we see today and they introduced the 700/40 as the fastest available. 100 down is more than enough for what we do.

    When they changed that in a sly way, we dropped them after being customer for 20+ years and went to Internode with thier 100/36 (advertised as 40). Internode where an Adelaide based company which is what drove me to use them. But now they have closed up in Adelaide so no more loyalty from me. Time to find something new.

    So started looking at NBN Enterprise Ethernet 100/100 offering which is $400/month for 36 months with no setup. In my hunt I stumbled on Telair who are selling Telstra Business Fibre. They had a special offer if you sign up, you get 200Mbps/200Mbps for the price of 100Mbps/100Mbps. which is $382/month. Not much to think about! Sold! So looking forward to the speed boost, especially the upload. It’s also dedicated fibre to me, it’s not shared with anyone else. AND we’re no longer using NBN. This is a great leap forward.

  • Facebook advertising and why I don’t see your post if you have paid to promote it.

    We’re in the middle of a state election here in my state of South Australia. I am someone that wants to know what the different parties are saying so I tag their Facebook pages as ‘see first’ which makes Facebook show me anything they may post on my news feed at the top. As long as they post without paying Facebook money to promote the post I will see it. Here is why.

    I got annoyed with YouTube quite some time ago where they started to force me to download ad content when watching video’s along with other sites that insisted I watch video content ad’s. The solution to that was install an ad blocker on my browser.

    An ad blocker reads and modifies data as it comes into the browser and removes any code that displays ad’s (your promoted post). It simply does not appear on my news feed. It’s a tool that is great. Everyone I know runs it because they are as annoyed as I am with the intense level of advertising on the internet. There is a way for facebook and other sites to get through these ad blockers by subscribing to a set of standards that put limits on how much advertising is shown.

    Why does Facebook show that the ad’s are getting through? Well they don’t really know. All they can know is they have sent the data. They could, like more and more media companies add code that senses if the ad’s are being shown otherwise display a message that tells the user to disable adblock before they show the content. That only works for a short time as the ad-block developers (or people with programming skills like me) sense that and block the code that checks.

    Some stat’s on how prevalent this is comes from a report by PageFair https://pagefair.com/blog/2017/adblockreport/. I’ll be upfront, I don’t know if this report is accurate but my experience of the people I know and talk to all use adblock and if they don’t, ask me to help set it up for them. The key statistics I took from the report are (remember we’re now Feb 2018):

    • 11% of the global internet population is blocking ads on the internet in Dec 2016
    • 615M devices are blocking ads in Dec 2016
    • 30% global growth YOY in adblock usage Dec 2015 to Dec 2016

    The other challenge with Facebook is a normal post is shown on a few news feeds. It’s only spread if people react to it in some way, for example it may show on 20 news feeds. When a person clicks like (or one of the other interactions) or makes comment or shares, it is sent to another 5 news feeds. Note I don’t know the actual numbers, just know that’s how it works. So when you promote, that initial number is increased so your starting point is much higher, but it’s blocked by adblock.

    Most adblock software will allow ads through if they meet specific criteria (https://acceptableads.com/en/) which it appears some are accepting but many are not so they spend money developing systems to sense if adblock is blocking their ads and refuse to show the page unless the user disables the ads. Some just ask the user which is not as bad. For large social media their success depends on popularity. With 74% of American’s saying they leave sites with adblock walls which I think is highly probable as most I talk to do the same would be disaster for the popularity of the social media site like facebook. The other way is to change and fit within what users have determined is acceptable level of advertising and register with the adblock companies. Adblock puts control back in the users hands where it should be.

    Now in the interim the only way I can think of how to get the most out of social media advertising is to use a combination of paid and unpaid. If something is important, make sure you repeat the post with slight change in text, one you pay for the other you don’t.

    This for me is an interesting area of the Internet, the battle between large corporate and the end user. We’re seeing the end user has significant control when it comes to advertising and it’s growing rapidly. I can just imagine the frustration that is inside the large web content companies on this topic as they know it’s going to impact on them. I think some of the larger companies that advertise with these content providers are catching on to the issue but many smaller ones are not aware they may be paying for something that is not being delivered.

     

  • Update site to WordPress

    The old PHP Nuke site was running tired, hard to update and add to. So move across to WordPress which was not to difficult a migration to complete including all the post data from the old Nuke site. All up about 10 hours work.

    The next few weeks will be doing minor tweaks with the way things look and work. If you can’t find something, from the old site, please use the search as it is here (with the exception of the downloads section which I’ve turned off).

     

  • DNS and what to watch for

    Trev’s suggestions on the best way to manage your domain name

    Domain names are a vital part of your hosting and mail system and is often forgotten as it’s the part that sits in the background quietly working until one day it does not. This is meant as a plain english guide to help would be web masters understand how to set up the management of their domain name to reduce the impact of outages on the internet.

    First, what is DNS

    DNS stands for Domain Name Service.

    Human’s like to use names. A name has a meaning. The internet can’t use names, it needs numbers. So we have an issue.

    DNS is the translator between the human name and the internet number. So my web site here is called “trev.id.au”. That’s what you type in your browser to get here. Your web browser asks the DNS for trev.id.au internet number address. The DNS returns the number (in this case 61.14.187.198). The browser now can ask the networking system of your computer to go fetch the page for the address that the Internet can work with.

    Email works in a similar manner. You address an email to user@domain.com.au. The email program first asks the DNS where it should send mail for domain.com.au and what is the number address or IP address. It then tries the address and if it works, it sends the mail.

    The key problem with incorrectly managed domains.

    The real problem is around email. If an email server cannot resolve your domain name because the DNS is down, it will return the email to the sender with an error that makes it look like you don’t exist. If it’s just a hobby system, not so bad, but if it’s your business, it can be severely damaging.

    What needs to happen

    You should have at least two physical servers in different parts of the internet doing the resolution of your domain name (the translating between name and number and the telling where to send mail). It’s also a good idea for these servers to be different from your domain name registrar and your hosting provider. I have used both http://www.zoneedit.com and http://www.dyndns.org.

    So with two seperate servers capable of answering DNS queries for your domain and email, and these in two different physical locations, both have to be down for your domain to be down. Chances, well I’ve been hosting this way for about 7 years now. My site goes down because my server does, but my domain has never and mail always works.

    You can host the domain name at zoneedit for free on 2 servers (as per their site at time of writing this)

    Email when your server is down

    Servers go down. That’s life. What happens to email if your server is down? If the domain name resolves, the sending mail server will generally hold and keep trying for a short while. This overcomes the occasional network outages. For longer periods, the sending mail server bounces the mail back to the sender.

    This can be overcome by using a mail forwarder which is a server on the internet that is defined as being the second server if the primary server is not available. It holds a lower priority than your main mail server. This allows your server to go down with no impact to mail from the outside world.

    I use this service and have been happy to pay the small amount it costs me each year.

    Summary

    Separate functions to provide resilience.

    1. Register the domain name with a domain registration authority. Seehttp://www.auda.org.au/registrars/accredited-registrars/ for a list. I’d recomend using a AUDA accredited organisation.

    2. Register with a DNS hosting organisation like www.zoneedit.com or www.dyndns.org and set up your domain name. Note this is not registering the name, but it’s getting it ready. You will be given some info from the DNS hosting company in the form of a name and ip address for each of the two servers that are going to host your domain name.

    3. With the server information, go back to the registrar and manage your account/domain. Find where to enter the domain name server information and change it to the names and ip addresses provided in step 2.

    4. Now sign up with a hosting company. The hosting company will give you an IP address to use for your domain name. You should use the manage interface of the DNS hosting organisation to configure the name and number for domain.com, www.domain.com and optionally, but usually good, mail.domain.com. These 3 names should all point to the IP address provided by the web hosting company in step 3.

    Detailed configuration example
    [This is under construction]

    There are many providers of these services. I’m going to provide the detail around setting this up using www.enetica.com.au as the Domain Name registrar, www.zoneedit.com as the DNS hosting organisation and www.mdwebhosting.com.au as the web and mail hosting company.