What is MySQL

MySQL is a database. A database defines a structure for storing information.

In a database, there are tables. Just like HTML tables, database tables contain rows, columns, and cells.

Databases are useful when storing information categorically. A company may have a database with the following tables: "Employees", "Products", "Customers" and "Orders".

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Database Tables

A database most often contains one or more tables. Each table has a name (e.g. "Customers" or "Orders"). Each table contains records (rows) with data.

Below is an example of a table called "Persons":

LastName	FirstName	Address	City
Hansen	Ola	Timoteivn 10	Sandnes
Svendson	Tove	Borgvn 23	Sandnes
Pettersen	Kari	Storgt 20	Stavanger

The table above contains three records (one for each person) and four columns (LastName, FirstName, Address, and City).

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Queries

A query is a question or a request.

With MySQL, we can query a database for specific information and have a recordset returned.

Look at the following query:

SELECT LastName FROM Persons

The query above selects all the data in the LastName column in the Persons table, and will return a recordset like this:

LastName
Hansen
Svendson
Pettersen

Essential Ingredients of Every Linux Hosting Plan

All of us are quite familiar with the website. A website normally comprises of domain name, web space and web pages. When you want to launch a website, first of all you will choose the domain name. After the selection of domain name the next step is to find best web hosting server on which you will be able to upload your files. Following are the main ingredients of every Linux hosting plan:

Control Panel

The most important and the major feature of any website has always been the control panel. Control panel empowers you with freedom to administrate your website. As per the agreed plan, you will be given access to control panel to manage your website and make necessary amendments.

Email ID’s

The POP3 email ids is one of the important ingredients of Linux hosting and you will be provided with plenty of email ids. The number of email ids depends on the size of your website.

FAT Accounts

FAT accounts brings you freedom, power and control on your website and you can freely upload the files, delete and up grade your website content, details or any other information. A good Linux plan will have many FAT accounts with the password. It is one of the important features of the Linux plan where the customers have been given access to make changes in the web site with the help of protected password.

Backup

Back-up too is an important feature of Linux hosting plan although users don’t give it much importance but it becomes very important in case of any setback.

Statistics

The success of any website depends on the number of the visits on the website. The statistics application will help you to review the number of visits and this is an essential feature is Linux plan.

Bandwidth

It is quite natural for you to choose the server with maximum bandwidth. A good Linux plan will provide you sufficient bandwidth.

Web Mail

If you are going to launch a website then email forms will be very effective. A good host must provide this feature so that the users are able to check mails. It should also provide download feature. These options will be availed by SMTP and web mail. Therefore it is recommended to have the feature of SMTP and web mail.

Web Hosting Reviews

Why Our Reviews Are Different?

There are hundreds of web hosting reviews websites out there; honest hosting reviews, user hosting reviews, best website hosting reviews and so on. Every one of them claims to have found the best top 5 web hosts with great uptime and lots of positive testimonials. But none of them reviews the web hosts based on the hosting packages! Different websites have different hosting needs; a web host can have a good hosting plan for hosting beginners while another web host can have the best plan for someone that needs dedicated hosting. We review the web hosting plans based on the personal hosting needs of each website.

Different customers have different needs, so why recommend the same web hosting plan?

Recommended Hosting Packages and Reviews

BEGINNER Hosting
Best-suited for small to medium websites, blogs, online family pictures, corporate presentational websites, or any site that doesn't require a lot of traffic.

ALL-PURPOSE Hosting (*)
The best "one size fits all" among the hosting offers; a hosting plan perfect for busy blogs, small e-commerces or any other similar websites.

DEDICATED Hosting
You should consider dedicated hosting when you have a large e-commerce website, a website that gets a lot of traffic or runs a lot of scripts.

VPS Hosting
VPS stands for Virtual Private Server and can be the first step from "leaving" shared hosting, if you don't want to manage a dedicated server.

Best TRAFFIC
Basically, as the name suggests, we looked for the best traffic/money ratios in hosting packages, while having all the other "standard" features as well.

ECOMMERCE Hosting
E-commerce websites are about catalogues with lots of pages of products' descriptions, memberships, online, secure credit card payments.

Why Trust Our Hosting Reviews?

When it comes to trust and uptime, our recommendations are based either on great personal experience with the web hosts or based on comments and reviews from clients and hosting professionals on top forums and discussion boards such as the WebHostingTalk forum. We listen to what other customers has to say about the host and we do NOT rank the web hosts based on how high is the affiliate commission!

Web Host - Ecommerce

If you are thinking of starting an ecommerce web site, stepping through this Web Host Guide is critical. If you have read through this guide, start to finish, and follow the advice we have offered, you will be well on your way to choosing a quality host. Ecommerce is a much different business then the world has ever known. It is fast paced and those who cannot keep up are left behind. There are many reasons ecommerce sites fail, but hopefully the information here will help you avoid those issues that are under your control.

Free Hosting? Never!

If you are running a web site on a free host you had better rethink your business plan. If you do not have the 10 or so dollars a month to pay for a reliable web host, then it would be much better to wait and save up the money. Launching your business on such an unreliable service as "free hosting" would discredit your business and irritate your visitors. Some pitfalls of freehosting:

• Pop ups - Many "free" hosts will contain pop up advertisements for their own site every time someone visits your site. Instead of people focusing on your product, they are immediatly distracted by this ad!
• Unreliable - Free hosting subscribers are at the bottom of the pecking order when it comes to customer support, bandwidth, and server resources.
• Cancelled - You may discover one morning that your web site is not loading, only to find out later that your hosting service has been discontinued. Free hosts reserve the right to remove you at any time.
• No Domain - Many free hosting services do not give you a unique domain. Visitors will have no domain name to associate with your site and will instead have to remember an unreasonably long url, such as: http://www.example.com/freeService/YourSite/index.html, which is simply horrendous.

Shopping Carts

Shopping carts, as seen on Amazon.com and numerous other ecommerce web sites, are the key way to allow visitors to purchase items. Usually these programs are written in PHP, ASP, or CGI, which are all server side scripting languages. Installing these programs onto your web space is often as simple as a couple of clicks. Many hosts offer pre-configured shopping carts that can be installed through the control panel.

If you do not know much about installing scripts, be sure you choose a host that offers a quality shopping cart installation. On the other hand, if you are not afraid to configure your own shopping cart.

Web Host - Backup

Your server's hard drive crashed. A hacker compromised your account and deleted all your files. Your web host disappeared with your money and your data.

These catastrophic events happen without warning, and without discretion. If you are not prepared for the worst, your hard work might be lost forever. That is why it is of the utmost importance that you keep regular backups of your data. Do not worry, there are a variety of backup options to pick and choose from.

Backup Schedules

Depending on the type of site that you run, you will need to choose a backup option that fits your needs. If you run a forum, news site, or any other site with current information you will want a daily backup, at the very least.

However, if you operate a simple personal page, that has not changed in over a year, keeping a backup of your most recent changes will suffice. A good rule of thumb for the casual webmaster is to do a complete backup every week or so.

Manual Backups

The simplest way to backup your data is to download every file that exists on your account. This can be done with a simple FTP program by copying your main folder to your local hard drive.

A good backup practice is to create a "Web Backup" folder on your computer, with a sub-folder that states the date and time the backup was created. This way, if your host removes your account, or you somehow lose some or all of your files, you can choose a new host and upload your web site in its entirity. The downside to this backup option is the heavy usage of your monthly bandwidth, as you must download all your data each time you do a backup.

Note: downloading the main folder will not download the database on your server, you will have to ask your provider on the specifics about database backups

Automated Backups

Web hosts may or may not offer an automated backup solution. For those that do they usually follow one of the following backups plans, with higher costs associated with more frequent backups:

• daily
• every other day
• weekly
• monthly backups

As we stated before, depending on what type of web site you run, choose the best backup schedule for your needs.

Incremental vs Full Backups

There are two classifcations of backups: incremental and full.

• Incremental Backup- The backups controller compares the existing backup to the data that you wish to backup. If it is an exact match between the two, then no additional files will be backed up. However, if you have added or edited any file, these files will be updated in the backup, thus the incremental name.
• Full Backup - All files are written to the backup, even if they already exist in the most current backup.

Web Host - Uptime

Uptime refers to how often a site is available or responsive to web requests. The internet never sleeps, which means your web site needs to be up every second of every hour of every... you get the idea. A visitor could be arriving at your site's home page at any time of the day, so a web host with a high uptime percentage is critical.

Advertised Uptime

Nearly all web hosts will advertise and guarantee a "99.9%" or higher uptime percentage. However, these guarantees are about as trustworthy as a used car salesman, not very! If a host has a history of a great uptime performance they will post a history of their uptime performance, monitored by a 3rd party, such as Alertra or InternetSeer.

Additionally, web hosts that operates on a redundant network (more than one data line to the internet) will be more reliable than a web host that is running only a single data line.

Monitor Server Uptime

If you have already signed up for a web host you can use a 3rd party to constantly monitor your site's uptime and be instantly notified by email if your web site ever becomes unresponsive. InternetSeer provides a free monitoring system that will check your web site every 60 minutes. If your web site needs to be monitored more closely, both Alertra or InternetSeer have pay for monitoring plans that are very thorough.

Web Host - Statistics

Knowing the who, what, where, and how about your visitors is extremely useful for getting an idea of your user base. More specifically:

• Who - By using someone's IP address it is possible to know where a web surfer is geographically located.
• What - What pages did the surfer view on your web site?
• Where - Was the surfer referred from another site, search engine? Do they have your site bookmarked?
• How - How long was the surfer on your site?

All this information and more can be provided to you without troubling your visitor, i.e. no cookies need to be placed onto the visitor's computer to gather this data. With a decent statistics program you will be able to find out how many people have bookmarked your site, how long the average visit is, what are your site's most popular pages.

Stastistic Terminology

There is not much use to a detailed traffic analysis report if the terms mentioned are not understood by the reader. Below we have a glossary of web statistic vocabulary to make your web analysis reports more informative:

• Uniques/Unique Visits - The number of unique visitors you had for the given time period. Example: if there was only a single person who visited your web site, and visited 1,000 seperate times in a day, the unique visits would just be one. The uniqueness is dependent on the IP address of the visitor.
• Visits - The total visits, ignoring uniqueness, that a web site recieves in a given time period. Using the same example as above, the total visits would be 1,000 for the day.
• Page Views - Each time a web page is loaded it is referred to as a page view.
• Hits - Every server request is counted as a hit, so if you have a web page with 15 images, then there will be multiple(15+) hits per page view.
• Direct Address & Bookmarks - This amount refers to the people who accessed your web site through their bookmarks or typed in your URL manually.
• Referrer & Referral URL - The web address where the visitor followed a link to reach your web site. This is a great way to find web sites that have linked to your content!

Popular Statistics Programs

There are many reliable statistics programs available, ranging from the most basic to a complete suite geared towards businesses. Below is a list of popular statistic programs that meet various needs.

• - It is one of the most basic of the statistic programs available, yet it is fully functional. Graphical and numerical data is displayed for monthly, daily, and hourly time spans. Additionally, you can keep track of your top referrers and the popular search terms that lead people to your site.
• - AWStats improves on Webalizer by adding additional features coupled with a more professional interface. Added featres: track unique visitors, improved search engine monitoring, visit duration, and more. AWStats is one of the best free statistics program available.
• - Urchin proves a comprehensive web analytic suite for those who need the most detailed information about web site traffic and visitor behavior. Such detailed information comes at a steep price (a license approaches the $1,000 mark) that makes this product aimed at companies and individuals with a substantial budget.