Web Hosting & Domains

Recently on CloudSpring, we cover what the cloud means for your business, a very in-depth tutorial on the dedicated PHP PaaS, PHPFog, a review of Amazon Cloud Drive, and more.

Your website's down but you're convinced nothing has changed? Craig's 5-step guide could help diagnose those pesky performance problems.

Craig reviews Google Drive - a new service which takes aim at Dropbox, SkyDrive, iCloud and similar file synchronization applications.

On CloudSpring, we cover the best solutions for backing up your data. We also compare Azure and EC2, inspect 10 recommended tools for managing your cloud, and more.

Dropbox is great but file sharing was always a little tougher than it should have been. Craig looks at the latest development which fixes that problem.

How disastrous would it be if you lost all your clients’ files? Here's your Field Guide to surviving a hard drive crash, among other things.

Web applications usually follow a synchronous communication model. However, non-interactive and long-running tasks (such as report generation) are better suited for asynchronous execution. One way to off-load tasks to run at a later time, or even on a different server, is use the Job Queue module available as a part of Zend Server 5 (though not as part of the Community Edition). Job Queue allows job scheduling based on time, priority, and even dependencies.

Apparently 90% of the data in the world was produced in the last 2 years – which should give you some idea of just exactly how much data is being accumulated the world around, especially by large companies like Google. The data field is so enormous that traditional methods of linking, searching and retrieving data don’t work any more. This is Big Data. Big Data The term “Big Data” was popularized by Roger Magoulas from O’Reilly in 2005, although avid net trawlers have found evidence of the term being used occasionally as far back as 2001

Traditional enterprize systems have well developed designs & strategies around relational databases. Relational database products are well developed not only from a data consistency point of view (ACID) but also from a database administration perspective. Databases are maintained in house or sourced to a competent vendor who has a well developed process for backup, migration and security. In contrast to this, the emerging cloud technologies employ NO SQL database structure more often than not.

PHP has a vast selection of built-in string handling functions that allow you to easily manipulate strings in almost any possible way. However, learning all these functions, remembering what they do, and when they might come in handy can be a bit daunting, especially for new developers. There is no way I can cover every string function in one article, and besides, that is what the PHP manual is for! But what I will do is show how to work with some of the most commonly used string handling functions that you should know. After this, you’ll be working with strings as well as any concert violinist! On the Case PHP offers several functions that enable you to manipulate the case of characters within a string without having to edit the string character by character

Amazon Web Services’ S3 storage solution is useful for many things, and serves as the CDN for many major websites. But despite the portfolio of high-profile use cases for the service, it’s still just as handy for personal conveniences, like backing up your data. In this post, we look at five useful Amazon S3 backup tools. S3 Backup “S3 Backup is the most reliable, fast and simple to use solution around for keeping your data backed up online but still safe and encrypted.

PHP 5.4 has a built-in web server which you can use for testing your applications. Craig looks at the new facility and the options available to developers.

Cloud computing opens a world of possibilities for software and developers, but coding for the cloud isn’t necessarily as straightforward as you might think. The learning curve for developers can be tricky—especially for web developers unused to working with concepts such as threading and concurrency, latency, asynchronicity and failure tolerance. Here are 11 things you need to watch out for when you start developing for the cloud. Compliance & Governance Legal and operational requirements often dictate the location of your data storage and hosting, and in the cloud it’s no different

In the first part of this series , we went through the basic environment GAE offers the developer. You must be excited to get yourself into coding your first application and seeing it live! Setting up the IDE for GAE development is a fairly simple task: simply install the GAE plugin in Eclipse version of your choice and you are good to start development on GAE. But before we actually get into APIs and services GAE can offer, let’s understand the application structure and configuration which affects how your application will work in runtime.

It’s the end of the year and the holidays are almost upon us. The US recently celebrated Thanksgiving and with Christmas coming next, we look forward to giving and receiving gifts. Shamefully, I admit I sometimes pay more attention to the gifts I hope to receive.

Average web page weight has increased 25% in one year. Craig discusses why file sizes should be falling.

Created and maintained by Jean-Damien Pogolotti, a systems engineer based in Toulouse, France, pChart is a library that creates anti-aliased charts and graphs using PHP. It’s object-oriented code has been recently redesigned and makes it easy to add beautiful, eye-catching data. The library is free for non-profit use and for inclusion in GPL distributed software; licensing plans for other uses start at just 50€.

We’ve finally arrived at the moment of the map. For the last several articles in the Loccasions series , I have promised things like “in the next post we will deal with the map” and “I will lower taxes,” and I have not delivered. In this post, I will fulfill at least one of those promises. Adding the map to this application is almost completely a client-side proposition.

You have built an awesome application. You need to get it out there. Let’s face it, deployments should be easy, repeatable and if it doesn’t work out, you should be able to roll back to the last known good state. If you are using manual Git workflow (other SCMs are available) or, gawd forbid FTP, then I can hear you scream “Preach it!”

You have your big players in the cloud like Amazon and Rackspace. Then, there’s Liquid Web with Storm On Demand . They are relatively new to the cloud computing scene but, they aren’t a new company.

Web performance optimizer Coach Wei spells out in detail what could be negatively affecting your website's loading speed and general performance.

Writing apps in your favorite language on the web is fun and rewarding for developers — and can be a good value proposition for small businesses and start ups. This is easily possible with Google App Engine (GAE), with Java as the language of development. It’s very important to know the landscape within which you can build your application using emerging GAE, and to understand the limitations of an evolving product. Sandboxed Runtime Environment for Java Applications in Google run on Java 6 JVM, and the SDK supports Java 5 or later.

As a recap from my previous article , CloudFiles is a an online storage service for your static content. Rackspace provides a Software Development Kit (SDK) for multiple programming languages. They store their PHP SDK on GitHub . The PHP SDK requires PHP 5 with the following modules: cURL, FileInfo and mbstring.