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Web Hosting - Do It Yourself Administration, Things to Consider
The choice of whether or not to try to administer your own web site brings with it a host, pun intended, of issues.
For most web site owners, the primary focus is naturally on creating, maintaining and enhancing the site. That often is just part of managing an entire business, for which the web site is just the means to an end.
That implies there will be little interest in or time left over for technical administration like database maintenance (tuning, space management, security, bug fixes), establishing and maintaining backups to ensure they're successful and usable, email administration, disk space management, applying operating system fixes for bugs and security, and other tasks.
But cost is always a factor in any business. Paying for technical help can burden the budget of a new and struggling business.
Consulting fees can range from a few dollars an hour to over $100. On the lower end, the poor skill level and quality of work will make it not worth even that small amount. On the higher end, you can quickly rack up expenses that will bust your business.
Permanent employees are usually somewhere in the middle of that range when you add up salary, employment taxes and more. Often, server and/or web site administration can be paid for as part of the web hosting package. That cost is usually lower than independent contracting help, but those staff are usually tasked with maintaining dozens if not hundreds of servers and sites. They can, therefore, give very little individual attention to yours.
Often, novice web site owners are intimidated by some of the technical requirements for server or site administration. But, as with anything, a little familiarity can show that the knowledge required is more modest than one might expect. Administration in many cases involves fairly elementary, and frequently repetitive, tasks. These can be learned easily. Using a test site or a free hosting service is a good way to practice and learn without risk or cost, other than time invested.
Once that initial hurdle is jumped over, administration can be done quickly and some even find it interesting. It allows the site owner to exercise additional control over the total product, and there's satisfaction in being able to say 'I did that' even if you prefer not to do it forever.
That real-life learning experience also allows the site owner to better judge any consultants or staff that are hired. It's much easier to judge if someone is providing you with an accurate assessment of a problem if you've solved it yourself. Any time-estimate they provide to fix it can also be better calculated if you've had to do it yourself.
Every web site relies on a variety of factors, usually unseen, in order to continue to function properly. But the fact is that they misbehave from time to time. Deciding whether to tackle those problems yourself depends on your available time and skill set, and what it will require to get things back on track. In other words, it's a standard cost-benefit analysis that everyone has to undertake every day in life.
Copyright music lyrics To Copyright Music Lyrics is to Protect the Wealth of your Future Whether you copyright music lyrics or the notes to a song you have a certain amount of ownership in the song. This is one of the many instances where the copyright affects more than one person and results in being valid until the last remaining person on the project (of course you must be identified in the copyright in order for this to affect you) have been deceased for at least 70 years. The easiest route for musicians is not just to write the notes but also to copyright music lyrics at the same time. This is much better for everyone involved and there is only one registration fee rather than creating a need to register the music and the lyrics as separate entities. For those who are new to the entire process of registering copyrights, owning copyrights and wondering exactly what happens now that you've registered it can seem like either an extremely complicated or confusing process. Many new artists fail to properly protect themselves and their non copyright music lyrics from those who would take advantage of them. If you are hoping to copyright lyrics that you've written for a song, I strongly recommend copyrighting music lyrics and registering them before introducing the lyrics to the music of the song unless you wrote both the lyrics and the music. Doing all of it together is often more difficult, particularly for those who feel more talented or gifted in one area than another but it really does help keep everything together and straight over the long haul. It's also great practice to write your own music rather than focusing only on the righting of words. After all, you had something in mind when you wrote the lyrics (a tune, a melody, something) and only you can truly give the unfinished artwork the justice it deserves. So many people forget how similar creating music is to creating visual art. Both require dedication, visions, purpose, and passion. They require different skills but very similar emotions and qualities in order to do well. Once you've begun to copyright music lyrics there really is no major difference between moving on to the next task, which is actually writing and copyrighting the music to go with those wonderful lyrics. If you're not a great music writer, then it is probably preferable that you find someone who is to work on this project with you. Perhaps your next copyright music lyrics session will lead to some wonderful collaborations and joint ventures. Many times in music the hardest part of any big break is in finding the right partner with whom to work towards your common goals. Most bans fail because they either never shared a common goal or someone in the band changed the goal without consulting anyone else. The vast majority of marriages break up over very similar claims. Perhaps the cruelest point of all to make is that not everyone who can copyright music lyrics will be completely honest about the source of the lyrics or the period of their lives while leading up to that point. The sad news is that we live in a world that isn't going to easily take someone's word that they created those lyrics, particularly if someone else already has a copyright on those very same lyrics. If you aren't the ones writing the lyrics, or the music for that matter be careful that you don't end up trying to pass of copyright music lyrics or notes that aren't your own creation, this could definitely lead to more harm than good in time. More than anything else is extremely dishonest and unbecoming of a musician. Web Hosting - Redundancy and Failover Among the more useful innovations in computing, actually invented decades ago, are the twin ideas of redundancy and failover. These fancy words name very common sense concepts. When one computer (or part) fails, switch to another. Doing that seamlessly and quickly versus slowly with disruption defines one difference between good hosting and bad. Network redundancy is the most widely used example. The Internet is just that, an inter-connected set of networks. Between and within networks are paths that make possible page requests, file transfers and data movement from one spot (called a 'node') to the next. If you have two or more paths between a user's computer and the server, one becoming unavailable is not much of a problem. Closing one street is not so bad, if you can drive down another just as easily. Of course, there's the catch: 'just as easily'. When one path fails, the total load (the amount of data requested and by how many within what time frame) doesn't change. Now the same number of 'cars' are using fewer 'roads'. That can lead to traffic jams. A very different, but related, phenomenon occurs when there suddenly become more 'cars', as happens in a massively widespread virus attack, for example. Then, a large number of useless and destructive programs are running around flooding the network. Making the situation worse, at a certain point, parts of the networks may shut down to prevent further spread, producing more 'cars' on now-fewer 'roads'. A related form of redundancy and failover can be carried out with servers, which are in essence the 'end-nodes' of a network path. Servers can fail because of a hard drive failure, motherboard overheating, memory malfunction, operating system bug, web server software overload or any of a hundred other causes. Whatever the cause, when two or more servers are configured so that another can take up the slack from one that's failed, that is redundancy. That is more difficult to achieve than network redundancy, but it is still very common. Not as common as it should be, since many times a failed server is just re-booted or replaced or repaired with another piece of hardware. But, more sophisticated web hosting companies will have such redundancy in place. And that's one lesson for anyone considering which web hosting company may offer superior service over another (similarly priced) company. Look at which company can offer competent assistance when things fail, as they always do sooner or later. One company may have a habit of simply re-booting. Others may have redundant disk arrays. Hardware containing multiple disk drives to which the server has access allows for one or more drives to fail without bringing the system down. The failed drive is replaced and no one but the administrator is even aware there was a problem. Still other companies may have still more sophisticated systems in place. Failover servers that take up the load of a crashed computer, without the end-user seeing anything are possible. In fact, in better installations, they're the norm. When they're in place, the user has at most only to refresh his or her browser and, bingo, everything is fine. The more a web site owner knows about redundancy and failover, the better he or she can understand why things go wrong, and what options are available when they do. That knowledge can lead to better choices for a better web site experience. |