Over the last few days I have been working on an article about my feelings towards web hosting. It is my opinion that behind every good website is a good web host. The article is titled Laying the Foundations of a Good Website – Good Hosting as is the first article of my relaunched website White-Pug.

The article has been written for novice webmasters and those taking their first steps on the road to building an online presence. It focuses on the factors that I think are important in selecting the right web hosting package for your project and then follows to explain some of the types of web hosting that are in common use today including shared hosting, virtual private servers and dedicated hosting.

photo credit: sonicwalker

Please take a look and let me know what you think. I have been compiling the article over the last few days and in all it probably took me about 3-4 hours to write. I am not a naturally good writer so your thoughts will be appreciated, and any tips you are willing to share will be taken on board with enthusiasm.

White-Pug was originally a personal website of mine first started when I was at Cardiff University. The name derives from the car I drive, a white Peugeot 306 which is affectionately known as “pug” to those who know me. I have now relaunched the site with the intentions of writing articles based on building and maintaining your own websites and will be aimed at people who are just getting in to web development. I have plans to write about one or two articles a fortnight and I am willing to take suggestions as to what areas I should cover.

Please let me know what you think about the site, and keep watching this blog for more information about what I am getting up to!

I would like to take this opportunity to welcome a new discount partner to my Peugeot owners website Club-306.

GAP Security are the UK market leader for car alarms, immobilisers and GPS vehicle tracking systems. They work in tandem with UK insurers and car club enthusiasts to make sure that their customers are getting what they want and what the insurance industry says they need.

GAP Security have kindly teamed up with Club-306 to offer it’s members a 10% discount on their services, and with over 30,000 UK vehicles fitted with GAP Security systems you can expect top quality service and value for money.

More information on this offer and contact details can be found at the Club-306 website – Car Alarms from GAP Security | Club-306

About Club-306

Club-306 is a Peugeot 306 car owners club founded by John Blackmore in June 2006. In February 2008 the number of registered members on the Club-306 forum is in excess of 3400 and the site is visited by over 9,500 unique visitors each month.

Club-306 offers a number of discount offers to paid members, as well as a wide range of free articles covering Peugeot 306 information and Peugeot 306 DIY guides.

If you want to get involved and can offer a service to Club-306 members, please get in touch using the form on the Contact John page of this website.

Protecting the data on your Windows based system has just got a whole lot easier with the latest release of the open source project TrueCrypt. The latest incarnation (version 5.0) is the first release to include support for encrypted windows boot partitions, and uses pre-boot authentication as part of the start up process.

This will be welcome news to anyone with highly sensitive information stored on hard drives that are possible targets of theft such as laptops or external portable drives. With the ability to encrypt the boot partition a stolen laptop protected with TrueCrypt will be un-bootable without the correct passphrase.

TrueCrypt encryption is done on the fly, and with improved pipelining of the encrypt/decrypt process file access times are not noticeably affected. The additional benefit of TrueCrypt as a multi-platform open source development will in my opinion make this a project to keep an eye on in the coming years as concerns over data security increase and more tough data protection laws emerge.

On a personal level TrueCrypt 5 will be a welcome addition to my laptop, adding that extra piece of mind that if my laptop did go missing at least all of my clients personal and professional information will be secure. More information about TrueCrypt 5.0 is available at http://www.truecrypt.org/news.php