Depending on the system administrator, your access to your internet may only allow you to access work-related only sites. Today, we’ll discuss a technique that will bypass such restrictions and let you browse with an ease of mind.

It’s called Secure Shell (SSH) or Tunnelling. This method replicates a direct tunnel route from your home pc to your work/school pc. The technique itself is securely encrypted, so no one, except you knows what kind of activity is been done within. You can use it to browse your private emails, surf the internet, and/or sFTP.

First, we need some programs for the setup.

1. FreeSSHd - Allows you to make a secure remote connection to a windows PC and setup SSH tunnels, allowing other services to connect to your PC securely.
2. PuTTY - Putty is a Free SSH client for windows. We need this to connect to the SSH server on the remote PC. It will also allow us to transfer files between the two PC’s.

Installing the SSH Server

You will need to install and configure the FreeSSHd in your home computer so that you are able to tunnel your way from work/school. Download the program at their official website and install it. When it asked for you if you want to run the program as a windows service, click yes.

Once installed, bring up the configuration screen and start setting up the server.

1. Click on the SSH tab and enter the port number. You can set it to any port you like, but most standard institution will have port 443 open. This port is for encrypted data transfer such as SSL. So this will give you some cover. Try not to set it for port 22, where most http transfers takes place.

   

2. Next, creating the user for you to login with. Click on the Users tab and “add” a user. Enter the desired username and password. I suggest using the “Password Stored as SHA1 Hash” option for your password.

   

3. Lastly, enable the tunnel access. Click on the Tunneling tab and check the boxes as followed:
   
   

Apply your changes and restart your SSH service. You should be able to tunnel now. What’s left is to download your PuTTY program and configure it to connect to your home server.

You can either configure it using a BAT file or from the GUI. Either way works equally fine. I prefer using a BAT file. If you decide to create a BAT file, here’s the syntax for it.

putty -D 8080 -P <port#> -ssh <Home IP Address>

Edit the values in bold. <port#> indicates the port number you have set previously in the FreeSSHd, while <Home IP Address> is your home computer’s IP. Save the file as “<filename>.bat”, without the quotes.

Run the BAT file. Accept the servers public key and login using the credentials of the user you set up earlier. If all has gone well you will see a command line prompt similar to what you see on windows.

Almost there. You will have to set your browser to route using your tunnel access. If you are using Firefox, open up your network connection option tab and do the following:

Internet Explorer users - It’s basically the similar thing. Just on a different option area. You should know where it is.

That’s it! You can officially browse the internet with full access.

So what’s the fuss about?
Most of us would want to be hosted inside power servers, where access times are fast, with lots of resources and there is not a single downtime. Yet, many complain about their hosts not delivering that standard. Why is that so?

Web hosting is a volume business. Hosting companies put between 500 to 1,000 websites on a single server, and it is not uncommon to see over 1,000 on these UNIX machines. Yet, this number is considered mild in terms of volume and is not considered overselling yet. A server hardly crashed even with all domains accessed at once.

The problems lies in the server-scripting each of these websites are running.

A single script running is not a problem. Ten is still good. Twenty and it slows down a bit; acceptable. On the other hand, try a thousand scripts running all at once (provided that each domain has only one script), and your server grinds to a halt. Adding insults to injury, you have programs written by many programmers with varying levels of skill. You may be an excellent programmer, but your well-written, streamlined code is competing against many poorly written, inefficient programs, and these poorly written programs eats up a lot of resources.

You have to understand that hosting companies are companies in their basic form too. Most just lack a brick and mortar place that you can visit. With that, they do have costs to cover, employees to pay, and profits to be earned. And in a highly competitive market for web hosting today, most web hosting companies almost always scrimp on back-end servers. They lease cheap servers which may have no quality assurance or performance monitoring. Since the hardware is usually remotely stored in a data centre somewhere, it’s very hard to fix problems at times, resulting in long downtimes.

What you should do to avoid such a mess?
No matter what server configuration your host promises you are on, and how it can improve your site’s performance, it can only go so far. You can’t push a diesel engine to run like an Indy race car, period.

The closes thing to a fast server comes is in form of a dedicated server or colocation, where there’s only an individual having all the resources to oneself. It’s a wise choice for big companies and busy websites generating thousands to millions of traffic daily. However, such options can be very costly for most of us. Start up businesses can’t possibly pay $300 - $800 monthly just to maintain a website that only generates a handful of traffic.

A viable solution for us to get a hosting account that does not break our bank account, yet still provides reliable and stable servers is for hosting companies to limit the number of domains and users in a single server or cluster. Such a practice is costly for smaller companies.

At the end of the day, we have to ask ourselves this question. What’s the price of paying a little more each month to have your website running perfectly than having to deal with the constant headaches of downtime ever one day or so? Balancing needs and wants is hard, but if we are able to do that, we can get definitely get the ideal host.

…5X extra bandwidth…”, or “…Terabyte storage space…”

As file size gets bigger by the minute, especially with videos, it is only logical that you will need all the resources you can get. For a couple of bucks, it’s indeed hard to resist these offers. However, what you may not have known is that, to cover such a low price, these bargain hosts will cramp up as many users as they possibly can to maximize their Return-of-Investments (”ROI”).

Overselling isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Just like the every sword has two-sides, overselling has its up and down sides. The really good thing about overselling is that we, as consumers, get to buy an affordable hosting package. Then again, it does indeed over-stretch the server’s life quite a bit. With the constant access to the server, 24/7, 365-days, it is only time when the server will crash. The server crashing isn’t the big issue here; it’s what comes after that.

Insufficient Resources
Due to the fact that they are bargain hosts, they may not have enough resources to employ extra staff to handle customer support, especially in a crisis moment. If you are not running a business site, it’s still ok for you to have your website down for the time being. However, business relying on their sites to profit is going to lose a significant portion of their revenue due to the downtime.

Your live chat attempt might be redirected to a “please create a ticket” page, because they are short-handedly handling the already numerous chats before you. Its ok you might think. Just create a ticket and wait for them to reply. Even if your tickets are replied, it may take quite a while before you get any response. The reason is because your ticket is among the hundreds in queue daily. You might already be losing a lot by then and not even their uptime guarantee will cover for it.
All these will only add stress for you. What seems to be a bargain at the beginning can end up costing more than it should.

Time is Money
For most small businesses, maintaining a website is a tedious task. There are so many things to manage and sometimes, time is not on your side – and time is money. Why do you have to wait around? Wouldn’t you rather spend your time doing something constructive than waiting for your host for hours at a time, just for an email reply?

That is why getting a host that provides excellent customer support is extremely vital. Not just customer support, but support that is friendly and prioritizes you as a valued customer. Even if nothing ever happens at your host like the scenario above, you are still going to need your hosts’ immediate assistance with certain issues such as billing, domain, database or scripting errors.

With a business website, it doesn’t hurt for you to shop for a host that doesn’t sell itself on price. Resources are important too, but in reality, you won’t even use more than 40% of what is allotted to you. Even if you need extras, you can buy more for just a few dollars monthly. However, very few hosts will truly value you as a customer and take care of you like as if you are a friend.

There are two common approaches to calculating bandwidth costs:
In a normal situation, bandwidth is typically measured per GB (gigabytes) of data transferred. However, large web-hosting companies who have their own servers and colocate them in a data-centre will usually calculate by per Mbps (megabits per second) sustained - the method in which colocation data-centres bill you. Web data, by nature, is a bursty medium. Figuring in GB of data transferred makes it much harder to account for bursts. The Mbps method makes it easier to charge for bursts.

Calculating the Gigabytes
First things’ first. Find out the total GB of data a single T1 connection can transfer, assuming that there’s no overhead or packet loss. (If you have stats for your packet loss or overhead, just subtract the overhead from the amount of data that can be transferred and continue with the equation.)

A T1 transmits data at 1.536 Mbps. To translate that to Bytes per second you divide by 8 (since there are 8 bits in every byte), and you find that a T1 can transfer data at 192 KBps. Multiply that by 60 seconds in a minute, times 60 minutes in an hour, and you will find that a T1 can transfer 691.2 MB of data per hour, or 6.589 GB per day. Assuming that your web traffic is evenly spread over a day(which in most hosting situations it isn’t, of course) your cost per GB of data transferred—given T1 costs of $2000/month—is just over $4.

The Mathematics:

• 1.536 Mbps /8 = 192KBps
• 192 KBps * 60 seconds/minute = 11.52 MB/minute
• 11.52 MBps * 60 minutes/hour = 691.2 MB/hour
• 691.2 MB/hour * 24 hours/day = 16.589 GB/day
• 16.589 GB/day * 30 days/month =497.67 GB/month
• Hence, Monthly cost/GB = $2000 / 497.67 GB = $4.02/GB of data transferred.

But, there’s still more…
In most cases, you will have peak times of web page viewing. If you have a steep curve, you need to keep this in mind and adjust your cost calculations appropriately. For example, most of your traffic were concentrated in a peak period of 4 hours, then,

• 691.2 MB/hour x 4 peak hours/day =2.765 GB/peak period/day
• 2.765 GB/peak period x 30 days = 82.944 GB/Month
• Monthly cost = $2000 / 82.944 GB = $24/GB of peak charges.

Mbps costing
Commonly, Mbps is usually calculated by the 95th percentile rule. Meaning, every month, all of the samples are pulled and ordered from highest to lowest. The top 5 percent of readings are then discarded, and the customer is billed based on the next highest reading.

The Mbps costing is usually done with a committed rate and a burst rate. The burst rate is usually a $20-25 increase over the committed rate. If your T1 costs $2000/month including local loop (always include loop charges), then your Mbps cost is $1,302.08/month. So, how do you make money? By oversubscribing your pipes. With oversubscription, you are betting that even though someone is committing to 1 Mbps, they will not use the full 1 Mbps continuously. The typical oversubscription rate is 4 times, which—using our arbitrary numbers—makes your cost per Mbps $325.50/month.

As such:

• $2,000 / 1.536 Mbps = $1,302.08/Mbps monthly
• $1,302.08 / 4x oversubscription rate = $325.50/Mbps monthly (oversubscribed)

I hope that clears up some confusion on why some hosting companies can offer you cheap bandwidth charges while others just won’t even consider lowering theirs.

I ended up Googling various websites for that slim hope that I would not have to buy it hundreds of miles away from here. To my surprise, there are many variants to the plant family. Known as a member of the genus Zanthoxylum, there’s a similar one here in Indonesia.

Called Andaliman (Z. Acanthopodium), its native to North Sumatra, where they used it for preserving food and chilli paste.

First Experience
First tasted it 3 years back, when my sister-in-law came from China for a visit. She cooked a soup-based dish that is red-hot, almost resembling curry, except that it had black seeds all over it. Not used to having seeds in my soups, I foolishly asked what they were doing in the soup. My brother told me, “Just try it.” Without thinking twice, I tried and I could feel numbness everywhere; from the tip to the back of my tongue.

Accurately, wikipedia describes the ma la seeds as,

“…has a unique aroma and flavour that is not hot or pungent like black or white pepper, or chili peppers, but has slight lemony overtones and creates in the mouth a kind of tingly numbness (caused by its 3% of hydroxy-alpha-sanshool) that sets the stage for these hot spices…”

Seeing that all hopes is not lost in the quest for my ma la tofu, I will set out to the nearest supermarket to source out for andaliman.