I have always been a bit of a space nut. Growing up I had my room decked out in NASA stuff. Between having a live size Astronaut poster on my wall (Up until it started scaring me...) Blow up plants hanging from my ceiling... etc...

Needless to say when NASA releases pictures from space especially like this I get a little excited.

Denial of Service Attacks or (DoS Attacks) or (DDoS Attacks) are a common battle in the web world. They involve a repeated ping or call on a server. The goal is to make the server/website unavailable.

I do my best to keep up to date on the latest hacks and not to mention old hacks resurfacing. One of these issues seems to be coming up again. And that has to do with PHP's $_GET, $_REQUEST, and $_POST variables.

These are excellent ways of creating heavy loads on a server if the maxium allowed variables is to high. Not to mention if each one of those variables is not limited it could potentially unleash a lethal Denial of Service attack on a victim hosing and destroying there CPU's.

A friend and collague of mine spent the better part of a week. Or for good ole time's sake a "Get Married Two Week's." On this article. I am still working on my article that will show all the main revisions of getmarried.com, but until then please enjoy his article.

Tedlee.net

He really does do a good job, without making to many punches, but in truth being honest. There was so much more drama that happened in between each event, but he does a really good job summarizing the reasons why Get Married Media, Inc closed.

Recently I was given a VDI, that is a Ubuntu Server. This runs a web app for a company that I work with. We use these VM's for development, integration testing, and testing. When I installed the VDI I found that it was not connecting to my local network by just using the regular settings. After roughly two tutorials I found a mix of the two to be my resolution.

It sadden's me to find out a company I recently just left will be closing down most of its major operations today. The rest will follow on December 16th of this month. I had worked for them for over 3 years starting as a base level web developer and grew into a Lead Senior Web Developer. Over the years they definitely had there bumps in the road. It is unfortunate that they could not make it past what was always told to us. "We are not going anywhere." Taylor Corporation assured us that we were a center product and that we were a necessity.

Unfortunately GM is coming to a close and the work I had done over the last three years will now be gone forever.

I have been thinking on this topic for a while and have come up with a couple easy steps to figuring out what will be the best hosting solution for you.

Firstly you will need to ask yourself these questions.

1. What can I afford?
2. How big of an application / website am I going to run?
3. What level of traffic are you expecting / have?
4. What is your technical knowledge of administrating servers?
5. What kind of application / site are you running (Terms and Conditions may prevent you from doing some...)

These five questions should really help you decide in what to go with. So now ill go in depth and explain each portion. Aft ert this ill explain the differences in the different types of hosting.

1. Shared Host / Grid Hosting
2. VPS Hosting (Virtual Private Server)
3. Dedicated Server

Yes there are other hosting types that exit, but to not complicate this decision more ill leave that for another post. I have been round robin with several different hosts now. Each I have found things I like, and things I do not like about them. So with my research and sit back and enjoy. As a side note this will be a two part post as I want to go into details about each host that I will review.

I am trying to keep this going with new things that I do every so often. Along with helpful tidbits that I run into.

So here is a list of upcoming articles.

1. Alternative Hosting Solutions / Website Hosting Solutions.
2. Alternative HTTP Servers (Other than Apache and Tomcat.)
3. CSS3 Animations with JavaScript
4. GDFonts... Converting text to an image. (I use this on the side bar of the site.)
5. Social Network Plugins
6. Voting Systems (The good the bad and the ugly...) "This one will probably be December before I get to it."
7. And so much more than  I can recall at the moment also!