Archive for November, 2008

How to avoid website crash or downtime?

Thursday, November 27th, 2008

Everyone have fears. Fear to let down our parents, fear of sweaty palms when holding hands, fear of awkward silences.  But common for any website owner (and hosting client) is the fear of downtime. Tapping the address to your wonderful and popular website for your daily routine visit, to be slapped in the face with a not found-404 message. Here are the thing that may cause your site some serious damage and hourly downtime.

CPU-usage exceeded

When a majority of today’s hosting customers do not have experience, money or common sense enough to stay away from quality-compromising and “unlimted bandwidth” hosting deals, a risk with shared hosting is exceeding your CPU-usage percentage. All is well and dandy, until one of your blog posts or articles hits the first page at Digg.com and your site is instantly flouded with traffic. What happened? Well, when signing up for that budget, minimum inclusive hosting account you clicked yes to the user agreement policy staing in small letters that if your website exceeds a certain percentage of the central processing unit’s capacity, the hosting provide has the right of temporarily offlining your site. That’s why?

If you have big plans for your site and are looking forward to thousands of daily visits – go big. Get a dedicated server or a virtual one at least. Otherwise the transition between small site to popular site will be painful and almost certainly not without some downtime.

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Posted in Reliability | 4 Comments »

Being an Expert at SEO

Thursday, November 27th, 2008

seo

I know that you all probably already know about SEO and I’m also sure that many of you have incorporated it in your business. There’s of course nothing wrong that. It will probably only boost your business. The thing that irritates is me when people talk about being experts at SEO. The Internet is an ever changing market and this means that all types of marketing methods are as well. What was hot one day is not the other and it’s the same with SEO.

Google and other search engines find ways of disturbing people that utilizes search engine optimization to give their business a boost. In other words, what you knew about SEO one day is rubbish the other and it’s because of this that I get annoyed at people calling themselves experts. Probably it’s just me being cranky and it’s only semantics. However, I just felt as if I had to get this off my chest. I feel so much better now…

Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

Parking Domain Names

Friday, November 21st, 2008

Ok, this is probably something you’ve been doing for years but I have totally missed out on the action when it comes to parking domain names. You have two options when it comes to parking domains – either purchase a new domain name (as I’ve said in an earlier post isn’t this exactly the easiest to do as all the good ones seem to be taken) or buy an expired domain name at for example GoDaddy. Some are very expensive and some are under $50 – I don’t think you should rush this moment as the name is crucial. So, what should you do with this domain? Fill it with niched content and sign up for relevant affiliate programs. If you’ve gotten your hands on a domain with an ace name you can be sure to get some targeted traffic. I don’t know about you but I’m at least going to try it!

Have a great Week-End!

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

True green web hosting – DC powered servers

Friday, November 21st, 2008

What does the hosting industry do in the global fight against current climate changes? How can a hosting provider cut costs, improve data center stability and still call themselve a green web host? Do you plant a tree for every new customer? Do you put a couple of solar panels on top of your roof? Or do you save up to 30 % on power supply to your servers using low wattage components?

The answer is the new DC power technology. With direct DC power to the servers or the option of applying a AC-to-DC converter solution, outrunning other AC powered dataventer solution, a company called Rackable Systems claims to have come up with a data center power solution that not only will increase system reliability but also decrease monthly power costs by up to 30%.

I just started reading about this and it seems that finally environmental thinking is beeing applied directly on datacenter systems. Full cargo centers of servers running 24/7, demanding loads of power supplies – it is in the datacenters that green web hosting really can be applied. Planting a tree or using some solar panels is just for show, to ride of the green hosting’s good name.

DC power is the future, as far as I can tell.

Posted in Green web hosting, Hosting News | 1 Comment »

What About Applications?

Friday, November 14th, 2008

Hi Everybody,

Ok, now I’m gonna do like my fellow blogger Brian and ask for your participation. What I want to know from you have to do with applications. They’re everywhere on the Internet and they’re increasing faster than one thought was possible. Take a look at Facebook for example – I get new applications sent to me every day. Some are just annoying and some I kinda like. The worst one so far has to be the “Friends For Sale” application. Totally useless and nothing but annoying. One that I dig is the “I-like” application where you can compare what kind of music that you like with your friends. So, get of your asses and tell me what applications you like and which ones that you wished never was invented.

Have a great Week-End!

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Funny Websites to visit at Office Hours

Tuesday, November 11th, 2008

Thanks to an expanding IT-industry, millions of us are spending our full working days online. And since staring at a screen all day isn’t exactly great fun all the time, I thought I would give you hard working guys/girls an online source of fun and relaxation. I can’t stand the idea of us not taking the only liberty Internet has given us; to surf around on office hours. I know most of you limit yourself to having a quick check at Facebook, your private email while stressfully looking over your shoulder. But from now on, you’ll have one site to explore on coffee breaks and when your boss is out of office.

The first time a stumbled upon this site, I couldn’t close it. Dedicated to list the top 10 things regarding any given topic, this site always makes me laugh and de-stress. Funny Top 10 lists – at TotallyTop10.com you’ll find top 10 lists dedicated to all kinds of different topics. Their listing of best Letterman Top 10 lists is priceless.

Check it out and tell me what you think. Other suggestions on funny site’s are very welcome and perhaps by the end of the month we’ll have enough tips that I can summon them into a great top 10 list myself :-)

Posted in Fun | 1 Comment »

Analyze Your Website

Friday, November 7th, 2008

Hello my friends!

Sorry about not putting up a post for a while. Unfortunately I’ve been sick so I’ve just been lying in my bed. However, now I’m back, healthier than ever. I thought it would be a good idea to kick start this blog again. So, without any further ado here are some tools that can help you analyze your site. They’re in no particular order and do with them whatever you want. Hopefully they can help you in some way. Isn’t half the pleasure analyzing ones site?

SEO Analyser / Raven SEO tools

Free tool that helps you optimize your site from a SEO perspective. Easy one click analyze button

Crazy Egg

Great tool if you want to find out what people are doing on your site. Get heatmaps, overlays and lists.

Mint

In some ways similar to Crazy Egg since it also shows what people are up to when visiting your site. I guess that Mint is somewhat more extensive than Crazy Egg.

Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments »

Spice Up Your Content with Video Hosting!

Thursday, November 6th, 2008

This blog post goes out to all you fellow bloggers who currently are crowding cafés and park benches, trying to catch some sunlight while untying the mental knot of with what to fill your next blog post. While the post’s topic remains for you to figure out, here’s a tip on how to make your post more attractive, dynamic and, hell, even interactive!

YouTube Your Post!

There are not many untouched souls left today who hasn’t hear of YouTube. The best and perhaps only good example of video hosting, containing millions of video about anything and everything you can imagine. YouTube is a great source of videos to implement into your blogposts. It’s very easy since for every video that is uploaded on YouTube is accompanied by a string of html-data to simply copy/paste into your code-view while writting your posts.

This is not the most uncoventional blog tip but a very useful nonetheless. The inserted video will give your readers a complete picture about the post’s topic.

Post through Flickr

Using pictures to spice up the blog post is also a popular way. But rather than burdening your server’s bandwidth with uploaded images there are several web-based image galleries through which you can write blog posts with selected images and remotely publishing them directly on your blog. By getting an account you can gather images and easily set your blog settings this can be done in 5 minutes.

Video and image hosting is truly god-sent gifts to us bloggers and should be comtemplated more often. I have successfully untied my mental knot and actually dedicated a whole blog post in loving memory of YouTube and Flickr, the big guys in video and image hosting. Now it’s your turn :-)

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