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Irish Communications Regulator Seeking Feedback on dotIE

hosting — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0500

The Irish communications regulator, Comreg, has opened a public consultation period about dotIE (.ie), which I mentioned last week.This follows on from a study conducted by Comreg into stakeholder attitudes towards the IE namespace and the current registry operator, IEDR.We get a lot of people complaining to us about the IE domain registration process, so now is the time for them to make their opinions known.You can download the consultation document and submit your feedback via email or more "traditional" methods.I'll be submitting a detailed set of answers to Comreg before the August deadline.

ICANN Paris - New TLDs, ipv6, Dottel and dotme

hosting — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0500

Last week's ICANN meeting proved to be incredibly busy, both in terms of number of attendees and the number of announcements made.From our point of view there were a number of topics that are relevant and important to our business and I'll be posting about some of these in the coming weeks both here and on my personal domain blog.Last Thursday morning I was on the panel for a workshop on IPv6. There were four of us on the panel talking about our experiences from very different angles. If nothing else I definitely feel that I learnt something from it.Of course the big announcement of the week was in relation to new Gtlds. Unfortunately a lot of people seem to have cherrypicked from the announcements and now seem to think that all sorts of crazy domain extensions will now be available. They won't. (I'll follow up on this over the next few days).As John mentioned on his blog, ICANN have finally taken steps to mitigate "domain tasting". It won't stop it outright, but it should curtail it quite a bit. It will also have the handy side-effect of stopping Network Solutions' practice of "holding" domains for "clients", as they won't be able to do it without incurring a fee.The Afilias team were at ICANN Paris in full force and held a drinks reception to celebrate the launch of dotme (Montenegro).Closer to home (relatively speaking), Telnic announced their launch timeline. They've also started rolling out demo applications so that both users and developers can get a "feel" for the things you can do with a dottel domain (.tel).The next few months should be an interesting time for the domain industry!

Mobile Lan

hosting — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0500

Guess who got a 3G iPhone… two weeks early?Try not to be too jealous of me, but… me!Hooo yeah, it is SO sweet, being able to download web pages, like 90 times faster. Not to mention, I can access the iTunes Store anywhere now, so I can rock out to 30 second clips of whatever song I want, anytime I want, for FREE. Plus, YouTube works better now, with higher video quality and faster streaming.. not to mention downloading and updating apps is lickety-split!To top it off.. my 3G iPhone is already UNLOCKED and on T-Mobile, AND I share the 3G network over wi-fi (802.11g) to my laptop, my Nintendo DS, and everybody else riding my bus!Now, how did I finagle all this awesomeness? You might say, being the greatest corporate blogger IN THE WORLD is finally starting to pay dividends!Or, you might say… I just got one of these:The PHS300 from CradlepointSo, the truth is, I’ve still got my old iPhone.Ain’t nobody beating down my door with free new gadgets to test and review. But, what this “Personal Hot Spot” does is take any one of the USB high-speed data modems on the market right now in the US from Verizon, Sprint and AT+T and turns it into a portable, rechargeable battery-powered, wi-fi hotspot!I had heard about this thing before but I’d sort of forgotten about it. And with the new iPhone news, I was thinking, “Man, if only the iPhone could just share its 3G network over wi-fi, turning itself into a little portable hotspot, that would make it perfect.”And that’s what made my brain remember about it; it was right about the time I was testing all the various USB modems and starting to accept that I was going to have a HUGE dongle sticking out of my laptop all the time. The PHS300 saved the day with its 100% pure awesomeness..Pure AwesomenessOh, pure awesomeness, let me count thy ways:1. You can plug any of the various USB modems out there and they immediately just work.2. Therefore, you don’t have to install any of the relatively crappy software drivers on your laptop.3. Therefore, my VPN now works fine on all of them.4. Therefore, macs/pcs/linux machines all work fine… and with zero configuration.5. Now, dozens of machines/phones/gaming systems can all share your one USB modem.6. The web-based management it provides works great and has every feature you’d expect from any 802.11b/g wireless router.7. From completely off to connected to the 3G network on wi-fi only takes about 30 seconds.8. The battery lasts a bit over 2 hours, enough time for my daily bus rides.9. The PHS300 also works while charging from the wall.10. It only costs $145.

More TestingBeing a huge nerd, I decided to do some performance testing of my new 3G wi-fi setup. In this case, since I’d already returned the Sprint Compass 597 USB modem, I tested another Verizon modem (the USB720 this time) vs. the AT+T USBConnect 881 modem, both directly connected to my laptop, and through the PHS300.Set Up% Loss, Min/Avg/Max PingDown/UploadVerizon Direct0% Loss, 60/88/162 ms160/28 KBsVerizon PHS3000% Loss, 79/117/682 ms160/28 KBsAT+T Direct0% Loss, 124/137/185 ms230/35 KBsAT+T PHS3000% Loss, 118/147/361 ms110/20 KBs(A few notes:1. My apologies to Verizon. It looks like the slowness from my last test was more due to the PCMCIAM interface to my laptop, rather than the speed of their EVDO Rev. A network! Using this USB720 modem brought it up to the speeds I’d seen from Sprint’s modem.2. I pinged craigslist.org this time instead of google.com. For some reason craigslist’s ping times were much better across all the various networks.)Now, for the two things I found:1. The PHS300 added about 10-30ms to average ping times it seemed. No big deal.2. For some reason the AT+T down/upload speeds were essentially HALVED by the PHS300. I thought that I must have been hitting some (surprisingly low) threshold for throughput of the device, but then the Verizon modem performed the same whether it was through the wi-fi or not! Weird.So…That “halving” effect is a technical mystery to me… and it’s making it hard for me to decide if I should keep the AT+T modem or just stick with the (USB) Verizon one. HMM! The Verizon USB720 does have this annoying super-bright flashing green light on it, but that doesn’t matter if it just stays hidden in my bag all the time I guess.Anyway, in case I haven’t made it clear, I really like this PHS300 thing. It’s 100% pure awesomeness. In fact, it’s so awesome, it’s small enough to fit in my pocket, so I can walk around and be a human hotspot, a full five years before the rest of America!I also like having a hotspot in my car (again, a full five years before it comes standard in all new KIAs). Especially since you can’t talk on the phone while driving in California anymore, I’m definitely going to have to be doing a lot more emailing, instant messaging, and pushing out while driving!

Web Hosting Service

hosting — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 18:01:00 -0500

Web Hosting ServiceIf an individual or any business house needs to put their website on the internet, their website needs space on servers that are constantly connected to the internet, so that the website can be accessed by the millions of web surfers. These servers are owned by web hosting services, and provide their clients [...]

Dedicated Server Sale

hosting — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 18:00:00 -0500

We are happy to announce that we are having a sale on a batch of servers that we had leftover. Some of you may remember these servers being our former Pro Dedicated offering. For those who are not familiar with these former Pro Dedicated specifications:Processor: Intel Xeon Conroe 3060 server @ 2.4GhzMemory: 4GB DDR2Hard Disk: 4 x 500GB SATA under RAID-10 configuration.Monthly Bandwidth: 2,500GB @ 10mbpsIP Addresses: 10OS: CentOS 4.6Control Panel: cPanel/WHM 11 with Fantastico included.Pricing: $350 per Month.This is a great solution for those needing a high performance server with large data storage with redundancy. Under the RAID-10 configuration, risk of data loss would be minimized as the information is mirrored throughout all 4 hard drives. In case a hard drive fails, copies of your data should be stored on the remaining 3 hard drives. At the price of $350 per month, this server definitely provides the most bang for your buck.This was a very popular dedicated solution when it debuted as our Pro Dedicated package, and we are very excited to be able to offer these servers to you once again. Please keep in mind that stock is limited and once we sell out, this offer will not be available for quite some time. If you are interested in this offer, please email us at sales@hostgator.com and put it in attention to our Dedicated Sales Department.

$7.75 Domain Names

hosting — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 18:00:00 -0500

You may have noticed the image above on the left-hand side of every IPOWERWEB page. For only $7.75 (less than two gallons of gas) you can register your own domain name with IPOWERWEB. This is a great deal and one of the lowest prices in the domain name industry. To learn more either visit our web site www.IPOWERWEB.com or call us at 888-511-HOST(4678).

Web Hosting For Only $3.98 per Month

hosting — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 18:00:00 -0500

The famous IPOWERWEB Pro Site web hosting plan is now on sale for only $3.98 per month. The image above is a snapshot of our homepage for the current sale. Our Pro Site web hosting plan has never been priced so low and time is running out. Take advantage of this unbeatable price before its too late.

Mobile Man

hosting — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 06:00:00 -0500

So, what with all this mobile spam and iPhone 3G talk, I spur-of-the-day decided last week to check out Sprint and AT+T’s current wireless data offerings.Well, mostly spur-of-the-day. It was also because my current laptop is starting to die (just like my last three VAIOs, something comes loose somewhere deep inside its soul, and it begins to just randomly turn off), dammit. So, since I’m pretty sure my next laptop is not going to have a PCMCIA slot to fit my current Verizon EVDO modem, I need to get a USB dongle one anyway.I also kinda wanted to check out how the coverage and speed was on AT+T’s 3G network, just in case I need to switch over to it come July 11th. I’m sorry T-Mobile, it’s been great, but you still ain’t got no high-speed Internets!While at Radio Shack I also decided to get the USB modem Sprint makes and try it out. Despite the 2-year contract you need to sign to get $60/month (for only 5GB of transfer now!) and the $150 off the devices, both providers have a trial period so I figured might as well. And, Sprint has their new “Compass 597? USB modem which is not only itty-bitty, but has a microSD card slot AND GPS.A few things I noticed right at the store: Sprint’s rebate (at least at Radio Shack) was mail-in and left the price of the modem at $50, whereas AT+T’s was instant and made the modem free. But, as if to make up for that, AT+T did a sleazy thing where they automatically add one month of “free” roadside assistance to your account. You cannot opt out of it, and if you don’t call to cancel they’ll start charging you $3 a month for something probably all your credit cards already provide you for free. Boo!The TestsTo test each card, I first did a bunch of pings to google.com, and recorded the dropped packets, minimum, maximum, and average ping times. Then, to measure the download speed I downloaded iTunes (56MB) from apple.com, and to measure the upload speed I then uploaded it right back to a DreamHost server via FTP…At HomeAt home, I have pretty close to perfect coverage for Verizon, Sprint, and AT+T. Under these ideal conditions I found:Carrier% Loss, Min/Avg/Max PingDown/UploadVerizon0% Loss, 141/175/363 ms45/20 KBsSprint0% Loss, 106/137/236 ms110/16 KBsAT+T0% Loss, 154/161/198 ms230/35 KBsTW Cable0% Loss, 101/148/128 ms700/100 KBsDreamHost0% Loss, 76/77/78 ms9000/9000 KBsWow.. DreamHost is the bandwidth king! Ha!Ha, well, I just threw in my home cable modem connection and DreamHost’s data center for comparison purposes… AT+T seems to be the current wireless bandwidth king! Sprint looks a bit better in the latency department, but only by a hair, and all three were fast enough to not even notice a lag in a remote shell window.The RoadFor my next test, I rode the bus to work like I do, down the 10 freeway in Los Angeles. Along the way, all three have great coverage; except actually Verizon’s EVDO Rev. A (”Broadband Access”) drops down to 1xRTT (”National Access”) a couple of times. 1xRTT, like everybody’s “2G” technologies, is slowwwwwwwww and suuuuuuuuuuucks. And, annoyingly Verizon’s “VZAccess Manager” software seems (at least for me) to never be able to jump back up to EVDO once it’s dropped down to 1XRTT without manually disconnecting and reconnecting.At 60 MPH, both Sprint and AT+T’s download speeds were cut in about half, to 60 KB/s and 130 KB/s, respectively. Good scientist that I am, I, um, forgot to do the upload test (or test Verizon), but even if Verizon performed exactly the same as it did at home, it would have still been slower! Ping times more or less stayed constant.The OfficeOur new office is way up there, and cell phone coverage of all kinds is a bit spotty. What I learned at the office was you do not want to use any of these in a location where they drop back to their “2G” speeds.At 700 feet, all three of them are in the 10-30% packet loss with 400 ms ping times range… along with download speeds around 10 KB/s and upload speeds around 5 KB/s! I did learn that it seems like both Sprint and AT+T are better at automatically noticing when they can switch back to EVDO/HSDPA than Verizon was, and it’s nice not having to re-connect things yourself.The SoftwareSomething nobody seems to ever mention in reviews of these wireless data services is what the client software you have to install is like. Well, nobody bar me!Sprint’s is garbage, Verizon’s is fine, AT+T’s seems good.Sprint’s software took the longest to start each time (AT+T was a little slower than Verizon, but both were still twice as fast as Sprint), couldn’t minimize to the system tray, and, worst of all, doesn’t work with a VPN! At least not mine! If you connect to the VPN while connected to Sprint, about three seconds later you’re disconnected. Then, if you tried to re-connect, the Sprint software gives an error about being connected to another network device! DEAL BREAKER!Also, the MicroSD slot is useless for me, and the built-in GPS I guess is interesting but I couldn’t figure out how to make it do anything besides give me my current latitude and longitude.. in degrees! Are you supposed to cut and paste it into google maps or something? Anyway, if I’ve got an Internet connection, I generally don’t need GPS.As for Verizon’s software, the one thing I always wish they added was a signal-strength meter in the system tray when minimized. AT+T’s software does this, yay! Other than that, both are pretty much fine. They’re simple, don’t get in the way, and work with my VPN. (Er, I think.. I think I need to do a little more testing with AT+T…)The DeviceIt’s true, Sprint’s modem is the smallest. However, it also sticks out the furthest from your laptop, like a USB stick. The AT+T one is about as big as one of those old Nokia brick phones, but at least it has a hinge so it is aligned veritcally. The Verizon one actually has the smallest form factor outside the laptop, just because the PCMCIA part is so big. But, my next laptop probably isn’t going to have a PCMCIA port, dammit!ATT BFFSo, I guess it’s probable pretty clear by now, I’m going to go ahead and stick with the AT+T 3G device. It does have the biggest physical footprint, but I’ve already devised a plan to deal with that! Stay tuned for how that turns out…I guess I’m sort of glad my laptop started dying, dammit.(My mobile broadband is now four times faster!)

Colorteck.com website downtime, client sites unaffected

hosting — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0500

Some of you will have heard of the ThePlanet.com datacenter explosion and subsequent downtime over the last 3 days. We use ThePlanet.com for hosting our main billing server and our Colorteck.com website. We do not host any clients with ThePlanet (rather we have our own racks elsewhere).Also our live support system has experienced some technical issues with live chats being disconnected. This is down the software we used. As a result, and a temporary measure to ensure we still serve those of you who prefer live chat to using our helpdesk@colorteck.com email (24/7), we have opened a GTalk service using Google.com’s GTalk client. 1) Download the safe, light-weight GTalk client from http://www.google.com/talk2) Add the contact: humanassistance@gmail.comThis will not be a 24/7 service. If you want to get helped faster, please open a helpdesk ticket by sending an email to helpdesk@colorteck.com first. Then you can reference your ticket number with live support to get priority assistance.Remember- when you write to helpdesk@colorteck.com you will get an automatic reply. If you do not, this is because your email account or settings are wrong or your client is incorrectly filtering our reply as spam. You need to whitelist helpdesk@colorteck.com to prevent this.

Improving Magento Speed & Performance With MySQL Query Cache

hosting — Mon, 26 May 2008 00:00:00 -0500

Improving Magento performance is at the top of the list for most professional Magento developers. There’s no doubt that enhancing the speed at which Magento performs can only be good for business. (more…)

Hostgator for Humanity

hosting — Sat, 24 May 2008 06:00:00 -0500

That’s right, the folding@home hostgator.com team is a reality and we’ve broken into the top 1,000 ranked teams!Although we’ve kept this fairly low profile on our forum post here , we do have a large amount of users starting to come on board, so I’d like to present something a hosting company is doing to better the world.The Folding@Home project by Stanford University is a distributed computing project used to create one of the largest supercomputers in the world. The client has long been used used as both a metric to measure processors and machines efficiency and also to help the cause. The project is distributed much in the way Seti@Home was, however, with a more direct human goal.Just in case you’re wondering, “what is protein folding and why does this matter to me?”; the Folding@Home project simulates complex mathematical formulas about how these proteins fold, unfold, and misfold with the goal to hopefully one day learn better how many well known diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington’s, Parkinson’s disease, and many Cancers and cancer-related syndromes actually work and occur. Results? Darn right! The project has already come up with a number of notable scientific results, and is with our help and yours, continues to go somewhere tangible as you can see at Stanford’s whitepage papersAs for how this all came about; I was first introduced to the project when I was looking for something better to do with my Spare CPU cycles than let them idle. A lot of people are worried that clients like this will hog CPU, but the beauty of this software is it scales and re-nices it self so well, so you can be running it and it will use a defined amount of CPU at all times, but when any other process needs the CPU it will throttle itself. You can literally play high end games with the client running, as it will just scale back.I really began to get involved in the project when I picked up a PS3. I wanted to put the powerful Cell processor through it’s paces so I immediately downloaded the client and started running work units. Now, as an administrator here I began thinking how helpful it could be if some of the machines we have that idle certain days of the week at HostGator were to fold in the background while the machine was not in use. NAS boxes were the perfect solution, and now we’re about to break the 1,000,000 point milestone.So, do you want to help humanity and have a chance at free hosting? Well help us out and we’ll help you! Here’s what to do :

Go to http://folding.stanford.edu/ and download the appropriate client for your operating system, and if you have a dual or quad core make sure you get the High Performance SMP client. (If you have a PS3 you can install it directly from the PS3 crossbar interface)
Install folding@home and use team number 122600 , you can enter anything for your Donor name but we would prefer you use either your forum name so we can better contact you for your prize(or your wordpress login name)
Start folding and leave it running. Don’t be surprised if it takes a while for you to start getting work units (these things are huge), the more machines you have it running on and the faster the machines, the quicker you will break milestones.

Prize DetailsPrizes will be calculated by contributions to the team based on performance. Dead line to see who can get the most milestones will be on 07/01/2008. At that time winner will need to claim prize by emailing sales@hostgator.com with their donor name.1. GRAND PRIZE (1 winner)The top contributor who contributes the most points to the team will get a free year of hosting on our Aluminum reseller plan or equivalent in credit to existing HostGator plan if already a customer.2. FIRST PRIZE (1 winner)Runner up will receive a free year of hosting on our Swamp hosting plan (or equivalent).3. SECOND PRIZES (8 winners)Following 8 runners up will receive 6 months of free hosting on the Baby hosting plan (or equivalent)I’d like to extend a special thanks to every team member both from our employee pool and some of our very active forum members and customers currently active (over 345 active CPU’s) and especially to both our owner Brent Oxley and our CTO David Collins for allowing me to run this on each and every one of our network backup servers to create a huge grid.Statistics links :Python Driven Stats Quick stats Kakao Stats

Advantages and Disadvantages of Overselling Web Hosting

hosting — Sun, 18 May 2008 06:01:00 -0500

Advantages and Disadvantages of Oversold Website HostingOverselling is something that is becoming common practice within the web hosting industry, and is the term that is applied to a web host that is selling web hosting packages with resources that are impossible to provide customers with and at the same time retaining a profit; this is [...]

CBS Acquires CNET

hosting — Fri, 16 May 2008 00:00:00 -0500

Read the full press release from CNET here.NEW YORK and SAN FRANCISCO, May 15 — CBS Corporation (NYSE: CBS.A and CBS) has entered into an agreement to acquire CNET Networks, Inc. (Nasdaq: CNET), it was announced today by Leslie Moonves, President and Chief Executive Officer, CBS Corporation. Under the terms of the agreement, CBS will make a cash tender offer for all issued and outstanding shares of CNET Networks for $11.50 per share, representing an equity value of approximately $1.8 billion. The acquisition will make CBS one of the 10 most popular Internet companies in the United States, with a combined 54 million unique users per month, and approximately 200 million users worldwide. "There are very few opportunities to acquire a profitable, growing, well-managed Internet company like CNET Networks," said Moonves. "CBS stands for premium content and unparalleled reach, and CNET Networks will add a tremendous platform to extend our complementary entertainment, news, sports, music and information content to a whole new global audience. Together, CBS and CNET Networks will have significant additional exposure to the fastest-growing advertising sector and can accelerate our growth through a number of new content, promotion and advertising initiatives. We could not be more pleased with the prospect of adding CNET Networks and its tremendous team of people to the CBS family. I look forward to working with Quincy Smith, Neil Ashe and the considerable combined talent at both companies, as we build upon our success."

Choosing An Accurate Domain Name

hosting — Wed, 14 May 2008 12:00:00 -0500

Domain names can be tricky. All too often, a domain name ends up with some sort of wacky, unintended double entendre of meaning that may detract from your overall branding message. One famous faux pas is Speed of Art's website, found at www.speedofart.com. With a second look, you can see how this might be a little uncomfortable. When you choose your domain name, it's important to follow some simple guidelines to ensure that your website upholds your branding image. 1. Type it out. Sit down in front of your word processor and pick a couple of different fonts. Type the domain in each font and see how it looks. Look at one letter at a time, and see which letter combinations make words that you hadn't expected.2. Say it out loud. Watch yourself in the mirror and use a couple of different tones as you say it. Pronounce the letters one at a time and change your inflection. 3. Ask other people. Get a third-party opinion on the domain you're considering. Call your hosting provider, your advertising agency, or a trusted friend and ask them to look at it from all angles. You'll likely want to keep this domain active and engaged for a long time—it's important to choose wisely.If you have seen other websites or domain names that might have benefited from a second look, I'd love to see what you've found! I know there are a couple in our area that are notorious for neglecting that final proof edit--just stick them in the comments for me.

Announcing Magento One-Click Installer

hosting — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 12:00:00 -0500

Magento Containers now comes with a one-click installer for Magento. You can install Magento, with or without store sample data, in minutes by accessing your site’s control panel. (more…)

Modular, Redundant, Multi-Flex- wha?

hosting — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 06:00:00 -0500

As any long time visitor of our site knows, we’ve recently been unusually abuzz about our new Multi-Flex servers. If you’ve Googled Intel’s new Multi-Flex systems, you’ve surely gotten plenty of useless tech garble.What this means for you is actually simple- a hosting platform virtually void of even the potential of any hardware-related downtime.Opting away from all of the overcomplicated “grid” platforms in the past, year that have been notorious for software explosions and at minimum, overcomplicated for the most simple of tasks.By going redundant at the hardware level with the Intel Modular Multi-Flex server, we’re above to maximize uptime, and paired with the fantastic cluster scalability of InterWorx, we’ve prepared to host the most successful of websites.Official Press Release: Ubiquity Adopts Intel’s Modular Multi-Flex Server PlatformTags: multi-flex, modular, server, intel

How to grow your business using Social Media

hosting — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 12:00:00 -0500

Increasing the traffic to your website can only mean one thing. More sales. The more traffic you get to your website increases the amount of people that know about your site and the products you offer. The more people that know about your products and services the more opportunities you have to sell. Of course traffic will only bring the customers, it won’t sell your products. So if you feel like your products are ready to be seen and sold, then your next step is to make sure that the people that need to see your site, and the products and services you offer, do actually find it. One of the best ways to create traffic is to do so through social websites. People naturally phase out un-original and pushed advertising, so talking to your customers, without pushing anything is one way to get their attention. Social news and social forum websites are generally specific to subject areas. Which means that the people who are using the forums are interested in particular areas. So for example lets have a look at one business owner. Mark Duncan owns a business that sells gardening products, like clippers, shoes, and so on. About three years ago he started trading online. Duncan Gardening offers fantastic prices and plenty of variety. Duncan had problems getting traffic to his website and even when he did, the traffic wasn’t specific enough to create sales.Duncan decided to visit gardening forums in order to talk about his interests. After a while Duncan told fellow forummers about his business and what kind of products he sells. As time went on and word of mouth (or type) spread Duncan noticed that the traffic to his website started increasing. And over time Duncan started visiting a range of gardening websites and forums, and told more people about the products that his website offer. Duncan found that after visiting and posting on these forums for one month, his traffic increased 5 fold and his sales increased 2.85 fold. And the sales and traffic was still growing. The best part? This didn’t cost a cent. Social news, bookmark sites and forums, are driven by the community. The community maintains it and the more interest your post gets the further it moves up into the first pages. Not many people travel to far back into the forums, so it’s important to any poster to maintain and drive interest. Social news, bookmark sites and forums are not for boring and pushy posts. In fact if you post something that reads too much like advertising, you post will likely be ignored if not deleted. So it is up to you to be interesting and in return you will get a ready made market for the picking. To get your start in forums and increasing your website traffic through them, have a look at the terms below. Drive Traffic: social networking sites use these words to describe traffic that has been delivered by forums and their traffic. Reach Influencers: forums and social networking sites have the ability to reach influential people. These influential people will often help you by linking their website to theirs and so on. Build Authority: by taking part in forums and social networking sites, that are particular to your field, you will build authority in the area. People will generally buy from someone with authority rather than someone who doesn’t. Brand Growth: social networking sites will give you the opportunity to grow your authority and grow the recognition of your brand.

Video Sharing Script & Youtube Clone Comparison

hosting — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 18:00:00 -0500

As a follow up to a previous post made in this blog about video sharing scripts, we thought we would follow up with a comparison of the most common scripts out there. There are several around with prices ranging from free to almost $1000.00 however it all boils down to the specific features you want. Of course all the scripts require ffmpeg hosting support before you even start looking for a script. Most features are common with all the scripts out there, but one or two stand out in terms of that extra feature to make your website stand out from the crowd. Below is a comparison table on some features that may be of interest to you, plus the cost of each script. Features that are listed in the table as not being available could be updated at anytime by the developer so be sure to double check.

HOSTING365 ANNOUNCES €2 MILLION INVESTMENT AND CREATION OF 20 JOBS

hosting — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0500

6th March – hosting365, an Outsourced IT Services and Internet Hosting provider, has announced a €2 million investment in new infrastructure, which has led to the creation of 20 jobs.The investment has seen the company incorporate blade server and virtualisation technology into its existing facilities in order to offer a range of new services. hosting365 signed deals with HP to provide the blade server technology and with VMware for the virtualisation software.It has enabled the company to offer its customers on-demand IT services, such as Hardware as a Service and Software as a Service, allowing clients to pay for IT as and when they use it. The new technology positions hosting365 to match the shifting needs of companies looking to reduce future investments in IT infrastructure and power consumption costs.The company milestone has led to the creation of twenty jobs, all of which have been filled. The new recruits include Senior UNIX, Networking and Microsoft engineers, as well as technical infrastructure staff. hosting365 also plans to hire an additional 14 staff in its Dublin and Polish offices by the end of the year as it continues to expand.Commenting on the announcement, Stephen McCarron, Managing Director, hosting365, said “This is a strategic investment which has enabled us to offer on-demand IT services. We are now in a position to offer organisations computing assets as and when they need them. IT is not a core competency for most organisations, so it makes little sense from them to make huge investments when they can take advantage of our staff’s technical expertise and cut down on capital expenditure,”“Companies are starting to realise that they are overspending on IT and their existing investments are often underutilised. The outsourced managed services model is a cost effective solution as they can take advantage of our economies of scale. hosting365 combines the best of both worlds by offering world class data centre facilities and the IT expertise of our diverse engineering, technician and support teams,” McCarron added.“By combining the VMware layer with the high availability, high performance components of the HP infrastructure, Irish companies can, for the first time, avail of the benefits of a multi million euro infrastructure for a cost less then a traditional dedicated server,” added Sales Director, Paul Lynch. “This approach to how managed hosting is delivered will change not only how it is viewed in Ireland, but also globally”.hosting365’s existing clients include the Irish Stock Exchange, the Irish Government Department for Social & Family Affairs, Certified Public Accountants of Ireland, O2, daft.ie and entertainment.ie.EndsFor further information please contact:Piaras Kelly / Joe CarmodyEdelman01 6789333086 8131691 / 086 8058764piaras.kelly@edelman.com /joe.carmody@edelman.com

Register365 Announces Price Drop In Line

hosting — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0500

30th January – register365 has announced a price drop on .ie domains in response to the IE Domain Registry’s announcement to reduce its charges by 5.8%. register365 has dropped its price on .ie domains from €25.95 to €21.95.Commenting on the price drop, Stephen McCarron, Managing Director, register365, said “We welcome the IEDR price drop as they have been investing in their own system automation, and releasing this to resellers through an API. We have been using this API since day one and it saves us a huge amount of manual labour. Previously every domain registration needed to be handled and submitted manually. We have a policy of passing savings on to our customers, and we are the price leader in Ireland for domains and hosting.”ENDSFor further information please contact:Piaras KellyEdelman01 6789333086 8131691piaras.kelly@edelman.comAbout register365register365 (a division of hosting365) is Ireland’s largest and leading hosting services provider. register365 owns and operates its own 25,000 square feet, state of the art data centre in Park West, Dublin, Ireland. The company holds 35% of the Irish market and has over 75,000 customers.

Lunarpages Heads to Texas: SXSW Trade Show

hosting — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 18:00:00 -0600

We have some big news for folks who want to learn more about Lunarpages, Lunarpages Dedicated Server Hosting, and all of our many web hosting services - Lunarpages is going to Texas! ;D
More specifically, if you are attending the South by Southwest music festival in Austin, Texas, you can meet up with our National Sales [...]

Web Developer for Firefox

hosting — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 12:00:00 -0600

By Mitch “The Developa” Keeper
When you talk about awesome tools for Firefox to make your web development job just that much easier you can’t overlook the Web Developer toolbar extension. The best thing about this freeware download is that it mixes two great things into a handy tool to keep close at hand [...]

Better I/O Performance

hosting — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0600

After months and months of hard work, we’ve come up with a solution to increase I/O performance.
What does this mean? It means that the sites will load faster and face fewer CPU warning messages.
Anyone that has any experience with web hosting will say that I/O performance is key to getting the best possible experience on [...]

No News is Good News?

hosting — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 18:00:00 -0600

Well, some say no news is good news- it’s certainly the case with a server network. But it’s not really been all that quiet. We’ve been keeping the servers fully up to date, managing to patch the recent CPanel updates in record time and many of you have commented on how much you’ve been enjoying the X3 features (if you want to try it- just send us a helpdesk email).
Further to this we’ve been concentrating on reducing helpdesk response times, and many tickets are now responded to within 20 minutes. We’re still seeing technical issues be resolved well within 24 hours, even for complicated cases.
Some of you have noticed the introduction of new phone numbers- and I have to say I have enjoyed talking to clients again as it sometimes gets a bit isolating when you only interact via email or helpdesk! We’re still not letting Jeff anywhere near the phones though, his strong Welsh accent would probably be enough to scare customers away…
As always if you need some help, have any queries or find something you want to check on, just let us know. helpdesk@colorteck.com is the helpdesk email, and you’ll receive an instant response with your ticket ID and details. If you don’t receive an email straight away then something is stopping it from getting to you- if you use yahoo mail, for example, it may have gone straight to your SPAM folder. Annoying!
If you submit a helpdesk email but don’t hear from us- please just give us a call. There is a local rate number for the USA and a London number for the UK. We can’t always pick up the phones, but there is a voicemail system which we 100% react to. If you leave a message, you *WILL* get a response and a call-back if you leave a number.
I hope you all enjoyed Valentines day- we didn’t get any roses here in the office, but there’s always next year!

Bits and Bobs

hosting — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 06:00:00 -0600

I got to say that our in-house development team has been working SUPER hard on some pretty neat and amazing things, which our shared customer can expect to see in their cPanel before too long. These range from; Google Adwords Vouchers to File Count graphs – I don’t know the full ins and outs as [...]

Monkey shine on tree

hosting — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 12:00:00 -0600

Monkey Shine on tree
I want to do a test to show how important different elements of a site are when it comes to getting ranked in Google’s natural listings. To do this, I have written the title above (which makes absolutely no sense) to see how long it takes for this post to be ranked and how high up I can get it.
To start with I have used the keywords as the title tag, the page URL and the page’s headline. To help it along, I am now going to start adding keywords into the paragraph so here comes monkey shine and now here we have on tree and to make it interesting let’s put them all together to make monkey shine on tree.
Another factor is a website’s Google PageRank (PR) which uses the number and quality of links to the site as a method of predicting relevancy, so I am going to put this exact post on to our sister site, the 123-reg blog as well. WebFusion has a PR of 6 compared to 123-reg’s 7, so in theory 123-reg’s should rank higher. I’m also going use the keywords in anchor text linking to 123-reg, and vice versa so to read exactly the same post on 123-reg click on this link: monkey shine on tree.
Keyword checklist:

Title tag
Page URL
Body text
PageRank
Anchor text

Limitations:
Obviously I can’t build the keywords in to the domain name itself, so I can’t demonstrate the importance of that.
A background to “Monkey shine on tree”
The search query at the time of writing has 96,000 results, with the top 3 being:
#1 A Flickr account picture that uses the term and a woman hanging in a tree, with a keyword in a sentance below the picture
#2 A web page with the keywords in the domain name and a sub-directory along with use of the keywords a lot in the text
#3 An entry on quizilla.com using the keyword in the URL and another in the body of the text
Let’s see how I get on…
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Search engine pay per click guide - part 2

hosting — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 18:00:00 -0600

Part one of this guide helped you understand the basics of pay per click (PPC) marketing through search engines and set up a PPC account. This second part will look in more detail at researching your keywords and setting your budget.
What are keywords?
Keywords are the terms people have typed in to a search engine to look for some information. For example, if you are looking for a birthday card you may type in ‘birthday cards’. When the search engine brings back the results, it also displays adverts related to that subject.
Advertisers have told the search engine that they want their advert to be shown whenever their chosen keywords are searched for. Depending on what you want to advertise, your list of keywords may be anything from a dozen up to literally thousands (as is the case with the major retailers).
Keyword research
There are numerous keyword research tools to help you decide which terms to bid on. Some of these are free and others ask for payment. Google provides a free keyword estimator tool as part of its AdWords account, which will show predicted spend and traffic for a keyword. However, it will not create a list of keywords for you.
One of the most popular tools is Yahoo’s free keyword selector tool. This will tell you how many times a certain term has been searched for in the past month, along with associated searches using that term.
In order to build a keyword list, start by using these tools; type in the keywords you think people will use when searching for your product or service. The keyword tools will then show you know all the combinations of alternative keywords that people use to look for your product or service.
Choose the keywords that you think are most relevant to you. The more keywords you choose, the greater the potential traffic and sales that your PPC campaign will generate.
Generally, common keywords are popular amongst many advertisers, so the cost per click you’ll pay for them is likely to be higher than longer, less frequently used keywords. It’s a good idea to include as many as possible within your account.
(more…)
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Are You Valid?

hosting — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 00:00:00 -0600

The World Wide Web Consortium is a beast well too unknown to too many webmasters. Along with maintaining the standards of the web, the w3 lets you validate your web pages and style sheets to find out if the code you used is right.
Who Cares?
If your site works it works right? Unfortunately no. Some browsers overlook css and html problems, while others don’t - which means your awesome website might not look so awesome to some people if the code isn’t squeaky clean. To go even further, Google’s webmaster guidelines makes it pretty clear the things that they look at when deciding what sites are high quality for their search results.
But Don’t Worry
As big a deal as valid code is - you’re not the only one that’s slacking. Most websites on the Internet aren’t valid, and even being mostly valid will put your site above most. Writing HTML is easy - writing a totally valid website is pretty hard (hey - not even Google lives up to their own standards). I did it for us - but I’m not going to lie - that’s a week of my life I want back. So anyway, the next time your website looks awesome in FireFox and your visitors using Internet Explorer v. 0.1.2 beta start complaining - it’s time to validate.

To share or not to share

hosting — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 06:01:00 -0500

When looking for a hosting solution for your web site you’ll discover you have the choice of shared or dedicated hosting. This article will briefly explain the difference between them.
Shared hosting is what it says it is. Your web site shares a server with other web sites. You don’t have access to the other web sites files, they don’t have access to yours and you don’t share a domain name. What you do share is the machine and the scripts that are pre-installed on it. Why would you do this?
Because it’s cheaper.
As you can understand, the cost of setting up a server machine is not inexpensive. Even relatively large web sites are only a few hundred megabytes, so today’s computers with multiple hard drives are easily able to handle the space. There can be as many as one or two hundred web sites on a shared server.
You’ll find there are different platforms available in shared hosting too. You will find you can have Linux or Windows as your platform. You don’t have to choose the platform your PC is running. This has nothing to do with what the server needs to operate on. Unix platforms are very stable and are perfect if you have a site using mostly HTML pages, PHP or CGI. If you are using scripting such as Active Server Pages, have designed your web site using FrontPage, or need access to a Microsoft Access or SQL Server database, you need a Windows platform. Currently, our shared hosting only comes in the Linux platform, however a Windows platform is available with our dedicated servers.
Shared hosting, itself comes with a heap of extras and most are included in the price. You can get email, auto-responders, pre-installed scripts, free templates, password protected directories, your own cgi-bin, browser based control panels, secure directories and more. Check the options to see that you are getting what you need.
However, if you need complete control of your server, you need a dedicated server. Obviously if you’re not going to share the server with anyone, it is going to be more expensive.
Dedicated servers are usually only required by experienced developers. If you’re not sure if you need a dedicated server, then you probably only need shared hosting. If you’re in doubt, contact us at sales@apthost.com so we can give you more detailed information about our products.

VPS Solutions on the Horizon

hosting — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 12:00:00 -0500

After many requests from customers needing an upgrade path from shared hosting, we have started plans of rolling out VPS solutions. Although we already offer dedicated servers, it was apparent that many customers did not quite need the resources of a whole server and neither could afford one. So it is now in planning and testing phase we go for our upcoming VPS solutions.
It would be great to hear from those who are currently thinking of or waiting for this product from AptHost. determining demand and features will greatly help us fine tune our product offering for launch this fall.
If you have any particular needs or wishes with regards to a VPS, please let us know what you have in mind.
It is our goal to offer a first class VPS solution with support and configuration options that make sense for our customers.
This is why we need to hear from you.
Cheers,
Brian French