The figure reported by the Chinese government institution was a 53 percent jump from 137 million Chinese Internet users reported at this time last year. The Sydney Morning Herald reports: China says number of Internet users rises to 210 million, could overtake US this year

“Currently China’s online population is about 50 million less than that of the United States and is the world’s second-largest,” the agency, also known as CNNIC, said on its Web site. “CNNIC forecasts that (China) will become the largest online country in 2008,” it said.

The U.S. Census Bureau said last year that about 218 million of the country’s 310 million people used the Internet.

China promotes Internet use for education and business but tries to block the public from seeing material deemed pornographic or that opposes communist rule.

This latest figure only consolidates the fact that China is a very ripe market for web hosting.  With a population of  1,323,128,240 [over 1.3 billion], China currently ranks as the most populous country in the world with the USA coming 3rd after India. China’s current population is 19.83% of the world’s total population whilst that of the USA is 4.55%. Economists are predicting that China and India would be the world’s next super-powers in as soon as ten years time, going by the strong annual economic growth the two countries have been marking over the years.

Having realised all the above-stated points, many of the leading dot-com companies have opened shop in China to reap from the economic windfall: Google, Paypal, ebay, Microsoft, Yahoo etc

Now, China is not exactly a virgin market if the figures by WebHosting.info are anything to go by. Chinese web hosts share 2,735,314 domains amongst themselves whilst Chinese ICANN-accredited registrars have registered 3,275,345 generic domain names.

My point is simple: web hosting firms in other parts of the world that can target a section of their marketing website at the Chinese population stand to reap economic benefits from China’s fast-growing Internet population. A website with a Chinese language version would be a first step though its important to point that many educated Chinese individuals can handle the English language fairly well. Read my previous post for some more ideas about how to go about this: SEO Web Hosting and how its good for you

Leading search engines especially Google and Yahoo have country-specific versions for several countries across the globe. The mere fact that one’s website would necessarily rank better if hosted in the target country has given birth to the new genre - SEO Web Hosting.

According to Travis aka “The Farmer“:

SEO Web Hosting is the art of hosting your marketing efforts across multiple IP ranges using multiple name servers. By doing so you are ensuring the true success of your online business.

What web hosts do is to provide multiple IP addresses and multiple nameservers spread across different countries such that the website appears to be hosted in these different countries and thus have the chance of ranking better in the respective countries. The specialized SEO packages typically have the following range of specifications: [20 IPs / 10 class C; 2 IPs per Class C; 10 Nameservers] and [120 IPs / 60 class C; 2 IPs per Class C; 60 Nameservers].

Understandably, these SEO Web Hosting packages come at a relatively high cost since immense effort is put into sourcing this different IP ranges. This makes it feasible for companies with deep pockets, who are specifically targetting web users in specific countries.

It is important to point out however that aside web hosting that provides local IP addresses, successful search optimization for international markets may require professional translation of web pages, registration of a domain name with a top level domain in the target market.

If SEO Web Hosting is not for you and you still want to rank better in specific countries, you want to consider registering your domains under the Country code Top-Level Domains (cc-TLDs) for your target countries. You would then have to put up localized content for maximum effect.

Online payment systems are very popular with web hosting [and domain name registration] companies. Paying online speeds-up the order process for getting a new web hosting account and leading the pack of online wallets is Paypal. Aside Visa and Mastercard credit/debit cards, online wallets like Paypal have become increasingly popular online. What makes Paypal even better is that it can function as a 3rd-party credit card payment processor. Paypal has thus been enabling several Small-Office-Home-Office [SOHO] businesses worldwide to accept payment online.

That said, Paypal is not available in every country and available in some countries on a “Send money only” basis. This makes accepting payment online via Paypal very difficult for online merchants in such countries where Paypal is not fully functional or not available at all. The fact that 2Checkout now includes Paypal as a checkout option empowers millions of online merchants [web hosts included] to accept payment from Paypal’s over 130 million users. Several leading global brands have increasingly been adding Paypal as payment option on their respective websites, in recent times.

According to 2Checkout’s blog post on this issue:

This will allow customers to pay for products and services with the funds in their PayPal account, even if the supplier does not have their own PayPal account and only uses 2Checkout.

The PayPal payment option will be available for all non-recurring orders in the following currencies:

• Australian Dollar (AUD)
• Canadian Dollar (CAD)
• Euro (EUR)
• British Pound (GBP)
• Japanese Yen (JPY)
• U.S. Dollar (USD)

2Checkout is much easier to join and use though they would verify your information if they have any reason to suspect you/your business.

In case you’re a web host helping your clients with e-commerce solutions, the e-commerces scripts under Fantastico (if you’re using CPanel) have modules that allow merchants to accept payment via 2Checkout. CubeCart, OSCommerce and Zen Cart are all available for installation via Fantastico and there are several other equally good e-commerce shopping scripts out there that integrate well with 2Checkout.

Do you run a web hosting business? How do you accept payments online? Has the addition of Paypal to 2Checkout’s checkout process had an positive/negative impact on your web hosting business or online store? Share your thoughts here and now.

A Slashbot job advert seems to suggest that Cpanel is recruiting Windows application developers for this new venture.

Cpanel has been working on this Windows version for some time now. The only difference this time is that they are re-staffing and commiting more time and resources to it. Cpanel is expecting to release the beta version of the product on December 15th 2007 and have the production release available by March 30th 2008.

A press release by Microsoft quotes cPanel CEO J. Nick Koston as saying:

“Microsoft has shown a strong commitment to the hosting industry over the past several years. cPanel’s Windows development team feels that IIS7 offers a robust, high-performance Web server with increased security that the industry will quickly adopt. Microsoft Server 2008 and IIS7 with its modern architecture and support for legacy products was the natural starting point for our expanded product offering.”

The first and most striking impression is the new looks. The entire user interface of Cpanel has been overhauled and its now much more visually-appealing. The icons that link to the main controls have also been re-arranged into more relevant groups and same goes with a new Notice panel that displays on the top left corner of the Cpanel first screen. The Notice panel displays vital warnings about the hosting account in red, and also carries News from the web host or server administrator.

Some controls hitherto placed a few clicks into the panel have been brought to the homepage making such controls more accessible. Even better, cPanel shortcuts have been introduced. These links can be added to your desktop or your browser’s bookmarks toolbar. They are an easy way to access your cPanel.

What makes the several panels better is that they can actually be moved to suit the preference of the user. All a user has to do is drag-and-drop. The overall theme of Cpanel can be changed as well. Thats not new, but whats new are the several other more visually-appealing themes that have been added.

For a new Cpanel user, there are free Video Tutorials that would guide them through all the basics of using Cpanel 11. Similar videos have been made available before now by other companies, for a fee. Not to forget the “Getting Started Wizard”, a 7-page basic guide that takes new Cpanel users through the rudiments of setting-up their new hosting account.

The Cpanel interface loads faster as well. In some cases, processes are carried-out using AJAX thus the entire page needs not be re-loaded, to complete a process. Some back-end processes now run faster as well. Example? SpamAssasin. It now requires less server resources.

These are a few amongst the several CPanel improvements that make an upgrade a must. What has been your experience with using Cpanel 11? Share your thoughts here and now.

In those three years it has seen many improvements over PHP 4. PHP 5 is fast, stable & production-ready and as PHP 6 is on the way, PHP 4 will be discontinued.

The PHP development team hereby announces that support for PHP 4 will continue until the end of this year only. After 2007-12-31 there will be no more releases of PHP 4.4. We will continue to make critical security fixes available on a case-by-case basis until 2008-08-08. Please use the rest of this year to make your application suitable to run on PHP 5.

Already, several web projects using PHP have announced their intention to switch to PHP5 soon. These include: The Symfony, Typo3, phpMyAdmin, Drupal, Propel, and Doctrine project.

With this new announcement, it is expected that many more web hosts will upgrade their Linux server currently using PH4, to PHP5.

PHP5, a successor of PHP4 was launched about 3 years ago but has not witnessed widespread use mostly due to its incompatibility with PHP4. Most scripts and software today are written in PHP4 even though PHP5 comes with vast improvements including better security and improved functionality. The PHP Group has thus been forced to continue offering support to users still on PHP4.

This is about to change though. An organization was formed, exlcusively for that:GoPHP5.org The objective is simple, gather more support for PHP5, and make sure most software required PHP5, by February 5th 2008. In their words:

It is a dangerous cycle, and one that needs to be broken. The PHP developer community has decided that it is indeed now time to move forward, together. Therefore, the listed software projects have all agreed that effective February 5th, 2008, any new feature releases will have a minimum version requirement of at least PHP 5.2.0. Furthermore, the listed web hosts have agreed that effective February 5th, 2008, they will include PHP 5.2 (or a more recent version) in their service offer.

The news this week though, is that some leading PHP software have joined the massive effort to switch to the latest PHP upgrade. The Symfony, Typo3, phpMyAdmin, Drupal, Propel, and Doctrine projects have all announced that their next release after February 5, 2008 will require PHP version 5.2 as part of a coordinated effort at GoPHP5.org, and have issued an open invitation to any other PHP projects and applications, both open source and proprietary, that want to participate in the effort.

According to phpMyAdmin’s project lead, Marc Delisle: “The phpMyAdmin project is very enthusiastic to join the GoPHP5 initiative. We see GoPHP5 as a way both to improve our product’s new versions — not always having to add workarounds to remain PHP4­compatible — and improve the experience of our users — by projecting the correct message about the PHP system itself and its evolution.”

The first-ever version of PHP appeared on 8th June 1995 and as of October 2006, PHP6 is under-development.

Can you hazard what they would change the name of the Yahoo portal to? Perhaps they would not change it at all. Yahoo! has evolved over the years to become a leading brand on the Internet. Scrapping the brand will not be a smart idea, in my opinion.

The area I want to concentrate on is the programming language Yahoo! has used on much of its online estate. Many sections of Yahoo.com (I don’t know what percentage) are coded using PHP. At least, some are obviously PHP.

PHP is an open-source programming language popular used for server-side scripting in developing dynamic websites/applications. It is popular among many leading websites and open source geeks.

Microsoft on the other hand, developed rival language, ASP.NET. According to Wikipedia:

ASP.NET is a web application framework marketed by Microsoft that programmers can use to build dynamic web sites, web applications and XML web services. It is part of Microsoft’s .NET platform and is the successor to Microsoft’s Active Server Pages (ASP) technology.

Now this is where it gets interesting. Will Microsoft get rid of all the millions of Yahoo pages scripted in PHP and replace same with ASP.NET? Will they maintain the PHP scripts?

What do you think? Share your thoughts here and now!

cPanel and WebHost ManagerTM (WHM) combine to form a fully featured web hosting control panel system. cPanel and WHM allow you to provide an interface for both your customers and your staff.

The cPanel and WebHost Manager package includes:

* cPanel - Domain Owner Control Panel
* WebHost Manager - Server Administration and Reseller Panel
* Webmail Panel - Webmail Access Panel

cPanel 11 promises amongst other features, enhanced security, improved overall performance, better usability, nicer visual style, tightened branding and integration.

The point here though is, my server management service provider announced they were not upgrading to cPanel 11 on my Linux server just yet. They felt it was still unstable and contained bugs that needed to be fixed.

Early this month, cPanel published some release notes for cPanel 11.

These release notes provide information on the new features and functionality in cPanel and WHM v11 along with any known issues (and their workarounds), and frequently asked questions.

One thus needs to strike a balance between upgrading for the sake of it, and upgrading because it’s really necessary. As at today June 27th 2007, cPanel stated on their website that the STABLE upgrade of Stage 2 for cPanel 11 will be released on July 31st 2007.

Have you upgraded your Cpanel to version 11 already? If yes, share your experience here.