Imagine working on a special project or writing a document halfway when the monitor displays a blue screen. Imagine your computer not being able to detect the drive after restart. Both events are only 2 of the many that could happen to a hard disk at any time of the day. Imagine losing your system and not knowing how to rectify the issue at hand.

Which is why data recovery is important for business continuity and disaster recovery strategy. Which is where good data recovery services like DTI Data come in.

DTI Data has been on the hard drive recovery scene since 2006 1998, with a list of notable and satisfied past clients which include :

• Cisco
• Ford Motor Company
• Campbell’s Soup
• NASA
• United States Army
• United States Navy
• United States Air Force
• United States Marines

Currently, DTI Data has about 51 service areas scattered throughout the United States. Oh, and another surprising thing is that DTI Data’s expertise cover ANY hard drive repair imaginable. Whether if you are on a PC, Linux or Mac, DTI will save your data’s butt. DTI’s engineers are always involved with R&D to keep up to date with the most recent changes in hard drive technology. The R&D team usually develops new technology even prior to its appearance to the public eye.

Here are the 5 simple steps that a customer usually goes through.

Get a quotation.



Of course you will want to the price for the repairs. A smart person would want to compare the value of services offered by each competing company and a smart company would want to be as clear as possible about the value and price for the services offered. Both customer and company should be fully informed of the recovery process. DTI data’s online quote form is free and do not require any registration. For immediate assistance, there is always the 24 hourly available recovery hotline located at the bottom of the quote form.

Send out for recovery.



They have partners all over the US, which is quite convenient for customers to send in their hard drives. All service centres can be found here. However, there is also another option for sending out the drives for recovery, which is by mail. Just bubble wrap the hardware, print and fill up the order request form and send it to the address at the top of the form.

Diagnose.



DTI Data’s engineers will then take a look at the drive once it arrives. If the damage is irreparable, you pay nuts. They will send it back to you. DTI’s policy is ‘flat rate pricing and a 100% satisfaction guarantee on all your data recovery, free up till the moment your data is recovered’. Cool, isn’t it?

Recovery.



Once the green light is given, the engineers will work on recovering the lost data. Normal turn around time is between 2 to 5 days from the time the drive is received. DTI also owns a class 100 clean room for data recovery. A clean room is actually an environment, typically used in manufacturing or scientific research, that has a low level of environmental pollutants such as dust, airborne microbes, aerosol particles and chemical vapors.

Get it back.



Upon completion, recovered data is then sent back to the customer. That’s it.

There is even an interesting data recovery blog that keeps readers informed of the types of data recovery solutions and tips related to data recovery. Do check out the testimonials of previous customers and read what they say. You can even contact them through their website to further evaluate the experience that they had with DTI Data.

Every website has at least 1 web analytics application running, but we rarely utilize it. What we may see are only figures and colourful charts. Data is most useful in decision making when we could fully extract and transform them into understandable information.

Let’s take a look at rangit.com’s site statistics for the month of August 2007. I use the free Google Analytics. Everyone ought to, actually.

1. Visitors Overview



A traffic overview page should exist in all web analytics. It allows you to get to know your site’s traffic and their communication with your site’s structure and design. From here, everyone should be able to delve deeper to diagnose the contrasting visitor subdivisions and examine the influence that produces the quality of average page views, time on site, bounce rates, etc.

2. Countries Overlay



Know the people that you are attracting to your site. Get a clear picture of the visits, page views and quality measures of your site’s progress and achievements by geographic region. The general info gathered on this page is enough to help make several important decisions.

Most websites have advertisements. Knowing the origin of the majority of visitors will help you in getting advertisers. For example, if the majority of visitors are from the US, then it is relevant to sign up advertisers targeting the US market.

Another thing is, if you are a blogger from Singapore and majority of the visitors are from US then it helps to know when to strategically publish your daily articles. For example, 8am in the morning US time, to cater to the lunch break crowd.

3. New vs Returning Visitors



Large crowds of new visitors generally mean that you are pretty good at getting traffic to your site while large crowds of returning visitors would suggest that the site content is engaging enough for visitors to come back.

The result of your effort is in the form of this graph. It indicates the success of your intent. Let’s say you’ve added a lot of related content, links on all your pages at the start of the month and update your site daily. If you hit high on return visits, then it’s good news. Otherwise, keep improving your site. There are always forums where you can get helpful opinions and suggestions. Try DigitalPoint.

4. Language



The language shown in the report is the language configured on their computers. I know from my statistics that 80% of visitors to this site prefer English and differ with others in site usage, and other measurements. Awareness of the language used helps in creating favorable content and fully utilizing your marketing spend. This report complements the countries overlay. Different countries have different populations speaking different languages that present crucial market targeting opportunities.

5. Visits



This is the most basic measure of any website analytics application. It’s the measurement of how well you’ve promoted your site. Here are some examples on the useful stuff you can get out of the visits report.

• You may have changed your keyword purchases and would like to know if it landed you more visitors or not. This report is your answer.
• You may want to know if stopping certain ads would affect your visitors. This report is your answer.
• You may have started a marketing campaign and want to know the effectiveness magnitude. This report is your answer.
• You may have moved moved up in search engine rankings for a particular search term and want to know if it improved your traffic. This report is your answer.

6. Pages / Visit



If you get between 1-2 page views per visit, relax, it’s normal. About 55% of others fall into the same category. If your site has been setup to interact, then you should be getting high page views. Only 2 things will cause high average page views.

• The right visitors.
• Quality, effective, original content.

If your page views are below 1.5 pages per visit, then you fall into the lower portion of the normal population. Low average page views is an indication to focus more time on the 2 factors mentioned.

7. Bounce Rate



The measurement of how many visitors leave after viewing the entrance page. The lower the bounce rate, the higher the quality of the visit. Average bounce rates vary according to websites and any average given would have so much variance it would be meaningless. Move at your own pace, improving it from month to month. 2 things that influences bounce rates.

• Marketing. Whether if the campaign is bringing in the desired visitors or not.
• The landing page. If the visitor enjoys what you have to offer, and you manage to hold their attention with an informative, attractive and user friendly website design, you will have low bounce rates.

8. Browsers / OS



Knowing which browsers and operating systems that your visitors use the most allows you to optimize your site’s technical capabilities to make it more engaging and user friendly which usually leads to higher conversion rates. This report serves as a reminder to make sure that your web site works for that browser.

This site’s visitors use 22 different browsers and 10 different operating systems. I personally check my site on Firefox, IE, Safari and Opera only, since they make up 97.42% out of all visitors. And if you ever want to cross check your website across all other browsers, OS or screen resolutions, you can do so easily at BrowserShots.

9. Screen Resolutions



Looking at my screen resolutions report will tell me that it is time to change my theme. Currently, it’s width is at 780 pixels to accommodate the 800×600 users who now make up only less than 3% of my visitors. As you can see 9 out of the top 10 users have screen resolutions above 1000 pixels wide. I have already found myself a super, duper cool, smashing new theme for myself. I’ll be customizing it this weekend and hope to roll it out by next week. =)

10. Connection Speeds



From the report, I know that around 3% of my visitors are on dial up. About 60% are on cable and DSL, which means that it is alright to have media running around without thinking too much. If you noticed, most of my articles are accompanied by visuals and each image averages to about 65kB. For broadband users, especially cable, it’s like taking a walk in the park.

However, if a majority of your users are made up of dial up, try minimizing images and keep your main content as text rich as possible.

11. Traffic Overview



The traffic trends report. Get an overview of your site’s performance here.

• Direct traffic comes from typing the URL into the browser or clicking on the browser’s bookmark. As long as it comes from the person itself and not from any other site, it’s considered direct traffic.
• Referring sites are visitors who came upon your site from another site. As long as it is not direct nor from a search engine, then it is considered referred.
• Search engine traffic consist of visitors who came from the search engine result page.

12. Direct Traffic



This type of website traffic could be potential customers looking for you because they heard of your site from a discussion forum, saw your ad somewhere offline in print or on television, or they might have found you by directly typing in your web site address. A good web site statistical application should allow you to pit direct traffic over city, visitor type, etc. Traffic of this type spend more time on the site if compared against other types. If you have offline campaigns running, high percentage of direct traffic is an indicator of success.

13. Referral Traffic



Visitors coming from other websites. This is about the quantity of links to your site. To me, referral traffic is the 2nd hardest type of traffic to get because it is influenced 100% by the quality of the content on your web site. If it is interesting, cool, attractive, original then you’ll naturally get link love. Recycling material will most often lead a person away to the source.

The 2 direct benefits of referral traffic is that it heightens the awareness of the existence of your website and it also increases the value of the site. Directly. Moreover, you will definitely receive a regular source of traffic from this type of traffic.

There are so many ways to push up this type of traffic but the most importantly, as I have said before is the content. Traffic maketh not the website, but website maketh the traffic. Here are some examples to bolster your site’s referral percentage.

Try building relationships. Leave constructive comments around blogs and forums that you enjoy visiting. Write more than 10 words. For example, a constructive comment at the bottom of this article may sound like, ‘Holy shit, Chris! Your suggestions and ideas and explanations are extraordinarily profound. The part I like best is about referral traffic. Everyone who owns a website should read this piece of yours’. =P

You can even write articles for others. Be a guest blogger in other blogs. As long as your guest article rocks, your referral traffic will rock too.

14. Search Engine Traffic aka. Organic Traffic



The most important and hardest type of traffic. This determines whether if you have a successfully sociable or a lonely website. It’s a BIG deal to get naturally motivated high search engine traffic. It is necessary for any website that intends to generate sales or be noticed. Everyone who uses the internet uses search engines, as they are the tools that provide you what you are looking for. Always aim for the high search engine rankings, like getting on the first page, which will eventually bring up your search engine traffic because too few look past the first page.

Search engine listings are the best as they are the most relevant and free at the same time. As a result they are the most beneficial in 4 ways.

• You get stable, steady, constant, regular traffic.
• Pay nuts. Save on advertising. Build dollar note mountains in your room.
• Get targeted traffic. Visitors get what they are looking for from you. You become of value to the search society.
• More sales = more profits. More profits = more dollar note mountains.

And nothing else will bring you the desired result except by understanding and applying these 2 rules of thumb.

• Unduplicated, unique content is king.
• SEO techniques that are solid, white hat and full of quality. I promise you will be 35 steps ahead of others if you follow these 35 simple SEO directions carefully.

15. Keywords



As you can see, above are the top 10 keywords that brought in organic traffic to rangit.com in August 2007. Go ahead and try it. Enter any of the keywords above into the search engine and tell me what you find. =) And that, my friends, is an example of a successful organic traffic keyword listing done by simply applying the 2 rules of thumb above.

As of writing, I know my article is better than any of the top 10 listed. However, a good website statistical software should be able to allow anyone to segment search traffic by search engine or any other factor. A better one, like Google Analytics, even allows me to segment referrals from a particular keyword by city and visitor type.

This report acts as an indicator of success to your site’s search engine rankings for the keywords listed. If your site is small, don’t look at the percentage of visitors. Instead, look at the number of visitors coming in for each keyword. It’s clearer and you can pick up the patterns faster. Of course, if the site is huge and there are thousands of visitors, only then it is relevant to look at the percentage of visits.

16. Content



Above is a report of the top 10 titles that were most responsible for driving pageviews in August 2007. I can also see the time spent on page, bounce rate and % exit. I’m glad to see some 3-4 minutes average along with one 6 minute average. It shows how well that particular article has done. Overall, I’m happy with the attractiveness of my site.

Ask anyone what they expect from their own website and their response would be to attract visitors. Of course it doesn’t come easy. A lot of time and effort is needed to shape and deliver valuable information for the pleasure of others. Oh yeah and good content is defined by :

• Uniqueness
• Structure of point delivery
• Quality of grammar, punctuation and spelling
• Readability

The idea is to keep a balance between what the readers want, what the search engines think they need and what they really need.

Have fun!

P2P is defined as a computer network that exploits diverse connectivity between participants in a network and the cumulative bandwidth of network participants. It reduces server load and maintains high bandwidth transfer rates. Nowadays, you can get almost anything from P2P. That includes movies, e-books, songs, applications, games and pictures. But before you can do that, you gotta know which P2P file sharing client to use to get the best out of your time. Listed below are 11 of the best, free P2P file sharing clients of 2007 for you to try it if you haven’t. Forget the rest.

Ares Galaxy



Written in delphi, Ares was originally designed for operation on the Gnutella network. Later on in 2003, it switched to its own network of leaves and supernodes which was much more difficult to identify compared to other networks. However, this turned out to be a blessing in disguise when it was the only P2P application that could work on restricted networks like university campuses. Ares also has a hashlink function where it is able to search for peers with files pertaining to a hash and download from them.

As a conclusion, downloading files is rapid, file organization is as simple as a mouse click, hassles don’t exist, the interface is pretty clean and attractive, it’s so simple to use that there will never be a Complete Idiot’s Guide To Using Ares Galaxy being published because it is already idiot proof. Search response is lightning fast. On a dial-up, you’ll get a heap to select from in a second. Once you’ve selected your download, everything else is automatic. If the user is no longer available, it will find another. If it gets disconnected, it will reconnect by itself.

Azureus



One of the only bittorent clients in the world written in Java that supports I2P and Tor anonymous communication protocols. Azureus is actually the Latin name of the blue poison dart frog reason being that the co-developer, Tyler Pitchford, uses Latin names of poison dart frogs as codenames for his development projects. Message stream encryption is a method of anti throttling supported by Azureus.

A range of plugins was designed to make using the program easier and to give experienced users more flexibilty and control. The plugins which I would personally recommend are ‘Upload Shaper’ and ‘Ono’. Upload shaper will automatically adjust global upload speed limit based on download speed * factor and Ono will finds nearby peers, which tend to give better transfer rates, and preferentially connects to them.

BitComet



Written in C++, BitComet boasts of many functions including Mainline DHT, protocol encryption, disk cache, port mapping, peer exchange (PEX), UDP NAT traversal. There’s even an embedded internet explorer window for searching torrents within the client.
Since version 0.90, BitComet has included a plugin to transfer files using the eD2K protocol, which is configured to automatically connect to an eD2K server. What makes it different is the ability to preview media files.

In versions 0.85 and above, an IFrame displays a page from BitComet’s server that displayes a web search and a single ad on the right side of the client window and Google Toolbar is installed by default.

Workaround : DISABLE the IFrame in the view menu and CHOOSE not to install the toolbar.

BitSpirit



BitSpirit exceeds expectations. It will not let you down. I swear if this program is developed more it will kill azureus and utorrent.

Fast, nice-looking, feature-loaded, stable, very light on the system, like as if it’s not there while doing the best that you might imagine. Some BitSpirit’s unique features include automatic import of IPFilter.dat from eMule folder which protects you from various prying eyes and private blacklists. It also anables increasing TCP connections of Win XP SP2 and uses Kademlia DHT network(compatible with uTorrent and mainline) and encrypts connections.

Cabos



Written in REALbasic, Cabos was written based on Limewire and Acquisition. Available on both Macs and Windows. It will find every file you ever wanted and 100% successfully download them. You could check the iTMS if you wanted to purchase tracks, but there won’t be any available. That’s how good Cabos is. Moreover, it is not like Limewire in that you have to buy a PRO version to unluck full searching and download capabilities.

In addition, it allows you to import your iTunes library if you are so inclined. Thats not the only thing to make iTunes users feel like home as the search results and downloads are presented with an iTunes look, with a varying blue and white lines in a list, iTunes music icons, etc. If you are a Mac user, I would personally recommend you to take a look at these 40 useful and free mac os x softwares.

DC++



Written in C++, DC++ is the P2P files sharing program used to connect to the Direct Connect network or to the ADC protocol. On DC++ u have to connect on ‘hubs’ and every hub has admins. These admins take care of their hub really good so that users have really little chance to find viruses or fake files, because people with this things are kicked or banned from the hubs even before you can say ‘Ala ka zaam’.

There are many well known mods of DC++ out there, most popular being StrongDC++. It is suitable for newbies in the dc network as well as those who know all about p2p connections and want something more form their client. Basically, you’ll just have to configure your connection, name and put something that is of value in your share folder. Yes, understanding will take some time but once you’ve mastered it, you’ll experience the advantages of multi-source download.

eMule



Written in MS Visual C++ using the Microsoft Foundation Classes, connects to both the eDonkey network and the Kad network. With downloads of over 330 million times as of July 2007, it has become the most downloaded project on SourceForge. The distinguishing features of eMule are the direct exchange of sources between client nodes, fast recovery of corrupted downloads, and the use of a credit system to reward frequent uploaders. Furthermore, eMule transmits data in zlib-compressed form to save bandwidth.

You can find nearly any film, music or program ever made, but if there’s only a few sources it will take long to download them. It also gives more info about the downloads because there is a system where you can rate / comment on files that others can read easily. The cue system encourages people to share because the more you upload the more you can get off others and the faster your downloads. You can also add a proxy to make yourself anonymous and untraceable. Useful when downloading recently released movies.

iMesh



The audio media player works just as well as itunes along with the music search which works the same way. The database is far more limited in terms of only having audio and video but you could find many things on this that you won’t find on Limewire. Downloading speeds are higher searches are very fast. The friends and internal message system is useful, handy and surprisingly bug free.

LimeWire Basic



Written in Java, Limewire offers the sharing of its library through Digital Audio Access Protocol. As such, when LimeWire is running, any files shared will be detectable on the local network by DAAP-enabled devices like iTunes. LimeWire doesn’t forward SHA1 searches, which find exact copies of files. Magnet links use SHA1 searches and SHA1 searches can also be used to find more sources for a download. SHA-1 and tiger tree hash cryptographic hash functions is used by Limewire to ensure that downloaded data is uncompromised.

LimwWire basic is free but you can download the Pro version of Limewire off of the basic version for free. =P The only difference is that the Pro version offers personalized technical support and provides more results and faster downloads by connecting to more sources.

Shareaza



Available in 27 different languages, Shareaza supports the Gnutella, Gnutella2, EDonkey Network, BitTorrent, FTP and HTTP network protocols plus handle magnet links, ed2k links, Piolet links and Gnutella links. The user interface is clean and does not lag in any way. Start up is fast and easy to use. Power mode enables experienced users to control about nearly everything. The monitors and real time graphs are easy on the eyes. There is also a local filtering of received results, besides the many filtering options. For now, I would personally recommend you to not use it to download torrent files yet because it is still immature compared to the other bittorrent clients mentioned in this article.

µTorrent



Written in C++, uTorrent is the No.1 bittorrent client that uses the least computer resources. It can use as little as 14 MB of RAM running a 486 processor on Windows 95. Translations have totaled 38 languages. It has peer exchange with other uTorrent clients , ‘trackerless’ support using DHT and a user configurable intelligent dick caching system.

Unlike BitComet, it doesn’t mess up the ratio statistics and is very convenient to bring around. It is shipped as a single stand-alone compressed executable file, and does not require installation.