Web hosting -

ICANN Sydney Photos

hosting — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 12:00:00 -0500

While in Sydney I did my best to take as many photos as possible, though I also discovered the limitations of carrying a big SLR around with me ...In any case you'll find my shots over on Flickr.Other people's photos should be viewable on Flickr here if they're tagged with "icann" (I'm not the only person who put photos on Flickr - honest!)Related articles by Zemanta

Down Under Special - ICANN Sydney (blacknight.com)
Rod Beckstrom Announced as New ICANN CEO (blacknight.com)
ICANN Sydney Kicking Off (blacknight.com)
Blacknight Goes Down Under (blacknight.com)
ICANN 35 Sees More New Domain Extension Announcements (blacknight.com)

Last Call! Silly Server 2008 Promo

hosting — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 12:00:00 -0500

Our Windows sysadmins inform me that there are still one or two Windows packages available on our special promo pricingSignup now for the Windows 2008 Minimus and pay only 29.95 for the first year (when that offer's gone it's gone.. )If you're using Windows on your desktop - why not upgrade to Internet Explorer 8?

The Perfect Solution for Online Business: Drop Shipping

hosting — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 06:00:00 -0500

Many people start selling products online with the help of EBay. Many times people start selling off items in their house that they have no use for any more. When people start turning a profit they see this as an avenue to be able to make more money online. To find more products to sell many people look to different avenues. A number of entrepreneurs have become very successful in going to garage sales and finding undervalued items. This is a way to make small term gains but is very difficult for long term growth.One other method that has taken the internet by storm is to become an affiliate marketer. Affiliates push sales to other companies and get a percentage of the sale. With this is can be difficult to get accepted into programs that have the products that you want. Benefits of Drop ShippingWith the internet another option that can bring great results is drop shipping. Drop shipping has been used for years in many retail stores. A quick definition of drop shipping is when a site or retail store does not keep stock of certain goods. Instead, at the time of the sale the company orders the unit from the manufacturer or wholesaler and has it delivered to the customer. In the past this has allowed retail shops to sell high priced goods without keeping a stock of these items. This is still done with many items such as hot tubs.Using Drop Shipping with EBayAs you can imagine this can be a very valuable tool for website owners. Let’s also go back to our EBay example from the beginning. EBay is a large auction site that encompasses much of the globe now. There is nothing stating that you need to keep the item at your own residence or business. This allows one to be able to place items on the site that they don’t currently hold. Instead with drop shipping you are able to sell off these items. With EBay you will be able to take the payment and then use drop shipping to move the item to the consumer. The difference between selling the item and the cost for the item and shipping will be yours. In essence, you have become a middle man to turn a profit.Building Business with Drop ShippingWhen building a website over time it makes sense to make it profitable. We have talked about affiliates and you can also use advertisements. With drop shipping you can allow your customers to have the ability to purchase many different products. Now instead of needing to obtain these items you can work along with the wholesaler of manufacturer. There a many different ways to make this process automated so you do not need to worry about taking the orders. With this you can work on building your online business and driving traffic to that site.Drop shipping gives us another avenue to be able to make money online. You can use drop shipping in many ways to make your online business more successful. With a little thought this can help you become more profitable by the day.

Round TWO

hosting — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0500

Hey!Big props to the dozen or so DreamHosters who showed up and got $61 of credit to their DreamHost account.. I scored 29 points total, Micah 32!Unfortunately, Micah didn’t get to move on to the next round, tomorrow at 11am in the Venetian (ballroom C).BUT I DID.All thanks to my mad 17 point handicap (in a game to 21) against two guys in my round-robin! BOO YAH. And the other guy dropping out because he “hurt his shoulder”. Pshaw.So, if you missed the first round, here’s your (last) chance to get some more credit.. come root Josh on tomorrow (Saturday) and get $2 a point scored!!To wrap things up, here’s a pic of the big mac I got on our drive to Vegas:What, was it their first day?!

The New Dream Machine

hosting — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 12:00:00 -0500

You may remember Dream Machine from such sports as basketball, basketball, softball, and basketball.But what you may NOT remember is that we got in trouble with our building when they saw our elevator lobby table tennis shenanigans.And what you couldn’t possibly remember, is that Micah and I have been working on our game since then and now are officially USATT rated (771 and 720 respectively).Which is why I’m pleased to introduce for the first time… Dream Machine Table Tennis!What’s it to you?Well, we’re headed to the $100,000 Hard Bat Classic this weekend in Vegas, and anybody who shows up to cheer (either of) us on will get $1 in DreamHost credit for every point each of us score.. THROUGHOUT THE ENTIRE TOURNAMENT!That could very well end up being THOUSANDS of dollars of DreamHost credit .. or very well end up being TENS of dollars of DreamHost credit!To illustrate, I will now relay to you a little story of the LAST tournament we went to, less than a month ago…The California State OpenThe way USATT tournaments generally work is that everybody is grouped into four person round-robin contests, where everybody plays everybody else, and only the one winner advances to the “playoff” bracket.When I showed up for my under-1100-rating tournament, I found my bracket on the board… and things didn’t look too good:

Jones, Josh 725

Lee, Kenneth 927

Liao, Hung Ju (Andrew) 844

Lu, David 958Hmm, Jones vs. Lee, Liao, and Lu. Not to be prejudiced, but I was nervous.And in fact, it wasn’t good… I ended up losing all three matches, although I did win one game at least vs. Ken.Overall, it was still a lot of fun and afterwards I got everybody from our round robin together to take a picture to commemorate their victories:............................See you tomorrow at the Venetian!

How to Brand your Business and Make More Sales

hosting — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 12:00:00 -0500

In this crazy economic climate it has become difficult to stay afloat. It has become more and more paramount to be able to make a name for your business. With branding it is easier to keep in touch with your clients. Think about all the times you have put on a pair of shoes and see the Nike emblem. These brands are what stick out in our minds. This helps make your customers become repeat customers and repeat customers are the key for long lasting success in many forms of business. The Importance of Logo DesignWhen looking to brand your business it is important to look for quality work. The logo that you are looking to design, if done correctly, could last years on your product. This means it is paramount to not look for a budget solution. Luckily, throughout the internet there are many developers that you can outsource the project to. Sites such as Elance let you find many people that you can outsource the work to. Make sure to check prior reviews and ask for samples of other work that they have accomplished. This way you can find quality work at a budget that is suitable to your business.Trademark your LogoOnce you have settled on a logo, or a set of logos, for your business it is important to trademark the logo. In the United States it costs $335 to trademark the logo. There are many lawyers that will do the work necessary to get this done. While the costs seem prohibitive for many do not overlook the value of having a trademarked logo.Also with your logo it is important to include contact information. A contact number or website address is critical for people to get back to you. Don’t forget this step with your logo.So you have your Logo, What Next?Now, if you have your logo what do you use it for? Depending on your product the logo should be placed on the product or on the packaging. This way anytime someone looks at the product they see your business in front of them. When other people see the product they instantly know where the product derived from and this becomes a form of free advertising.Advertising with your LogoHow do you use your new logo in advertising? You can find many ways to use your logo once you start looking outside the box. Before that, look at examples where you have seen other companies’ logos. The logo should be part of your website and any advertisements for that site. Also don’t forget the power of t-shirts, mugs, flyers, banners, bumper stickers etc. All of these options get your business in front of a larger audience of eyes. Again, all of these items can be outsourced for cheaper than you believe.When looking to build on your business it is important to build up a brand. Over the course of the last 100 years many brand names and logos have lasted the test of time. Could you imagine Coca Cola without their logo? If not, what would your product ever be without a logo?

Business Web Hosting Package

hosting — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 18:00:00 -0500

Business Web Hosting PackageBusiness web hosting services offer businesses the chance to receive a reliable web hosting service within the context of a secure web hosting environment for a cost which is very near to that of shared web hosting, but provides a level of service closer to that of dedicated web hosting services such [...]Post from: UK Web Hosting | Linux Windows Server Tutorials | PHP MySQL Service Business Web Hosting Package

Key Points For Choosing an E-Commerce Host | Part 2

hosting — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 00:02:00 -0500

Your website, especially if it is an E-Commerce site, must be online 24 x 7 x 365. Anything less than this means a possible loss of sales opportunity to you.Post from: UK Web Hosting | Linux Windows Server Tutorials | PHP MySQL Service Key Points For Choosing an E-Commerce Host | Part 2

End of March Improvements - Building the Network

hosting — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 06:00:00 -0500

Closing Q1, Ubiquity has made a variety of improvements to our offerings, and begun turning focus towards improvements in our network infrastructure, rooted in Foundry Networks XMR 4000 and 8000 series routers for production carrier networks.

Revised unmetered bandwidth deals and made our 12TB promotion permanent
Re-released Ubiquity Overstock with an automated pricing system and smooth new interface
Overstock systems are now placed in an RSS Feed for bargain hunters and resellers (subsribe!)
Began offering nLayer and Abovenet bandwidth via our IP transit product
Chicago network has gone 10gig! We have begun turning up 10Gbps connectivity to each of our upstreams.

End of February Imrovements - A New Look

hosting — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 06:00:00 -0500

In keeping with our promise last month - we’re continuing to re-invent everything Ubiquity does with piles of new improvements.

Launched an entire new ubiquityservers.com that’s far more informative and useful
Opened Ubiquity’s nationwide IP Transit network for resale in all of our locations as a brand new service
Began offering r1soft backup solution to dedicated, colo, and vps clients
VPS provisioning automation system moved from alpha to beta - instant VPS provisioning ensues
Implemented sFlow monitoring of Ubiquity’s network to make performance more clever
Increased level 2 support coverage at our NOC with more staff
Improved add-on pricing on all of our dedicated server options

The Placebo Effect ... on Pricing

hosting — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0500

OK, so here's an interesting dilemma for many businesses out there, including us here at IPOWER.I just read this fascinating article from The Washington Post on "The Price-Placebo Effect." Most people understand the Placebo Effect as it pertains to medication studies: "control" participants are blindly administered a sugar pill instead of actual medication, and yet still experience improved symptoms, probably as a result of their belief that they have received real medication.The Price-Placebo Effect takes the same tack, but instead of medication being the agent of change, price is strangely the culprit. The Price-Placebo Effect, according to the article, is basically the notion that people experience more pleasure (i.e. larger activation in their medial orbitofrontal cortex) when they consume a product that they pay a higher price for, compared to those who pay a less-expensive price.While the article leads off referencing the uncomfortable Eliot Spitzer scandal, the more relevant story revolves around a study in which two groups of participants were asked to drink some wine: one group from a bottle priced at $90, and the other group from a bottle priced at $10. The participants who drank the $90 bottle not only indicated an overall higher level of enjoyment (as to be expected), but they also had experienced more activity medial orbitofrontal cortex than those who drank the $10 bottle. The catch? They drank the exact same wine.So what does this tell us about pricing our products? Well, for one thing, Apple's got it right. The price of their notebooks is significantly higher than it needs to be, and yet they don't have much trouble (a) selling them like hotcakes or (b) cultivating a dedicated (some might say fanatic?) userbase. In fact, it wasn't until the end of last year that they even contemplated releasing a notebook under $1000. So what's the story here? Great products justifying expensive prices? People paying for the "brand"? Or is there something actually physiological going on?It's tough to say, but notions like these definitely make us think about our strategies. The webhosting industry is a complicated one--commodization is driving prices down and requiring hosts to underprice their services. Two years ago it was ludicrous to advertise a price under $6/month. Now that price is considered expensive. And yet does our catering to the competitive nature of the hosting market mean our product is any less valuable to consumers than it was two years ago? In fact, no--our product is constantly improving and evolving and a hosting plan now is "worth" more than ever. It would be great to price our plans to invoke the "Price-Placebo Effect," but unfortunately, the likely result would be potential customers hammering the "Back" button as soon as the images start to load on IPOWER.com.So how do we tap into this pricing enigma? Have you tapped into it?

Your Feedback, Hard at Work

hosting — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0500

We've been soliciting feedback from customers, and we've been listening to your responses. Over the past couple of weeks, we've launched a couple key changes to our offerings, which we hope will improve your overall experience.1) The Activation Center: Activate Your Plan's Freebies in One Fell Swoop!We recently launched The Activation Center to help customers find and activate the free tools that come in their hosting plans. Located in the top stripe of your control panel (between the "Tutorials" and "Help" icons), The Activation Center opens up a list of products that you can add to your control panel just by selecting the items of interest to you and clicking the "Activate" button. Free tools include SubmitNet, Google AdWords $50 credit, Google Custom Search box, as well as a free 60-day trial with RatePoint, and a free 60-day trial with Constant Contact, which provides email marketing tools.Keep an eye out for more free tools in the Activation Center--we'll be adding new ones all the time!2) ServiceCentral: New Portal for Managing Your ProjectsWhen you purchase an SEO package (soon to be extended to a Design package or Professional Services), you'll get an icon called "ServiceCentral" in the "Marketing Services" section of your control panel. When you click on this icon, you'll be brought to a portal page, which, on the "My Projects" tab, keeps a list of your active and past projects and their statuses. From here, you can also add comments to your project and check out the latest status via comments left by your project team.The "My Team" tab keeps track of your team members, with access to their schedules and contact information. At the moment, customers can email and call most of their team members, but shortly we'll add the ability for customers to chat with team members and schedule appointments! Plus, uploading files you'd like your team to use in the project is a cinch--just click on the "My Resources" tab, and select the directory where you'd like to upload to.3) Akamai Quick Connect: Increase Your Site's Load Time for Visitors Everywhere IPOWER is one of the first hosts to offer this incredibly cool service, which allows visitors from across the globe to access your site nearly as quickly as someone sitting next to our servers. Akamai Quick Connect will be available to some customers starting next week through a special promotion we're running, and we'll likely roll it out to all customers by the end of March or early April.In case you're wondering how Akamai works their magic, here's a quick snapshot: Normal requests to see your website have to travel all the way from a visitor's computer to our servers and back. Akamai speeds up this process by caching your site's content (images, CSS, javascript) on its edge servers, which are located all around the world--so when someone in China, for instance, wants to see your site, the content will be retrieved from the closest Akamai server in China, rather than traveling all the way to our servers and back. HTML requests will still travel to our servers, but through Akamai's optimized network, which can easily locate and circumvent trouble spots in the network.4) WebSite Creator by CM4all: Two Small Changes Based Upon Survey FeedbackWe have plans to revamp the CM4all tool page in general, but in the meantime, we fulfilled two small customer requests which seem to make a big difference in the usability of the tool.

Numero Uno: We made the "edit" link into a button so you can see it! Derrr ... not quite sure why it was a teensy tiny link to begin with, but at least you can see it now and know where to click to edit your site.
Numero Dos: We made this new and improved "edit" button open a new window. Finally. Now you won't lose access to your IPOWER control panel when you want to edit you CM4all site.

We hope these small changes across the board make a difference in how you use your IPOWER hosting account. If you have additional suggestions on functionality, definitely let us know through comments on the blog, in surveys, and as always, through tickets in your Support Console.

How To Setup Multiple Magento Stores

hosting — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 12:00:00 -0600

There are numerous ways to setup multiple Magento stores that all share the same codebase and backend, but what method you use depends on your needs. This article is written with cPanel in mind, though the methodologies listed below apply no matter what control panel you’re using. (more…)

Magento Showcase: Wall Bed Factory

hosting — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 18:00:00 -0600

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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.

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.

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

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.

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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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