Are you familiar with proxy servers? I mean online proxies like www.proxify.com , www.hidemyass.com ? If you are using Internet from school,workplace or if you are in China or Iran you will definitely know about proxy sites. Well if not its a tool which gets you access to blocked web sites in your place. Here is wikipedia article about it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxy_server
You can find many proxy sites in www.proxy.org but even best proxy sites has one problem. They are damn slow because high loads and buggy servers etc. The best solution to this is to run your own proxy server if you need proxies most.
You can find many pre-written proxy scripts (like wordpress script) on google. best of them are phproxy,glype,zelune etc. But you need a good server to get the most out of it.
Now you have a great chance to host your proxy on worlds fastest servers yes its google servers. Now you can run your own proxy server on Google App Engine 
I think I dont have to write the whole procedure because a blog post in www.labnol.org has the all necessary steps to create your own proxy with images you can find it here- http://www.labnol.org/internet/setup-proxy-server/12890/
Here are some disadvatages of your own app engine powered proxy-
- Doesn’t support Flash
- Doesn’t support javascript
- Doesn’t support SSL
But they are not very big disadvantages when comparing with another proxies because 90% of them doesn’t support flash too.
The biggest advantage on this is the speed. You cant get this much browsing speeds on another proxies. So try it out!
Google announced that it has acquired another small company today, Picnik.com. According to sources the financal side not yet revelaed but Picnik employs 20 people and its 5 years old site which provides online photo editing facility to its users.
The 20 employees have already joined other Google staff at the Googe office in Seattle and will be working with the Picasa group. Picnik seems like a perfect match for Picasa as the company offers web based photo editing and it only makes sense to use the company’s IP to help enhance Picasa.
Picnik’s official blog has the complete article about this you may see it here- http://blog.picnik.com/2010/03/google-acquires-picnik/
This blog is hosted on Dreamhost proudly. But for high traffic web sites shared hosting is not enough. I have proxy site www.hidedaddy.com which consumes lots of resources to run because high traffic. So hosting on VPS (Virtual Private Server) or in Dedicated server is must need. After trying loads of scammers in Digitalpoint (www.forums.digitalpoint.com) I took my decision to move to BurstNet www.burst.net VPS. They are in top position of providing dedicated servers and newly introduced VPS services for their customers. After reading reviews on webhostingtalk and digitalpoint (there were many bad reviews too) I decided to buy their cheapest package in start. You can find the packages here – https://www.burst.net/linvps.shtml . I got this package-
| VPS PACKAGE #1 |
| VPS Software: vePortal™ / OpenVZ™ |
| CPU: 1000MHZ GUARANTEED |
| Memory: 512MB GUARANTEED |
| Disk Space: 20GB (RAID BASED CONFIG) |
| Bandwidth: 1000GB/MONTH |
| IP Addresses: 2 |
| Management: BASIC MANAGED |
| DDOS Protection: CISCO™ GUARD |
| FREE SETUP |
$5.95/MONTH |
 |
After ordering I got my VPS working within 24 hours. So I installed kloxo which is my favorite server administration tool and settled up sites on there. So now 2 months passed and I have to said that I didn’t had even 1 minute of downtime and my sites running speedy and smoothly than ever.
For price of shared hosting you can get better VPS. But you have to manag the VPS yourself unlike managed shared hosting plans.
So here is my rating about BurstNet VPS service-
- Price- 10
- Speed- 10
- Worth- 10
- Nodes- Brilliant (Quad Core)
Please note that this is not sponsered review or something like that. (BurstNEt paid me nothing for this review)
As I said on my previous post DNS is very important factor that directly affects your internet browsing. Google says this abouut the importance of the DNS-
Why does DNS matter?
The DNS protocol is an important part of the web’s infrastructure, serving as the Internet’s phone book: every time you visit a website, your computer performs a DNS lookup. Complex pages often require multiple DNS lookups before they start loading, so your computer may be performing hundreds of lookups a day.
Big G said that. Google lately introduced their own DNS service. Yes its the next step in the process of Googles Internet take over 
Nevermind. Currently the biggest out of ISP DNS provider is OpenDNS www.opendns.com Before Google introduced their DNS service I used OpenDNS because its way faster than my current ISP’s DNS. OpenDNS has many servers inside USA and many other in leading countries. So its very fast if you live in USA or around. But even in Asia for me OpenDNS is advanced for me because its updating instantly while my local ISP takes about 48 hours to update.
So this is not the time to talk about OpenDNS. Now I have configured my computer and router to use Google DNS system you can do the same read this guide- http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/docs/using.html . I live in Sri Lanka both googledns and opendns doesn’t have servers in my country or neighborhood. So both services connect to USA servers (GoogleDNS only have servers in America with Level3 network OpenDNS got Anycast Routing Technology that Routes your DNS queries automatically to closest server available,). Lets compare this with Namebench DNS benchmark.
Yes its way faster than OpenDNS here is ping test to OpenDNS servers and Google servers-
Note that 208.67.222.222 is the ip of the opendns while the ip 8.8.8.8 belongs to googledns-
And DNSBench benchmark results-
All this tests shows that GoogleDNS better than OpenDNS for now. ITs your decision to move or not!
Why should I buy domains for $9 when theres peomotion for $1 for whole year by worlds best domain registrar Godaddy (www.godaddy.com) . I can remember the time I bought this domain www.ruchirablog.com for $2 from their promotion. So why are you waiting,
Godaddy $0.99 domain coupon code available again from today and will work to March 11, 2010 or reaches 7,500 registrations.
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The coupon code can be used for .COM, .US, .MOBI, .BIZ, .NET, .ORG, .CA, .CO.UK and .IN domain registration.
Only one problem is you cant use paypal only credit cards accepted in this promotion but its worth it!
Coupon Code: BUY2010
why are you waiting go and buy some stuff. 
What do you mean by DNS? Simple answer is Domain Name Servers. How they work?
Well the best choice to explain this is telephone directories. Imagine that you wan to call some one and you know his/her name but not telephone number. So you need a telephone directory to find his/her number. So you can flip the papers of the directory and search for his name and then find the telephone number you need to know.
DNS service acts same like the telephone directory in your home. When you type www.google.com or any web site address in your browser Internet service need to find the ip of the server where google.com situated. So your computer makes request to find the ip address of the google.com from DNS servers. So DNS servers gets the request and then forward us the ip of the web site you need to go.This process works inside of your computer network so you dont get any visuals of ips.
Typically Internet Service Providers operate their own DNS servers for their customers. They are automatically assigned to your computer if you not manually edit DNS options in your computers network settings. But you can change DNS servers if you like to get more accurate and fast web browsing.
Imagine if your telephone directory is old and un-arranged it takes more and more time to find the phone number. Like the same process the quality of your ISPs DNS server directly affect your web browsing speed. This doesnt means the downloading speed.Slow download and upload speeds doesnt mean your DNS bad.
Come again to the theory of the telephone directory. When you have un-arranged directory it takes more time but it doesnt affect the quality of the call that you make to other party. If you have well arranged telephone directory it takes seconds to find the telephone number but you gets the same quality of the call like previously said.
Bad DNS servers makes slight delay when you request for a web site.
In my next post Ill explain how to optimize your DNS system to be more accurate and Ill do a brief benchmark of newly introduced Google DNS system. SO wait……………….
