As a hacker, I have to program my remote web server to automatically perform routine tasks for me. It’s a whole lot easier and cheaper to rely on my web hosting company to manage an always-on server. For starters, I don’t have to pay for the 24/7 electricity the on-call technician!
To make the server perform an automated task in a Linux or Unix environment, you need to schedule a cron job. I won’t go through all the details of setting it up in shell terminal since most people do not have remote shell access. You can read about the details more at the cron and crontab Wikipedia articles. Most of us deal with an interface on the cPanel that looks kind of like one of these two screens.
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Two years ago, I switched hosting companies from QualityHostOnline to WebHostingBuzz. It’s not that I didn’t like my previous host. In fact, I thought that my old host was outstanding and I was very happy with them. It was just that (1) I needed more up-to-date IMAP mail servers and (2), with my numerous websites, I needed more bandwidth and space.
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I was so excited when Google Analytics was released to the public. At that time, I was a regular reader of ProBlogger.net – helping bloggers earn money. Darren Rowse broke the news to the blogging community that Google Analytics was offering free accounts on a first-come-first served basis. When I finally received my invitation from Google, I immediately added all of my websites to be tracked and painstakingly followed each and every instruction -that is, every instruction except for this one:
“It [the source code] should be immediately before the [ending] body tag of your page, and should look exactly as it was provided to you.”
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