There is a great site called Data Center Map. They provide detailed information on major data server locations. After only a couple of minutes on the site you will begin to see patterns. Data centers are usually built on international fiber optic crossroads, places with better economy conditions, close to power plants and any place where location can provide advantage in one way or another.

Iceland has been “ignored” as a viable data center location for quite some time. Investors have been skeptical because the country is notorious for its seismic activity. Not to mention the fact 3 banks went bankrupt in 2008, leading to a national crisis. Usually, this is all it takes to scare off potential investments. This, however, did not scare off Verne Global from building a 44.5 acre data center in Iceland.

Presently Verne Global’s campus in Keflavik, Iceland, is 100% carbon neutral and draws its commercial power from Iceland’s dual-sourced renewable energy grid of geothermal and hydroelectric power. This is the first major data center in Iceland. Because of its location and direct access to a modern power grid, they can offer over 50% cost savings to their customers. On top of this, Verne Global took advantage of Iceland’s strategic location between Europe and America. Two submarine cables connect Iceland to Europe and one to North America.

Verne Global chose Colt for their modular solution, allowing the owner of the data center to choose when to invest in infrastructure and expand, maximizing the utilization of the facilities over time.

So why not build more data centers in Iceland? Cheap renewable energy, redundant power grid, redundant transcontinental network connectivity and zero cost for cooling. What’s not to like?

If you like to check how servers in Iceland perform from your location, we might be able to help.

One popular MMORPG is based in Iceland – Eve Online. On eve-offline.net you can get IP addresses for different servers. Try 87.237.38.200 on port 26000. Our latest test from Seattle shows less than one second response time. In fact, most server monitoring targets from Iceland would return good figures, based on what we have seen. If you run a server in Iceland, go ahead and try how well it performs from Europe and the United States. Don’t forget to let us know what you found out.

Unscheduled downtime at Blizzard rarely lasts more than a couple of hours. This is possible mostly due to their scheduled downtime. Wait, what? Yes, they spend a lot of time maintaining the servers you login to, well, let’s be honest – every day!

The first tecnique that the authorities use to monitor the activity of their netizens is “mirroring” – a term normally used for normal copying or backup operations. Almost all internet connections between China and the rest of the world come from a very small number of fiber-optic cables that enter the country from three main points – the Beijing-Qingdao-Tianjin area in the north; Shanghai on the central coast and Guangzhou in the south. On each of these “gateways” there is a device called “tapper” or “network sniffer” which mirrors every single packet of data going in or out of the country. The mirroring process that occurs at these gateways, however, has a very literal side as well. The gathered information goes through the fiber-optic cables as little pulses of light. These pulses travel through the Chinese gateway routers and at the same time numerous tiny mirrors bounce reflections of them and make sure that the information is delivered to a set of surveillance (“Golden Shield”) computers which “decide” whether the requested content should be blocked. And how did the Chinese develop this mirroring technology? They bought it from a very famous company.

While the mirroring technique is scary enough in itself, it is also worth looking into the other methods employed by the Chinese authorities to discourage the search for potentially dangerous information.

The first problem that a regular visitor may encounter is the DNS block. There is a list of sites whose content is completely off-limits for the randomly browsing internet user. If you try to access any of these sites, you will simply get “Site not found” message on the screen. Keep in mind that most sites are vigorously scanned for potential banned keywords and the lists are regularly updated. One way to find out whether your site is blocked in China is to use our test .

If the DNS is working properly and delivering the correct IP address, the mirroring starts taking place. While you are sending the information request to the correct IP address, the information is mirrored and the IP address is checked in the list of forbidden IPs. If it matches an entry on this list, the gateway sends a “Reset” command to both computers (yours and the one you want to reach). This interception forces the connection to close and you are thus unable to load the site. Instead, you get a “The connection has been reset” message and, if you are very persistent, you can try to load the site again… with the same result.

If you have managed to not stumble upon the first two blocks, there is yet another check which you have to go through in order to get to the resource of your choice. It is the “URL keyword block”. If the IP of the site that you are trying to access is not blacklisted, the domain name is checked for potentially dangerous keywords. Should the requested URL contain forbidden terms, the connection will be reset. The forbidden list contains words in English, Chinese, and other languages, and is often updated.

Another popular technique to prevent the users from accessing this content is a “black-hole loop”. This means that the request gets trapped in a series of delaying commands. When browsers detect enter this kind of loop, they just issue an error message, saying that the request is redirected in a way that cannot be completed.

The last step involves actual content checking, which is done, again, with mirrors. While you are browsing the page, the surveillance system is scanning the content, looking for words, phrases and terms that it does not like. If it finds them – it breaks the connection and you cannot make any further requests to this server. The Great Firewall then blocks the connection between your computer and the site’s server. At first it is only for 2-3 minutes. If you try to access the site during this time, a five-minute time-out follows. On a third try, the time-out might go up to 30 minutes or more. In a word, with each attempt that follows, the time-out increases.

Recently, a new technique seems to be taking place. Lots of administrators of services with encrypted connections report that they are seeing strange activity coming from China. If a user from within China tries to reach the server, a string of pseudo-random data hits the destination computers before the user manages to connect. In some cases, the user’s communication drops mysteriously shortly afterwards. One of the theories is that China’s ISPs may be testing a new system which tries to identify censorship circumvention tools by preceding the user’s connection with a probe designed to reveal something about the type of service that the user is accessing.

Despite all of these setbacks, there are still several ways for you to circumvent the Great Firewall and we will discuss them our next post from the series.

A web robot is a program that checks the content of a web page. If a robot is about to crawl a website, it will first check the robots.txt file for instructions. A command “Disallow”, for example, tells the robot not to visit a given set of pages on this site. Web administrators use this file to restrict the bots to index the content of a particular website for different reasons – they do not want the content to be accessible by other users; the website is under construction, or a certain part of the content must be hidden from the public.

While search engines such as Google use the robots to index web content and can be easily restricted and instructed by the robots.txt, spammers use spambots to reach e-mail addresses, for example, and do not follow the instructions from the robots.txt file. They look for and follow keywords that might be related to an e-mail address such as “post”, “message”, “journal” and so on. What is specific for a spambot is that it comes from many IP addresses and acts as different agents, and thus it can hardly be blocked. Some spambots even use search engines such as Google to look for particular information on a web page.

Fortunately, there are still things that can be done to prevent spambots of scanning your web site and stealing information. Neil Gunton came up with a Spambot Trap which blocks spambots and allows the good search engine spiders to visit your website.

Still, if you would like to leave instructions for the regular search engine bots which pages are to be indexed and which – not, you might want to be careful not to block the search engine completely. If you put in the wrong commands, your website will have no chance of showing up anywhere in search results. If you don’t have a robots.txt file at all, then the web robot will index every single thing that is on your website.

Here’s a list with some ready-to-use basic commands for the robots.txt file:

• Exclude a file from a certain search engine:

User-Agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /private/privatefile.htm

• Exclude a section/page from your site from all web robots

User-Agent: *
Disallow: /newsection/

• Disallow any bot to index any part of your website

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

If you wish to add more complicated instructions, you can follow Thomas Brunt’s instructions.

If you go through your server logs and see a suspicious host, you can run it by our Blacklist Checker. It will tell you if the domain or IP has been blacklisted. If this is the case, then you can simply prevent this host from entering again.

As a result of the growing complexity of web designs, a web page takes longer to load, which is why the site needs an expires header. It simply makes all components such as stylesheets, images and others cacheable or, in other words, prevents unnecessary HTTP requests after the first page view and hence load time is reduced.

The “expires header” needs to have a date set up and it’s important that this date is a future one. The far future Expires header tells the browser how long to have a web page component cached. If a past date is set up then caching would simply not occur. Note that “expire headers” do not affect the load time of the website the first time the user opens it.

Here’s how to add a far future expires header in WordPress:

If the server is Apache, you can use “ExpiresDefault” directive. For example, [ExpiresDefault “access plus 2 months”] means that the expiry date of the file is two months from now.  The time period could be from seconds to years.

In order to add the header, however, you need to add the following code to the .htaccess file:

#Expire Header

<FilesMatch "\.(ico|jpg|jpeg|png|gif|js|css|swf)$">

ExpiresDefault "access plus 2 hours"

</FilesMatch>

or

# Expire images header

ExpiresActive On

ExpiresDefault A0

ExpiresByType image/gif A2592000

ExpiresByType image/png A2592000

ExpiresByType image/jpg A2592000

ExpiresByType image/jpeg A2592000

ExpiresByType image/ico A2592000

ExpiresByType text/css A2592000

ExpiresByType text/javascript A2592000

It’s important to remember that with the “expires header” the files are “saved” in the browser until the expiration date. Thus, you need to use the header on images, Flash and others that will not be changing until the expiry date. If you are, for instance, changing the pictures on the home page on a regular basis, it will not be a good idea to set up an expire header on them. The header will cache them for the period you have selected, and it’ll not be of any use to cache something that is going to change in a shorter period of time.

Here’s an expample:

In the results above we can see that the date is set in the past, which means that the search engines, proxy servers and browsers will always consider the page out of date and try to fetch a fresh copy. This can lead to unnecessary server load. To avoid this problem simply stick to the rule mentioned above and always set a future date.

To check the expiration date of any web page, you can use our free HTTP headers test. It will return the HTTP header (the initial response of a web page, invisible to the end user) where you can find the expiration date.

If you forget to renew your domain, you will stop receiving e-mails through your website; the website will simply be not there and replaced with ads. The best case scenario is to lose the site, but still be able to register it.

The most unpleasant part, however, is that someone else can take your domain and register it as their own. Imagine how many regular visitors you will lose if you have to register under a different name because someone else took it. If your website administrator doesn’t know the expiration date, he will have to run a lot of checks in order to identify the problem. At first it is not always obvious what happened to the site. Thus, it’s going to take a while until the problem is identified and a lot more time to fix.

So, again, the domain name is probably the most important part of your online presence. It is part of your brand. It is one of the easiest things to be good at online – protecting your domain name.

Here’s a short checklist of actions you can take to protect your online presence:

• Set up a domain name auto renewal in your billing system on the expiration day. GoDaddy and a lot of other domain registrars offer this service.
• Register the domain name for years ahead. Dot Com domains can be registered for up to 10 years! This way you will not be worried about having insufficient funds on the day of your auto-renewal because if the payment doesn’t go through, your domain will expire. The risk here is to remember for how long you have prepaid the domain for and when to renew it again.
• Always update your payment options in your account. If your card expires, your domain won’t be able to auto renew.
• Ensure that you have an up-to-date e-mail address set up for your domain renewal because you usually receive notifications when the domain is close to expiration. Make sure you have access to it.
• If you hire a 3^rd party to develop your site, make sure they purchase the domain name to your company and have your contact details in the WHOIS records.

If you forget to pay for your domain and your website goes down, that does not ultimately mean that your business is gone. There is a grace period for each domain. You can still get it back if you are quick. One way to know if your domain is down for good is to employ our most basic $5.00/month ping service. If your domain goes down, you will know it within a few seconds.

And last, save your online business by simply watching out for your domain name because neither your services and products or your web design would matter if you site is just not there.

Here’s what happens when the browser tries to communicate with the web server:

• The DNS (Domain Name System) looks up the IP address from the IP name of the web site;
• The browser opens an IP socket connection to that particular IP Address;
• It writes HTTP data stream through the socket;
• It then receives an HTTP data stream back from the server, which contains status codes. They are then analyzed.

The 503 status code occurs in the last step described above – the server is functioning at a minimum meaning it does show the status code 503, but the website is completely unavailable. During that time it is expected that the experts are working on fixing the problem. To troubleshoot for this error, you can try the following, as per Microsoft Support:

• Check if all services are running;
• Ensure the services are running under the Local System account;
• Mount the mailbox store and the public folder stores;
• See if a registry key that exceeds 259 characters exists in the HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT registry hive;
• Check whether Group Policy object exists – it will prevent the MSExchangeIS service from initializing;
• Re-register the MDAC Components;
• Verify the permissions for the HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT registry key.

Most of the time, status code 503 translates to “server not available, please come back in X hours”. Often webmasters return 503 on purpose. It is widely used during scheduled maintenance and website upgrades. This code is used to tell search engine agents that the content is not available, but it would be in a couple of hours (you can set any timeframe) and they should come back and crawl it then. This way webmasters make sure the web page will remain in the search engines’ index. It is also a technique used to take load of the server during peak periods.

One of the things you can do to protect your site from the much unwanted downtime is to monitor your server for free and test your website frequently. There are a lot of good practices to make your website and server work better, but there is nothing like a good remote monitoring service.

The security testing organization NSS Labswhich recently discovered that 3 out of 6 firewall devices stop operating when tested for stability. DDoS has been a major threat for network operators for over ten years since their appearance, but recently these attacks have become more aggressive and have increased in frequency and impact.

DDoS is a “distributed denial of service” and is a violation of the policies of all Internet service providers. The way it works is by sending a great load of requests or ‘attacks’ to the targeted computer. These attacks then force the computer to reset itself or to consume its own resources. As a result, the machine is no longer able to provide its intended service and drops the communication with its user. DDoS targets are mainly sites hosted on high-profile servers such as credit card companies or banks.

When DDoS attacks are successful, they lead to significant outages, OPEX (increased operational expenditures), revenue loss and frustrated customers. Unfortunately, the capacity of security products such as firewalls and IPS is limited and the attackers are well aware of it. They can easily exhaust the application layer resources and cause significant downtime.

According to a recent study conducted by Arbor Networks, the volume of DDoS attacks has reached out 100Gbps barrier or, in other words, the DDoS attacks are growing in number and strength.

In order to reduce risk, specialists suggest that large state-exhaustion attacks must be stopped in the ISP/MSSP because this is where the attacks occur. A packet-based detection and protection against all kinds of DDoS is required as well.

The Authorship markup encourages quality content by helping out its authors to rank better in the search results, according to Sagar Kamdar, Google Product Manager. For this purpose, the markup connects the web content to a Google Profile of its author and then – back to the particular web page. This way the content shows up in the search results, the author is identified, and the reader even sees a photo of the author displayed alongside, when an image is available. Content then looks more trustworthy and credible, and the website content is more protected.

Google say Authorship markup is quite a new project, and is yet to be improved and simplified. Still, they claim to have made this feature “as easy to implement as possible”. Their first users of this markup have been The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNET and more. Google also claim to have gone even a step further by adding this Authorship markup to everything hosted by YouTube and Blogger. In the future, however, these two platforms will include this feature automatically.

While Google created a feature to protect your website content, WebSitePulse perfected its monitoring service to help you keep an eye on any type of server and network device connected to the Internet, and measure the performance and availability of your websites and applications. Give it a try!

If your business depends on the company website to keep your clients informed about changes, share your office location and provide some basic interaction, we can offer you a free server monitoring service for life. We will check your server round the clock and inform you if it goes down.

While being one of our entry-level services, we assure you that it employs all the know-how we have gathered in the last decade. You will get free email notification each time we detect that your server is not running. We only have one simple rule – One account per customer.

We will monitor whether the server running behind your website is working properly. It makes no difference if you host your website on a free hosting provider, an in-house hosting solution or shared hosting. You will be able to choose one monitoring location. This is more than enough if your business is strictly local. If you provide service to people living in San Francisco, then your website really needs to be visible mostly to people in San Francisco.

We will not forward your details to third parties, and you will receive no emails from such. You can’t go wrong with a free service, can you? We won’t display any ads too. We would rather like it that you are happy with our service in the long run. So, let’s break it down.

We offer you:

• Free server monitoring for life
• One monitoring location
• Round the clock server status check
• Instant email alerts
• Server status timeline
• One account per customer
• Next level of service for just 5$ per month.

What we won’t do is:

• Let your server go offline unnoticed
• Flood your inbox with emails about service upgrades options. (We might contact you every now and then with updates about services and new prices for regular service.)
• Share your details with third parties.
• Display advertisements of any kind

Our free lifetime monitoring is suitable for:

• Local business owners
• Hobby & personal websites
• Small websites with informational purpose
• Anyone not too sure to go ahead with the full service.
• Anyone who would like to test our service

If you like to see how the system works before you register for the free service, then go right ahead and log in with our Demo account. Happy monitoring!