Mediumcube.com Web Hosting Blog

Many of us have websites dedicated to certain markets or countries. However, due to the Internet being a global space, we’ll often end up delivering traffic to users that may not be within our target audience.

At other times, we get annoyed by certain users on our websites that usually wreck havoc by either spamming the forum/blog we’re running or cause other annoyances to the site visitors.

There is a handy tool that we can use to filter out the visitors we don’t want while maintaing site accessibility to the others. It is called “.htaccess” file. The .htaccess file if placed inside your web root folder (typically public_html), it can simplify the way you manager your website.

For instance, to block a certain IP address from accessing our website, we would create a file called: .htaccess and save the following content inside it:

<Limit GET HEAD POST>
order allow,deny
deny from 41.204.224.50
allow from all
</limit>

The above code would block the user on IP address: 41.204.224.50 from accessing your web page. Obviously, you’ll have to remember that most users on the internet are assigned temporarily IP addresses that can change from time to time. So block a single IP address will likely not permanently block that user.

Nevertheless, this idea can be further expanded to block certain regions or countries in the world from accessing your website. Lets say you’re having some trouble with users visting your website from Nigeria. You wish to block access to your website from anywhere in Nigeria. First, you’ll need to obtain list of IP address blocks used in Nigeria. A very handy site for that is http://blockacountry.com which offers as comprehensive of a list as possible which associates IP addresses to countries. NOTE: This list may be incomplete or may contain errors. You should be very careful when blocking a whole country as that may include innocent users that reside outside of that country who may be leasing IP addresses in that same network block.

Follow the steps on the blockacountry.com page which will generate your .htaccess code. Copy/Paste that code into your .htaccess file, and upload it to your Unix based server. This will deny access to any site visitor coming from the black-listed IP addresses.

For our Shared Unix users on cPanel servers, there is a simple way to add an IP address to your block list. This is typically available under your cPanel control panel interface -> Security section -> IP Deny Manager icon.

As you’re about to select a company to host your important business applications, three items will come to mind:

a. How reliable is the service?

b. How good is the customer support?

c. How fast and quick your site will load?

In this brief article we’ll focus on the last question. How can you ensure your site is hosted on fast servers at all times?

First, we have to understand how speed is measured on the Internet. Web site speed is measured by two factors: Network speed and Server speed.

Network speed is the link between your hosting provider and where your site audience are visiting from. For example, lets assume you are hosting your website with a hosting provider with servers located in Europe, however, most your clients are in the United States. Your customer will have to send/receive information from their location in the United States, across the ocean, all the way to Europe. This longer path translates into slower response and lower speeds.

Therefore, it is first important to pick a provider who is closest to your site audience, and not necessarily closest to your location. Furthermore, it is as critical to pick a hosting provider with multiple backbones. Backbone is the telecom provider who connects your hosting provider to other hosting and Internet Providers on the internet. The more backbone connections, typically, ensure your site visitors can connect quicker to your website.

At Mediumcube, we ensure multiple backbone links to most areas of North America. Operating from two datacenters in Montreal and Texas allows us the ability to provide speedy connections to Northern & Southern America. Our servers are connected to reputable and quality fiber optic cables alike PEER1, LEVEL3, GROUP TELECOM in Montreal datacenter and SAVVIS, INTERNAP and GLOBAL CROSSING in Dallas datacenter. We also provide

The other main factor affecting hosted application speed is  the actual server your website hosted on. Many factors go into affecting the server speed including: The type of server hardware (CPU, Memory, Disks), how many sites hosted on the server (the more sites, the more read/write access needed on the disks), the sort of websites running on the server and the type of resources they require.

The most likely cause for a slow server will be due to other websites running on the server that require large amount of resources (CPU, RAM, Disks). Tyically, the larger the website, and the more audience visiting, the more resources the site will need. Lets also not forget that sites are not usually busy 24/7. There is typically a peak time for busy sites. For business-to-business websites this is usually between 11 AM - 4 PM  and for websites targeting consumers this typically falls between 7 PM - 11 PM.

At Mediumcube we take every care in ensuring our service is well balanced. Our servers are never overloaded, constantly monitored for optimal performance. We never over crowd our servers nor allow resource intensive websites to run on our shared hosting platform.