Categories
Miscellaneous

An Independent Test of 7 Hosting Providers

Choosing a provider is not an easy task, you always want to find something «cheap and cheerful». However, quite often it is hard to find a golden mean and you have to choose between computing power, speed, and cost, not mentioning additional features such as DNS-servers, control panel, etc. In this article, I will present you test results for several providers of various sizes, and I’m hoping that it will guide you in a decision-making process of choosing a hosting.

Categories
Data Mining Web Scraping Software

Easy Data Visualisation with Silk.co

This post is outdated. The silk.co service is no more awailable.

This is a guest post by Daniel Cave.

With the rise of social media sharing, collaboration and a increasingly interested market for data, there are more and more people wanting to ‘play with data’ and learn using some basics free tools. So recently I’ve been trying to find a technically advanced and interesting combination of free tools to collect and visualise web data that will allow enthusiasts and students to get those all important initial quick and easy wins.

Categories
Development

Tutorial: How to use Headless Firefox for Scraping in Linux

I have already written several articles on how to use Selenium WebDriver for web scraping and all those examples were for Windows. But what about if you want to run your WebDriver-based scraper somewhere on a headless Linux server? For example on a Virtual Private Server with SSH-only access. Here I will show you how to do it in several simple steps.