I wanted to sell my bike since Im getting a new one (I change my bike once a year you know), and along with that ad, I tried to place an ad with which I oculd attract bloggers in Pondicherry and make a community. But for some reason, tey didnt really like the concept and refused to accept the ad. They thought it was some malicious advertisment that I was trying to place.

This is the result of ignorance. Those people, proficient and enterprising, arent able to understand what blogging means or why anyone would be writing atricles for no compensation at all.

Ofcourse there are ways to attract bloggers online, but I just wanted to reach the people who can really write and bring them into blogging and make the world a better place, but I think I made a mistake in choosing Ad Express. I should have gone for a bigger Paper where they understand stuff.

Thats what made me feel dementored yesterday I guess. I didnt mind their refusal ofcourse, but I felt a bit bad.

They have started a new form of voting. If you like a fabric, you just vote for it, and as the number of votes go up, the fabric gets into the count down mode, and the prices gets reduced every second. Anyone who is registered can login to vote. You will get a mail when a fabric gets into countdown.

Go ahead, login and register atleast for the fun of it.

To be honest, I have had some, sorry to say, stupid clients, who keep their passwords very simple such as “pass” or “password”, and hackers who are looking for free hosting on which people run unsuspecting sites to create their paypal spoofing pages and stuff, just login, place their files, and start spamming. The user of the site will see a sudden increase in the traffic to the site, and would be overwhelmed, but will not see a considerable boost in their adsense impressions. They just stay there wondering, untill the cyber cell calls you up and investigates about phishing and spoofing happening on your servers.

Or the datacentre just goes ahead and suspends your server and gives you a mail asking you to remove teh content. And when you send them several mails asking them how on earth you are supposed to remove teh content when your server is taken offline and when clients are calling you like crazy since you opened office, they boot the server for 30 mins within which you would be asked to remove the file. And that would be the time that your internet fails or you get a trouble in your UPS and your system refuses to connect to the internet, and your server would be taken offline forever.

Once that happens, clients will just blame you saying that you have not been keeping your servers secure and have allowed hackers to enter your sites and place files, and thats the reason that the server has been taken down.

To prevent this sort of nightmare from happening, always advise your clients, your resellers and the clients under your resellers thru your resellers, to keep their passwords safe. No matter even if they have a site that is least important and if they think that no one is going to hack into it, it is hazardous to the servers and all the clients who depend on the servers for their business and emails, and for the millions of people who could be cheated by spoofing or phishing.

Why?

Though their access might be restricted, you are literally giving them previlleges to download and install scripts on the server. They cant do that can they? You manage the server for them, and if they do something irresponsible, it would become your headache to get it fixed, and if they do something that affects your other clients? They will hold you responsible.

When in remote desktop, they can access the browser, and if they use it for some illegal activity, like using fake credit cards or stolen card numbers from your server on some site for some server or buy things, your server’s ips get recorded, and if there is a dispute, not only your server will be suspended, you will become responsible for the transactions that happen.

And if the client installs a mass mailing software on the remote desktop and uses it, your ip gets blacklisted.

There are several other things that could happen. Never give out Remote Desktop or SSH access to any client or reseller. You can always fix this limitation on your control panel when you create the account.

You just create a new server connection, select FTP over SSH or SFTP, enter your username and password, and if you have the admin or the root password, you can transfer files easily with sftp. Whats the benefit? You dont have to worry about Ascii and Binary upload settings, particularly when you are uploading zend or ion cube files, sftp does it better than plain old ftp.

Even with Filezilla, you could choose to upload thru sftp. But the SSH is strictly for the admins, and do not give access to ftp for any clients or resellers. Retain it as a personal privilege.

Personally I have shifted homes, I have shifted offices, shifted my own websites between servers before I started a hosting company, and now I find that all very easy. No matter how many men you have to do the work, you cant work any faster than the server would. Plesk is dead slow, and with all those sites working on the server, and with clients from all over the world, there is no off peek time for your server, you will never make it.

Plesk has a backup restore function, which you need to use from the remote desktop. Create the backup selecting resellers or domains in each task, and once its complete, move the backup file to the new server, and restore it there thru the plesk bakcup resotre function.

Sounds easy? It will, till you see it. I had 12 people working on it for 24 hours a day for nearly 20 days last year to get 1 server migrated. And in the last leg of the migration, the hard disk failed on the old server, and unfortunately, the backup files that we had created were yet to be moved to the new server, and all data was lost.

Just google with indyahozting and you will find out the bad reviews that we had got because of that. But still, we were quick enough to get the new server ready and ask people to upload the backups that they have had. Luckily most of the clients had their backups handy, and they restored all files, except for the few ones, who just decided to write about us on the forums.

Not that I had installed any other operating systems on a PC such as Mac or Linux, but that was something about Windows that I didnt like even at that time.

Linux installations wasnt that good at that time either. There was only redhat, and none of the hardware were supported. You had to get red had compatible hardware. It was fn to watch it install and boot however.  Some originality was there, unlike the stupid screens that say what you can do with windows when you install it.

About a year aog, when I installed ubuntu, that was the time that I really started to like computers. I really found out how good computers can be. Laptops battery started to last longer, PCs became less noisier and were relatively faster, and there was no need to defragment or install a virus scanner or worry about files getting infected or downloading an infected file. Even Wine doesnt get infected or spread viruses.

There is beryl, but ofcourse, at times I feel that the desktop and the task bar doesnt look as good as windows xp or vista, and is just as good as windws 98 or 2000 only. But a windows license is too much of price to pay. Who on earth would want to pay for bugs? And why do people go for windows and never turn to linux?

And vista is such a big flop, that it is having to be pre installed with PCs and Laptops. And it is n no way better than XP except that it requires more RAM to install.

I like the way Linux works, and I dont want to get back to windows. Stablity and security are the most basic things that ubuntu is giving my laptop. No one can get any data out of my laptop even if i loose it intentionally. Its not that I would loose it, because it is my horcrux. And for this one reason, even though I get drivers for new gadgets for devices like Webcams, cell phones, mp3 players and a whole lot of stuff, I wouldnt go back to windows, and I would promote it to people and make them write drivers for these gadgets adn have it submitted to the linux community rather than getting Bill Gates do and let him get rich.

They are receiving calls from Singapore and Malaysia, and are picking up calls on behalf of HP, to help their resellers with Printer Cartridges.

For the first few days, they didnt bring any furniture along, so they had to keep their pcs on the floor, and it was fun to watch the call centrer guys sitting on the floor and answering calls.

Not every call centre in India is like Sutherland. Come to my office and I’ll show you that it can be worse.