Category Archives: Resources

Your online presence, local businesses, traveling, etc.

Not all Clouds are the Same

Posted on April 13, 2013 by jnelson

Cloud computing may be a term both vague and overused, but it is far more than just the latest buzzword. The “cloud” is another way of referring to the Internet; hence “cloud computing” is simply computing done over the Net. In other words, it’s all about applications that function over the Web, and it indicates a revolutionary way of doing things. Even if you don’t have a clue as to what it means, you’re already using it on a daily basis. If you check your email on your smartphone, search for information, visit Amazon or Facebook or look at Google Maps, you’ve been interacting with a cloud. And if you didn’t realize it, it worked exactly as it should. Clouds may be revolutionary but the idea is not exactly new: at one time way back when, computers were hulking mainframe boxes in their own specially-refrigerated rooms attached to multiple terminals close by where operators inputted programs. The terminals were no more than teletype keyboards with zero independent memory or computing power. While the modern cloud system is vastly more sophisticated and widespread, the principle of sharing pooled computing resources remains. And it’s what gives cloud computing its tremendous potential, and unique risks. The term “clouds” suggests nice fluffy aggregations of data floating peacefully “out there” in cyberspace, but Internet clouds can be as varied as the real things are. Clouds can be private, behind firewalls requiring passwords to access, or … Continue reading →

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Virtual Servers Offer Power, Convenience, and Savings

Posted on March 16, 2013 by jnelson

As a full-service ISP, Southwest Cyberport offers a complete spectrum of web-publishing services from simple static webpages to highly complex, state-of-the-art interactive content managed sites. But there’s even more to it than that. At one end of the range are free personal webpages we offer to all our broadband and dial-up customers. At the high end are dedicated colocated webservers owned and operated by corporate clients that access the Internet directly from our secure, access controlled machine room. In between, SWCP offers web-hosting services in three different strengths: Starter, Basic, and Professional. But now, we are happy to offer a new upper tier of web-publishing service that gives the isolation and independence of private servers without the steep costs of owning and colocating hardware. A Virtual Private Server (VPS) here at SWCP balances convenience and cost to allow website owners and administrators to run their own web-publishing software just the way they want to. A virtual machine is software on a device that emulates the functions of an entire computer. This allows many virtual servers to run simultaneously on one “real” server, all hidden from each other. Less hardware is required, space is conserved, and resources are shared more efficiently than with purely dedicated servers. Virtualization is already common and is spreading quite rapidly through data centers particularly because of its usefulness in cloud computing. These economics make virtual servers much less expensive to operate than racks of dedicated devices … Continue reading →

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The Hazards of Abandoning a Domain

Posted on September 22, 2012 by jnelson

It happens all the time: you click on a link and the website that comes up is not what you expected. If you’re lucky, the page is simply gone, but the site may look oddly similar and contain links for the subject you’re interested in, or it may be a trap bristling with malware and spam. In any case, you probably shrug and move on, pausing briefly to delete the bookmark if there is one, but you likely don’t spend much time wondering what happened. What happened is that the website owner quit. Maybe she or he died, or their lives and interests changed, or the company went broke. Possibly the owner just forgot to renew the domain registration. Whatever the cause, abandoned domains rarely just die quietly forgotten any more. Usually they are snapped up even if they are not high-traffic, popular sites, often by a domain registrar hoping to cash in on, but increasingly by people with worse intentions in mind. Not long ago, it was not uncommon for websites of churches, schools and government institutions that had lapsed to be grabbed up by Web porn purveyors. They may have done it more for the shock value rather than to make money, but in more recent times even more sinister characters have been doing much the same. Nowadays, an abandoned website may present an irresistible temptation to hackers and spammers to walk in and take over. However, unlike … Continue reading →

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