Free and reliable PHP and MySQL web hosting

I have tried a lot of free web hosts when I was learning WordPress and other open source CMS applications.  From year 2005 to till date I have tested more than 15 free web hosts.  Free web hosts normally put their advertisements on top of the site to cover the costs they incur on free web hosting, which makes the site appear somewhat ugly.  The ads occupy the large space.  Another disadvantage using free hosts is that we cannot question them if it goes down.  Some free hosts go down even for weeks.

After testing these free hosts for more than six months, I chose FreeHostia as the best free web host.  I have been using it for more than three years without a problem.  I have been building mini websites and blogs for my customers using FreeHostia.  FreeHostia offers an ad-free Linux hosting for free.  It has the following features:

• 
  Apache, PHP, MySQL, PHPMyAdmin, and Perl


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  Hosting for 2 domain and 10 subdomains


• 
  Data storage of 250 MB


• 
  Monthly bandwidth of 5 GB


• 
  1 MySQL database (10 MB DB space)


• 
  1 FTP account & web-based file manager


• 
  3 POP3 accounts with SpamAssassin protection & Webmail


• 
  FrontPage Extensions


• 
  Free 24/7 technical support and ticketing system

Review and sign up for the free hosting here.

The downside of FreeHostia is 10 MB limit of MySQL DB.  When you reach that limit, you can either move to their paid hosting plan, which costs $1.95 per month and upgrades your MySQL database size to 25 MB or to a better and cheap paid web hosting like DraemHost, which removes all limits.  If you are planning to install WordPress on it, don’t forget to install the plug-in Revision Control, else your database will be filled up too fast because of the new feature called “Post Revisions.”

Free stock photos/images for your website or blog

I often see people copying images from other websites and blogs freely without permission.  They are not aware that copying image from other websites is illegal.  You can be sued and/or your site can be taken down for doing so.

So, when you need an image to put in your blog or website, either you need to purchase one from stock photo selling websites like Getty Images, iStockphoto, etc. or find free ones.  Before going into free resource details, I want you to learn about different licenses like public domain, creative commons, etc.

There are a few good sites where you can get high quality pictures for free.  Below are the three best sources I use for all my needs.

Stock.Xchng:  It is my favorite site to get quality images for my work.  There are around 4 lakhs of royalty-free images available on SXC.  Don’t forget to browse through Hall of Fame, Most Commented, and Most Downloaded images from the drop down menu below the SXC logo.

Flickr:  It has millions of photos you can use for your site or blog with attribution.  Flickr photos are tagged with Creative Commons licenses.  Use the advanced search to find the image you need.  Don’t forget to select the license at the bottom.  Browse photos by license here.

If you find a photo you really need and there is no license mentioned, you can always mail the owner asking permission to use it on your site.  I was working on a tourism site and I searched for the photos on Flickr.  I found high quality pictures on Flickr, but there were no license details mentioned.  I sent mail to the owners asking for the permission and they happily allowed me to use it in my work.  They just wanted to know where I was using them.

Picasa Web Albums:  Picasa is also a good place to search for images with Creative Commons attribution.  Go to Picasa Web and on the top right corner, you will see a search box.  Search for the image you are looking for and then clock the “Show Options” on the top left corner.  At the bottom, you can see a section called “All licenses”  Choose the one of three licenses available according to your needs and you are done.

Now, I think you got an idea where to search for free images for your website.

Get paid to read emails – Genuine paying website

From time-to-time, I will be writing about genuine website where you can make money online. You can browse those articles by clicking on the Category section called “make money”

Today, I am going to tell about a site that pays for reading emails. There are ‘n’ number of scam sites that say that they pay for reading emails, but they don’t. I have tried a lot, but it is the only site where I got the payment. It is Hits4Pay. You will get two to five mails per day and they pay 2 cents per mail. Minimum payout is a bit high, $25, but it is easy to reach if you have referral down line. Whenever there are new mails, they will inform you through the mail. So, while checking your mails, you can open it in another window and browse through all the mails making money for you.

It took six month for me to reach the $25 without a single referral. If you can spend time on promoting it, you can easily get referrals and they pay 1 cent for every mail that your referral reads.

Click here to register and get a $10 sign-up bonus, so you need to make only $15 to get your first cheque. It accepts Indians. You can choose to get the payment through the cheque or Paypal.

Here is a payment screenshot:

Creating Dynamic Website Screenshots for Your Website

This week I have worked on a project, which required me to categorize few websites and show screenshots of those websites arranged neatly.  Special requirement was dynamic creation of website screenshots because if the administrator wants, he will just add the URL and the screenshot need to be generated automatically.

I have searched for few solutions and ended up using Websnapr.  It has very simple API to fetch the screenshots of websites.  If it does not have the screenshot for the website we need, it will update it in few seconds after the first request made for it.

There are free and premium services available.  Free service allows 100,000 requests per month and if your site needs more than that, then you need to upgrade.  It is around $45 per month.  Website screenshots will be updated once in a month.

Go to Websnapr and register for a free account with the domain where you want to implement their service.  It will give you an API key, which looks like “123ABc1abcdA.”  Then, edit HTML of your website and use the following code to render the dynamic web screenshots.

<img src=”http://images.websnapr.com/?size=Size&key=YourAPIKeyHere&url=http://www.DomainURL.com” />

“Size” parameters: Use “T” for 92×70 pixel screenshots and “S” for 202×152 pixel screenshots.

If your site requests are more than 100,000, either you need to upgrade to their premium service or you can use tiny Firefox extensions to manually grab the screenshots.  Use Screengab, Abduction!, or FireShot if you are looking for advanced editing features.

IDwhois – Free WhoIs client for Windows

Yesterday, I have come across this fast and free WhoIs checking software, IDwhois. Before findings this, I was using another free client, which checks only few TLDs like .com, .net, .org, and .info. I use this software to check domain availability across different extensions.

It is too fast and checks nealry 130 gTLDs and ccTLDs. It has checked 500 domains in less than a minute. You can prepare the domains list in text format and upload it when you are ready, and also you can save the results into XML format too.

IDwhois Features :

- More than 130 TLDs to lookup

- Stand alone whois client

- Integrated Parser

- Export results on .HTML, .CSV or .XML for fast reporting

- Import domain name list from a .TXT file

- XML Configuration files to add or modify TLD settings / interfaced

- Multi thread WHOIS lookup

- WHOIS Request timer to avoid registrars/NICs time out

- multi-IP bridge lookup environment (avoid NIC black list)

- Rearrange the information in your whois results

- Tree view result

- Free online support by mail

- Proxy environment

Download it here.

What does “Who Is” mean?

WHOIS is a TCP-based query/response protocol which is widely used for querying a database in order to determine the owner of a domain name, an IP address, or an autonomous system number on the Internet. WHOIS lookups were traditionally made using a command line interface, but a number of simplified web-based tools now exist for looking up domain ownership details from different databases. Web-based WHOIS clients still rely on the WHOIS protocol to connect to a WHOIS server and do lookups, and command-line WHOIS clients are still quite widely used by system administrators.

How to report an Abuse website

In the last few days, I got lot of mails from greetingcard.org that I received a greeting card.  But, Gmail has marked them spam and thrown into spam folder.  Usually, I check only few spam messages that I think Gmail has wrongly marked as spam to see whether they are actually spam or not.

So, I opened the greetingcard.org mail today and seen that it is actually not coming from greetingcard.org.  From address is looked like this:  greetingcard.org

<webmaster@infinisource.com>.  Someone used loopholes in mailing script of that site or spoofed the mail to send this spam message.

Email read like this:

From above you can see that mail is coming from another site with the user name as greetingcard.org.  It shows the greeting card link as an .exe file, which may contain harmful virus, malware, or adware.

So, how can we report it so that the domain and server can be shutdown and save others from this email attack?

 

To see the website’s registrar and hosting company details, we need to check the “Who is” of that domain.  “Who is” data contains the domain registrar’s and owner’s details, domain creation date, update date, and expiration details along with name server details, which normally look like ns1.hostingcompany.com and ns2.hostingcompany.com most of the time.

Every domain registrar and hosting company will have a section called “Abuse Department,” which takes care of spam issues from a website and shuts down the domain or hosting when they receive complaints against a domain.

From the above mail, the suspicious website is wings-softbal.com.  Go to the website, IPTools.com or DNSstuff.com from which you can do a whois lookup.  Enter the domain name wings-softbal.com in Domain Whois Lookup section.

It will show the whois information like this.

Whois query shows that the domain registrar is WildWestDomains.com and hosting company is TotalChoiceHosting.com.  Go to WildWestDomains.com and see if there is a link to report a spam site. Fortunately, we can see on the homepage itself a “Report Spam” link in the “Quick Help” section.