Monday, February 28, 2011

Smaller search engines tap social platforms

As the major search engines work to integrate social components into their search algorithms, it's interesting to also see niche engines tapping those same social networks for targeted results.

BuzzFeed, for example, recently launched its Pop Culture Search Engine to search pop-culture memes. It searches in a viral sort of way — the more "buzz" a story gets on social media platforms, the more likely it is to appear in the results. They also use this traffic indicator as a basis for isolating quality content.

Foodily is another targeted engine. It aggregates recipes from around the web and integrates the information with your friends' comments, recommendations, tips and recipes from Facebook. This approach creates more of a community environment for foodies, setting it apart from straight-up recipe search engines such as those on Cooking.com, Epicurious, or Food & Wine. Foodily can also search for recipes that don't contain certain ingredients. If you're allergic to garlic or out of milk, this feature might come in handy. (Note: Google's new Recipe View also allows you to select ingredients.)

Tuesday, January 25, 2011

What makes a good Web Hosting Provider!

When building your website and getting it hosted online, you want your site to be up and running on the World Wide Web 24/7 without any hitches so that it is making you money all the time and all you have to worry about then is getting visitors to your site, doing seo, getting repeat visitors, maximizing your sites revenue, etc. You don’t want to have to worry about your web hosting and it’s stability.

So, when choosing a web hosting provider to host your website with, you want to try and get the best web hosting provider so that your site is always up and running smoothly on the World Wide Web.

So what makes a good Web Hosting Provider?
There are many things that make up a good web-hosting provider. Some of these include good support, good uptime, good backup system in place, good hardware, offers loads of web hosting features including email features, scripting features and more.

So where can some good Web Hosting Providers be found?
There are many places across the web where you can find some of these good web-hosting providers. A good place to start is probably using a web-hosting directory as you can easily compare these web-hosting providers against what other providers are offering that’s listed within any individual web-hosting directory. For example, with onenetwork.net you can easily find and compare a large amount of some of the top and most reliable web-hosting providers online. You can easily compare each web host against each other so that you can easily see what they offer for the amount of money that they charge.

When choosing a web host it is also best to choose one that offers free set-up and also a money back guarantee. This is because if you find that they don’t quite offer what you need for your website, then you can easily get your money back and choose another web hosting provider.

Even if you found some web hosting providers from a web hosting directory like onenetwork.net that offer the features that you need for your website, but you still would like further information about the quality of their service, then you could also go to a web hosting related forum and ask others about what they think about these web hosting providers that you have chosen....


http://hostingpost.com/articles/224338-what-makes-good-web-hosting-provider.html

What is a web host reseller account?

You’re the webmaster of more than one website. You design websites for clients. Your business needs more than one site. Is a web host reseller account for you?

A web host reseller account is a web hosting account that allows you to create hosting packages to sell to your clients. You can also host multiple sites of your own using the disk space allotted to the one hosting account.

Typical features of web host reseller accounts:

They come with a reseller-level control panel that allows you to create your own packages.

You can allocate disk space and bandwidth to each site on the account and change the space and bandwidth specifications if the site’s needs change.

Most reseller accounts provide the option for private nameservers (also called private label, personalized nameservers, or virtual nameservers). For example, if your reseller account is with SomeName Hosting and your company name is ExampleName Services, your clients will enter ns1.examplename.com and ns2.examplename.com for the nameservers for their domains.



With a web host reseller account, you handle account setup, billing, and (usually) support for your clients. Your web host provider maintains the servers and answers your support questions.

While a few starter reseller hosting packages are as small as 500 MB, most reseller providers offer packages starting at 1 GB or larger. A range of packages is usually available, a few going as high as 30 GB of disk space.


http://hostingpost.com/articles/224337-what-web-host-reseller-account.html

Web Site Hosting Plan - Key Elements

What are the key elements in a good web host package? The answer to that question depends mainly on the service you expect from the web host provider. To decide what you need, you'll need to have at least a brief understanding of the typical services and features offered by web hosting companies.

The number of e-mail accounts available might be one of the key elements in a good web host package. If your ability to send and receive e-mail is important, you'll want to carefully consider whether a particular web host package includes enough e-mail accounts to accommodate that need. Some companies tout unlimited e-mail accounts and depending on your specific needs, this might be a very favorable element of a potential host company. If you are a businessperson, remember that it's possible your company will grow in the future. While you might need to only establish one or two e-mail accounts now, consider what your future needs could be. It would probably be difficult to change hosts later if you find that you need additional (even unlimited?) e-mail accounts.

Which brings up another of the key elements in a good web host package. If you are establishing a connection with a web host provider for business purposes, consider your provider's ability to grow with your business. The last thing you want to do is start with a company that will be unable to keep up as your business grows. Changing companies later is always an option, but that transition is not likely to be without problems.

The amount of disk space that will be allotted to your web site is another of the key elements in a good web host package. While it might seem that 30 megabytes is plenty of room, the potential for growth of your company means that you could easily need more space later. If you choose a web hosting provider that simply can't offer more space, you might find that your growth will be severely limited.

Other issues that can be key elements in a good web host package include the bandwidth, security and speed. Finding a company that provides the best of all these features is likely to be a daunting task, but it is possible.

Price is naturally a key element in a good web host package as well. Prices generally vary only by a few dollars per month and the difference between paying $6.95 per month and $9.95 per month is not likely to play a significant role in the final choice. If the less expensive service provider doesn't fulfill your needs, you'll certainly face significant expense and trouble rectifying the situation later.

In the end, deciding which are the key elements in a good web host package will be up to you. If you need large storage space, that becomes an important element. If your needs include larger-than-normal space requirements, that becomes one of the most important elements in a good web host package. The true test of a good web host package is answered with one easy question: "Will this provider adequately meet my needs at a competitive price?"

http://hostingpost.com/articles/224336-web-site-hosting-plan-key-elements.html

Web Hosting & Web Development: Unravel the Technobabble and Create a Great Site

If you’ve ever browsed the World Wide Web and wondered how you could stake your claim on the Internet, like the millions of others that have done so already, then web hosting can provide you with the services to do just that. The Internet is a great way of sharing information and it is possible for you to take a portion of the web and make it your own. This article introduces the term “web hosting” and provides some useful tips for web development once you’ve obtained some web space.

What is the World Wide Web?
The “World Wide Web” is the network of computers from all over the world that communicate with each other using the HTTP protocol, a language that allows the transmission of web documents. Be careful as this term is not synonymous with the “Internet” because it is defined as a network of networks, where the computers communicate with protocols other than HTTP. The web is what you see on your Internet browser, the web pages complete with graphics, sound and other information. All this has got to come from somewhere, and this is where web hosting comes in.

Web Hosting
The information that you see from your web browser is contained in web pages. These web pages are kept on computers called web servers. Web hosting is about the storage of the web pages so that people can access them. It is possible to host your own websites yourself but the reasons stopping most people doing this is that there are issues to consider with having the right hardware and software to successfully host your web pages. Your web pages will take a certain amount of space, users will need to download each page to view them and your Internet connection needs to be fast to offer good performance to your viewers. Using specialised companies that offer web hosting capabilities on their web servers will take most of these worries away from you but you will need to choose wisely and weigh up the costs and your needs. In addition to having access to a web server, you will also need to register a domain name (for a cost) that uniquely identifies your website.

What Web Hosting Can Do For You
The most basic service that web hosting offers is that it exposes your web pages for others to see. The other services are: email capabilities that allow for email to be received and sent from your server; database capabilities that allow for large amounts of information to be updated and accessed on the web; and dynamic content which allows for users to interact with the web pages you’ve made.

Website Development
Poorly designed websites will most likely turn away users and harm the credibility of the information it contains. Thought should be put in on the way it looks and the way you intend your users to interact with the content. It is also recommended for more complex websites, a structured development process should be followed. Here is a guide to the logical steps of web development:
· Requirements Analysis: What is the purpose of the website? What content should it contain?
· Design: How should the pages be linked? What structure should they take? How should the pages interact with the user?
· Implementation: This step is the actual coding of the websites in accordance to the previous websites.
· Testing: Does the website do what it should?
· Maintenance: Is the information on the website up-to-date?

Some useful hints for web development below are taken from software quality aspects but they apply to the development of websites as well. They are described in terms of web development:

Reliability: Is the website reliable? Do faults allow for the system to continue running?
Robustness: How does the website respond to incorrect input?
Performance: How fast does the web page respond to user’s actions? Is it efficient in processing requests and inputs?
Usability: Is the website easy to navigate and understand?
Maintainability: Is the website easy to change? Can new functionality be added?
Portability: What software requirements does the website require? Will this limit the amount of potential users?
Understandability: How well do you understand the website you’ve developed?

When designing your website, keep these quality aspects in mind as they will help you develop pages worth visiting. How to choose the way to host your website is half of the problem, the other half is to create a website that people would want to visit and come back to....

http://hostingpost.com/articles/224335-web-hosting-web-development-unravel-technobabble-create-great-site.html

Web Hosting Strategy for Managing Multiple Websites

If you are making a comfortable living from the Internet and the Web or have a plan to achieve that goal, it's likely that you are running more than ten websites. The websites are your virtual offices. You want to your sites to be up and running 365 days, 7 days a week and 24 hours a day. Managing multiple websites is a daunting task if running one website is a hobby.


Proposed Hosting Strategy for Managing Multiple Websites

The hosting strategy we propose is to host your multiple major websites with 3-4 different hosting companies, and open a reseller account with another hosting company for 1) small and new websites, 2) web development and 3) backup. Hosting with too many hosting companies will significantly increase the time and the difficulty of managing sites, and using a single hosting company isn't a smart choice either.


Justification of the Hosting Strategy

Cost - Cost of the Web hosting isn't an issue for running a single web site whether it costs $5 or $25 a month. The difference is only a few hundred dollars or less a year. It's always nice and smart to get the most out of every single dollar in doing business. At least, a few hundred dollars difference wouldn't make or break a business. If you run 10 or even 50 websites, the cost of Web hosting alone will define the success or failure of your online adventure. To cut the hosting cost, the option is to use a reseller hosting account to host as many small or new sites as you want for about $15 a month. You host one or 2 major websites with one hosting company. Shared hosting account costs under $10 a month, and dedicated server will cost $50 or more a month.

Uptime - If your bread-and-butter maker website is down for a few hours, you'll lose hundreds of dollars and more. Even though most hosting companies promise 99.9% uptime, it's not common to see a website down for a few hours. A site could be down for a half day or even more if a hosting company is doing a major update. The hosting company may do the update in a weekend or a major holiday, but that's when many family-oriented and travel sites generate their revenues. If you could afford the loss of revenues, many websites owners can't bear the psychological loss and pressure. Hosting your sites with a few hosting companies will reduce the risk of downtime.

Application Development - For simple web Application, webmasters will do development on the same production hosting site. If your ecommerce applications are complex, doing development on the production site may bring down the live site especially if you're in the process of changing configuration files or install customized applications. The option is setup a website on your reseller account for development and testing, and move the applications to production account on another server after the completion.

Backup - If you're not happy with a hosting company, a hosting company is out of business, or the servers will be down for a day or two, you can easily temporarily or permanently switch from one hosting company to other since you're familiar with the site managing tools already. If you have a backup or secondary copy running on another server, all you need for the switch is the transfer of the domain, which will take no more than a minute.....

http://hostingpost.com/articles/224334-web-hosting-strategy-managing-multiple-websites.html

Web Hosting Providers Rule The Web

It has been reported there are currently more than a staggering 50,000 web hosting providers all competing for the honour of hosting your website.

Every day dozens of new web hosting compaines are launching and struggling to get your attention and your web hosting business.

Even though the web hosting industry is really quite young, it is certainly one of the most competetive and cut-throat industries on the web today. Yet the growth of this marketplace is assured for the forseeable future.

Now each and every week it is estimated more than 50,000 websites are launched and need to be hosted somewhere online. This figure continues to grow and grow.

In fact the current monthly count for the number of searches at Yahoo for the term 'web hosting' is a whopping 2,149,851. That's right, over 2 million!

Also just recently it was reported that the popularity of blogs was seeing tens of thousands of new blogs launched each and every day. While many of these are hosted freely, the more serious bloggers each require an account with a reliable web hosting provider.

Of course every paid web hosting account usually requires at least one domain name registration. Here are some amazing domain name figures for you:

The registrar holding the largest number of domain names is said to be WildWestDomains. They may be better known to you as Godaddy. They currently hold over an estimated 5 million domain name registrations!

The registrar holding the second largest number of domain names is estimated to be Enom. The registrar holding the third largest number of domain names is estimated to be Networksolutions.

Domain Name Registration Growth:

By far the most popular top level domain is the .com There are currently over an estimated 40 million of these registered.

The .com top level domain currently holds over an estimated 70 percent of the domain name marketplace.
The .net top level domain currently holds just over an estimated 10 percent of the domain name marketplace.

The good news for web hosting and domain name customers is that incredible deals have become available as competition increases among web hosting providers.

In fact the price of web hosting has plumeted to just under $10 per month for a quality service. Domain names that cost up to $35 just a fews years ago can now be bought for as little as $4.99.

This is a winning situation for both the web hosting providers and their customers. The quality of service continues to grow. The new web hosting providers must impress their customers to compete with more established organisations.

There has never been a better time to find a web hosting provider and establish an internet presence of your own.

http://hostingpost.com/articles/224333-web-hosting-providers-rule-web.html