GKauten Consultingv1.2

With so many web hosts out there it all becomes a little confusing when you start trying to weigh the apples against the oranges against the onions and so on and so forth. Of course you could always Google “best web host” or something of the similar but you will most likely get a relatively interesting set of results pointing to all sorts of websites promoting their top ten list of web hosts. Honestly, some of these lists contain hosts I have never heard of before, but what gets even more interesting is that their number one web host is sometimes the same company that is hosting the website. You then begin to wonder if the company or someone affiliated with the company created this website as a traffic driving venture to make their services appear better from a “non-biased third party perspective”. Other times people just tend to rate the products they used the highest simply because they have not actually tried the other projects and maintain their personal bias. In either which case, just doing a little research can really help you out. Just to give you an idea though I have taken some of the published Top 10 lists, pulled them together, and looked up their Better Business Bureau (BBB) Reliability information just for good measure. » Read the Rest

Since domain privacy seems to be the hot topic on everyone’s minds I decided that maybe it was time to delve a bit deeper. This time though I am going to focus a bit more on the personal level versus the business level. First, just to make sure everyone is up to speed on things, here is a quick breakdown on domain privacy. When you purchase a domain name, your information will be made “publicly available to allow rapid resolution of technical problems and to permit enforcement of consumer protection, trademark, and other laws” (http://www.icann.org/en/faq/#whois). This is where the term WHOIS comes into play. WHOIS is a query against a database of publicly available information maintained by each of the registrars. This is where your information is stored and displayed to anyone who runs a WHOIS query against your domain. This information typically includes your name, address, phone number, and email address. In order to remain not only ICANN compliant, but also compliant with any agreements you have with your registrar when you purchased the domain, this information is supposed to be kept up to date and accurate at all times. » Read the Rest

Web hosting can be quite a wonderful thing once you get it all figured out, especially with all of the neat things you can do. But how do you get to the point where you know what you want and you know what you need? This is where a little bit of research comes into play, but I am going to try to help you out with that a little bit before sending you out into the cyber world. Typically I think it is better to start out broad and narrow your way down. So let’s start with what type of server platform you would like to run, Windows or Linux. » Read the Rest

Buying your first domain can be a fun but confusing experience all at the same time. There are so many companies out there that you can buy domains from each with varying prices, and even more variance to the add-on services you can get with your domain at a cost, or for free. Some of the top names in the market are GoDaddy, BlueHost, and 1&1 Internet. To make things even easier for you we have broken down the benefits and downfalls of each. » Read the Rest

So again, something I have come across many times over is people still having trouble connecting to MySQL databases from their GoDaddy Windows hosting accounts. First and foremost, traditional methods do not allow for this. But why you ask? The MySQL connector itself requires a full trust environment. GoDaddy has their servers limited to medium trust for security reasons. Thus, a full trust DLL will then always throw an error in a medium trust environment. This explains most all of the errors people get when trying to go about things in this manner. » Read the Rest

One thing I have come across time and time again are fellow developers who are completely perplexed by the GoDaddy GDform.asp form mailer. What they often times do not realize is that this is not the only method available to them; GoDaddy also allows for the use of the CDONTS and CDOSYS functionalities. Proof of this can be found in the GoDaddy help knowledge base found here: http://help.godaddy.com/article/1485

The CDOSYS functionality is what I am going to focus on here as it is what I personally use and have had amazing results with. It uses the System.Net.Mail namespace and can be used with all of the Windows hosting accounts on the GoDaddy network. Certain hosting accounts however do have some limitations as to how many messages can go out in a day, which I will discuss later in this post. If you want to check out the GoDaddy help knowledge base article on using CDOSYS functionalities feel free to check it out at the following URL, however rest assured that I am going to simplify it for you a bit: http://help.godaddy.com/article/1073 » Read the Rest