Guides Receiving a spam email that contains your password The internet has been incredibly beneficial in spreading educational information, positive experiences and digital services to all four corners of the globe. Despite this, the internet is also used for malicious attacks. These attacks come in many forms, including viruses, worms, and phishing. They trick unsuspecting victims into giving away sensitive details or paying ransom... read more
Guides nslookup explained A huge number of people use the internet, but very few understand how the internet works under the hood. Considering that there are around 1.74 billion websites registered online, we need an efficient system for sorting and storing connection details for each. While we technically connect to websites and servers via an IP address,... read more
Guides A guide to proxy servers The internet relies heavily on server infrastructure to deliver the websites, videos, and audio files we consume daily. These servers can be used for personal file hosting or service delivery in the enterprise. In some cases, you may wish to add a middle-man server into the equation to protect your hosting infrastructure, or anonymise your... read more
Guides Recursive DNS Whenever you connect to a website over the internet, what you are doing is connecting to a server using an IP address. While you can type www.fasthosts.co.uk and reach the website right away, many things are happening in the background. Since each server on the internet has an IP address made of... read more
Guides Static and dynamic IP addresses explained The internet is a complex interconnected web of servers and client devices. Each device needs a way to communicate with one another, much like a person gets given a name at birth to communicate with others. In technology terms, there are a few different naming conventions for systems, including MAC addresses and IP addresses. With... read more
Guides Telnet explained Computer and server management is a tricky task, especially when you don't have direct access to the system itself. For this reason, IT administration and support tools that facilitate remote connections are incredibly popular. These tools allow you to connect to and manage a PC or server, in precisely the same way as... read more
Guides Traceroute explained The internet is a massive interlinked network of personal computers and servers. This is where the name World Wide Web (www) comes from, with many individual systems interconnected in a web-like structure. In some cases, however, these connections can fail and cause network outages. To combat this, network troubleshooting is commonly used by both consumers... read more
Guides Upgrading to PHP 7 Programming languages are used to create all the software we use, and the web is no exception. The most commonly used web languages are HTML, CSS, and our topic of the day: PHP. Hypertext Preprocessor (or PHP) is a server-side language, and allows users to perform actions on webpages and have the server deliver a... read more