Are you setting up a business and need to know how to setup email and web hosting?  Are you confused about terms like domain name and DNS records? This article is the first of a series that will guide you through the process of setting up email and web hosting as well as explain terms you’re likely to encounter along the way. This article gives you an overview of the entire process and defines important terms. Each of these steps will be explored in detail in future articles in this series. Here’s the overview:

1. Select a domain name and register it with a domain name registrar.

2. Select a company which provides email and web hosting and sign-up for service.

3. Configure your computers and smartphone, if you have one, to access your email account.

4. Build a web site and place it on your hosting company’s web server.

Sounds pretty easy doesn’t it? It can be easy, but it can also be confusing. There are a lot of choices to be made and you’ll encounter a lot of jargon along the way. Let’s explore some of these terms.

Domain Name – Even if you’re not familiar with the term “domain name” you know what they are. Examples are apple.com and mail.comcast.net.

To over-simplify slightly, a domain name is a human-memorable name assigned to an individual computer or a network of computers. Thus, it makes it easier for a person to remember your email address or web site name.

Domain Registrar – A domain registrar is a company that will help you register a domain name. One pays an annual fee to register (own) a domain name. It’s common to register a domain name for several years at a time or have your registration set to automatically renew every year. Make sure you don’t accidentally let your domain name registration expire or else your email could suddenly stop working and your web site would no longer be visible. GoDaddy is a very well-known and now infamous domain registrar. Network Solutions is one of the oldest registrars.

There’s actually very little money to be made in being a domain registrar, so most companies that register domain name also offer email and web hosting services since they can make a bit more profit in that business.

While I understand the convenience of having your registration, email and web hosting all with one company, I prefer to keep them separate. I like to use one company as my registrar and a second company for my email and web hosting.

Hosting companies – A company that houses or stores your company’s web site and processes incoming and outgoing email messages is a hosting company. More specifically, they could be called a web and email hosting company. Obviously, one pays a monthly or annual fee for email and web hosting services. In order to get your email and web hosting setup and working, a hosting company will configure their name servers with DNS records for your company.

Name Server – A name server is a server which maintains authoritative records for your company’s domain name. Put more simply, a name server stores information about your company’s domain name. A name server then responds to requests from anybody trying to find your company’s web site or trying to send emails to your company. The information stored are called DNS records. DNS stands for Domain Name System. The Domain Name System is a hierarchical system for naming computers and for keeping track of and locating the millions of computers that are connected to the Internet.

DNS records - DNS records include information about the names and locations of your company’s servers, like a mail server or a web server. DNS records are stored on DNS servers. DNS servers are often described as the phone books of the Internet since they translate human-memorable server names like www.apple.com into IP addresses like 23.49.45.15. Another example is mail.apple.com might be translated to 17.171.2.21. Humans find it difficult to remember strings of digits like this and easier to remember names like www.apple.com. However, computers are just the opposite, so DNS servers play a critical role in making the Internet easier to work with.

If you use just one company as your domain registrar and as your hosting company, they’ll setup all of the DNS records on their name servers and you won’t have to deal with any of this. On the other hand, if you choose to use two or more companies for your domain registration and hosting, you’ll need to deal with some of these details. For example, if you register your domain name with one company then pick a separate company for your email and web hosting, you’ll need to list the hosting company’s name servers in your account at the domain registrar.

This concludes our introductory overview about what you need to know about setting up email and web hosting for a new company. The next article in this series will cover picking and registering a domain name.

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What is iCloud? iCloud is a cloud computing service offered by Apple since October 2011. In a recent Tech Tip we got a brief overview of cloud computing. Now let’s look specifically at Apple’s iCloud. There are a lot of answers that one can give to the question, What is iCloud?

iCloud is a free data synchronization service that connects your Mac (or PC), iPhone and iPad. While the core iCloud services are free, there are optional features which cost money. Apple describes iCloud this way. iCloud stores your music, photos, documents, and more and wirelessly pushes them to all your devices. Automatic, effortless, and seamless — it just works. You can watch Apple’s video demonstrating iCloud.

iCloud is the successor to Apple’s MobileMe service. iCloud is really the fourth iteration of Apple’s online service. Wikipedia’s article about iCloud reviews this history. MobileMe had a shaky reputation in terms of reliability. When it first launched there were many incidents of slow performance and lost data. Personally, I’ve seen MobileMe data get corrupted that caused syncing to stop working. Apple redesigned and built iCloud from the ground up. It hopes to impress us with its rock-solid reliability. So far, I’ve been pretty pleased but I feel it’s a touch early to pronounce my final judgement.

According to Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, iCloud is more than a product. It’s a strategy for Apple for the coming decade. Cook implies that iCloud will grow over the coming decade to offer more and more services.

iCloud offers an array of services which I won’t list here. Many others have already covered these services thoroughly. Here are links to two such articles I think do a particularly good job of describing iCloud’s current services. David Pogue’s blog post about iCloud and Gotta Be Mobile’s blog post about iCloud.

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Do you use GMail, Google Docs, Dropbox, Facebook, CrashPlan or iCloud? If so, then you use cloud computing. It’s not essential that you have an in-depth understanding of cloud computing, but here’s a brief overview.

Cloud Computing is often misused as a synonym for the Internet itself.  This is an incorrect use of the term. However, the term was inspired by the common use of a picture of a cloud to represent the complex infrastructure of the Internet in diagrams. Consequently, this incorrect use is somewhat understandable.

Broadly, cloud computing refers to computing resources that are offered as a service rather then a product. More specifically, these cloud computing services also need to meet certain characteristics including wide access, measured service, as well as pooling of storage space and computing horsepower.

Let me illustrate this with an example. In the past, if you wanted to use a word processor you would typically buy a product, like Microsoft Word, and install it on your Mac. In a cloud computing world you might, instead, sign up for a free (or paid) service, like Google Docs, and use its word processor. Google Docs is broadly available and behind the scenes Google’s system can bring more computers online to handle surges in customer use of  the service.

Cloud computing has become possible because it’s cost-effective for companies to build huge data centers where computing and software can be provided remotely at massive scale and rented out, like a utility service. Other factors include the lower prices of computers and smartphones and the growing pervasiveness of fast Internet connections.

For those interested in a more in-depth description and definition of cloud computer I direct you to this excellent Tidbits article on cloud computing. It covers the essential characteristics, service models, and deployment models for cloud computing in more detail. With this basic understanding of cloud computing, we’re ready to look at Apple’s iCloud service. We’ll address the question, What is iCloud? Look for this in a future Tech Tip.

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One of the greatest sources of confusion for computer users is the difference between a computer’s memory and its storage space. The confusion is not entirely the users’ fault. Overlapping terminology contributes, as does poor word choice. I’ll try to reduce confusion by differentiating the terms as well as talking about their overlap.

A classic example of this confusion is when a person receives an error message which states something about insufficient memory and the person thinks that they need to delete files from their computer to make more memory available. This is not the right action to take. Taking the error message at its face value, the proper response would be to close applications and files to free up memory. Alternatively, one could buy more memory for the computer. Let’s start to examine these terms.

Computers have two kinds of storage — temporary and permanent. A computer’s memory is used for temporary storage, while a computer’s hard drive is used for permanent storage. Whoever selected the term memory for temporary computer storage did the world a disservice since people tend to permanently store information in our memories. If I asked you to recall your first grade teacher’s name you could, most likely, tell me because that piece of information is stored in your memory, right? This is not how computers use their memory. A computer’s memory is also called RAM which is an acronym for Random Access Memory. A computer’s memory is where information is temporarily stored while it is being accessed or worked on. For example, if I’m updating my resume, then I double-click its icon to open it. This process of opening the file, copies it from its permanent home on the computer’s hard drive into the computer’s memory. Once in memory, I can edit it. If the computer loses electrical power while I am updating my resume, the most recent changes I’d made are lost. This is because the information in a computer’s memory is only kept there while electrical power is supplied. To avoid losing my most recent changes, I need to save the file. The act of saving a file copies it back to the computer’s hard drive. The contents of a hard drive remain intact even if the computer is turned off or it loses electrical power some other way.

A simple analogy I use to help remember these terms is that memory is like your desk’s work space and your hard drive is like a filling cabinet. Your filing cabinet is typically large enough to store hundreds of file folders and thousands of pieces of paper. Your desktop work space is not large enough for all of these file folders and papers.

Both temporary computer storage (memory or RAM) and permanent computer storage (hard drives) are measured in bytes. These days they are measured specifically in gigabytes (GB). If you’d like to learn more about bytes and gigabytes, please read this previous Tech Tip. This overlap in measurement systems contributes to some of the confusion.

In early 2012, a new Mac might be equipped with 4 GB of memory and a hard drive whose storage capacity is 500 GB. The primary reason for this great disparity is cost. Memory, RAM, is much more expensive then hard drive storage space. Here’s a rough comparison. One GB of RAM costs about $8, while 1 GB of hard drive storage space costs about 10 cents. In other words, RAM costs about 8000 as much as hard drive storage space. Wow.

This price differential explains why we can have much more hard drive storage space compared to memory (RAM) storage space, but why do we need both? Why are computers designed this way, constantly copying data back and forth, into memory and then back to the hard drive? The primary reason is that RAM is much faster than hard drive storage space. I don’t have exact numbers, but RAM is thousands, probably tens or hundreds of thousands, times faster than a hard drive. This is true for both mechanical hard drives, which have been used for decades, as well as solid-state drives (SSDs), which are becoming increasingly common. Apple uses SSDs in all iPhones, iPads and MacBook Airs. SSDs are an option in the iMac, at present.

The prevalence of confusion between (temporary) memory and (permanent) hard drive storage space is so great that the occurrences of misuse of these terms is greater than the proper use of these terms. For example, a discussion from January 2012 is about how much memory is enough in an iPhone. The original poster’s question should be how much storage space is sufficient in an iPhone. It’s tough to use these terms correctly when so many don’t. I feel like a fussbudget grammarian when I correct a person or clarify a person’s question. Now that you have a better understanding, help me out and use the terms properly!

Note: Since I’m a strong advocate for everybody backing up their computer’s hard drive, I should point out that hard drives should be thought of as only semi-permanent storage. This is because hard drives fail. Every hard drive will eventually fail. It’s only a matter of time. Drives can fail in a number of ways, so some fail sooner than others. Sometimes they give warning signs and other times they don’t. Consequently, it’s necessary to backup the contents of a hard drive. Ironically, we often backup one hard drive onto another hard drive! In previous Tech Tips, I’ve recommended backing up your data to at least two different drives and having one copy of your data stored in an off-site location.

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If you connect your Mac to your TV, you might need to deal with TV Overscan. Explaining what it is and why TVs do it is complicated, but recognizing it is easy. If  your TV screen cuts off the outer edges of your Mac’s image then you’re suffering from TV overscan. For example, you might not be able to see all of the menus at the top of your Mac’s screen or the lower half of the Dock icons might be cut off. If this is the case then you should figure out how to turn off the overscan feature on your TV.

If you want to understand what TV overscan is and why TVs do it, I’ll direct you to these articles from Wikipedia and Graham Hughes.

My focus is try give you some guidance on how to turn off this feature. I recommend using your TV’s manual since television manufacturers use different terms, and the exact process varies from model to model. For example, I have a Samsung LCD TV. I eventually found a Picture Option named Just Scan.It turns out that this turned off overscan. The only clue that I was a parenthetical phrase in the manual which read, “Use the function to see the full image without any cutoff when HDMI, Component or DTV signals are input.” The feature’s name clearly didn’t give me a clue about what it does. I’ve learned that Samsung also sometimes calls the feature Screen Fit. Pioneer apparently calls this feature Dot by Dot. If you don’t have your TV manual hand you might be able to download one online. I typically find manuals by doing a Google search terms like this, “download Samsung LN42A550 manual.” Often the results will take me to a download link from the manufacturer’s site or a third party site which compiles user manuals.

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Clients are often unsure how to properly use the term streaming or unsure about what this term means. In a slight misuse of terms, you could substitute broadcast for stream. For example, you might hear a person say, “Last night, I streamed Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino on Netflix”. You could think in your head, “Last night, I broadcast Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino on Netflix”. It isn’t 100% accurate to think this, but it could help you while you work on getting your head around the term streaming.

A proper definition of streaming is transmitting a continuous flow of audio and/or video data while earlier parts are being used. The term refers to the delivery method of the data rather than the data itself. Another common delivery method for audio and/or video data is downloading the data onto your computer so the data ends up being stored on your computer. Streamed data is not stored on your computer, at least not the entire data file all at one time. When audio or video is streamed to your computer, the data is being continuously sent to your computer and your computer displays earlier parts while subsequent parts are being received. Once the earlier parts have been displayed they are typically discarded. Downloading and streaming data are two contrasting ways of obtaining audio or video data.

Looking back at our movie example, if a person downloads a copy of Clint Eastwood’s movie onto her computer so she can watch it again and again, then she is not streaming the movie when she watches it. She does not need to be connected to the internet to watch the downloaded movie. However, if this same person goes to her Netflix account and clicks a button to begin watching the movie, then Netflix begins to stream the movie across the Internet to her computer. This transmission is more fleeting. At any one point in time, only a small portion of the movie is on her computer.

There is a variety of streaming media currently available. These days one can stream movie trailers, Internet television and radio, YouTube videos and much more. Let’s look at some examples. If one lives in Boston, but wants to listen to a Seattle radio station, like KUOW, then one could go to www.kuow.org and listen to an audio stream that is identical to the radio station’s FM broadcast.  Streams can be live or on-demand. KUOW’s Internet audio stream is a live stream. Similarly, when Apple Inc. introduces a new product they will often hold an event in an auditorium and invite the press. To increase the event’s exposure they would often send out a live video stream of Steve Jobs’ presentation. Subsequently, they also often allow their web site visitors to watch the video presentation streamed to them on-demand.

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How big is a kilobyte? How big is a gigabyte? Relative to each other, how big are any two files? Here’s some information which can help you get your head around file sizes and comparing them.

File size is commonly measured in bytes. In a plain text file, typically each byte is equal to one letter. One page of text can hold a few thousand letters, so a plain text file that has one page of text might be about 4,000 bytes in size. Since 1,000 bytes equals 1 kilobyte, we could express that as 4 kilobytes (KB).

Plain text files can only contain letters, numbers and punctuation marks. In other words, they can’t contain any formatting. Formatting is a general term that includes such things as bold text, colored text or fonts (typefaces). The information needed to store formatting details in a file takes up space and thus increases a file’s size. If we took that one-page plain text file and converted it into a Microsoft Word document, underlined some text, converted some of the text to the Palatino font and other text to Times New Roman, this formatted one-page document might grow to be around 100 KB in size.

If you then placed a jpeg image into that one-page Word file, it’s size would increase further. The size of jpeg images can vary widely from tens of kilobytes to hundreds, thousands or even tens of thousands. Let’s imagine that we insert a jpeg that is about 2 inches x 3 inches in size and is a low resolution. Such a jpeg might be 100 KB in size. Now our Word file could be about 200 KB in size.

At this point, you hopefully remember that 1 letter is typically 1 byte in size and have a sense for how file size grows. You likely have a rough idea of how large a word processing file can be. Let’s move on.

In addition to kilo- there are other metric prefixes which you’ll commonly see in front of byte. Here’s a list of some of these prefixes and their size relationship to each other:

8 bits = 1 Byte = 1 letter

Bytes
1 kilobyte = 1000 bytes
1 megabyte  = 1000 kilobytes (KB)
1 gigabyte = 1000 megabytes (MB)
1 terabyte  = 1000 gigabytes (GB)
1 petabyte = 1000 terabytes (TB)
1 exabyte (EB) = 1000 petabytes (PB)

While file sizes can vary widely, here are some gross generalizations to further help get your head around the sizes of different types of files.

1 page of text might be around 50 KB
1 an email message of two paragraphs might be 10 KB
1 jpeg photo could be 500 KB
60 minutes of spoken words could be 25 MB = 25,000 KB
a 10 minute long mp3 song could be  20 MB = 20,000 KB
1,000 minutes of an audiobook could be = 1.4 GB = 1,400 MB = 1,400,000 KB
2 hour long movie could be = 5 GB = 5,000 MB = 5,000,000 KB

These days a computer’s hard drive is typically measured in terms of gigabytes or possibly even terabytes. So how many Word files, jpeg photos, mp3 songs and movies could be stored on your hard drive?

If your hard drive’s storage capacity is 100 GB then you could have room for the following. Let’s assume that Mac OS X requires about 5 GB of storage space and that your applications (Word, Safari, iPhoto, etc) take another 20 GB then that leaves us with 75 GB to store our own files. Again, let me use some gross estimates and generalizations. This will let you see some rough comparisons and that photos and music files take up a lot more space than individual Word files or a typical email message.

5,000 photos could use 10 GB
5,000 mp3 songs could use 30 GB
5,000 email messages with their attachments could use 100 MB  or .1 GB
5,000 Word, Excel and PDF documents could use 600 MB or .6 GB

Added together, these photos, songs, email messages and other files are about 42 GB. Since we have 75 GB of available space on our 100 GB hard drive we know that we’d still have a healthy amount of free space even with this many items. Roughly 30 GB of space would still be free. To fill up this much space you might need another 15,000 photos or another 5,000 songs or another million or so email messages.

With this information you should have a general sense of how large files of different types should be and how their sizes compare. If somebody told you that you need to clean up your hard drive to free up storage space, you’d know that you should focus on files that take up 100 megabytes or gigabytes of space. You’d know not to worry about files which take up kilobytes of space since it would take thousands and thousands of these smaller files to equal the space of a larger file. Thus, when you need to clean up, you typically shouldn’t waste your time deleting old emails. Instead, review your pictures, music and video files to see if you can get rid of some of those.

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What is the difference between the words download and upload?

I’m asked these questions frequently. I have 3 answers that I offer.

1. It doesn’t matter if you use them properly. Go ahead and use the words.  People will understand what you’re trying to communicate even if you pick the incorrect word for a given situation.

2. Rather than worrying about which word is correct, just avoid the words and use alternatives. Using either copy or move will work in most situations. For example, rather then saying “There’s a problem downloading photos from my digital camera to my Mac.” you could say “There’s a problem moving photos from my digital camera to my Mac.”

3. Finally, here’s a direct answer to the question. Use download when you’re talking about moving files (such as song files, pictures or Word docments) onto your local computer. Use upload when you’re talking about moving data off of your local computer. For example:

“Yesterday, I downloaded pictures from my digital camera onto my Mac. Then I uploaded them to my Flickr account so my friends would be able to view them.”

I should probably add a bit more clarifying detail. Historically, uploading referred to moving files from your local computer to some remote, typically larger, shared computer. Downloading referred to moving files from a shared, remote computer to your local, peripheral computer. So, one typically uploads from a smaller device to a larger device. Thus, one uploads files from a personal computer to a fancy server computer like the ones that comprise Flickr.  So, I think one could also say that one uploads files from a camera to a computer even though in my example above, I used the word download to talk about moving files from the camera to the Mac. It’s easy to see why people get confused about how to use these words, so why not just avoid these words and use move or copy!

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