I am sure some of you are looking for the best hosting company to host your site or blog, I myself did a thorough research on where I can find a web hosting company to host my blog. When I do my research I see to it that I also review the company’s profile before buying or entering into a contract. Reading other people’s reviews and their recommendation about the service is highly regarded when it comes to choosing the best hosting company.

When I am doing my search I always visit Webhostinggeeks.com they provide ranking of the top 10 web hosting providers based on performances and customer reviews. They provide much needed information about the company and the services this company provides. And what’s best on this site it features Best Web Hosting Awards based on the services the web hosting company provides.

Some simple command line utilities you can use on your Windows and Linux computer to test DNS resolution. this will also show you how you can quickly test if you have resolution via a name server or not. Many times this comes up, a DNS server is down; client loses IP connectivity and can”t resolve DNS, DNS cache poisoning. Using this handy tools can guide you quickly to see how you can test to see if your system is ”ok” and resolving names to IPs properly.

1. You have to see if DNS resolution is working you can see if the DNS server you are configured to query.

C:\Documents and Settings\raxso>nslookup www.google.com
Server: everest.local
Address: 192.168.1.200

Non-authoritative answer:
Name: www.l.google.com
Addresses: 72.14.235.99, 72.14.235.147, 72.14.235.104
Aliases: www.google.com

2. When you query my Local DNS I can see that www.google.com has mulitiple IP addresses.

3. Now, you can ping with the -a switch to also verify if DNS resolution is work. Pinging Google’s IP address with the -a switch produces the DNS name of the system.

C:\Documents and Settings\raxso>ping -a 72.14.235.99

Pinging tw-in-f99.google.com [72.14.235.99] with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 72.14.235.99: bytes=32 time=85ms TTL=245
Reply from 72.14.235.99: bytes=32 time=85ms TTL=245
Reply from 72.14.235.99: bytes=32 time=85ms TTL=245
Reply from 72.14.235.99: bytes=32 time=97ms TTL=245

Ping statistics for 72.14.235.99:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 85ms, Maximum = 97ms, Average = 88ms

Although this is a simple command line but very helpful when you are troubleshooting network connectivity and DNS resolution.

Don Reisinger wrote from his site that cuil the ill-fated “Google Killer,” has unleashed its Twiceler indexing bot on websites across the globe and in the process, has brought many sites down.

Cuil’s overzealous method for indexing brought down websites because of the Twiceler robot and one user said it “leeched enormous amounts of bandwidth - nearly 2GB this month until it was blocked. It visited nearly 70,000 times!”

For website admin and site owner’s you might need to check your Apache or IIS logs to investigate this issue.

Read Full details…

Speed up access to data

Disk fragmentation slows the overall performance of your system. When files are fragmented, the computer must search the hard disk when the file is opened to piece it back together. The response time can be significantly longer.

Disk Defragmenter is a Windows utility that consolidates fragmented files and folders on your computer’s hard disk so that each occupies a single space on the disk. With your files stored neatly end-to-end, without fragmentation, reading and writing to the disk speeds up.

When to run Disk Defragmenter
In addition to running Disk Defragmenter at regular intervals monthly is optimal there are other times you should run it too, such as when:

To use Disk Defragmenter:

1.	Click Start, point to All Programs, point to Accessories, point to System Tools, and then click Disk Defragmenter. Click Analyze to start the Disk Defragmenter.
2.	In the Disk Defragmenter dialog box, click the drives that you want to defragment, and then click the Analyze button. After the disk is analyzed, a dialog box appears, letting you know whether you should defragment the analyzed drives. Tip: You should analyze a volume before defragmenting it to get an estimate of how long the defragmentation process will take.
3.	To defragment the selected drive or drives, click the Defragment button. Note: In Windows Vista, there is no graphical user interface to demonstrate the progress�but your hard drive is still being defragmented. After the defragmentation is complete, Disk Defragmenter displays the results.
4.	To display detailed information about the defragmented disk or partition, click View Report.
5.	To close the View Report dialog box, click Close.
6.	To close the Disk Defragmenter utility, click the Close button on the title bar of the window.