Round Tale

The success and sustenance of every website begins with the server on which it is hosted, and the performance of that web server relies entirely upon the competence, reliability and capabilities of the web hosting provider. Perhaps even more essential to the success of a website is it’s ranking in the search engines. Without traffic a site may as well not exist, and it is a well known fact that having a high page ranking search engines is the bet way to get constant traffic automatically. Many people do not see the correlation between their web hosting plan and their search engine optimization efforts, but I assure there is a valid connection. Every web hosting plan comes with certain features and options, some of which can directly impact your site’s ranking in the search engines.

Geographic Targeting

Many people seem to overlook the importance of targeted traffic. Getting traffic to your web page can be easy, especially if you accept any kind of traffic. However, getting traffic that is actually going to convert into sales is another story. Therefore, it is absolutely imperative to go after traffic that will be beneficial to your business. One of the ways you can do this is by targeting your traffic geographically. If you are trying to sell a product or service that is going to be popular in the UK, then you wouldn’t want a lot of your traffic coming from China. For this reason it is important to choose a web a hosting provider that is located in the area you would like to target. I.E. -  If you are in the US, then try to pick a web hosting provider in the United States.

IP Addresses

Another important aspect to consider is the IP address of your web site. Search engines often look at the IP address of a website to determine it’s relation to other websites, which may directly impact it’s rankings in the search engines. In other words, choosing a web hosting plan that offers only shared IP addresses may not be the best decision. You may find it too expensive to purchase a dedicated hosting plan, however you can still get a dedicated IP address with your shared hosting account. If you share your IP address with other websites then you are risking the search engine ranking of your site, since the actions of those websites could be directly connected with your site’s behavior by the search engines. When you have a dedicated IP address you will not have to worry about such occurrences, as your IP address will only be used by your website.

Site Building Tools

You’ll also want to make sure you have access to all of the website building tools and languages that are standard in today’s technology. For example, you’ll need to be able to use PHP, MySQL databases, FTP clients and other standard tools. You’ll also need access to your .htaaccess file and PERL if you want to have a fully functional and reliable website. These tools are also extremely important in the search engine optimization efforts of your website. If your web hosting provider does not offer these tools then you may want to consider a different web hosting company.

The internet is an ever-growing sea of entrepreneurs and small business owners, and with every passing day new people are joining the gold rush trying to get their piece of the pie. If you are in this situation and you’re trying to make a name for yourself in the online world, then you’ll need a web hosting solution. Simply put, you’re site cannot exist without a web host. A web hosting plan gives your site access to a web server, which stores all of the site’s data and makes this information viewable to the world. Selecting a web hosting plan when you know absolutely nothing about web hosting or site creation can be nearly impossible to do correctly. In fact, you’ll almost always regret your first decision unless you do all of the research necessary before deciding upon a web hosting solution. If you’re having trouble figuring out which hosting plan would be right for you, then you may want to consider a free web hosting solution.

Free Web Hosting Really Exists?

Yes. You can get free web hosting from many different  companies, the only set back is you’re not going to be able to build your business with free web hosting. However, you can become acquainted with the web hosting industry and you can learn how to build and operate your site with a basic free web hosting solution. Instead of spending your money on a plan that you’re not sure about, you can opt to test the waters with free web hosting instead. If you are looking for a free web host, just do a web search for the term “free web hosting.”

What Can I Do With Free Web Hosting?

The answer to this question is a broad one, in that you can do pretty much anything you would do with a regular hosting plan, except you are limited by the amount of server resources. Free web hosting provides a sample of what web hosting is like, and it let’s you site up a small site that you could use as a personal profile or a small personal blog. Free web hosting is similar to the food sample you’ll find at the food court in the mall – you can get a taste of what is on offer, but don’t expect to make an entire meal out of it!

Can I Upgrade My Free Web Hosting Plan?

One of the best aspects of free web hosting plans is that most web hosting companies will let you upgrade your free plan to a more inclusive paid plan. Many times upgrading is as simple as sending an email or making a phone call. If you are looking for a way to test the waters before you set your boat a sail, you may want to consider free web hosting with a company that offers the option to upgrade. Since free web hosting is such a limited solution, you are undoubtedly going to have the need for an upgrade in the near future, so you’ll want to leave this option open and make the transition as smooth as possible.

The market for ASP.NET CMS products is expanding rapidly.  Users now have another option for blending content management and the power of ASP.NET with Webaptive.  Just released by developer Striquent, Webaptive is an enterprise CMS available in premium and community versions.  The biggest draw to this program is its ability to incorporate content management functionality into existing applications without the implementation of third-party software development kits.  This is made possible by the presence of IIS and the stack of Microsoft .NET technologies.

Creating ASP.NET Applications

Webaptive works closely with the web server to add CMS functionality to your applications.  From within IIS, you can choose the application you want to enhance. Once you make your selection and a database is automatically created, you can then enable existing applications or develop new ones.  Because the method in which Webaptive associates itself with applications is specific to the ASP.NET framework, it is strongly recommend that you create your pages and applications using standard ASP.NET programming practices.

CMS Features

Though rich in ASP.NET functionality, Webaptive offers many of the same capabilities found in other CMS products.  For instance, it has a built-in WYSIWYG editor for easily creating articles and blog posts, a CSS editing facility, and support for multiple authors.  Some of its more advanced features include localization and campaign management as well content inheritance options for managers and administrators.  Another unique quality of Webaptive its seamless integration with Perifigure, Striquent’s sister product.  Perfigure is a powerful analytic tool that analyzes site performance and provides detailed statistics on traffic, marketing campaigns and several other business related activities.  These capabilities alone make Webaptive a very attractive CMS for business users.

Standing Alongside and Out from the Crowd

Marketed as a CMSaaS product, Webaptive shares a few qualities with similar hosted SaaS CMS solutions such as CushyCMS and Surreal CMS.  Many of these platforms work by mildly blending content management features into a web page or website.  Though effective for the most part, they are not all that intrusive in regard to the core technologies and as a result, only provide limited CMS functionality.  Although Webaptive performs in a similar manner, it goes beyond the basics by digging into the code at the ASP.NET application level.  This gives it the ability to interact with ASP.NET controls as well as the standard HTML elements.  When all components are properly configured, this CMS can truly help you take your web applications to the next level.  Another difference is that whereas most SaaS CMS platforms are hosted solutions, Webaptive can be downloaded, installed and configured on your own server.

Availability and System Requirements

The Webaptive CMS is currently available in three versions: Community, Express and Enterprise editions.  In terms of functionality, the Community and Express versions are nearly identical.  However, the community version is free and therefore does not come included with reliable technical support.  The Enterprise edition is the most powerful version of the product as it is equipped with many advanced back-end versions and of course, paid support.  In order to run Webaptive, you will need the Windows Server 2003 operating system or higher and an SQL Server database.  These elements are needed to support your ASP.NET applications and web pages.

Previously known as cmPublish, the Clickability Platform is a CMS with a different approach on content management.  Developed by CMS provider Clickability, this platform is delivered on an on-demand basis, as well as full service with the company’s “Innovation as a Service” solution.  Aside from content management, the Clickability Platform also offers analytics, email campaign, web 2.0 and advertising among other functionality.  While there is obviously far more to the Clickability Platform than content management, this is indeed the focal point of the package.

Core Technologies

Though a licensed commercial product, Clickability Platform is based on powerful open-source technologies such as PHP, MySQL and Java.  It utilizes Apache as its web server and Velocity for the templating system.  Even though you have to pay for a license, the leveraging of various popular open-source tools makes Clickability Platform a cost effective CMS product.

Clickability Content

The main content entity in the Clickability environment is the item.  Authors have the ability to create content items by selecting various types of content from the navigation pane.  This CMS gives you a number of different content items out of the box, including jobs, blogs, press releases, case studies and FAQs.  Furthermore, custom content types can be created as well.   The templating system is a major part of the process as it allows you to actually get the content on your web pages.  These templates can be tailored to display numerous types of content in different sections of a single page.  While this feature caters to beginners, Clickability Platform also has something for developers with advanced creation environments and other customizing assets such as stylesheets.

Additional Features

Clickability Platform certainly isn’t short on features.  The package bundles streamlined content management capabilities alongside a host of SEO tools, Web 2.0, capabilities and the following list of features:

Newsletters – Publishers can create a newsletter of content and automatically distribute it to subscribers.  They can also manage mailing lists and have the ability to provide subscribers with double opt-in capabilities.

Advertising - Adverting functionality is tightly integrated into the Clickability Platform.  This allows administrators to create and maintain campaigns as well as all the details that go along with them.  Because ads are considered content pieces, they have targets that provide administrators with a way to track and keep up with the history of their performance.

cmSideKick – Clickability Platform allows you to run your website in the browser and the intuitive cmSideKick in a second frame.  cmSideKick is a utility that enables you to perform deep analyzation of statistics, allowing you to view your site in the administrator mode or selective views to modify certain areas.  This is one tool that you are likely to put to great use in the Clickability environment.

Conclusion

Clickability has come a long way since its days as cmPublish.  However, it has managed to maintain all the basics of content management and received some nice upgrades to compliment the emerging technologies and web trends.  Clickability Platform is definitely a enterprise CMS solution and can help to satisfy the needs of businesses of all sizes.

In-House hosting or outsource services; If you have to ask yourself this question, going with a web hosting service is likely the best option.  However, before making the final decision, you should determine what resources you have available and where you need to focus your energy to meet your goals.  Whatever road you take, each will require careful planning in order to come out with successful results.  Let’s go over these two forms of hosting to help you better determine which option is right for your needs.

Benefits of Outsourced Hosting

Outsourcing your internet hosting processes to a third-party company is a wise move whether you run an online business or simple personal site.  The minor drawback is that you will be forced to give up some flexibility.  For example, you are essentially locked into the hosting provider’s system, technologies and policies.  However, web hosting services are far less restrictive than they were years ago.  In fact, there are several companies that allow you to have a great deal of control and flexibility with your own server.  Many of today’s web hosts provide you with administrative control over your entire domain.  This typically includes the ability to add and modify database entries, set up email accounts and manage user permissions all without the aid of the network administrator.  If a particular host cannot provide you with these standard luxuries, they aren’t even worth dealing with.

The advantage of outsourcing to a professional web hosting service is that you can usually count on more reliability, a greater level of availability and cost savings right from the jump.  The burden of servers and other network hardware do not fall on your shoulders.   If the operating system and web server require updates or security patches, you can sleep well by knowing IT experts are on top of the matter.  When choosing to run these operations internally, you are opening up an entirely new world of responsibility and complexity.

Disadvantages of In-House Hosting

Successfully hosting your IT operations in-house is possible, but it does come with its fair share of disadvantages.  There are a number of costly and complex factors you need to consider, including the following:

- Server platform for web server and database applications

- Efficient disk space allocation

- Bandwidth limits

- Network connectivity

- Data Backups

- Security

- Environmental Issues

- Day-to-day Maintenance

The above are elements most smaller businesses simply cannot afford or maintain internally.  If this sounds like your situation, then an in-house hosting solution is most likely out the question.

Conclusion

With the wide variety of solutions on the market, professional web hosting services are ideal for whatever you plan to accomplish online irrespective to the size of your website or business.  While the price varies greatly among the type of service and company you choose, this option is far more cost effective than trying to host these complex technologies on your own.  On the other hand, if you have the space, manpower, financial resources and the need for the utmost control, an in-house set up could turn to be the best solution.

Webmasters throughout the world will probably agree that website administration tools have come a long way over the last few years.  The software these days has been injected with more features and functionality than many ever imagined was possible.  One of the most powerful management tools on the market today is a type of software program known as the control panel.  This application provides you with an easy way to maintain a complex web server and all the essential features of your hosting account.

Different web hosting providers tend to utilize and offer different control panel applications.  For example, some use the industry leading Linux-based cPanel, while others prefer Plesk because of its ability to support both Windows and Linux platforms.  You also have hosting providers that offer their own custom or proprietary control panel software.  One such company happens to be one of the largest and most well know entities in the internet world.  This article will introduce you to the Yahoo control panel, very underrated yet highly effective and easy to use.

Tools and Features

In order to access the control panel, you must first sign in with the username and password designated for your Yahoo web hosting account.  After entering the required information, click “OK” to log in.  Once inside, you will see that you have a variety of options to work with.  Below are some of the options you will find:

Home - The Home tab lets you view your daily website traffic in the form of detailed reports.

Email – The email tab allows you to create additional email addresses that will be associated with your website and domain.  Simply click on “Add an Email Address” and enter the required information in the short fields.

Create and Update – The Create and Update tab allows you to incorporate a number of add-on programs and utilities such as the WordPress blogging platform, and intuitive file management tools.  It also offers a variety of helpful support resources for beginners.

Manage – The Manage tab lets you add or remove files from the web server and password protect specific domains, sub-domains and web pages.  It also allows you to generate online snapshot backups of your website data.

Promote – The Promote tab is a powerful SEO tool that allows you to submit your URL to all the major search engines in one easy click.  Underneath this tab you can also send news about the launch of your website via email and create a Yahoo local listing for your site or business as well.

Help – The Help tab offers a comprehensive menu that can be used to assist you with all the functions of the control panel.  This is where you want to go if you get lost creating emails or maintaining your domains.

Index – The Index tab gives you an alphabetized index of the features and options that come included with the hosting control panel.

While the Yahoo control panel in not the most sophisticated piece of software, it does provide all the tools you need to create and maintain your hosting account.  Hundreds of thousands of personal and business customers agree that it delivers more than enough functionality for their needs.

London, United Kingdom – (The Hosting News) – May 21, 2009 – UK2 Group web hosting provider has entered into an exclusive deal with ISPsystem which is designed to allow VPS.NET to offer customers ISPsystem’s flagship control panel ISPmanager PRO, free of charge.

Ditlev Bredahl, CEO of UK2 Group remarked, ”Our VPS.NET product is doing extremely well across the UK2 Group and we have had lots of great feedback from our customers. We aspire to having the best Cloud Hosting solution available so will continue to launch great features which will amaze current and potential customers.”

ISPmanager PRO is one of the leading server management control panels in the market. The control panel allows customers to manage various aspects of a web server through a friendly web interface. ISPmanager Pro is powerful but lightweight, as it only utilizes 10MB of RAM and 40MB of Hard Disk space. The usual pricing for ISPmanager is 34.00 Euros per month, which means that VPS.NET customers get even greater value from their VPS solution as they will get ISPmanager for free.

In addition, VPS.NET have recently launched a new feature which allows customers to upgrade the amount of nodes on their VPS when needed. There are two kinds of upgrade available, temporary and permanent. With a temporary upgrade a customer can select to add a number of nodes to their VPS at a certain date and time, and keep it there for a determined period of days and afterwards the extra nodes will simply go away. Customers only pay for the extra temporary burst nodes on a daily rate of 1 pound per node. With a permanent upgrade a customer can schedule their VPS to be upgraded to an increased number of nodes, which are permanently added to the account and assigned to the VPS.

The nodes can be removed at any time but are charged for at the standard monthly rates.

This feature is ideal for customers who need to extra capacity on a short term, flexible basis with pricing to match. Instances of when temporary or permanent bursts night be needed are; to support marketing activities which result in an influx of website traffic, for increasing the amount of resources for development projects, for growing companies who might not need the extra resources straight away but want to future proof and so on. In the near future VPS.NET will be launching Recurring Scheduled Bursts where customers can set temporary increases in nodes on a recurring basis.

VPS.NET has been designed to simplify the process of virtual private server cloud hosting, whilst at the same time making it available and affordable for everyone.

It will be a valuable addition to many of the brands within the UK2 Group is the ideal hosting solution for many customers.

VPS.NET is a recent addition to the UK2 Group, and offers affordable virtual private server cloud hosting. It is a redundant cloud system, which utilizes a RAID 10 SAN backend and node based VPS architecture. It also has immediate scalability with pre set up stacks, a simple billing process and a user friendly management portal.

UK2 Group provides domain name registration and web hosting services to many global customers through its family of hosting brands – UK2.net, midPhase, WestHost, 10TB.com, AN Hosting, Autica, Resell.biz, US2.net, WingSix, Supreme Support, Dotable, VI.net and the most recent addition VPS.NET. The group operates its services out of several state of the art, multi million pound data centres in the UK and US, and are committed to providing reliable, secure and great value products and services underpinned with excellent support.

For more information about VPS.net, please visit: http://vps.net.

London, United Kingdom – (The Hosting News) – May 21, 2009 – UK2 Group web hosting provider has entered into an exclusive deal with ISPsystem which is designed to allow VPS.NET to offer customers ISPsystem’s flagship control panel ISPmanager PRO, free of charge.

Ditlev Bredahl, CEO of UK2 Group remarked, ”Our VPS.NET product is doing extremely well across the UK2 Group and we have had lots of great feedback from our customers. We aspire to having the best Cloud Hosting solution available so will continue to launch great features which will amaze current and potential customers.”

ISPmanager PRO is one of the leading server management control panels in the market. The control panel allows customers to manage various aspects of a web server through a friendly web interface. ISPmanager Pro is powerful but lightweight, as it only utilizes 10MB of RAM and 40MB of Hard Disk space. The usual pricing for ISPmanager is 34.00 Euros per month, which means that VPS.NET customers get even greater value from their VPS solution as they will get ISPmanager for free.

In addition, VPS.NET have recently launched a new feature which allows customers to upgrade the amount of nodes on their VPS when needed. There are two kinds of upgrade available, temporary and permanent. With a temporary upgrade a customer can select to add a number of nodes to their VPS at a certain date and time, and keep it there for a determined period of days and afterwards the extra nodes will simply go away. Customers only pay for the extra temporary burst nodes on a daily rate of 1 pound per node. With a permanent upgrade a customer can schedule their VPS to be upgraded to an increased number of nodes, which are permanently added to the account and assigned to the VPS.

The nodes can be removed at any time but are charged for at the standard monthly rates.

This feature is ideal for customers who need to extra capacity on a short term, flexible basis with pricing to match. Instances of when temporary or permanent bursts night be needed are; to support marketing activities which result in an influx of website traffic, for increasing the amount of resources for development projects, for growing companies who might not need the extra resources straight away but want to future proof and so on. In the near future VPS.NET will be launching Recurring Scheduled Bursts where customers can set temporary increases in nodes on a recurring basis.

VPS.NET has been designed to simplify the process of virtual private server cloud hosting, whilst at the same time making it available and affordable for everyone.

It will be a valuable addition to many of the brands within the UK2 Group is the ideal hosting solution for many customers.

VPS.NET is a recent addition to the UK2 Group, and offers affordable virtual private server cloud hosting. It is a redundant cloud system, which utilizes a RAID 10 SAN backend and node based VPS architecture. It also has immediate scalability with pre set up stacks, a simple billing process and a user friendly management portal.

UK2 Group provides domain name registration and web hosting services to many global customers through its family of hosting brands – UK2.net, midPhase, WestHost, 10TB.com, AN Hosting, Autica, Resell.biz, US2.net, WingSix, Supreme Support, Dotable, VI.net and the most recent addition VPS.NET. The group operates its services out of several state of the art, multi million pound data centres in the UK and US, and are committed to providing reliable, secure and great value products and services underpinned with excellent support.

For more information about VPS.net, please visit: http://vps.net.

What Websites are Hosted on this IP?

This is one of the best reverse ip tools I have ever seen. Most reverse ip tools do not show you nearly all the sites hosted on a server and sometimes there users are even charged for a premium service to use the full tool. At first, I thought it was capable of actually displaying all domains hosted on a server. However, it doesn’t because I checked one of my servers and it got only 3 out of 7 domains on ip address. But, in other cases it seems to list a long list of domains hosted on a server. Over at digg.com, users are having fun poking around on government and scientology sites to see what domains are hosted.

Using the You Get Signal “Reverse IP Domain Check,” you can see all of the other sites hosted on the same web server as a particular domain name. Try it.

Here’s more from YouGetSignal.com… and story at Digg.