April 23, 2010
Dreamhost allows SSH access and it is available to all customers, but first needs to be enabled on your account before you can use it. Enablling SSH access on dreamhost is easy and consist of creating FTP/SSH/SFTP user and granting permissions. A tutorial is available at the following web address: http://wiki.dreamhost.com/Enabling_Shell_Access.
SSH
SSH is a powerful feature and a tool which allow you to have secure and encrypted access to your server or host. With SSH you can copy files, access CVS (concurrent version system), cron jobs, setup file permissions, list files and many other tasks. Dreamhost uses OpenSSH as a SSH server which is free and open-source tool, currently the best on the market. After you enable SSH on your account (there is 20 minute delay) you need to install a SSH client to be able to connect to the server. Good client for Windows is Putty, for linux is ssh (openssh) and for Mac OS X is built in. After you connect to the server you can unzip/zip files, modify files, create new directories and access other dreamhost services.
April 12, 2010
Dreamhost Nameservers are:
ns1.dreamhost.com – 66.33.206.206
ns2.dreamhost.com – 66.201.54.66
ns3.dreamhost.com – 66.33.216.216
In order your site to be hosted on dreamhost you need to setup your domain so it is pointed to these nameservers. This can be setup at your domain registrar.
What are nameservers for?
Nameservers maps IP addresses to names (domain names). Every computer including web servers needs IP address so it can be connected to the Internet. Because numbers are hard to remember, especially long numbers, people have invented the domain name system (DNS) which is responsible for this. There are several root dns servers around the world that respond to queries for domain names. They return the authorative nameservers for specific domain, which return the IP address browser needs or any other application. The application then connects to the IP address and asks for the webpage in question. Nameservers can be setup at any domain registrar. At least two are required because if the first one fails the second will continue to serve the queries.
April 2, 2010
MySQL
MySQL is the most popular free open-source (GNU GPL) relational database management system (RDMS). It is used by many popular web applications (wordpress blog, joomla cms, drupal, phpbb forum, galleries and many others) for data storage of settings, text and even binary data (photos or other files). MySQL is often mentioned with together with PHP web programming language, and with Apache HTTPD and Linux OS they are part of the popular LAMP setup. Lots of tools have been developed to ease the work with MySQL databases. The most popular is phpmyadmin tool (written in PHP) that allows you to easily manage databases, create/edit tables, execute queries, browse databases and other tasks.
DreamHost MySQL
Dreamhost supports MySQL on their servers. Interesting option is that you can have your own VPS dedicated MySQL queries in case your site or service are very popular. With dreamhost control panel you can easily add new databases, setup mysql hostnames, users etc. You can have unlimited databases.