Whether you’re planning the launch of your first site, or wondering why your site counter is actually moving backward, stop. You need a strategy to promote your site to search engines and to visitors. A plan of action based on five key factors, all of which should be weighed carefully before you take another step. Here are the five, most important considerations in the development of any search engine promotion.

1. The Site’s Objectives

What are your expectations for the website? These will usually point you to the site’s objectives. In the case of commercial sites, the broad objective is straightforward – to sell enough goods and/or services to become profitable.

However, you might also want to educate, motivate, persuade and inform in addition to, or instead of, selling. A top-down analysis of your site’s objectives is the place to start the development of your action plan.

Once you’ve determined the site’s objectives, keep them front and center during the entire development of an SE promo strategy. It’s important that any search engine understand your site’s objectives on the very first spider visit.

2. Market Analytics

Essential. Who are you trying to reach – your sales demographic? What do the members of your demographic need? How do they make purchase decisions? Are they computer savvy? Critical to the design and implementation of a search engine promo strategy is to know your market.

And the best place to learn is from the competition. Pull a Google on the competition to see how the successful sites do it. Perfectly ethical and a measurable, absolute guide to what works and what doesn’t.

But you can’t stop there. Market metrics are also a part of a successful promo strategy. The development of multi-dimensional metrics will be useful in virtually every step of the design, development and SE optimization phases. There are plenty of metrics software packs on the market. Some are even free.

The problem with these number crunchers is simple: all they do is provide the raw data. Number of hits. Average number of pages viewed. Ratio of visitors to buyers. Just stats, not strategy.

Analytics gathered using a variety of apps and tools must be properly correlated and analyzed to develop an effective search engine promotion. It’s not enough to have the data. You must interpret the numbers in order to take actionable steps.

3. Techno-Factors

An over-achieving website doesn’t just happen. It must be crafted. It requires highly-specialized knowledge of everything from HTML, SEO and CSS to human nature and purchase motivators.

Search engines spider sites in a variety of ways. The simpler and clearer your site is to an SE spider, the greater the likelihood that your site will be assessed and ranked properly. Conversely, if the technical design of your site isn’t dead on for search engine spiders, a site may be mis-indexed or even banned from SEs altogether for what spiders perceive as black hat tactics, though it’s simply inept (and therefore costly) programming. You might as well hang out the ‘Going Out Of Business” sign.

Techno-factors come into play during the design phase, the development and testing phases and after the site’s launch when refinement, optimization, content updat
es and routine site maintenance are undertaken.

Any well-considered strategy must provide the means to design (or redesign) the site, develop it, promote it to the SEs and optimize it over time. Search engine promotion and site optimization aren’t goals. They’re part of the process.

4. Plan Your Presentation Layer

Once the technical aspects of the site have been incorporated into your promo strategy, turn your attention to the presentation layer. The presentation layer can make or break a site, regardless of how well-designed the technical structure supporting the site’s skin.

Navigation should be simple. Buttons and links clearly labeled. The user should always be able to go ‘Home’ from any page. Check-out should be clear, uncluttered and instill buyer confidence. A site map is useful to visitors and SE spiders. Anything less will hurt the bottom line.

The site skin also presents the look, feel and tone of your on-line enterprise. Stately and dignified, WiLd & KraZy, helpful and concerned – all determined by the look of the site. Color combinations, type font and size, type placement and the tone of the content make up your public persona.

And the skin is spidered right along with the back office so it should appeal to eyeballs and make spiders happy, as well. Header placement, number of headers above the fold, keyword density and other SE search parameters must be fine-tuned for successful search engine promotion.

5. Promotion and Optimization

Once you’ve gone live with your site, you’ve only just begun. The world of ecommerce is fast-paced and cutthroat. And if you don’t promote your site to search engines and to potential buyers your chances for success diminish accordingly.

Today, site success depends on promotion - search engine promotion and eyeball promotion. You can promote on a shoestring or you can launch a pedal-to-the-metal campaign with banner ads, Google Adwords, links building and opt-in cultivation. If you aren’t SEO-experienced, you’ll be best served by professionals who can track site activity, develop useful metrics and devise and implement a strategy for improved site performance.

The same goes for the process of optimization. Sites must be search engine optimized and conversion optimized – two very different things. Much of SEO takes place behind the scenes. That’s why it’s essential that you use SEO pros to actually build your site. This is not where you can cut a few corners.

Then there’s conversion optimization – converting visitors to buyers. Most of this takes place at the presentation level. Does the site meet or exceed the visitor’s expectations? You have 6.4 seconds to convince a visitor to explore your site. That’s how much time web users devote to site evaluation.

DYI or Go With The Pros?

94% of all ecommerce ventures tank. Down in flames. Many of these failures are based on poor business models, but just as many are due to poor site design, lack of SE recognition, an off-putting presentation layer or a home page that looks like a carnival midway.

If you’re a start-up and you don’t know much about SEO and SE promotion, do not let your teen-aged nephew design your site. And if you’re the owner of an underperforming site and you can’t figure out why, don’t waste your time tweaking. You’re losing sales every day.

If you know ecommerce, develop a strategy that encompasses all five of these critical facets. If you don’t know ecommerce, hire somebody to do it for you.

It’s the best money you’ll ever spend.

About the Author
Frederick Townes is the owner of W3 EDGE, a business web design company out of Boston, MA. W3 EDGE provides SEO copywriting services as a key compliament to their design and web hosting offerings. If you have any questions about web design, SEO copywriting, hosting or online marketing feel free to contact Frederick at ftownes@w3-edge.com.

There are mainly two types of guarantees used by the web hosting companies:

1. the money back guarantee and

2. the uptime guarantee

The reason they offer them is simple. It’s a very wise and effective marketing technique. Meaning what? Meaning that the ultimate reason for them giving these guarantees is that they will bring them more clients and thus more money. Don’t take me wrong, I have nothing against that. It’s just that we have to know the reason to understand the behavior.

Take the money-back guarantee for example. It’s definitely not a promise made by web hosting companies alone and most services/products come with a guarantee of some kind. Almost every time the guarantee is there to make you say: I’ll buy this! After all, it’s guaranteed!

This whole technique is known as “risk reversal”. Way back when no one (or very few companies) guaranteed anything about their products, marketers realized that there was something that stopped clients from buying freely (especially impulse buyers). It was the risk involved in any purchase that was made! When you buy anything you make a deal. With no guarantee, you risk everything in case the service/product doesn’t make you happy. The seller on the other hand, has nothing to lose.

A money back guarantee shifts the whole risk, or a part of it, back to the selling company. The most generous kind of guarantee is the “no questions asked” money back guarantee. Nothing beats that except a “no questions asked” money back guarantee + a free gift . But that’s not something you will see in the web hosting business… Now, if you think about the fact that they would have provided the service for free if they give you a refund, you can consider that you receive a gift!

I do recommend you to look for money-back guarantees when shopping for hosting. There is a problem associated with them though: the guarantee has a value only if the word of that particular company has a value. If that company treats its customers right, then you have reasons to believe that the money back guarantee is worth believing. To find out if the company treats the customers fairly, you have to look for company reviews.

Now there are money back guarantees and money back guarantees… Some are “no questions asked”, some are “for any reason” and some are “for the following reasons”. The “for the following reasons” guarantees tend to be tricky. Not necessarily because the hosting company wants to trick you, but because the company tries to minimize “unfair” risks. A “no questions asked” guarantee leaves the hosting company exposed to the real risk of being robbed by unscrupulous individuals who might take advantage of this complete risk reversal.

However, a guarantee that is not “no questions asked” opens you to a whole new set of risks, which depend on the exact conditions applicability. The negative thing about conditioned guarantees is that they can be easily overstretched by the hosting company to its advantage, meaning that whatever the reason they usually can argue that your reason is invalid.

So I’d prefer to go with either no guarantee, and decide based on customer reviews, or to go with a company offering a “no questions asked” guarantee. A conditioned guarantee is too difficult to weigh when you’re buying especially when you’re not very sure if the company is reliable (based on what former or current customers said about it).

What I mean is that between a company with no guarantee but a spotless behavior towards its customers and a company with a conditioned type of money back guarantee, I’d go with the one with the spotless record. Not because the risk would necessarily be lower, but because it would be easier to assess.

It’s a weird choice I guess, but I have another reason for my choice. Most of the good web hosting companies would issue a refund if real problems would emerge with respect to their service, even if they don’t actually have a money back guarantee.

Money back guarantees differ not only with respect to conditions, but they also differ in length. Basically there are two types of guarantees according to length: 15 days and 30 days. Of course, 30 days is better and considering the fact that most web hosting companies offer a 30 days money back guarantee, I recommend you to try and find a company that offers this. The advantage is clear and very important, especially if your website uses scripts, databases etc. because 30 days give you enough time to set things up and see if everything runs smoothly.

About the second type of guarantee, I discuss in this special article dedicated to the uptime guarantee.

About the Author
Daniel Lemnaru is a young man with a dream, that of building a very extensive resource, WHReviews.com, to help people find reliable hosts. He believes that credible customer reviews along with a fair amount of knowledge should be the foundation of all purchasing decisions and he made it his duty to educate potential hosting customers.

If there’s one thing constant in the IT and hosting industries, it’s that technology is constantly evolving. For me, keeping up with it all has been nothing short of a challenge. When Microsoft SQL Server 2005 came out towards the end of 2005, and now SQL 2008, I pushed it to the side. It was just another thing I didn’t have time to learn. But as my customers started asking for it, I realized I had to bite the bullet and get it installed.

The problem is I knew that when I implemented MS SQL 2005 (and eventually 2008) in my hosted environment my customers would need help connecting to it. I had to find a simple way for my customers to easily access their SQL databases. Since I was already using MyLittleAdmin (MLA) for my MS SQL 2000 installation and my customers were happy with it, I naturally looked to myLittleTools who by now had created a version of MLA for MS SQL 2005.

I can hear you ask, why not save the money and let your customers use SQL Management Studio to access their MS SQL 2005 databases? As a host, it’s often difficult to recoup the costs on tools like this since they’re typically “value added” as part of the hosts offerings. Well, consider that opening up your firewall ports to allow direct access to your SQL Server via SQL Management Studio would make the server more vulnerable to DDoS , script kiddies, and viruses. Second, many hosted users have no experience with MS SQL, much less the management tools and how to find and install them. They just know the app they just bought and paid for is asking them to set up and configure a SQL Server database. Third, external access to a SQL Server costs money in terms of bandwidth. Customers will often tend to try and permanently connect their external web sites to your SQL Server which causes large spikes in external bandwidth usage and, as many of you may know, is hard to track back to an individual database.

A web-based tool like myLittleAdmin takes all of this out of the equation. You don’t need to open the SQL ports directly to the Internet since users are accessing their databases via the web interface over port 80 (or even better, port 443) and the interface, in turn, is communicating with the SQL Server behind the scenes. You can then lock your internal firewall policies down as necessary to control connectivity to your database even more.

But, you might also ask, what about the free MS SQL web-based management tools you can find out there? Well, the short answer is IF, and that’s a big IF, you can find a decent web administration product for MS SQL 2005, it’s probably going to be nowhere as complete as MLA.

So, that being said, let’s get started. This article is meant to provide you with a high level overview of MLA 2005 from a web hosting perspective and how it helps you provide very comprehensive control of your MS SQL 2005 using a web-based administrative interface. This review is no way fully comprehensive of MS SQL 2005 or MLA2005. There’s just too much to talk about and too little space to do it. But it should give you a good idea of what MLA 2005 is capable of and how well a fit it is for web hosts who need to offer their customers easy but robust access to their SQL 2005 databases.

Installation

Installation in IIS 6.0 on a Windows 2003 Standard SP2 box, as you would expect, is straightforward. There is no executable to install. In fact, it goes in much like PHP installs. Just copy the files into a web accessible directory, enable the version of .NET you want to use on the site (MLA 2005 supports both .NET and .NET2), configure the MLA folder as an IIS application, edit the config XML file to setup the database connectivity, then browse to the web directory you installed MLA. Oh, and don’t forget to copy the license file to the root of MLA. That’s it!

The MLA installation documentation is very simple and spells this all out clearly so I won’t go step by step through the install process here. Just follow the install guide step by step and you won’t have any problems.

Where I did have an issue, and this was not related to MLA, was configuring MS SQL 2005 to allow remote connections. You need to ensure you do this or you’ll pull your hair out trying to figure out why MLA can’t talk to MS SQL 2005. The following KB article will get you set up right: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/914277

Configuration

Once MLA is installed and connecting to MS SQL 2005 correctly, you can configure the features that customers will have access to by modifying some XML configuration files. You can easily turn on or off features you want to offer, which in turn affects what the user will see in the MLA web interface.

Once you’ve done this, and log into MLA, you should see something like the following. In this case, all features are turned on so you can see what is available through this app.

Some features in the navigation tree that you usually don’t want to show to end-users, such as System Databases, can be removed from the XML file that handles the tree view hiding these options from users. All the config options are conveniently located in one XML folder which makes it very simple to modify and customize MLA to display only what you want the customer to see and use. And the manual does a nice job of explaining what you need to modify to remove some of the more worrisome features for shared database setups.

Features

In addition to a wealth of features already included in MLA 2000, including easy management of your MS SQL data, table structure, stored procedures, backups, and more, MLA 2005 sports a cleaner, more intuitive interface, support for database schemas, SSL certificates and asymmetric/symmetric keys, database synonyms, database snapshots, and an enhanced editable data grid making data editing a breeze for end users.

The administrator-editable config file allows you to turn on or off practically any feature that MLA 2005 offers so if you want to just allow customers to view and edit their table data you can, or if you want to allow them complete control over their databases then you can turn all the features on. It’s up to you.

I’ll briefly discuss each of the main areas of MLA 2005 below since these pretty well mimic the features of SQL Management Studio which you are already hopefully familiar with. Each area is accessible via an expanding contents menu at the left side of the application.

Connection

The Connection menu area has a couple of options: Connection Info and Disconnect. Connection info has two tabs that shows the connection information being used to connect to the database and the license information. You’d probably want to remove the license tab through the appropriate XML file as it’s not necessary for the end-user to see. The disconnect option to log the user out of the interface.

Databases

The Databases menu section is where your customers will be doing a lot of the real work they need to do. Here is where users can view their databases, edit their tables, etc..

You can see in the capture of the expanded menu from the databases section.

The System Databases section shows you the usual list of system databases. Users can view the data but without explicit access to the tables, they can’t modify anything. Still, I would remove this tree item from the XML to ensure they don’t “play around”. There’s no need for them to see this information.

The Database Snapshots area allows you to create a read-only, stable snapshot of a database at a point in time. This is useful for recovery of a database if, say, you damage data. Snapshots have pros and cons that are beyond the scope of this article, and are an Enterprise-only feature so many of you smaller hosts probably won’t be able to offer it. As with all tree items, you can remove it from the tree so it can’t be used. The point is, it’s there if you need it and can take advantage of it.

The User Databases is where users can administer their databases. Users will only see the databases they’re entitled to see. You can see by the expanded view image at left that on each user database there are more features than many customers will probably ever need or use, but the important thing is they’re all there and available and all able to be turned on or off depending on your needs.

Within the User Databases section, users can modify their tables, views, create synonyms for their databases, create and manage Stored Procedures and Triggers, create and view Full Text catalogs, and manage security on their database.

Many of you will be using a Control Panel of some sort to allow your customer to create and manage their database users so the Security section probably can safely be hidden from view since we usually don’t want users creating users at will outside of the control panel.
I’ll briefly cover some of the main areas of MLA 2005 to whet your appetite!

Tables

When clicking on the database name in the contents menu, the list of available tables appears in the right window pane. Left clicking on the table name pops up a nifty little menu containing the operations available to that table. You can easily create a new table, modify the structure of an existing table, open a table to edit the data, and much more. This is a nice feature that MLA 2000 didn’t have and it’s a welcome addition.

Creating a new table is quite simple. Choose New Table from the menu and the following screen opens.

As you can see, you have all the options available to you to create the table as you would in the SQL Management Studio. You can even simply create T-SQL scripts by clicking the little script icon at the top left of the section (circled).

If you instead click the Open Table menu item, the table opens and the data is then available for viewing and editing as in the following screenshot. Note the small menu icons. At the top you can go back up a level, refresh the data, or synchronize the treeview with the database. Below that you can export the data a XML, XLS, or CSV, and create a new data item. Then next to each row of data you can either delete the row or edit the row. You can also modify the content just by clicking on the column data.

When editing the row, you can easily modify the data contained in the row as in the following screenshot .

Views, Stored Procedures, and other Advanced Database Operations

Views, Stored Procedure, and most other more advanced operations on the database can be created through the respective content menu items. Creating these operations can be done by entering the T-SQL code into the script area and then clicking the create button as in the following screenshot.

Notice that a nice template is created for you so you can just plug your T-SQL code in, click the create button, and you’re done. Most of the other more advanced operations are set up this same way so I won’t bore you to death with an explanation of each section.

Synonyms

New with MS SQL 2005 and MLA 2005 was the ability to create a database synonym so you don’t have to use the long notation to reference a database and it’s perfect if you need to switch to another database temporarily to, say, do some testing then switch back. Customers should like this feature quite a bit and it’s easily configured through MLA 2005.

Security

« I would argue that this section isn’t really appropriate for a shared server environment so it should be hidden from the user by modifying the appropriate XML file. But if this tool is being used to manage your server in a non-shared environment, it could be very useful. Again, like all features in MLA, they’re there if you need them and can be hidden if you don’t.»

The Security contents menu section allows you to create, view, edit, and delete all logins on the server, assign server roles, and manage server credentials. I would argue that this section isn’t really appropriate for a shared server environment so it should be hidden from the user by modifying the appropriate XML file. But if this tool is being used to manage your server in a non-shared environment, it could be very useful. Again, like all features in MLA, they’re there if you need them and can be hidden if you don’t. (Users with no admin rights can only see their own login)

Server Objects

Server Objects allows you to create server-level objects such as backup devices, linked servers, and triggers. This section allows you to view any available backup devices, linked servers, and server triggers.

Management

The management section allows you to view any active sessions related to the currently logged in user. If you log in as the system administrator, you’ll be able to see all active sessions on the server. The error logs are usually only viewable by system administrators.

Tools

The tools section provides a number of useful features such as the database query, backup wizard for web hosting, detach and attach wizard, shrink database, and a tie-in to myLittleBackup.

The New Query feature makes it simple to type in some SQL and get a result set back, much like the old Query Analyzer. You can also import a pre-made .sql script using the folder icon at the top right of the screenshots as well, and set limits on the number of results you want returned in the options tab.

The results of the query are returned nicely formatted

You can also easily generate insert scripts to reimport data into a table, and use the CSV import wizard to import data from a CSV file.

Backup and Restore Wizards. myLittleAdmin also offers two wizards for backup and restore. One is a complete backup wizard and shown in the screenshots below. However, as a web host you probably don’t want to give your users access to all these capabilities so there is also a built-in web hosting version of the Backup and Restore wizard which is substantially limited but will allow users to do a basic backup and restore of their databases if necessary.

Detach and Attach Wizards. myLittleAdmin can detach and reattach databases just as you can do via the SQL Management Studio. While detaching a database is probably not something you want offer web-hosted customers as they may inadvertently disconnect their databases, the attach feature may be handy since many users are coming from other hosts and need to easily import their MS SQL database into their hosting plan. The attach features makes it easy for them to do this.

Detaching a database.

Attaching a database.

Shrink Database. How many times have your users databases grown out of hand? If you haven’t set your MS SQL databases Recovery Model to Simple the transactions logs will grow rapidly and you’ll end up running out of disk space before you know it. The Shrink Database feature allows you to shrink the database size and dump those old transactions just as you can in the SQL Management Studio.

Change Password. If you so choose, you can allow your database users to change their database user password through this function. Most web hosting control panels do this through their interface so this is really not a necessary feature for hosted operations, but for individual and company operations this would be a very handy feature.

Preferences

Finally, there is a preferences section that the user can use to change their desired display and language preferences. They can change features such as skins (if you have additional skins installed), their language settings (by default English, French, Deutsch, and Japanese are available), their date formats, and how many rows they want to be displayed in data grids.

Conclusion

Hopefully this article gives you a quick overview on myLittleAdmin for SQL Server 2005. As you can see, this is a complex and very complete application that gives you almost all the features you have in the MS SQL 2005 Management Studio, but it’s totally web-based and totally customizable.

For you hosts out there, this is an excellent piece of software to consider providing to your customers. It helps keep your SQL Servers protected by allowing you to close off all external ports to your SQL Server but still allowing comprehensive control of your customer’s databases. And your customers won’t need to know how to install and use the SQL Management Studio software on their desktops. That will help reduce the number of daily headaches you have to deal with from Denial of Service attacks, script kiddies, viruses, and bandwidth spikes.

No MS SQL database management software I have looked at comes close to the completeness of this application and your customers will appreciate having the ability to truly manage their databases from anywhere they have a web connection.

About the Author
Anthony Wilko is president of Infuseweb LLC, a webhosting company located in San Antonio, TX.
You can find more info about Infuseweb on http://www.infuseweb.com

About myLittleAdmin
myLittleAdmin software is developed by myLittleTools. You can find more info about myLittleAdmin on http://www.mylittleadmin.com and http://www.mylittletools.net. You’re also encouraged to have a look at myLittleBackup, a web-based backup/restore solution for shared MS SQL hosting.

There are two forms of growth - internal growth and external growth. Internal growth can be done by investment in new servers, new branch offices, etcetera. External growth (integration of amalgamation) can be done though expansion (through mergers with other companies/firms), mergers (mutually agreed partnership), and acquisitions/takeovers (hostile buy-over of the majority (at least 51% of a firm’s shares by another firm)).

External growth exists in 4 different forms, which will be elaborated below.

Firstly, there’s horizontal integration. This involves the mergers or acquisitions of firms in the same stage of production in the same industry. In this case, an example would be UnitedHosting merging with HTTPme. This is usually done for two reasons. Firstly, to exploit the potential economies of scale reaped from a larger scale of production (EOS comes in various forms including technical and managerial EOS. I could give you a thousand word essay on it but it’s a whole new ball game. Secondly, to achieve monopoly power in order to capture market share. However I don’t think the second reason applies here in a saturated market with relatively elastic demand.

The second form of external growth is vertical integration. This involves the integration of firms engaging in different stages of production within the same industry. There are two types of vertical integration — backward integration and forward integration. Backward integration is the acquiring of firms engaged in the previous stage of production (e.g. UnitedHosting buying EV1Servers). Forward integration is the acquiring of firms in the next stage of production (e.g. EV1Servers buying UnitedHosting). Vertical integration is done for 4 main reasons. Firstly, to achieve greater control and stability in the supply of inputs through backward integration (e.g. If UH could control all of EV1’s servers, they could ensure optimal uptime and put greater focus on their own servers). Secondly, it is to restrict the supply of inputs to competitors through backward integration. This is pretty self explanatory — with backward integration, you can make your competitors suffer and deny them access to your servers, which they require to run their business. The third reason is to obtain greater control of the demand for your products through forward integration (e.g. EV1Servers could market their services adequately to different markets with different packages if they bought out UnitedHosting). The fourth reason would be to penetrate and capture new markets through forward integration. Again, taking the example of EV1 and UH. EV1 would be able to appeal to the lower end users who consume fewer resources if they bought UH.

The third form of external growth is lateral integration. This involves the integration of firms engaged in the same stage of production in related industries (e.g. UH buying out DemoDemo). Again, this is done for 4 reasons. Firstly, to diversify and spread risks. If one of their businesses went bust, they have another one to fall back on, in a relatively different market. Secondly, to achieve economies of scope from R&D and marketing. Products can be marketed together, and this saves advertising cots. Thirdly, to develop greater compatibility and dependency between products so as to make the demand more inelastic (e.g. UH could put up a promotional offer like “If you buy 10 tutorials from DemoDemo, you get plan 2 at a 50% discount!”. The fourth reason is to penetrate related markets in order to jointly market products; this has been explained earlier on already.

Finally, the fourth type of external growth is conglomerate integration. This is the integration of firms in completely unrelated industries (also known as ‘diversifying’ integration). An example would be UH buying out a local chicken farm. This is done for 2 main reasons. Firstly, to acquire and strip the assets of sunset firms for the purpose of converting its real assets (land and capital) into more productive alternative uses. For example, UH could eventually use the chicken farm’s land as a site for a future datacenter that it’s about to build. The second reason is to diversify into different non-related markets in order to spread risks and exploit potential infant markets.

About the Author
Knogle has been closely involved in the webhosting industry for over 4 years. He’s currently studying Economics, Physics, Chemistry as well as Mathematics at a college in Singapore. He is an active participant at WebHostingTalk and strives to contribute to the community as best as he can.

Load, in computing, is a measure of the amount of processing a computer system is currently performing, usually in the form of a scalar and as some variation on a percentage.

In a *nix variant, Server load can be calculated by the uptime, top or the w command.
[root@localhost ~]# uptime
15:33:18 up 1:33, 3 users, load average: 0.01, 0.05, 0.09

The last 3 values show the server load for 1 , 5 and 15 minutes, in that order. This means that 1 minute back, the server load was 0.01, 5 minutes back it was 0.05 and 15 minutes back it was 0.09.

How much server load is ok.

What people usually call Server Load or Load is basically CPU load. This value shows how well the CPU is coping up with the tasks it needs to do. The server load is however a poor measure of a server’s performance. Yet it can give the administrator an indication if things are going wrong somewhere.

The ideal load for a single processor server is 1. A server load of 1 means that the CPU is doing all the tasks one after the other in a well oiled manner. There is no waiting Queue of processes.

The higher the server load goes, processes get Queued. That doesn’t mean that the moment the server load goes over 1, services will start failing. A server load of under 10 will result in sluggishness, may not result in failure. A Double digit server load may result in failure, especially if it sustains for a long time.

Multiple processors and server load.

For Servers with multiple processors, load is calculated by dividing the Load with the number of processors.

Actual load = Total load(as shown in uptime) / no. of CPUs

When there are multiple processors, the load gets evenly distributed among the CPUs. If one processor is busy, the task can choose another processor to perform the computation.

High load - How does this happen

In Internet servers, High loads are caused by diverse reasons, each requiring a different approach for correction.

Power users

In a virtual hosting environment, there are many users who use the servers for maintaining websites. Some websites are simple, and some are Processor hungry, bandwidth hungry eCommerce applications. If you or your clients have big ecommerce sites with a lot of visitors, your load may shoot up.

Many users have Database driven sites. When such sites have lot of visitors, the number of Database connections increases and results in high load.

Ideally an Internet server shouldn’t have more than 300-400 small to medium websites. If any of these users turn out to be power hungry, they could destabilise all the other users operations by hogging all the resources.

Script kiddies and attacks

Many times high loads are caused because the server wasn’t secure enough and got cracked. The cracker started running IRC scripts or eggdrops. Sometimes spamming could be reason.

In some cases, a valid user turns into a monster and starts illegally abusing the system by spamming or running insecure scripts.

The first indication of a problem is high load. That should give the server administrator enough hints that something is wrong somewhere.

Run “top” on *Nix systems to see which processes are causing the load. Kill such processes and check out where they originated from. You may discover that something is up. Be suspicious about anything that you see that is causing load.

Running backup on the server, daily stats, server tasks

Sometimes high load is caused due to valid maintenance tasks such as Daily Backups, Daily stats updates and Cron schedulers. It is normal that the server loads shoot up during these times. There is nothing to worry during this time, provided that high load doesn’t sustain for long. Therefore schedule such tasks during non Business hours when the users are minimum and therefore less likely to be affected.

Overselling

Irresponsible overselling by web hosts is a major reason why web Hosts have Server load problems. In overselling what happens is that the web host sells more resources(like space, bandwidth) than is present. The Web Host assumes that all users are not going to be using the space or bandwidth they purchased. For example, the government builds roads thinking that all the people aren’t going to use them at the same time. If the entire population were to step out of their houses, the roads would be totally inadequate.

Overselling is not all that bad, provided the Web Host is responsible in checking server load and acting upon it. Even if a Web host decides to oversell, the load has to be constantly monitored 24/7. If it reaches 2 or 3 fairly regularly, maybe it is time to move some websites to new servers.

About the Author

Sangeetha Naik heads Bobcares.com. She is the co-founder of Poornam Info Vision Ltd., Software and IT services company specializing in Linux based solutions for Webhosts and ISPs. Poornam Info Vision is an ISO 9001:2000 certified company with a team of over 140 engineers.

If you are acquiring web hosting companies and a specific target primarily has annual customer accounts, don’t run for the hills, quantify it. Some buyers are immediately concerned about the increased risk of customer renewals for annual accounts which are 6-12 months out. At the same time they do not want to provide service and support each month for free for many of the customers for that period of time. There is a solution.

The two main value drivers in this equation are customer renewal rates and the “Total Customer Support Months” figure, (or “TCSM”). The later is as follows. If a customer signed up or renewed their annual contract 2 months ago, then this customer counts as 10 Customer Support Months. If a customer signed up or renewed 5 months ago then the contributing Customer Support Months is 7. Add this for every customer and you get a Total Customer Support Months. Multiply the total, times the average monthly cost to provide service and support to the average customer and you get the TCSMs figure in dollars. This needs to be subtracted from the valuation of the company if all of the customer accounts were monthly.

For example, if you are analyzing a customer base of 1,200 accounts and they are all billed annually and spread evenly throughout the year so each month 100 are up for renewal, then the TCSM is 7,800 for all of the accounts and the average monthly cost to provide service and support to the average customer is $8, then the value of this issue is $62,400. This figure is of special relevance if the renewals are not spread evenly across the 12 months of the year. It is common for companies to do “marketing blitz’s” from time to time and sign up a lot of annual accounts in a 1-3 month period.

Customer renewal rates is the other value driver. I will use two examples.

Higher Renewal Rates: The target company has 1,200 customer accounts which pay $240/year ($288,000/year), and they are evenly spread throughout the year so 100 are up for renewal in each of the next 12 months. In looking at the trailing 12 months, on average each month 95% of the customers renewed for another year, so the initial forecast for the next 12 months is that 1,140 will renew and pay $273,600, not counting new customers.

Lower Renewal Rates: The target company has 1,200 customer accounts which pay $240/year ($288,000/year), and they are evenly spread throughout the year so 100 are up for renewal in each of the next 12 months. In looking at the trailing 12 months, on average each month 50% of the customers renewed for another year, so the initial forecast for the next 12 months is that 600 will renew and pay $144,000, not counting new customers.

Forecasting Renewal Rates: I wish forecasting annual customer renewals would be as easy as taking the seller’s historical rates and forecasting it out 12 months, but it’s not.

• It is important to realize at first the target company’s renewal rates will be par for the course, but over time the buyer’s renewal rate will be the correct rate to forecast. If the buyer’s rate of renewal is 60% and the seller’s rate is 90%, it goes without saying the buyer needs to think hard and fast about why and DO NOT forecast the acquired base at 90% renewal for a long period of time.
• Some of the factors which will affect a change in the renewal rates of the acquired base are the acquirer’s billing methods, pricing, service, support etc. Changes in each of these will affect renewal rates and should be factored in to the forecast.
• Look at the quarterly changes in customer renewal rates prior to closing. Look at the trailing 4 quarters renewal rates. Are they getting better or worse? … take into consideration the trend as opposed to using just last years total renewal rate.
• Figure out why did the renewal rate change? Did the seller keep lowering prices faster than others in the industry, hence the renewal rates increased a bit quarter over quarter? Or, did the renewal rates fall slightly because a year ago there were 300 accounts per support employee, six months ago there were 500 and for the last quarter there were 700 accounts per support employee.

In conclusion, yes, there is a reduction in the value of a web hosting company which has primarily annual customer accounts. It has to do with Total Customer Support Months “TCSM’s” and customer renewal rates.

About the Author

Presently, Eric Furlow assists small and medium sized companies both acquire and divest technology companies. He has experience in over 60 transactions in the paging, SMR, cellular, tower, ISP and web hosting industries. He has a Masters in Finance from Bentley Graduate School of Business in Waltham, MA. Before heading up Furlow Consulting Corporation , he was the Mergers and Acquisition Manager for A+ Network, Inc. which was sold to Metrocall, “MCLL”.

This article explains that one of the most challenging facets of starting a new web hosting business, or even maintaining an existing one, is keeping your clients happy. Here are some tips to make help make your customers feel satisfied that won’t break the bank.

To attract potential customers and also to keep them, it is important your business tries to satisfy them as much as possible with fast, reliable and efficient customer service techniques. There are important, and also cost effective ways, to maintain your customers levels of satisfaction.

It is important to remember that starting, or maintaining, a working web hosting company does not mean that you need to break the bank to keep your clientele satisfied.

24 Hour Support/Live Chat:

Standards in web hosting have changed in the last couple of years. One of the major changes is 24 hour support. To attract serious clients as of late, it is important to offer a level of support that is at parity with the best.

This might seem an expensive option to provide, however, it does not need to be, especially if you are just starting up a small company. Today there are plenty of web hosting forums and administration forums that allow you to advertise your services for free. Many of these forums always have freelance operators requesting work. It is possible to find the right person for the job at a very low cost.

However it is always important to ensure who you are hiring to help out with your business. Always remember that these people represent your, and your business.

Email Support:

If it is not possible to offer 24 hour support, the luxury of getting a timely response for the client should always be there. There are always talented individuals willing to help out on web hosting forums and can usually be hired for small amounts of money, or, some will generally just work for free to pass the time.

A Service Level Agreement (SLA) should always be advertised to ensure your customers are aware of the timeframe for a response. And if your business is running behind on that SLA, an auto-reply to your inbox explaining the temporary delay might save any angry emails if your deadline is not met.

Knowledge Base/Wiki:

Another option to help solve a client’s issue is a detailed knowledge base or wiki. Most good web hosting companies today have these available to paid clients. As a customer, I always found that a knowledge base was always useful to find out information, especially if a customer service representative was not available.

Information for your knowledge base can be found from a variety of places if you know where to look. For example, web hosting forums are full of free knowledge if you are patient enough to search for questions and answers. Search engines such as www.google.com, www.snap.com are just two good ways to find information for a knowledge base.

Another great option that has taken off as the Internet’s unofficial encyclopedia is www.wikipedia.org. There are developing web hosting wiki’s that are currently on the Internet that could also help you develop your own knowledge base or wiki.

A great example of a knowledge base is http://support.lypha.com/kb/.

Web Forum/Bulletin Board:

If you do not like 24 hour support/live chat or emails, or if you want another alternative for your customers, then you could try implementing a forum into your web hosting support repertoire. The advantage of a forum is this enables new and existing customers to interact with each other.

A web host with a good support network is always a popular selling tool. If it is there to see for potential customers they can see upfront what sort of customers you have, and how they interact. If you have a support or technical-minded customer base, implementing a forum can take some of the support workload off you or your business for no extra cost.

Phone Support:

Over the past couple of years phone support is an area of customer support that has expanded to become a more popular solution. A large majority of companies that offer phone support offer it as a free service to the customer. Larger companies see this as a means to keep a personal touch with their clients.

If you are a small hosting company, this is not always a cost effective solution to offer phone support. However, if you target your sales to a local geographical area it is possible for customers to call you directly for the cost of a local call. By limiting your geographical area it allows customers to understand the nature of your business is to maintain a healthy customer relationship.

In Australia, it is simple to setup a pre-paid phone number that you could use as a support line that customers could contact you locally. If you were a large company this option would seem highly unprofessional, although for a small company having a personal number to call adds a local feel to your business.

In Australia, generally calling a 1300 number is the cost of a local call. For example, http://www.cheap-1300-numbers.com.au.

Web hosting companies with a solid customer service base will always have a much better chance at succeeding as opposed to ones that do not. At the end of the day the customer is the most important asset that any business can have as they generate your revenue. If you look after your customers, then theory has it, they should look after you.

About the Author

Paul Harbeck is located in Melbourne, Australia. He has over seven years experience as a webmaster/admin with several successful websites. The current project he is working on is to launch his own personal website.

Today we won’t be taking a look at black-hat search engine optimization tactics. Admittedly, I’ve toyed with them in a “know your enemy” kind of way but I’m no expert on advanced cloaking techniques, nor effective link spamming tactics. What we’re going to cover here are the hidden (i.e. dark) areas of effective search engine optimization strategy.

I’ve written numerous times in past articles and blog posts that using tricks to rank your site highly is, in the end, ineffective as tricks imply a manipulation of the ranking formula and will eventually become obsolete as the search engines work to advance their algorithms and shut down such possible abuses. But here I’m going to illustrate some of the tricks we use to drive traffic to our site. Is this a conflict? Not really. These “tricks” aren’t so much directed at search engines as they are website owners and visitors. These are marketing tricks, not SEO tricks; they just happen to help you with your rankings.

Before we begin, let’s review an important point about Google. When most people think of Google they think of the dominant search engine (and in that they would be right). However, if Google was primarily a search engine it would be much smaller than it is now. No, it is an advertising company, and the world’s largest at that. To this end it needs traffic, market share, and clicks. It needs you to love Google.com, to visit it often, and to visit the other properties and offerings such as Gmail. If you do this, the odds of you clicking on one of the paid ads increases and its primary function is fulfilled. It is driven by this purpose that Google has developed the most complex search algorithm that has ever existed. Its search is the company’s primary source of traffic. The better its results, the more you will return, the greater the likelihood you will click an ad, and the more revenue it generates (thus leading to its continued increases in reported revenue quarter-after-quarter). Why is this important? Because this is the driving force of its current algorithm and will be for the foreseeable future, we can assume that any action that increases relevant traffic to your site, increases the stickiness of your site and/or increases the number of links from relevant sites to yours will help your rankings and it will help Google keep its visitors loyal.

Let’s also recall the purpose of this article. This is NOT an article about black-hat search engine optimization tactics; rather it’s about the hidden aspects of SEO that are often overlooked. And so, without further ado, let’s get down to the meat: What are the dark tactics that you can use to boost your website rankings?

Building A Sticky Site

A point I’ve made in past articles that I will reinforce here as opposed to “contradicting” will be that of the importance of a sticky site. Of course, monitoring your statistics to assess your visitors’ behavior is an important practice for the conversions on your site; however its importance from a search engine optimization perspective is often overlooked. I’ve mentioned before and I’ll mention again, the search engines have the ability to monitor the length of time a visitor spends between visits to that engine. If you are on Google, enter “sSEO services” into the search bar and visit the Beanstalk site but only spend five seconds there before hitting the back button, Google can infer that the site was not what you were looking for. If it was five or 10 minutes before you returned back to Google, it could thus infer that you found content useful to your query.

So let’s put that more obviously, having a site on which visitors find what they’re looking for quickly, easily, and in a visually pleasing way, will increase their time on your site, which will thus increase the assumption by the search engines that you are relevant for the phrase the searcher has queried. This will reinforce that your site does indeed belong among the top site. As a disclaimer: this works on a mass scale, so don’t go running off and clicking through to your competitors and quickly hitting the back button. First, it’s unethical (like clicking their paid links) and second, it doesn’t work like that (how big a hole would THAT be in the algorithm) so it would only be a waste of your time.

The “how to” of building a sticky site I will leave to designers (being an SEO - my skills lie more in understanding mathematical formula).

Clickability Counts

The engines know when your site appears in a set of search results and they further know how often your site was clicked on when it appeared. The more often your site is selected when presented in a set of results, the more relevant it is assumed to be and thus, the more entrenched it becomes in that set of results (assuming your stickiness issues are dealt with).

What this means is that your title and description matter, not just as part of the classical search engine optimization tactics we’ve used them for since the 90’s but also to draw visitors to your site. Fortunately the end goal of the engines closely matches what your own end goal should be for your site - maximizing traffic. Let’s take a look at two example titles that the Beanstalk site could have:

An old-school over-optimized title: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Services Company | Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning | SEO Services, Internet Marketing, Link Building, Consulting, Training & Copywriting

Our current title: Expert SEO Services by Beanstalk

Can you see the difference? While our title changes periodically as we test new titles for clickthroughs, we always keep it short, easy to read, and always such that the whole title will appear in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). Our clickthroughs are much higher with shorter titles than longer and we have seen the same results with client sites.
The same applies to your description tag, but the rules are a bit different. With your description tag you want to make sure to include your targeted keywords and make the copy compelling to a searcher. The reason for this is that when searched keywords are included in your description, it is typically the description that appears in the SERPs. This gives you an opportunity to determine how your ad to the world appears. You write your title, you write your description - write both well and your clickthroughs will increase. And when your clickthroughs go up, the implied relevancy the engines will assume your site has to that phrase will increase with it and thus, so too will your rankings for that phrase.

Getting People To Link To You

We’re not going to bother discussing reciprocal link building, directory submissions or the other usual suspects. There are countless articles out there on those topics. What we’re going to focus on here are the tactics for getting articles picked up widely and the resources you want to get them onto (and if you’re reading this, you know it works), as well as ways to get the links that both you and the search engines will love the most, which are the ones you don’t ask for or work for outside of creating a great site with useful content. The best part of these links is that they not only work to boost your link popularity, but they also tend to drive great traffic to your site. Let’s begin with articles.
When you’re working to publish an article there are two main audience members: the readers and, more importantly, the editors (I say more importantly as they’re the ones that determine if you have any readers at all). There are some tactics for increasing both:

1. Write a compelling title. This gets back to the point I was making in the first paragraph. Everyone is interested in black hat-search engine optimization, even those of us who don’t practice it. Readers will be drawn to it as it receives relatively low coverage and editors like to publish something that they feel may draw some controversy. While this article doesn’t get into black-hat tactics as some editors may have hoped, it will draw them in and get their attention.
2. Find quality related resources and get the article published there. I generally use a tool like PR Prowler to find good, quality resources to submit articles to. You can do it manually through a search engine, but PR Prowler just speeds up the process so much that after its first use it’s paid for itself. You want the places you submit to, to be related to your industry and you want them to provide a link back. If you can setup that link as anchor text instead of your URL, it’s all the better.
3. Keep a list and add to it. If you’re going to publish multiple articles, don’t start from scratch every time. Keep a list and try to add a few sites to it with each submission. This will keep your list growing and get you more exposure and links as time goes on.
4. Keep a good relationship with the editors. They are the end-all-be-all of whether this tactic will work or not as a link and traffic building tactic. Make sure you’re polite and don’t write rude emails if you get declined. Read what they say and make sure to take it into account with future articles.

But what if you don’t want to build links with articles? What if you want to get links the old fashioned way (and I’m talking about the old old old way - you know, before there was any SEO value to it)? What if you would like to get people to link to you simply because they like your content? (I know, shocking but it actually happens!) There are a few different factors that you need to take into account to accomplish this. Here are a few important rules to follow:

1. Create content that others will want to link to. This is an art in-and-of-itself. I wrote about some of the basic rules involved with this in a past article “Building Link Bait” and so I won’t repeat it here.
2. Get the bait into social bookmarking sites. This will get people interested in your topic aware of it. If it’s good, they may link to it. Don’t just focus on Digg and the other majors, look around for some industry-specific bookmarking sites. For example, when this article is complete, I’ll work to get it into Sphinn, an SEO bookmarking site.
3. Get the bait into forums and/or blogs. I’m not talking about blog spamming here, I’m talking about finding blogs and forums that are RELATED to your topic and whose visitors could be genuinely helped by the tool, information, etc. that you’re providing. Don’t worry if the blog has rel=”nofollow” on the links. The purpose is webmaster awareness, not getting links from the blogs (I’ll leave that to a different article).
4. Promote the bait on your site. Use banners, links, your blog, etc. to build awareness.
5. Provide the code to link to your bait. The easier you make it for people to link to you, the more of them will. Provide the code with a text and banner option and you’ll increase the number of people who will link to you.
6. Put out a press release. If it’s big enough news, put out a press release. If the media grabs it, you’ve won the lottery both in publicity and in high-valued links.
7. If the topic of your bait is searched on the engines, rank it.

About The Author

Dave Davies is the CEO of Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning. Beanstalk offers SEO, consulting, training, copywriting and link building services to clients from around the world. We would like to thank Moonrise design, a San Francisco web design company, for allowing us to use our experiences with them as an example. Be sure to visit our SEO articles archives for more information on SEO and web design best practices.

• The most liquid scenario is a co-located web hosting client base, with no data center, offices, or employees, and only one owner/decision maker. This type of business can be under contract to be sold within 48 hours. (Post ‘Letter of Intent’ due diligence, contract preparation, integration plans etc. all take a bit of time.)
• The least liquid scenario is a web hosting company, which offers design services, that has offices, a data center, and offers-related services such as access, marketing services and more.

Valuation Difference:
Something I have seen many times is where the owner/decision maker on the sell side has heard web hosting company valuation formulas and wants to apply those formulas to his company. Inevitably the owner is disappointed when the offer comes up short in their mind, and passes on what actually is a fair valuation.

Design Services:
The decision to staff up and start offering web design services to complement the pure play hosting recurring revenue is a huge decision with regards to the effect on business liquidity. Of course, design services can be a natural fit with hosting clients by helping to reduce client churn and up selling existing clients. However, the value of the revenue and cash flow generated from one-time design jobs is nowhere near the value of the recurring hosting revenue and cash flow.

Negatives of design departments when it comes time to sell:

• From the buyer’s perspective, acquiring the entire company and keeping the design efforts going is risky. It’s 50/50 whether the key design people will stick around after closing … regardless what they or the seller states. In addition, if you have to replace key people, the new staff will not have the relationships with the client base.
• From the buyer’s perspective, acquiring the entire company then canceling the design efforts is usually a risky decision as well. There are offices to deal with in addition to staff, which needs to be let go because they are both time consuming and detrimental to the existing client base.
• My estimate is for every 20 buyers of a pure play hosting company, there are only one or two buyers for hosting design shop combos.

Internet Data Center:

Investing in an IDC may increase the value of the entire company by an enormous amount over time, but it definitely reduces the liquidity in the short run. Typically, smaller web hosts co-locate in the beginning. Then, at a later date, they acquire their own data center. In turn, the company will then offer space to other smaller hosts, hence creating yet another service offering.

Owning an underutilized data center reduces the number of one type of buyer - the “cash flow buyer” - yet invites a new category of buyer - the “asset and cash flow buyer.” The later buyer is looking to both grow through acquisitions and make the swap from co-location to owning the data center. The less remaining capacity of the data center, the more of a cash flow type deal it will be, meaning usually more liquid.

About the author

Presently, Eric Furlow assists small and medium sized companies both acquire and divest technology companies. He has experience in over 60 transactions in the paging, SMR, cellular, tower, ISP and web hosting industries. He has a Masters in Finance from Bentley Graduate School of Business in Waltham, MA. Before heading up Furlow Consulting Corporation , he was the Mergers and Acquisition Manager for A+ Network, Inc. which was sold to Metrocall, “MCLL”.

Web 2.0 and You

Web 2.0 features are zipping across cyberspace like laser-guided missiles. The 2.0 concept may be fresh; or maybe not. That debate is still in full swing at webmaster meeting places, with many digi-pundits loudly proclaiming that we’re already on to version Web 3.0 or 4.0 or 8.0. Talk about splitting hairs!

The fact is, regardless of what you call it, the web is changing at the speed of human imagination. In the good old days (pre-2004), the web was a ‘place’ where people went to do stuff. You shopped, researched arcane facts in nanoseconds and shared your thoughts in chat rooms. You logged on to perform a task. Plain, simple, understandable.

Then along comes the concept of Web 2.0 and web hosts and site owners are looking at a very different on-line dynamic. Today, people don’t just log on to passively read, buy or share. They want to be a part of it. And they are.

Think about it. In the past, a few million web sites were interactive to the extent that you could click through pages and maybe leave a comment on a chat board. But that’s no longer the case. Today, everybody can own a little bit of digital turf. For example, the blogosphere is expanding at light speed. Blogs and forums are showing up on more and more sites. The new revolution, Web 2.0, is here and things will never be the same.

What Web Hosts and Site Owners Must Know About Web 2.0

In the past, content was developed by copy writers and distributed through web sites to end users. Each site was a self-contained, little unit with a few links to similar sites. Those few delivered content to the many.

Today, content is created by anyone with a computer and a dial-up modem. It’s no longer site owners and SEO hacks developing web content. So, what does this mean to you as a host or consumer of hosting services?

Well, because the sources of on-line information have expanded, there’s a lot more data out there, which needs to be stored and made accessible. (We’re going to need a bigger hard drive). Furthermore, increased storage capacity is a given. Lots of it.

Increased bandwidth will also become crucial. As content is developed from an expanding pool of sources, it will be remixed, repackaged and distributed in new ways. RSS is a perfect example. Distributing content through RSS technology means that data is no longer static. It moves. And readers move with it.

So, a reader finds a blog entry of interest with a link back to the origin site. In the Web 2.0 world, content is often accessed far from its origination domain. That means there are more web users on the move to track down the source of the blog entry, RSS (really simple syndication) feed or API (application programming interface). Now, multiply this by a million times a second and suddenly, the need for a larger door becomes plainly evident. We must have more bandwidth!

And what about the personalized delivery of content to millions of users? It used to be that a politics junkie had to visit his ten favorite sites to see what was new. Now, in the age of Web 2.0, content can be selected by the user from numerous different sites and delivered to his or her RSS reader each morning. It’s a real time saver for the user and site owners love it because it provides a new means to distribute and gather fresh content.

A web host, however, is looking at ever-increasing bandwidth needs, which ultimately will lead to higher rates for site owners (subscribers). And some of those subscribers are going to bail when their monthly hosting fees double. That’s why astute hosts are paving the way by offering new services and new client options. Sliding scale, a la carte hosting features and fees, will become more common and more diverse.

Web 2.0 Software — Are You Ready For The Unknown?

If you don’t stay current on issues impacting hosting companies, you won’t be in business for long. You have to deliver the latest — right now. The problem is, the latest has yet to be created in many sectors.

Really Simple Syndication (RSS) technology, again, provides the perfect example. RSS actually covers several formats of content distribution, but compatibility issues are present. Clearly, the solution is to develop uniform standards for RSS aggregators and for the distribution of all RSS-delivered content. What those standards will be is unsettled (though that’s likely to change quickly). However, any web host or site owner must be ready to adapt to all the Web 2.0 tools that will be developed to handle this expected tsunami of metadata.

Extreme Trust — Does It Threaten Your Functionality?

In the static days of Web 1.0, you could access a bunch of on-line encyclopedias and download an article for your child’s homework. The content was developed by a relatively small pool of authors and experts and it didn’t change. It wasn’t dynamic.

However, today, a site such as Wikipedia.com is being built on the concept of extreme trust.Wikipedia is written daily by volunteer contributors and revised by those who read the original submission. So, for example, a nurse could submit an entry on a specific type of surgical procedure that would be posted with the caveat that the content hadn’t been verified. Still, it was there to be read.

T hen, along comes a brain surgeon. He makes a couple of revisions and adds a little more technical data. The surgeon’s name is then added to an expanding list of contributors and editors. And the original article is refined a bit further.
The result is something called “social information” — a concept that brings together the collective knowledge of all web users to develop a dynamic, ever-expanding base of metadata.

However, there have been problems. In one case, a contributor submitted an entry that tied a prominent government official to the Kennedy assassination. And though the error was caught and the article was removed, it points out the inherent dangers in relying on extreme trust.

Over time, the ability to access and alter content housed on a host server or web site may create problems. With over 200 viruses introduced each week, how long will it take the black hats to turn extreme trust to their advantage? And what does that mean for web hosts and site owners? Certainly, a top down analysis is a worthy consideration.

Selling Web 2.0 Services

Get a jump on client needs and demands by delivering the services that the Web 2.0 e-commerce community will expect:

Diversity and Compatibility
The ability to store, manage and distribute metadata in all formats and to all media (cells, ATMs, digital TV, etc.)

Cost
More bandwidth, more services = higher monthly hosting fees.

Reliability
It has to be functional 24/7/365 as this data mass expands and more users discover the ease of becoming a part of the process.

Host Server Security
Updated regularly and promoted heavily. If you’re a host, you must provide security and accessibility. If you’re a site owner, you want a host that maintains the latest web tools to ensure security and customer participation — a dicey mix, but one that’s already here.

Accessibility
Easier uploads and downloads and more client-activated, client-engineered features. Site owners will have to update sites regularly. No more so-called “evergreen content.” The process should be transparent and easy enough for a simian to understand.

Relevant Site Metrics
It’s not enough to know the number of hits; site owners also want to know who’s getting those RSS feeds. Part of the host’s service upgrade should include improved site metrics.

Those are what savvy site owners want from a hosting service and that’s what they’ll be looking for. They’ll want answers and explanations of how the host currently manages these services and what plans the host has for updates and upgrades.
The impact of Web 2.0 has yet to be felt, but there’s no doubt it’s coming. And it will affect web users, designers and hosting services alike. It will require new web tools and a new skill set on the part of those in the business of constructing and supporting web sites. Web designers and hosts who fail to develop these new skills will be doing themselves a disservice. They’ll also soon discover that the hosting company across town is eating their lunch!

Web technology no longer evolves, it explodes with new uses and features that require the development of new skills, new security and a new way of thinking for web hosts, site designers and, of course, site owners. The web, as a platform on which all users develop connectivity through the mere act of participating, is the next challenge waiting to be met.

About the Author

Frederick Townes is the CEO of W3 EDGE, a Boston-based web design company specializing in web standards and search engine friendly web design. Whether your needs fall into the Web 2.0 category or if need an attractive design that will convert your visitors into buyers, W3 fills the need.

Companies have to ensure that their trainees assimilate lessons fast and imbibe them deeply. A long training phase results in a lot of revenue loss, and an incomplete understanding of lessons will result in the trainee having to spend a lot of time retraining himself on the job, or wasting his co-worker’s time by asking for help, or in the worst case, making mistakes which could affect business.

As a trainer, you need to first keep in mind a few basic techniques and formulate a training methodology. The process is independent of what you teach. You could be teaching apache, DNS or walking them through the features of cpanel. But a common teaching methodology is applicable for each of these topics. The following points try to capture the essentials of a training methodology :

1) GETTING STARTED :

a) Organize study material - You need to make sure the trainees are actually using the material prepared for them. They should also find the material convenient to use.

Make the material as modular as possible, and email them the modules, one at a time. This is a far better approach than asking them to use your online tutorials. Most students don’t prefer using online study material. You need to hand it to them directly, and give them only what is required at the time. Don’t email them the entire course manual, as they would simply get lost in a sea of information. There is also a risk of them skimming through all the topics without really focusing on them one at a time.

b) Make them understand the business - Before getting into the technical topics, it is extremely important to make them understand how the hosting business works.

All the components of a hosting operation need to be listed out and connected, preferably using diagrams and examples. They need to be familiarized with the various vendors, contractors and service providers that your company uses, and the relationship and significance of each of these entities.

2) LAYING THE FOUNDATION

a) Get their basics right - Start with the basic topics and make them understand it thoroughly. Specifics can be taught later.

For instance, it is important to first make sure they understand the basics, such as how apache and DNS works, before teaching them how to compile stuff. Explain how a domain name resolves to IP, how webservers serve pages and how email works. Lay a strong foundation, and build on it.

b) Enter topics quickly - Don’t waste time with introducing the topic and giving prefaces. Keep increasing the “detail level” gradually. Make it easy for the students to enter. Once they’re in, turn up the heat.

While explaining DNS for example, first explain to them that it acts like a database which associates domain names to their corresponding IP addresses. You could then explain the series of events that happen outside a DNS server, during the process of domain name resolution. Next, the structure of a DNS server can be explained. Specific details such as TTL can come much later, after the trainee has understood what DNS is all about.

3) THE PRACTICAL APPROACH

a) Talk less, do more - Demonstrate how things work.

Your training process should mostly consist of lab sessions. Once you’re done explaining how an email is delivered, show them what actually happens on the server. Try sending email and showing them the complete verbose output, with all the handshakes and transactions that take place. Show them the relevant files that come into play, show them log messages, open the inbox and show them the email itself, walk them through the headers for the complete picture.

b) Make them lose their inhibitions and gain confidence - Set up prototypes for them to work on.

One of your most important objectives as a trainer, is to make your trainees lose their fears. You may find that your trainees are just too inhibited, while working on your servers or while using the admin tools and control panels You may often find them taking too much time doing simple tasks, because they’re too unsure and are low on confidence. Just like you probably were, the first time you entered a live server or tried to modify a real account.

The solution to this is to constantly engage them in practical exercises on prototypes. Avoid using live servers. Instead set up a local server farm in your intranet, complete with domain names (that resolve locally within your intranet), accounts and control panels. Set up as many exercises as possible, so that they become comfortable with the type of work, gain confidence and lose inhibitions. The trainees evolve into productive, efficient employees in quick time through this.

4) TEACHING TIPS

a) Always draw a real life parallel - A real life association helps them understand the subject and ignites interest. For example, instead of spending 10 minutes explaining what Mailman is, tell them it is a sofware that works similar to yahoo groups.

b) Never “lecture” continously for long - Talk in short, crisp sentences, interspersed with questions and similar interactive sessions.

c) Drill it in - Repeat what you said over and over again, in differently packaged sentences and actions. Our memory seems to absorb data more effectively when we encounter it repeatedly.

d) Be passionate about the subjects - The excitement and interest that you arouse in the trainees is directly proportional to what you have towards the subjects.

e) Teach through stories - While explaining a flow of events, package it in the form of a story.

Though a cliched teaching technique, it is also one of the most underestimated ones. Stories bring about an element of liveliness, curiosity and enthusiasm in the teaching sessions. Besides, it also helps memorize information very well because the stories greatly improve association and recall.

5) EXERCISING THE BRAIN

a) Give their brain a tough workout - Devise methods which will ensure that their brains get a lot of exercise.

It is a well known fact that our brain gets more exercise when you throw things at it that don’t meet expectations, as opposed to those that do. So set up as many twisted and unpredictable problems as possible. Don’t help them a lot. Let them wrack their brains and arrive at solutions. Refrain from spoonfeeding.

b) Set up interactive exercises - Organize quizzes, seminars, competitions. Make the whole training programme look like one big tournament. Conventional oral examinations are also highly recommended, preferably on a daily basis. Let there be prizes and trophies, to add the vital elements of appreciation and achievement.

Your organization’s employees are its jewels. But it is not possible to create a jewel without first mining and polishing the gold. All the best with your training efforts!

About the Author

InstaCarma has been in the business of providing technical support and server management services for the hosting industry since 2002.

The company’s operations are based in Bangalore, India. The company has grown rapidly since inception and now boasts of excellent human resource and an enviable client base. The company falls under the Carmatec group of companies, which also runs a premier linux training organization named EduCarma.

It’s no secret that there has been an on-going war over customers in the web hosting industry for many years. Together with the technical evolution of computer hardware, this fierce competition has drastically increased what you get for your money when you buy a web hosting account.

The people behind Pingdom originally came from the web hosting industry, so we tend to keep an eye on the development in that industry out of sheer curiosity (aside from the fact that we have a lot of web hosting companies as customers, so we deal with them on a daily basis). We know that the changes in what the hosting industry offers have been enormous, but we wanted to find out exactly how much things have changed.

Reaching 10 years into the past

Thanks to the good old Wayback Machine, we were able to look at archived web pages of a few web hosting companies that were active 10 years ago. We selected Dreamhost, Liquidweb and Hostway, for no other reason than them being well-known today and that they were around 10 years ago.

We looked at three things. The price of a regular, consumer-oriented shared web hosting account, and how much storage space and data transfer (traffic) was included in that account. And boy have things changed.

Let us visualize the change for you.

The image above is based on the averaged offers of the three web hosts for the shared web hosting account we described above.

Content has changed, not prices

You can say that the term “price war” that has been thrown around isn’t necessarily what has actually been happening. The war has been one of features, adding increasing amounts of storage and data transfer. Prices haven’t changed all that much (if at all), but you get a lot more bang for your buck these days. And with a lot, we mean A LOT, as you will see if you continue reading.

Increase in storage space

The hosting industry has clearly benefitted from the huge advances in hard drive technology (and of course much cheaper hard drives in general).

The largest increase (of these three) comes from Dreamhost, who have increased the storage they offer by 50,000 times. (Yes, that’s right. Fifty thousand times.)

Increase in data transfer (traffic)

(Numbers are per month.)

Data transfer numbers have increased, but not as much as storage. Network capacity is apparently not keeping up with storage space.

Here again it’s Dreamhost, out of these three, that have increased the most. 2,500 times more traffic per month. (Their offer in 1998 actually said “unlimited”, but a look at their terms of service revealed this to mean 2GB per month.)

Bang per buck

This table really shows how much more you get for your money compared to ten years ago.

*cough* Overselling? *cough*

There has been a lot of discussion about overselling (i.e. offering more than you can actually deliver to everyone), and some of these numbers do indicate this to some extent, at least those of Dreamhost. It’s hard to look at these numbers without thinking that, so that is why we mention it.

To be fair, they have gone on the record in their blog explaining the practice and their reasoning behind it (similar to mobile carriers not having capacity to handle everyone calling at once). Anyway, this article was never meant to be about overselling. It was meant to be about now vs then.

Web hosting 10 years from now?

We only looked at storage and data transfer here, but there are of course also other factors and features that add more value to web hosting packages these days compared to 10 years ago.

We are not going to speculate what hosting will look like 10 years from now, though. Judging by what has happened in the last 10 years, we don’t even dare to guess that far ahead into the future. But please feel free to do so in the comments!

About the Author

Pingdom is an uptime monitoring service with a global approach, monitoring websites and servers from every continent to ensure the best reliability and accuracy possible. The company is growing fast and today has customers in 126 countries, ranging from small one-man businesses to large, international corporations. Find out more at www.pingdom.com.

I get asked every day about the valuation of hosting companies and related entities. Here is my take on the market. Since everyone in the hosting space is not a pure play hosting company, I will review several combination business models.

• Pure Play Web Hosting Companies, without an IDC
• Pure Play Web Hosting Companies, with an IDC
• Web Hosting Companies, which offer web site design services
• Web Site Design Shops, which can also host their client’s site
• Web Hosting Company, which also offers IT related, one time and recurring services

Pure Play Web Hosting Companies, without an IDC:

Of these five business models, this scenario is by far the most liquid, and is what the greatest number of buyers are presently looking for. While this model is the easiest to value and has the least variation in valuation perception between buyers and sellers, it is not necessarily the most valuable of the five. These companies are valued around 11-13 times monthly recurring revenue. If a company is growing rapidly, it is common to add the trailing six months and annualize the amount. In some cases, with all of these business models, the valuation can easily be less due to variables such as annual billing, no contracts, commodity pricing, high customer churn, reliability problems, bad reputation, poor support, a lack of organization and a few other reasons. In other cases, the valuation can be slightly greater due to the opposite status in all of the aforementioned variables. In addition, with every model, the company can be worth a greater amount to a specific buyer because of his post-closing synergies and strategy. This happens quite frequently.

The reason there are more buyers for this business model is because most of the time these buyers have their own IDC and want to increase the capacity utilization by migrating the seller’s servers/customers. In addition, there is no data center to acquire, manage and sell post-closing. In almost every case, if the seller co-locates their servers or leases servers from a Tier 1 facility, the risk to the buyer is less than if the seller has their own IDC. The buyer simply takes over the server leases.

Pure Play Web Hosting Companies, with an IDC:

When growing a web hosting company, the benefits of control and leverage of owning an IDC can be notable. When evolving into the divestiture phase, it can be a negative to many buyers. (On a side more, I have seen many very successful business models where the company co-locates and/or leases servers with no intention of ever owning the IDC.)

Here is an example of when the IDC can be a problem:
A web hosting company billing out $1,000,000/year, invests $500,000 in a small IDC which they anticipate using 30% of with the existing servers. Six months later the IDC is built, the servers have been migrated, and the company has grown to $1,200,000 in annual sales. Now let’s say, for whatever reason, the owner wants/has to sell the entire company. There are two basic groups of assets.

Est. Value
1. Recurring Revenue (and associated equipment): $1,200,000 +-
2. IDC: (with associated, and now slightly obsolete equip) $450,000 +-

Scenario A: To most buyers the company is worth $1,200,000 +-, because they have their own IDC and do not want or need additional capacity.

Scenario B: To a few buyers it’s worth $1,650,000 because they want to acquire an IDC either because they need more capacity, want an IDC in that geographic area, or simply because they are currently co-located or lease their servers and want to finally own their own. The number of buyers pursuing Scenario B is far less than in Scenario A. However, this buyer is much more motivated to do a deal.

So the seller has a decision to make. Sell the customer base, and then try to sell the IDC to another buyer at a later date, or hold out for a buyer who wants both. The greater the recurring revenue a company has as a multiple of the amount invested in the IDC, the less this is a detriment to the divestiture process.

Web Hosting Companies, which offer web site design services:

One day earlier this year someone presented an argument to me that one time web site design revenue is actually recurring revenue and should be valued as such. His logic was that customers continually ask his firm for updates and changes, and that is recurring revenue. The truth is, it is not recurring revenue and the market agrees, hence one-time design revenue valued less than recurring revenue. It is no more recurring than an accountant or attorney whom provide regular professional services to their clients.

One approach to valuing the one time design revenue is applying a multiple of the gross profit … design income per hour, minus real employee cost per hour. Some hosting and design companies are in reality breaking even on the design work. Their goal is to provide inexpensive web design to keep the customers from leaving. In this scenario, the one time design revenue is worth almost nothing other than its positive affect on decreased customer churn.

Side Note: The Valuation and liquidity with any design revenue stream.
This applies to the business model in this section as well as to the next section. The greater design revenue is as a percent of the total revenue, the less the valuation of the company. In addition, the company is less liquid. Another correlation, the more design revenue is a part of the total revenue, the more the company is valued using metrics such as EBITDA multiples, growth rates, gross profit, and the committed client work pipeline, and less on the recurring revenue multiple. The reason there is such a focus on the recurring revenue with regular hosting company valuations is because the buyer’s cost structure post-closing is in many cases going to be notably different than the seller’s cost structure.

Let me illustrate two scenarios of web hosting and design companies for sale.

Scenario A: (the good one): This company has 8 employees and 80% of their revenue is recurring web hosting revenue. The owner is passive and is not involved with day-to-day operations. In addition, the design clients are not local. … This company is not only “very sellable”, it can be moved out of that market.

Scenario B: (the bad one): This company has 8 employees and 80% of their revenue is one-time web design. This owner, who designs himself, is very active in the business and knows most of the web design clients himself. Most of the design clients are all in the local market. This company is close to being “un-sellable”.

Web Site Design Shops, which can also host their client’s site:

This business model looks a lot like Scenario B. This is really a web site design shop, which can just happen to host their client’s web sites. They no doubt co-locate or lease a couple of servers somewhere. This is the least valued of all the business models. Having said that, it doesn’t mean it’s not a profitable and rewarding business to own. These shops are typically sold to a senior employee or an in-market or adjacent-market similar web design shop.

Web Hosting Company/ASP, which also offers IT related, one time and recurring services:

This is the most unique of all of the business model categories and where some very interesting deals are happening these days. These recurring revenue streams come from managed services in addition to regular hosting. Each of these entities has to be analyzed individually and the focus is more on EBITDA, assets, client list, developmental stage, and all of the other typical valuation metrics. The premium valuation is apparent both with private and publicly traded Internet companies. It is important to note these businesses are worth notably different amounts to different buyers.

The benefits of these types of entities are that customer churn is less and there are typically higher revenues associated with each customer. In many cases the customer would have to go to great lengths to leave the company. While design services can be picked up by a new web design shop fairly easily, in many cases, IT managed services cannot.

Side Note: Carve-Outs
With any of these models, even pure play hosting, occasionally companies decide to carve-out a specific line of the business. In some cases it might be a carve-out of the shared line of the hosting business, or in others, the dedicated line. All else being equal, what I have seen is a decreased valuation on the carved-out assets. If a company is carving out a line of business, they typically have not focused on it for a period of time so it’s operating less productively than what the company as a whole is operating. In addition, the documentation of the assets is typically sub-par. Having said that, carving out a business line is usually a logical and profitable course of action. What I recommend to sellers is to treat the sale of the carved out assets with the same level of professionalism you would if you were selling the entire company.

About the author

Presently, Eric Furlow assists small and medium sized companies both acquire and divest technology companies. He has experience in over 60 transactions in the paging, SMR, cellular, tower, ISP and web hosting industries. He has a Masters in Finance from Bentley Graduate School of Business in Waltham, MA. Before heading up Furlow Consulting Corporation , he was the Mergers and Acquisition Manager for A+ Network, Inc. which was sold to Metrocall, “MCLL”.

Google Takes the Leading Role
In part one of this two-part series we reviewed the basics of conversion rate optimization and how Google’s Web Optimizer — a free tool from Google — can help improve your conversion rate, making tire kickers drive off the lot. We also examined some of the tests that GWO performs to deliver useful conversion rate analytics. But there are additional benefits to using this performance assessment tool. Let’s have a look:

Test Problems Identified During Usability Testing
In part one, we urged you to undertake usability testing — sitting actual humans in front of a monitor to move through your site identifying anything confusing. From usability tests, you should have a list of problems and issues identified by your testers (or your observations of them). Then move on to use GWO to analyze anything other problems.

For example, if several people thought the checkout was confusing, test it after site launch to see if the checkout page is where many visitors bounced (opt-out of the sale). If so, you need to make the checkout more simple, don’t make visitors think. Remember, usability tests identify why visitors aren’t buying and that’s one thing you want to know now!

Test Your USP
Your USP — your unique selling position — is what sets you apart from the competition. It could be your low, low prices or the assurance that high cost means high quality. In any case, describe your USP in a few words. Then, look at the competition to see what they use as their USPs and conduct some A/B splits to see if, maybe, your current USP could be changed, clarified or refined.

What Do Visitors Take Away From Your Site?
Make a list of priorities — the five messages or sell points you want each visitor to remember when s/he leaves the site. Then, run GWO tests to determine if these five points are clear. You’ll be able to tell with the reporting GWO provides which messages stick and which are lost on visitors.

Characterize Your Ideal Buyer
Male, over 30, income over $50K annually — make a list of the characteristics of the ideal buyer. This is who you’re trying to reach. Your copy, site design, graphics and images should be directed straight at your target demographic — the market segment you most want to reach.

Test Headlines
Headlines are critical to site success. If they don’t motivate buyers to action you won’t make sales. So try different headlines in A/B splits to see which headers pull best. Headlines should describe the benefits of products or services (not product features), they should emphasize ease of use and finally, they can’t be overblown bombast, i.e., headlines must be believable. In fact, all site text must be believable.

Test Your Tagline
The tag line is the phrase that follows your site or company name, e.g., Dow: Better Living Through Chemistry. The tag should express the essence of your site and, in a few words, the site’s USP.

Test Pricing
Cheapest isn’t always best. Many consumers take comfort in knowing that they’re getting better quality at a higher price. This “velvet rope” approach to marketing is what makes haute couture so expensive. Test pricing to find the comfort level of your target demographic.

Also, drop prices a penny. $24.99 sounds so much less than $25.00. It’s a strategy that’s worked for decades and all of us fall for it because we tend to round down not up.

Promotions and Give-Aways
Buy one get one free. A one-month free subscription. Enter our Island Hide-Away Sweepstakes. Test these one at a time to see which promos have the great
est impact on your site’s bottom line.

Make the Call to Action Link Really Obvious
A colorful button labeled “Order Now” tells the visitor what’s expected and how to complete the most desired action. Don’t let them guess. Tell them what to do next.

Other ways to make points stand out? Bold type face, italics, high-lights, arrows – anything to grab the readers’ attention – quickly.

Test Site Layouts
A single-column layout gives you greater control over the order in which information is presented to visitors. Make sure the most important information comes first.

Also, studies show that people read from upper-left to lower right, stopping at the headlines. That makes the upper-left corner of each page prime site real estate.

Critical Information Goes Above the Fold

Some visitors don’t scroll so if they don’t see it above the fold they don’t see it at all.

Test Images
A picture is worth a thousand words – sometimes. Test various images and color usage to see what pulls best: a tabletop product image, product in use by happy customers, etc. A/B splits will tell you what you need to know, here.

Typography
Critical to site success. Don’t overwhelm visitors with pages of text. Use enough to make the pitch then get off stage. Know when to stop selling.

Use simple language to describe product benefits not product features. Make sure visitors have all the information needed to make a buying decision and address common buyer objections, e.g., too expensive, etc.

Test font sizes and colors for readability and use bulleted lists for quick delivery of key points. Refine after each test.

Accessibility
Accessibility is closely married to usability. Start by testing your site in different browsers and at different screen resolutions to get a “customer’s eye view” of your on-line business. What looks good in FireFox may not look so good in IE.

Keep download times as short as possible. 90% of visitors will sit through a 10-second download. Only 10% will sit through a 30-second download so keep site pages light on graphics, Flash animations and other bells and whistles.

Activate Google’s site search feature using Google Mini and Google’s Free Web Search tools. These make your site more accessible to search engine users.

Create “clickable” features. Users click on anything – links, pictures, graphics — anything that captures the attention of the visitor should be clickable.

Test on-site adverts such as Google Adwords. Adwords allows you to split links into various channels for A/B split testing. Test for: ad size, shape, positioning on each page and color formats to make ads pop out or blend in with the rest of your site design.

Finally, establish and record baseline measurements for comparison purposes. Compare test results to your baseline findings to determine what’s working and what needs more work.

Google’s Web Optimizer is a terrific tool for improving your site’s conversion rate and improving your bottom line. However, be patient. It may take several refinements before your site is fully optimized to convert visitors to buyers.

Also, remember that conversion optimization is not a goal. It’s a process — one that continues even as your site sees improved traffic and sales. Optimization should take place regularly and every change you make should be tested for results. Does the change improve conversion? If not, go back to what you had and try again.

Conversion optimization is a little bit of a science, a bit of an art and a whole lot of trial and error so keep at it. With Google’s Web Optimizer, you have the tool to test how your site is doing.

Use it to grow your site to profitability faster. Use it to achieve site success. Use it to make your site the best it can be. After all, that’s what we’re each trying to do in the world of e-commerce — and Google wants to partner in your success.

About the Author

Frederick Townes is the CEO of W3 EDGE, a Boston-based web design company specializing in web standards and search engine friendly web design. Whether your needs fall into the Web 2.0 category or if need an attractive design that will convert your visitors into buyers, W3 fills the need.

I discovered WHT in 2004. A WHT member who took part in the forum for our web host mentioned it a few times. I went to WHT, I joined, and like many others, I became addicted.

When WHTwiki came along, I didn’t know much about wikis, and I wasn’t that interested at first. The forum is where people interact and share knowledge, right? But when I learned more about wikis, I saw that they also offer opportunities for interaction. I also saw how wikis can work better than forums as places to collaborate on knowledge. Of course forums are still best for discussion, but when you want pages with information that a variety of people contribute to, the wiki platform is exactly suited for that. And who better than the Web Hosting Talk community to build a web hosting wiki?

2. What does your day-to-day role as the WHTwiki administrator consist of?

I check the Recent Changes page regularly to see what’s been added or edited. When new content has been added, I add categories to pages that don’t already have one, and I look for ways to add links between new articles and other articles. Sometimes I add headings or copyedit.

If a page isn’t within WHTwiki policies, I edit or (on rare occasions) remove it. For example, some members overlook the Company Profiles guidelines and add promotional content to their company profiles. Or they miss the copyright notice about not posting content from other sites without permission from the copyright holders.

iNET has a team of people behind WHT projects, and I work with them on WHTwiki. Some changes that you’ll see soon are the work of that team.

The rest is a variety of things to do. I talk about WHTwiki in forum threads, on the helpdesk, and in one-to-one contact with members. I periodically check for broken links and other problems, and I look for other changes to make. When time allows, I go back and read older articles to see if I can contribute anything to them.

3. What’s the purpose of having a wiki tied to Web Hosting Talk?

We answer that question on the About page:

Why have a wiki in addition to a forum? Because both are useful for what they do best. If you want to ask questions or take part in discussions about web hosting and related topics, go to the WHT forum. On the other hand, if you want to help build and update a quality web hosting resource, or to browse such a resource, that’s what WHTwiki is for.

4. What types of content are suitable for the wiki?

WHTwiki is a web hosting wiki, so if the information is related to web hosting, it’s probably suitable for WHTwiki. The main difference is in the content format.

If someone wants to ask questions and get responses, that type of discussion belongs in the forum. The forum is also the place to post advertisements (in the advertising section, of course).

On the other hand, the wiki is more suited for tutorials and other informational pages. When tutorials were posted in the forum, they were often followed with suggestions on what to add or change to make them better. Readers had to read the whole thread to see what the community agreed on. But in the wiki, members can add or change content themselves, so each article page can have the current, collective knowledge of our members.

Wikis allow for discussion too. At the top of each article page is a “Discussion” link to a page where members can discuss the page content. If there are different opinions about what information is accurate, members can talk about it and decide together what should be on the page. In this way, WHTwiki is also interactive.

A difference between the non-advertising sections of the forum and the wiki is that in the wiki, members can link to and even discuss their own services — within WHTwiki guidelines, of course. Members can add links to their websites if they’re suitable for the pages about types of services, such as the list of server management companies. They can also write about their companies on Company Profiles pages as long as they stay within Company Profiles guidelines. In fact, members can write about any company in or related to the web hosting industry provided that they have factual information to contribute.

Article topics can be about anything related to web hosting. If the topic is suitable for non-advertising sections of the forum, it’s suitable for the wiki. WHTwiki has categoriestypes of web hosting, web hosting definitions, running a web hosting business, web hosting software and control panels, domain names, web design and content, SEO, and more. If we don’t have a category for a relevant article, any member can create a category for it. Or just start an article and leave it for someone else to add a category.

5. Wikis are not just about collaborative content. There are a lot of ways that people can interact with them. How can WHT members contribute to and interact with WHTwiki?

We cover that on the Participate page. Here’s a summary:

• Start articles
• Add to existing articles
• Contribute content that you’ve already written
• Add categories
• Add links between wiki pages (wikilinks)
• Create redirects
• Mark short pages as stubs
• Nominate articles to be the Article of the Week
• Fix or report any problems you see, from spelling mistakes to content that doesn’t belong on a particular page

A key difference between the forum and the wiki is that in the wiki, all members can edit and moderate content themselves. Instead of reporting a problem, you can fix it yourself — or you can still report it. We’ll moderate in edit wars if necessary, and we’ll stop spammers and other disruptive types, but for the most part, you don’t need to be an admin to help moderate WHTwiki.

6. What can we expect from the wiki in the near future? Do you plan on introducing new features?

We’re working on templates to use for company profile and software pages. When we have the templates in place, the company profile and software pages will look more professional and consistent, and they’ll be easier to create because members will be prompted to add specific types of content.

We’re also working on some tweaks to the appearance and function of WHTwiki. It’s an ongoing project.

7. How do you plan to promote the wiki to encourage members to participate?

Stay tuned for news about an upcoming wiki contest.