Hosting Embraces Twitte

Twitter was created on March 31, 2006 when the man who is credited with conceiving the idea, Jack Dorsey, wrote the original code version. From that day forward, Twitter has now become arguably the hottest and fastest growing brand on the Internet. If you somehow have completely missed all the popular hype, and actually don't know what Twitter is, Wikipedia defines Twitter as: ''a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read other users' updates known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters, displayed on the user's profile page and delivered to other users who have subscribed to them (known as followers). Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends or, by default, allow anybody to access them. Users can send and receive tweets via the Twitter website, Short Message Service (SMS) or external applications. The service is free to use over the Internet.''

From humble beginnings Twitter has grown quickly to become a huge and robust online community. It has recently been reported by the BBC that the Twitter service has grown nearly tenfold over the past year in the UK. The original usage data was gathered by analytics company Hitwise. According to the published reports, Twitter has now overtaken social networking portal Digg in popularity. One boost to Twitter's popularity came a few weeks ago as Oprah Winfrey joined the service - and concurrently Aston Kutcher and CNN raced to be the first Twitter account to garner 1,000,000 followers (Aston Kutcher won).

I first became aware of the true potential of Twitter earlier this year. In February there was a massive snowstorm which blanketed the UK from top to bottom with snow levels that topped over a foot in many places. Although weather reports guessed at snow amounts across the country, it was impossible to use satellite images of the snowfall in real time. That's because the cloud cover prevented the satellites from seeing the ground. One prescient developer named Ben Marsh came up with a unique and helpful idea: get the general UK Twitter population to report on the snowfall at their location in the UK, then create a mashup of that Twitter-reported data by plotting the results on a Google map. The result was a real-time graphical map of the snowfall amounts as reported by people who are actually there on the ground. UK Techcrunch and the BBC picked up the story, which quickly created a bandwidth challenge for Ben Marsh's hosting provider - reseller web hosting company 34SP.com.

Despite the massive additional traffic to the site and the bandwidth requirements to keep it live, hosting from 34SP.com stepped up to the challenge. Daniel Foster, founder and Technical Director at 34SP.com explained, ''Our bandwidth is supplied by Level 3, AboveNet, and Cogent. This is a fully BGP routed, multi-homed network. Failure of any two of the three providers won't affect connectivity. Additionally, the 34SP.com network operates far below total capacity, so any unexpected increases in usage will not cause any network disruptions. This is a key consideration when someone like Ben Marsh gets significant media attention in a short period.''

So now Twitter has been embraced by the larger website hosting community. Consider that HostingCon - the largest gathering of web hosting professionals each year - is actively using Twitter to market the show and keep attendees informed of the latest happenings. Large web hosts like Rackspace are using Twitter to communicate and reach out to their clients. The massive popularity of hosting with the Twitter audience can easily be observed by simply checking out the search feature at Twitter and typing in the search phrase: web hosting.

As the importance and audience numbers of Twitter grow, look for additional web hosting properties and brands to add themselves to the Twitter community. If you are interested in joining Twitter to see what it's all about go to: https://twitter.com/signup.

http://www.thehostingnews.com/art-hosting-embraces-twitter-165.html

Reseller Hosting

I am often asked about reseller hosting. Specifically, often a web designer or web developer is in a position of creating websites for clients and then recommending a hosting provider. The question arises from these developers and designers, ''How can my web design business benefit from reseller hosting?''.

Here are the main reasons that you as a web designer or web developer should consider reseller web hosting.

As a person in a position of trust - you can point your clients in the right direction. The 'right direction' in this case being a solid web hosting company that will provide reliability, expert service and support, and be available to answer designer or client questions if necessary. The reason that the client looks to you is to get an unbiased opinion on what is best for their website. You obviously have a great deal of interest in seeing that your design is hosted by the best hosting company that the client can afford.

Since you will have many clients over time, and you will be referring the majority of those clients to the same web host - over and over again - it makes sense for you to include this process as part of your business model. So how exactly do you as a designer make money from the web hosting portion of this equation?

Here is a financial example taken from reseller hosting company 34SP.com. You can easily substitute any other reseller host into this model using their current prices to create your financial model. Let's assume that you have just 10 clients that you have designed websites for, and will be recommending hosting to. The reseller hosting account costs 15 per month. The wholesale cost of this type of hosting account is 3.95 per month. You can charge that same amount - or if you add some additional value like support and website updates - you can charge a bit more, say 5 per month. So to do the simple math: you pay 15 per month for the reseller hosting account - your clients pay you 10 x 5 per month = 50 per month. Your business earns 50-15 = 35 per month. You earn this additional money each and every month. Over the course of a year your business has just gained an additional 35 * 12 months = 420. And that's for simply referring the design clients into your hosting account. If you do 30 or 40 or 50 website designs each year - the numbers get even better. The best element of the reseller hosting model is the recurring revenue that it generates. You simply get paid month after month for ensuring that your clients' websites are working and online.

To make the best use of your position as a trusted advisor to your website design clients, it is imperative that you select reseller hosting that is of the very highest quality. If you have not used and become comfortable with a hosting company, here are a few resources you may want to use to select a good reseller web hosting company.

Google search - most of us turn to Google with questions regarding the Internet these days. You can start with a search for reseller hosting.

Webhostingtalk - another great source of information on reseller web hosts in Webhostingtalk. You can view their reseller hosting forum here.

HostingCon - if you have the time and money, it is a good bet that many many hosting companies will attend this year's HostingCon trade event. Since your reseller account will be managed by one of these larger web hosts, you can actually sit down and speak with them face to face at HostingCon.

Good luck setting up a reseller hosting account for your web design business. Take time to do the proper research, and you'll be earning a great return on your investment.

http://www.thehostingnews.com/art-reseller-hosting--167.html

Top Five Ways Hosted SharePoint Improves Project Execution

In the past, collaboration was often very challenging, time consuming, and expensive.

In the past, collaboration was often very challenging, time consuming, and expensive. For one thing, people often had to travel great distances just to talk through the details of a project. In an optimal situation this might mean a drive across town and the loss of only a day. More typically it meant the hassle of a cross country flight, and the better part of a week or more in lost productivity, not to mention the expense of a round trip ticket and hotel stay. And that’s just the beginning.

Here’s an example of how it would take place: the project manager from the home office on the East Coast flies out to the engineering team on the West Coast. Monday is a lost day getting ready for the trip, getting meeting documents together and making whatever other arrangements needed to cover a week out of the office. Tuesday is a travel day, so if our hapless project manager is lucky, they’ll get to the West Coast office just about in time for everyone to head out. Wednesday is a meeting day, but only half of the people needed are actually in the meetings, because no one had the correct schedule. Adding to the confusion, the 50-plus pages of printed meeting documents are wrong, the numbers are all from an earlier analysis. The Thursday meetings go slightly better, but by this time things are badly off track, and anyway there’s an afternoon flight back home to worry about. By Friday our poor project manager is back in the office, exhausted and with only half of the goals for the trip accomplished, and at tremendous time and expense. Seems crazy, right?

Unfortunately that scenario is still very common for SMBs that have to collaborate with geographically distant teams. It’s a “sneaker-net” mentality that can bleed budgets and drag out project execution, two things that smart businesses simply can’t afford in a down economy. The solution for this is Hosted SharePoint.

1) People oriented computing

The secret to any successful project is good communication. With hosted SharePoint, people can work from the same documents, communicate tasks and report on progress with blog and wiki tools, and manage the project workflow across all the involved teams.

2) Collaborative workspaces

Avoid delays due to scheduling conflicts with collaborative workspaces and social networking tools that allow both “real time” interaction and “any time” collaboration. With SharePoint users can work together despite time zone and geographic obstacles that would otherwise slow progress.

3) Content Management

Put an end to version management headaches by creating and managing all relevant documents, task lists, and web based content from a centralized platform. Hosted SharePoint includes workflow tools and rights management to eliminate confusion and speed project execution. SharePoint is integrated with Microsoft Office applications for easy adoption into existing work habits.

4) Easy Information Access

SharePoint lets you build portals that can be customized for each user or team, and deliver exactly the content they need quickly and efficiently. By taking a ‘people first’ approach, you can take advantage of individual work styles and allow people to work in the manner they find most comfortable and productive.

5) Enterprise Class Tools

SharePoint gives you powerful information collection and analysis tools that not only make project execution more efficient, but they allow businesses to fine tune their processes in an ongoing basis. Easily design and create web based forms to input information directly into business applications, integrate enterprise grade search tools, and built in analysis and reporting tools allow clear communication throughout the organization.

If you’re wasting time, energy, and money on “sneaker-net” approaches to collaboration, it’s time to consider a hosted SharePoint solution. Low cost of entry, fully scalable architecture, and superior reliability, availability, and performance all make hosted SharePoint the right choice. Whether it’s collaboration between a handful of people across town or hundreds of people around the world, hosted SharePoint can have a dramatic impact on your project delivery.


http://www.thehostingnews.com/art-top-five-ways-hosted-sharepoint-improves-project-execution-168.html

Choosing The Right Web Host - The Hardest Customer Task To Solve

Can we take this whole internet thing one step further and host our site ourselves on our own PC? Well, the basic answer is no! If you need to get a site live quickly or cheaply, it can be nearly impossible to do it yourself. Outsourcing these tasks to professional web host prividers that will save you money and headaches. The company will lodge your site on a web server, make the necessary connections between your domain name and their server configurations and then you're up and running. Your site is out there on the internet for all to see . But there are so many web hosts. How can somebody choose between them?

Different companies offer different plans, features, transfer rates and support levels, so how can you choose what's right for you?

The problem is that there are so many, and to some shoppers, there is a lot of technical jargon that can get in the way of picking the right one. This article is meant to simplify matters a bit by giving a reasonable way to estimate a web host's value.

The first thing to be done is to decide what you need your page to do.Is this you personal site, business site or some organization's site. Do you think selling things on your site, or maybe managing a forum , do you need a hit counter ect. These are just some of the questions you need to answer yourself before even starting to choose.

There are more factors in what will determine the best hosting provider for you and that will be the primary goal of this artcle.

First thing to consider: Storage Space and Data Transfer
A small information site or personal site will usually only require a few megabytes of disk space, however, data transfer depends on the size of the pages your are offering your visitors multiplied by the number of visitors. Therefore, a popular and graphics heavy website requires a greater monthly transfer than a text site. You should look at a minimum of 2 GB (2000 MB) data transfer a month. Check with the company that they can upgrade your account if your site increases it's need for storage or monthly data transfer. Prepare for growth now so that you are not caught off guard by unexpected costs when you go to expand your services.

Second thing to consider: Reliability
For any online business, uptime is critical. You absolutely cannot go with a host that has an uptime of less than 95%.

No web host can have 100% uptime, and it's impossible to guarantee. Avoid any hosts promising more than they can deliver. Most claim 99.9% uptime, but due to the nature of computers and communications equipment, outages will and do occur occasionally. You can contact a company and ask, but they will tell you they're very reliable. Instead, ask for a couple of sites they currently host, that you can check out for yourself. The word of mouth is probably most powerful in helping to judge these companies.

Third thing to consider: Technical Support
Critical to success, you'll need an internet hosting company that can help you resolve problems quickly with the least possible disruption to your site activity. As most hosting companies offer inclusive technical support, you shouldn't pay extra for this. If you're not offered 24 hours/7 days you should look elsewhere. Most hosts have email support, but keep an eye out for hosts that have phone numbers listed. These are obviously more valuable. Though some hosts have excellent turn around on email service requests, there's no substitute for actually being able to talk to somebody if you need to. The test is to contact the company and ask questions. If they don't reply within 48 hours, or don't reply at all, consider another hosting company. A good company should reply within 24-48 hours.

Fourth thing to consider: Added Features
Various internet hosting companies offer a variety of services. Web hosters provide a listing of overwhelming features to hosting plans to entice you into joining their services. However, more importantly, what features you need and what ones you don't need. Make a list of what you know your website must be able to do and find out if the company you are researching can make it happen for you.

If you are paying for a website, you should definitely be getting email accounts and FTP access. Don't settle for a site without them. Make sure the email addresses are for your domain and not at your host's domain. FTP access is critical is you intend to do any amount of uploading files to your server. Don't settle for web applications. Also, you will want a host that provides a user control over these two features. Examples of services include also visitor counts, e-mail forwarding options, real time chat, shopping cart functions, and web statistics. The list goes on. With a predetermined needs list in hand, you won't forget to ask important questions.

Fifth thing to consider: Pricing Structure
If the previous four steps check out, then you need to consider price and this can vary widely. You need to consider setup fees, monthly fees, plan discounts and optional extras in your calculations. Don't let price be the primary factor in your decision unless you are launching a personal page. For ecommerce, businesses and organizations, the quality of the service is more important. Some companies offer you no monthly fees, but check the fine print before agreeing to anything. Free sites almost always have popups or require space invasive banners. Don't simply look for the lowest price. You need to know how much the prices will grow as you expand your services and customer base. Ask about a variety of scenarios. For example, a small business owner who knows he will only need a small site to get started should ask about internet service provider hosting prices for medium sized websites with a larger number of visitors.Think for the future!

Keep also in mind that the most expensive plan is not necessarily the best, and the biggest name company may not be the right match for you.

Many perfectly fine packages for small businesses now run between $15 - $25 per month. Some people say that there are three types of Web Hosts: free hosts, cheap hosts and good hosts - and there is more than a grain of truth in this.

A good web host company will not tie you into a long-term contract that will prevent you moving if you don't like the service.

Final words:
The most important thing to remember is to research and shop around. The are options and features that are offered by a wide variety of web host providers that is bound to suit you. The more requirements you have, the most likely you pay more. But paying for a quality web host provider is a good investment especially if your business will in the future become more reliant on the Internet. Finally, don't hesitate to ask questions and inquire about the services of web hosts - you don't want to regret it later.

Finally you can find more information about web hosting services visiting my site www.itstandard.net.

Author Bio
Richard Clement is an online publisher dedicated in helping online users in various categories. He is an online marketing specialist and owner of ItStandard.Net hosting company. For more info visit his site http://www.itstandard.net

Article Source: http://www.ArticleGeek.com - Free Website Content

Web Hosting Features

Finding a Web hosting provider seems like a difficult job. You think you've found a provider, but then another one offers some Web hosting features a little different than the first provider. So you have to decide what to do. Many of the features you won't even use. A Web host provider will add alot of features to your package to make it enticing. Instead of talking about all the features, I will discuss which ones are important. If you have a simple website, you can combine these features with a cheap web hosting package and be okay. Below are the most important features.

1. Disk Space
One of the biggest concerns you may have is how much disk space(also disk storage or web space) you may need. It all depends on how your website is created. First, let me tell you that Web host providers will show you disk space they provide you in either GB(gigabyte) or MB(megabyte). 1 GB equals 1024 MBs. A website with text only can get by with about 20 megabytes. However, if you add graphics and videos, you will need more disk space. The more things you add to your website, the more disk space you will need.

2. Bandwidth
Bandwidth(or data transfer) is the amount of information your website can deliver to visitors that surf your site. When someone surfs your website or downloads anything from your site, they are using bandwidth. A Web hosting provider usually gives you a month to month supply of bandwidth. If you are planning on having a website with few visitors, then the minimum bandwidth allowed by your provider(between 1GB and 5GBs) should be enough.
Here is some information you need to know when you are calculating bandwidth:
1024 Byte = 1 Kilobyte (KB); 1024 Kilobyte(KB) = 1 Megabyte(MB) ; 1024 Megabyte = 1 Gigabyte(GB)
Note: Some Web host providers don't calculate bytes in 1024's. They instead use 1000 to make it easier. This is something to remember if your calculations are a little different than the providers. You should ask your provider if you want to know which number they use.

3. FTP
FTP(File Transfer Protocol) is a method of transferring files from one computer to another. This gives you the ability to upload your website to your Web hosting provider. In addition, it makes life easier because you can copy lots of files at one time.

4. Customer Service
Technical Support is very important. You should find a company that gives you 24/7 customer service. You may have some issues with your website that need to get taken care of right away. The longer the wait, the more potential visitors to your website you could be losing.

5. Email Services
You definitely want to have email access so you won't have to give your personal email address to visitors of your website. You should get a few email addresses to use for different reasons.

6. Site Statistics
Site Statistics are important because you can keep track of how many people are visiting your website. Therefore, you can know how well your site is doing. In addition, you will be able to determine how much bandwidth is being used.

7. Reliability
If you find a cheap web hosting plan, it doesn't mean you can't rely on them. Furthermore, you should have a provider you can count on to keep your website up and running. Most web host can guarantee your site will be up and running 99.9% of the time. If you come across a web host that guarantees less uptime, I wouldn't recommend you use their services.

Conclusion
These seven features, in my opinion, are features you should have for a basic website. Now if you are planning on doing more than putting basic information on your site, then you should look at other features that may pertain with what you are going to do. For example, if you're going to run programs on your website, then you will need to look into the different types of scripts(PHP, CGI, PERL, SSI, etc....). Another example is if you are doing business online then you want to have security on your site like SSL. As I said earlier, there are alot of features that come with your web host package, but most of them you won't need. If you need more than the seven listed above, chances are you already know what you need because you will have built your website around those features. These seven are for a person who wants to put a basic website together, with information about their business. Now all you need to do is find an affordable web hosting provider to go with these features and you are on your way.

Author Bio
Carl Madison is an established author for www.hostdata101.com

Article Source: http://www.ArticleGeek.com - Free Website Content

How to pick a domain

If you are reading this you might be close to setting up your first website ever or you can be a person with experience that is just curious to see if there are things that you might have missed. Whatever the case is I hope to be able to provide you with a few of the things that I personally feel are important when you are picking the right domain name for your new site.

I assume that you have already found the topic that you are going to be focusing on and therefore I will not go into any of the things that relates on how to find a profitable market online. The reason I say this is that I assume that you new site will somehow have a business related theme as a personal website with pictures of your family and stuff doesn't need much consideration when choosing the domain name.

So let us get into the things that I strongly feel you would have great benefit from.

It is a know fact that more and more traffic (aka visitors to your site) comes from the search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN (which has now launched their new site called Live). So with this fact in mind you will need to find out how to get the best possible placement in the search engines so that people will come visit your site.

Most online marketers agree that from a SEO point of you the right keyword rich domain name can help your site rank better that if you are not using a keyword rich domain name. You might say that site like Nike.com, Amazon.com and Ebay.com doesn't have keyword rich names and you are absolutely right.

However the difference between you and the great site is that they have much larger advertising budget than you have and therefore they can get away with having names that doesn't make much sense. So if you are on a small budget I suggest that you go for the keyword rich domain name approach.

Choosing a keyword rich domain name does not mean that you will have to end up with a name that nobody will ever remember. That can be the case but it doesn't have to be. Let us say that you are going to create a site that deals with pets. Maybe you want to sell pet toys and other accessories.

What I would do is to go to the site called: http://www.wordtracker.com/free-trial.html and sign up for the free trial. Once you have received the e-mail from WordTracker you would enter "pets" in the field.

You'll see that the word "pet supplies" has a count of 2,000-2,500 visitors in a 90 day period. If you had paid for the full version of WordTracker (I strongly recommend that you do) you would have found that for the keyword phrase "pet toys and supplies" and that 145 people are searching for that particular phrase every day and that there are only 857 sites competing for that exact phrase.

Now that is great information and you can now use it for finding a domain name that will 1) Tell your visitors what it is that you do and 2) hold some really great keywords that you will want to target to rank in the search engines.

If you go to the site called: http://idenion.dk/tools/multidomaincheck.aspx you'll be able to enter domain names in the box and test whether they are available. I have just tested the domains pettoysandsupplies.com and pet-toys-and-supplies.com and both of them are available. That is great news as the domains names will help you some of the way to get the high rankings that you want.

Author Bio
2-register-a-domain.com provides you with information about how to register a domain name with free web hosting. Come take a look at 2-register-a-domain.com

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History of Domain Names

What is a domain name? A domain name is a unique name, kind of like an e-mail address is unique, which is registered in a database called WHOIS through an organization called Network Solutions, Inc. (NSI). The domain name corresponds to a unique set of numbers called an IP (Internet Protocol) address. The reason we use domain names instead of IP addresses is that they are closer to our language. It would be difficult to market a site like this: "Go to 64.233.167.99 or 216.109.112.135 to search the internet!" A much easier way to do this is to say "Go to www.Google.com or www.yahoo.com to search the internet!" (Both Google and Yahoo are trade marked by Google, Inc., and Yahoo, Inc., respectively).

A domain name points to a computer called a "name server". The name server knows that your domain name corresponds to your web hosting server's IP address and it routes the person who typed in your domain name to your web hosting server - to your web site. That is how people anywhere in the world can see your web site by typing your domain name.

In 1992, the National Science Foundation granted an exclusive contract to NSI to be the sole registrar of top level domain names. NSI also had a cooperative agreement with United States Department of Commerce ("DoC"). With no competition, consumers were at the mercy of NSI.

In 1998, NSI and the DoC amended their cooperative agreement to allow for competing registrars. NSI was forced to provide domain name registration to the competing registrars at wholesale prices, rather than the standard $34.99 annual fee. NSI still charges $34.99 per year.

In late 1998, the DoC assigned the responsibility of overseeing the transition to a competitive market for domain names and accreditation of new registrars to a new organization called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).

In 1999, ICANN began taking applications from companies who wanted to become registrars - and then capitalism took over: companies had to compete for business. Prices came down and service improved, however some are better than others. For a more detailed history of this transition, visit www.icann.org/registrars/accreditation-history.htm.

Even with the positive effects of competition in the domain name marketplace, the process of internet domain name registration remains a mystery for many.

There are a lot of companies that want to charge you hundreds of dollars to do the simple task of domain name registration for you. There are some registration companies who will charge you $35 just to register a domain. And there are web site consultants who charge over $100 to do the work for you. But you can do it yourself in about 15 minutes and it can cost as little as $1.99 for a year. If you do some research, learn a little and work smart, you can save yourself some money - and some headaches.