Rules of Engagement – Do’s and Don’ts of Managed Hosting

After you become a seasoned managed hosting customer, you come to know certain key factors and elements that play a big part in whether you stay or go. Choosing a hosting company and staying with them usually means the hosting company is going above and beyond what they are supposed to do, often times with a level of service that is almost impeccable.

Some of the mistakes you don’t want to make in managed hosting can actually improve your profit margin. For example, if you sign up for a hosting account with fewer features than you need, you’ll end up being dissatisfied for the duration of the contract,. If you don’t sign a contract, you could still be wasting money on a less than full featured account. Get what you want out of a hosting account to start with, plan ahead! You can save yourself the trouble of having to back pedal your life into a different hosting account.

Many hosting sites offer discounts, depending on what you purchase. Some offer a percentage off your hosting fees if you sign up on a contract. If your business stays pretty normal, without a lot of fluctuations in the number of customers and hits, signing a contract will be safe. Simply choose the features and options you want and bring on the savings!

If you haven’t already figured it out, business websites always have a “ranking”, so to speak. Whether it be the number of hits they get or customers they pull in, they are charted somewhere. Web hosts use these charts to determine the type of account, bandwidth and amount of data transfer you’ll need. You can usually trust customer service associates from companies which require this kind of data.

You don’t want to spend more than you should, so you should have an idea of what your business needs before you spend. The more popular a managed hosting service is, the better quality you’ll get for your dollar

As far as features go, you’re always going to want a server with the best uptime guarantee. Not only does this ensure your quality of service for your dollar but it also keeps things competitive and moving as they should. You can only offer the best service guarantees if you truly outperform the competition

There are different types of managed hosting you can choose from. Most are all alike, except for a new type of hosting called cloud hosting. Cloud hosting offers the same level of service but through a more reliable configuration structure. You’re safer on a cloud network than a regular one any day.

Managed hosting should be acquired using skill and knowledge. Know how much you are willing to spend on a specific plan and try and stick to that. If you overspend for options you don’t need, it will cut into your profits. You want to run as clean of a ship as possible, with nothing you don’t need. Part of the luxury of owning your own business revolves around you being able to make the right choices.

Automatic scheduling of service renewals is a definite do in managed hosting. It automatically pays your bill from either a credit card or your PayPal account.

If you’re looking to make all the right moves when it comes to your managed hosting efforts, talk to a friend or business associate who has already gone through it. You can learn a lot from someone’s past experiences and even get some help with your own efforts.

Managed hosting is great for keeping your business with a low overhead cost, providing you know how to configure your options. Each option you select, especially in the custom managed hosting market, will cost you an additional amount. Only pay for what you need initially, and then upgrade your account with new features and options. Managed hosting will also allow you to keep your mind on other things, while a portion of your income is set to be made online. This means more time to prepare your business for whatever might happen.

Don’t sign up with the first hosting company that catches your eye. Let them “compete” against each other! Price, performance and reliability are three very important areas you need to be focusing on. If a hosting company lacks these key business ingredients, then move on. More often than not, you will be left with sub-par quality service and less than desirable feature performance. However, if you can match yourself up with a hosting company with everything you need for a great price, what more could you ask for more?

Grow Your Business Using Managed Website Hosting

Three Free Ways to Get Quality Links

Nowadays, in order to rank highly in the search engine rankings, it is no longer enough just to have any old links coming in to your web pages. Google will now devalue links it no longer considers relevant to the subject matter of that web site and, if you have too many of that type of link, may even ban your web site for link spamming. So, how do you go about getting quality links? Well, here are three simple, free ways to increase links to your web site.

One method is to submit your web site to one of the hundreds of web directories that are available. Many of these are ranked highly by Google, and getting listed in such a directory will enhance your PageRank. The best-known of these is the Open Directory Project at www.dmoz.org, but there are many more, both general in nature like the OPP, or specific to a particular subject. Submission to most of these directories is free, though some will require a link back to the directory in return for listing your web site. One word of warning though – submissions to most of these directories are checked by real people, rather than by computer, and it may take many months for your listing to appear.

If you are running a web site, then it’s fairly safe to assume that you have some knowledge about the subject of that web site. Web sites of all types are looking for articles in their field of interest, whether it’s archeology or zoology, bell-ringing or yachting. There are also many web sites that have banks of articles, on all subjects. Why not use your knowledge of the subject to write articles about it, and submit the article to web masters looking for relevant content. Try to make such an article interesting, rather than self-promoting – you are not looking to promote your web site in the actual text of the article. You do this in your signature file, which web masters will include at the end of the article. In the signature file, make sure that you include a link to your web site, plus a few words about it.

The link will help in two ways, not only in PageRank, but also potentially increasing traffic to your site - people that find your article useful may click on your link for more information. Good articles are often picked up for reproduction at other web sites, increasing your exposure. This is allowed, as long as the content is unchanged and, more importantly for you, the signature file is left intact. Write enough articles and, if they are of good quality, you may appear to be an expert in that field and people will start looking for you by name.

This neatly brings me to the third method of adding links to your web site, although it’s not really necessary to be regarded as an expert for this – it just helps give you some credibility. Message boards, or forums, are all over the Internet, dealing with almost every subject under the sun. Become a frequent visitor to some that deal with your field of interest and start to contribute in the discussions there. Again, don’t try to be self-promoting – this will upset people and could even lead to you being banned. This is where that signature file comes in again – as in the section above, this is where you will get exposure, both from the link itself and the increased traffic you may generate. One thing to check though – some forums will not allow the bots from search engines to follow links from forums, which rather defeats the original purpose of posting on that forum.

To Your Online Success

Jeff

Google Page Rank Explained-Website Hosting

PageRank is one of the many methods used by Google to help determine the importance of a web page. Developed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, while at Stanford University, PageRank became one of the main tools used by the Google search engine.

Before I go any further I must give you a word of warning here – Google is very protective of exactly what factors are used in its search engine algorithms, and exactly how those factors are determined. What follows here is believed by most industry experts to be correct in essence, though some of the details may not be fully accurate.

In simple terms Google describes PageRank as a method for determining the value of a web page by the value of web pages to which it is linked. In other words, a link from web page A to web page B is considered as a vote by page A for page B. However, Google does not just look at the number of links that a web page receives; it also looks at the PageRank of those pages. A link from a web page with a high PageRank is considered to have more value than a link from a web page with a low PageRank.

The value of a web page can be between 0, the lowest value, and 10. However, this is not a simple linear progression, but rather some form of logarithmic progression – it takes more links, or links of a higher quality, to move from PageRank 6 to 7, than it does to move from 1 to 2. Google don’t state exactly how their scale works, but let’s assume that is actually logarithmic. If so, then for example if it takes 10 links to move from PageRank 0 to 1, it would take 100 links to move from 1 to 2, and 1000 links to move from 2 to 3. This assumes of course that all links are of equal value.

Now, so far we have been talking solely about PageRank in terms of individual web pages. However, a web site also has a PageRank. This can be determined by adding up the PageRanks of the individual web pages. The total PageRank for the whole web site can never be higher than the total number of pages on that web site. In other words, a web site that consists of just five pages will have a maximum potential PageRank of 5. Note the word potential there – that site may never reach that particular PageRank – but without adding more pages there is no way that the site will ever reach a higher PageRank than 5. Note that not all web pages within a site will have an identical PageRank – the web pages with more incoming links will have a higher PageRank than those with fewer links.

I mentioned above the importance of the value of the links to a web page. I don’t want to get into the math too much here – there are many examples of this to be found on the Internet – but I will try to explain this in simple terms. The value of a link is determined by the PageRank of the page from which the link comes. However, the value of that link is divided up between all of the links from that page. So, for example, a link from a web page with a PageRank of 6 and only three outgoing links is worth more than a link from a similarly-ranked page with twenty outgoing links. This holds true for web pages with similar rankings, but, due to the nature of the PageRank scale, becomes less of a factor as the difference between PageRanks increases. The amount by which that factor decreases is open to argument, since Google won’t reveal all of the factors that go into determining PageRank, but it is safe to assume that if the PageRank is significantly higher then it doesn’t matter how many links are on that web page.

So, in conclusion, what does all of this mean? As I mentioned at the start, PageRank is just one of the many factors used by Google when deciding how a web page should be ranked within its search results. The exact importance of PageRank within those factors is something that Google alone knows – everything else is pure speculation. There is some talk that PageRank has been devalued of late, with less weighting given to it than previously was the case. However, PageRank is still something that a web site owner or administrator should take into consideration when designing a web site. Links do still matter in search engine optimization and the higher-quality links matter more.

To Your Online Success

Jeff

Are Site building tools the new e-hype?

There aren’t many people today who haven’t thought about getting a website. Whatever the purpose is the increasing curiosity of the Internet is apparent. And while businesses and brands are constantly emerging online and thousands of new websites are indexed by Google every day, programming and site building are still crafts limited to a relatively small group.

Strong Demand - Little Knowledge

Based on this contemporary social and environmental analysis one out of several conclusions can be made. Unless people understand and learn the ABC’s of website building and start solely to create their own sites, site management software and tools are by all accounts going to take future years by storm. Worth noting is that people still expect their websites to have the advanced look and functions and while they have no clue how to build them they refuse to level their needs with their know-how. Webmasters are truly the hardest customers to keep content and site building management tools today are forced to keep a high level of quality in order to survive.

Site building 2.0

Site building tools and software have been around for a long time and we’ve seen them come and go with only a few good enough to remain in the game. But as the demand on more advanced and full-solution based site builders is getting stronger most builders have been found too limited and only useful to create simple and apathetic websites. However, as a result of these current unforgiving conditions a new site building tool has emerged and is anticipated to set the standard for site building tools of the 21st Century.

Platformic - The Site Building Standard

Already a buzz has started around this new web platform called Platformic with web hosting providers already offering it to their customers. With a professional web development team behind the scenes, Platformic supposedly delivers great quality web design software together with a CMS (content management system)-solution. It is accurately the latest advanced edition of Site building for Dummies. With the slogan Design Build Maintain, Platformic has hence included all vital parts of building and maintaining a website. Platformic seems to have covered the ABC’s of site building and where prior sit building tools have failed perhaps Platformic will succeed. Customers get web design and the ability to remove, edit and ad content on a highly user-friendly interface.

Only time can tell if Platformic manages to deliver and fulfill the needs of website enthusiasts of today and tomorrow. All that really can be said is that this site building platform has set the standard and even if Platformic fails, this is the type of site builders we can be sure to expect in the future.

How to rate the Website Hosting Providers

We here at Topnotchwebsitehosting.com want only the best for our customers and this is why we are meticulous when we list and rate the hosting providers you can find on our site. User reviews are more than welcome but we want to complement this with reviews written by our professional staff. Their experience, and know-how, of the industry is important to us and they make sure that the web hosts get a fair rating. To make the editorial reviews as transparent as possible we thought that it would be a good idea to present what we look at when we review the providers.

We take a look at their numbers

There are  a lot of statistics available that we utilize to determine whether a web host is performing well or whether it is not providing their clients with the hosting that they should be getting. If we notice that the web host won’t be able to provide you with what we believe to be sufficient quality hosting, they will not get listed here at Topnotchwebsitehosting.com.

The check-up continues

As already mentioned, we take a look at their statistics to make sure that they are a quality web host, but this is not the end of the road. We do regular check-ups of the providers to make sure that they’re continuously delivering as promised and that they are not only a fly-by-night operation. If you have a website, it is, of course, important that it is up and running 24/7/365 and that everything is working as it should. Ok, some outtake might be acceptable but there are limits to what should be regarded as fair.

Secret shoppers

We perform active tests of the web hosting providers by acting as secret shoppers. This means that we pretend to be an average customer looking for web hosting. Doing these types of tests help us understand how they act towards their customers in real-life and not just how they claim to be themselves.

We want the best for You!

When looking for hosting providers we are seeking the best. This does not equal the biggest or the best known providers, but the ones that are providing the best services for their customers. Hence, we include both the major web hosts as well as the smaller ones - what’s important is that they are matching your needs.

Website Hardware and Tools

The web hosting industry is very much driven by new technologies and we want to make sure that providers listed on our site have the possibility to provide the latest hardware and tools to their clients when signing up for an account with them.

Great customer support

We’ve already touched on this point, but when we act as a secret shopper we also test the support team. If the response-time is good and if the staff are friendly - as well as knowledgeable - we’ll credit them with some extra points. If not, it will drag down their total score.

Monitoring uptime

No web host can guarantee a 100% uptime but they should not be far off. This point is one of the most important for all website owners. We monitor the uptime of each and every web host and take it into consideration when rating them - we do not accept too much downtime and neither should you!

Your voice is important-Talk to us!!

Your opinion is of course important and it is something that we take into consideration when reviewing the providers. If many of our visitors have had the same complaint regarding a host we’ll take a look at it before we hand out any ratings.

Your needs are important-Let us know!

The whole objective with our website is of course to make sure that you, our visitor, will get the best hosting possible.  We try to take in as many aspects as possible into consideration when reviewing the hosting providers. When you are satisfied, and feel as if all your needs has been fulfilled, then we are satisfied as well.

We hope that you find the content on Topnotchwebsitehosting.com useful and that you’ll find a host matching all of your needs.

Standards in the Cloud-Web Hosting Know How!

Everybody in the web hosting industry is obsessed of the words ”Clouds”, “Cloud computing” and “Cloud hosting”. But very few discuss standards that companies use to provide Cloud hosting services.

Actually It is not like there are any standards in Cloud hosting. Most providers who offer some sort of clustered, grid or cloud hosting services do everything from “home”. Today’s “Clouds” are home-made technologies! It is like Wild West.

Don’t get me wrong and I do not underestimate anyone’s achievements. RackSpace is great! Other web hosts that run any forms of grid or cloud infrastructures also deserve attention. But all of them (OK, most of them) use proprietary technologies which represent their own approach to cloud computing and virtualization.

Unlike traditional Web Hosting industry, as we know it for years, the emerging Cloud Hosting market looks like jungle. It is not based on standards. Thank god that there are companies like Red Hat (ref: http://www.redhat.com/solutions/cloud/access/guidelines.html) which created standards that can be used as guidelines from Linux development community. Do I forget Microsoft? Of course not! If we should count on Microsoft to help us moving to the clouds it would cost us a fortune and we would fine ourselves tied up to Windows for ages!

In Search of Cloud Hosting Standards

The automation standards of the Cloud hosting industry are about to be established! In traditional Web Hosting industry we have cPanel, Plesk, Direct Admin and other automation software platforms. Web hosts use them for more than a decade and these platforms have become web hosting standards.

All these work good both for consumers and providers. From a user’s perceptive, using these platforms allows consumers to switch servers or to migrate hosting accounts from one web host to another easily. From the perceptive of hosting providers,standardized hosting plaforms help them to create stable and reliable IT hosting service models Some web hosts, like Hostway, Aplus, etc. use their proprietary software to automate web hosting management.

However for most popular web hosting providers, especially those in shared hosting and virtual private server (VPS) hosting, base their business models on the server automation standards mentined above.

The best we can do is to find a way to continue using these web hosting automation platforms in the new Cloud dominated hosting industry. This should help small and middle-sized hosting providers to keep going and to compete (at a leveled ground) with other major Cloud hosting providers. Consumers will also benefit a lot of standards based Cloud hosting services as it encourages healthy competition among the providers (so you get to choose from hundreds or even thousands of different cloud hosting service providers).

Cloud Website Hosting

“Cloud Hosting” has been creating quite a buzz around these days. You might be hearing the phrase for the first time but the technology is not something new at this time of writing. In fact, you’re already part of the cloud hosting/computing users (without being noticed) as Google naturally is a big promoter of this idea. Google searches (as well as other Google operations) are operating under a massive computer infrastructure (cloud!) that people tap into from their local computers.

What is cloud hosting?

Generally, a cloud-hosted website is opearting on multiple connected servers. Instead of limited to a single server like what we have in traditional hosting services (dedicated/shared hosting), the website now has the access to multiple servers. Virtually, the processing power is unlimited as you can always add a new server and scale up.

Benefits of cloud hosting

Cloud hosting benefits the users from various angles. It’s scalability and cost efficient is the commonly known advantages.

As the technology is highly scalable (load balancing, hardware upgrades, etc), website expansion can be done with minimum limitations. Think about the hassle of migrating your website from a shared server to a dedicated server; think about server crash when your website experienced a sudden surge – all these problem can be avoided easily by switching to cloud hosting.

Cost is another huge plus if you need a lot of processing power. Cloud hosting companies charge their users based on the quantity of computing power consumed. It’s like your electricity and water supply bills – it’s pay-per-use thus gone are the days where you need to reserve massive server powers to avoid website crash from sudden traffic surge.

Major disadvantage with cloud hosting: Security

Questions like these arise when it comes to cloud hosting:

• I am sharing the same physical hardware with other users, is my data safe?
• Where is my data located at? (You no longer control the physical location of your data in cloud hosting)

The security issue is always one of the major questions and arguments raised when it comes to cloud hosting. For those with similar concerns, further reading on this article (article dated Aug 31, 2009) is highly recommended: Cloud Security: Time to Smoke Another One? Also, check out this interview with George Reese (Author of “Cloud Application Architectures”) where he discusses cloud security and the challenges it poses for new adopters.

Cloud Hosting: New Players and Pricing Examples

Updated on April 2010

The topic (cloud computing and hosting) was widely covered in main stream media for the past one year. It’s no surprise to see that the industry is crowded with more competitors these days. Beside the common big names like RakeSpace, Amazon, and GoGrid, we are now seeing FlexiScale, GridLayer, Cloud.bg, and NetDepot… and so on.

In fact cloud computing/hosting has grown from being a business concept to one of the fastest growing segments in the IT industry. From what I learned, many startup tech companies nowadays do not build their datacenters anymore, they simply go ‘cloud’.

In case you are unsure about how cloud hosting users are charged, here’s a quick example. Listed table below is the pricing data of NetDepot (in three different packages).

Managed Web Hosting

Managed or “fully managed” web hosting solutions take the dedicated model to a higher level. We know that dedicated hosting allows the client to have full control of the server but dedicated servers can be difficult to operate technically and require that you have certain knowledge about server maintenance and system administration. The notch above is managed hosting, as it takes the dedicated features and adds extra services like reporting and monitoring, load balancing, security, setup, system administration and software updates. This is the most hands-off solution for the client.

Pros of managed web hosting

Managed hosting solutions continue to provide the benefits of a dedicated server, that is you have access to the complete server. Your package would be tailored to the amount of bandwidth and hard drive space that you might need and CPU intensive applications could operate without hindering other sites or being conflicted. Added as well is the management service that would ensure that the server operates at an optimum level by installing the needed software, updating patches, and providing support for any hardware or software issues. But you must make sure that the provider has the specialized people on staff and provides 24/7/365 support.

Cons of managed web hosting

Managed web hosting solutions are usually the premium offerings of a company and represent the top tier in terms of service. Therefore they usually command the highest prices - managed hosting solutions are more expensive than their dedicated cousins. Managed hosting packages will also likely involve some sort of a setup fee as it is more time consuming to setup a complete server than it is to create a hosting account in a shared environment. Managed solutions could also be an overkill. If you know your way around the operationg system being used and have system administration experience, you might be paying extra for something that you could do yourself.

Managed Hosting Review

• Allows complete control of the server and its resouces
• Allows custom web applications and higher level of uptime
• Provides complete server support and system admin
• More expensive than dedicated hosting

Co-Located Web Hosting

n situations dedicated or managed servers provided by a web hosting provider do not meet your needs, it is always possible to custom build your own server and place it in the data center of a provider. Co-located hosting means that you purchase a server from Dell, Gateway or your neighborhood hardware vendor and supply it to the host. The host will in turn plug your server at its data center providing you access to its network and infrastructure. The webhost is reponsible for the network infrastructure and the data center while you are responsible for the server through remote access. This type of solution allows the very customized and specialized web sites to function at peak performance. Many of the ulta-popular websites use a co-location strategy to provide them with the combination of customization and best possible performance. With co-location you would have to evaluate the specific providers to go over their terms of service, the security of their location, their bandwidth providers, backup and power systems. Some co-location hosting providers may also offer seperate management contracts for the day to day maintenance of your server.

Pros of server co-location

Co-location provides the ultimate in flexibility, choice and control. You as the customer know exactly what type of hosting service you need, and if your own custome server is the answer, you can put it together, house it in a data center and manage it as you please. Most providers will include a secure cage that ensures security and will also allow you to use your own specialized components like routers to increase efficiency.

Cons of server co-location

With co-located servers, you as the customer are fully responsible for the equipment. Most data centers will monitor and manage your system, but any problems will have to be dealt by the owner unless maintenance agreements are in force (extra costs). Co-located servers are most likely to contain specialized software or operating systems aswell, which have to be managed by experienced staff or the customer.

Co-located Hosting Review

• Allows complete control of the server and its resouces
• Allows you to use customized hardware and software for hosting
• Usually the most expensive hosting solution