Shristi.org: the Series of hurdles

I've been approached to build and launch the the website for the Techno - Management Festival of my university. I've designed and developed a couple of websites on my own and so it wasn't a big deal, or at least i thought so, for me at FIRST. Things however, have been going pretty weasy and confusing with various hurdles and problems i've to face which are quite unexpected and uncool.

The very first hurdle was when znetindia.com took 3 days to process my domain registration order. The second one came when i found out that znetindia doesnt bundle DNS control with the domain registration; and for which i've to activate an extra addon for the domain paying extra money. The third was the unfriendly user interface structure of the znetindia account manager area (if you are a starter, i bet you won't be able to find out where you should change your nameserver if your are changing your hosting service to some other service provider!). The fourth was when i realise that the TTL values for the DNS at znetindia was quite huge, which means any update in the DNS, A, MX, CNAME, NS, TXT etc will take time for its propagation. This happened when i mistyped the NS records and then i realise i mistyped it, i had to change it and for the change to propagate, i had to wait the whole day.

Later when everything from the domain point of view is working, unfortunately, my PC breaks down... or at least i thought so, coz later on i found it was my wireless modem problem. As an engineering student, and in the CSE branch, i use to do a lot of stuffs on my PC and it is not uncommon that i install a fresh copy of Windows a couple of times every month. This time, i'd already formated my PC 4 to 5 times since my semester starts, and that would be from the 1st week of Jan and i've already made it by heart the serial number to my copy of the windows. For development purposes, i've created a lot of complex structures, programs and databases that i don't want to lose but i'd to compromise some to make my PC working again.

Now, everything is set, the site is up (www.shristi.org, though still under active construction) and i'm using joomla cms for a quick built. A problem which i'd never faced before arises to my joomla hosting then. At the same hosting company, with the same apache, php and mysql configuration, i'm hosting another joomla website and it's not showing any problem but however in this website, problems after problems showered. I'd the problem fixed temporarily although it's not the best way to fix the problem.

The Joomla problem was that, whenever you try to upload/ install a component/ plugin/ module/ template etc, you got an error message "Warning! failed to move file".

This happens because of certain settings and file permissions on your joomla host. There are methods to overcome this problem but they are not the best yet known. For some, setting CHMOD to 777 for the" public_html/tmp" file seems to work but for others it's far from solving. Some solved it by disabling the FTP layer at joomla, but some solve it by just changing the temporary path "public_html/tmp" to "public_html/temp" or the vice versa. Other ways to solve includes giving the php file more space changing the php.ini, which requires contacting your hosting company. The best method, however, seems to be disabling the php "Safe Mode", which also require you to contact your hosting company.

For now, as my works need to be completed in a short period, i'd changed all the files/folders concern to 777 giving permission to change and execute to all while making the installation and then changing back to the normal CHMOD file permission after the installation is over; leaving no ways for hackers to poke their nose in. If you are having this problem, u can do it as i've done as it is the simplest and will always solve it regardless of the FTP, php.ini, apache or any other settings.

NovaTechNetwork has done a great job with there hosting servers. I prefer them.

Anyway, let me see if there're any other problems that are gonna pop up in front of me..

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