Though cloud & virtualization are the buzzing words in the industry, however, still there are many people are who are still confuse about the concepts of cloud and virtualization. They are still not sure about the differences between both of them.

The concept of cloud hosting and virtualization is very common today. Most of the times people tend to link them with same things. However, the truth is that, both the concepts are different.

The virtualization is an new  IT model that has an ability to separate the core computing functions and technology implementations from the physical hardware of a dedicated server. While, the cloud is a service where computing resources, software’s or data as a service are shared via the Internet as completely opposed to virtualization, which is a part of a physical infrastructure.

Today, many companies are quickly moving on the cloud just with a hope that they will find a solution to all their issues, especially for reducing costs and infrastructure management. But, blinded by the offers provided by some cloud providers, companies don’t realize that some are already partially tied in their own private cloud.

Still some people from the industry don’t realize that they are already in the cloud, just due to the virtualization infrastructure they have developed. Big players like Google, Salesforce, Azure, Amazon, AWS, OpenStack, Hyper-V and VMware offer various tools to build a cloud. These are not the ones that offer cloud services; the word “cloud” covers an array of offers provided by different providers.

The concept of cloud have thrilled many organizations and enterprises, as they don’t need to buy their own hardware or don’t need to hire a professional and highly experienced staff to manage their infrastructure. The main thing that attracted companies was the idea of full data center floating on air, however, they didn’t realized the real drawbacks of moving their data in the public cloud.

It’s not like cloud hosting services cannot benefit companies, but moving into the type of cloud model makes a big difference in terms of advantages. It is a reality that moving your data in the public cloud increases the costs as the term of the service increases.

Also, some of the people think that due to Patriot Act, there is a big risk of hosting their data with cloud providers in USA, as the Act allows the U.S. government to have access to your data anytime they want. However, let me tell you that people have many misconceptions about the U.S. Patriot Act and Data Security, which I will be clearing in my next article.

One more issue that should be considered is regarding the failure of systems. What happens if the system goes down? In such a case, the custody of the company data goes under the provider, the company won’t have any relationship with the data, unless it pays for the data storage service.

Despite the few drawbacks, the cloud services also have a positive side. It can offer a service that would be out of reach with their virtualization platform.  For example, some big cloud players allow organizations to have worldwide servers in various availability zones, which simply mean that if there is an outage, the consequences will be less.

Many people that are not aware about the real concept of cloud and virtualization associate them, however, in reality it is more of a step on the way to it.

Note: StatCounter is not fully representative because not all web sites use StatCounter.

Wondering whether you need to make your web designs work well on low display resolutions? Well, in the United States, from June 2011 through to June 2012, 1024×768 still remains the most used display resolution for web sites using StatCounter.

• 1024 x 768: 16.49%
• 1366 x 768: 16%
• 1280 x 800: 13.41%
• 1440 x 900: 7.15%
• 1920 x 1080: 6.55%

Worldwide isn’t much different either, with 1024 x 768 display resolution being the second most popular display resolution at 17.38%.

Tips to make your designs work well on lower display resolutions.

Try avoid using too many floats.

Floating too many HTML elements can be a factor of your design looking inconsistent on lower display resolutions. If you need to use floats, have an upper div within the body section of your HTML document and set it as position: absolute so any div within it will float within the constraints of the upper div.

Use percentage based widths.

When setting the size of div’s, use percentage-based widths where appropriate. This means regardless of the display resolution, the actual width of the HTML element will look similarly positioned whether it’s 1024×768 or 1920×1080.

Do not absolutely position elements unless necessary.

If you absolutely position elements, it can create issues for users on lower display resolutions, as regardless of the display resolution the div that is absolutely positioned will remain there, perhaps overlapping other elements on lower display resolutions.

Have a mobile theme.

If you have WordPress you can install a free plugin called “WP Mobile Detector” that will automatically activate a mobile theme if it is detected that a visitor is using a smartphone or mobile phone. Simply install the plugin and once activated, it’ll change to a mobile user interface for visitors accessing your blog on their smartphone or mobile phone. For mobile phones, it will activate a basic theme with no images.

PuTTY is a terminal emulator. The client part supports the protocols:

• SSH
• Telnet
• rlogin
• TCP crude

This is Free Software released under the MIT license. Its main features are:

• Retains the settings of the hosts and their preferences for future use.
• Control the encryption key and the version of the SSH protocol.
• It includes an SFTP client command line called psftp.
• It includes an SCP client command line called pscp.
• Allows control of the port translation (port forwarding) on ​​SSH dynamic local and remote.
• Supports IPv6.
• Supports encryption 3DES, AES, Arcfour, Blowfish, DES.
• Supports public key authentication.
• Supports Telnet, SSH, and rlogin, and RS-232.
• There is a command line version called Plink.
• No installation is necessary; simply run the downloaded executable to use.

PuTTY does not generate backup file for the parameters. These are stored in the register at the hive:

“HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ Software \ SimonTatham \ PuTTY \ Sessions”

If you wish to redirect all the urls from one site to another site’s url, then go through the following rewrite rules in .htaccess files.

For Example …

You want to redirect your old blog site http://www.abc.com/blog to new domain http://www.xyz.com/blog. So you have to include the following rules into old blog site’s .htaccess file; means when some one access the url http://www.abc.com/blog/anything  it will be redirected to http://www.xyz.com/anything.

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^abc\com\blog
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.abc.com/blog$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteRule    ^$   http://www.xyz.com/   [L]
RewriteRule    (.*) http://www.xyz.com/$1 [L]
</IfModule>

Note: Replace “www.abc.com/blog” equal to your old blog url  and also replace “www.xyz.com” equal to your new blog url …