One of the pioneers in cloud hosting is RackSpaceCloud. I did have a quick chat with RackSpaceCloud. The answer I’ve got is cloud is almost like dedicated hosting, where you don’t get CPANEL. You’ll only be given SSH shell access. If you wanna have a blog hosted there, you have to install your own Wordpress, MySQL. These could be lots of hassles for those who lack of technical capabilities. To me, these are all fine as I’ve been supporting lots of Linux environments and web hosts.

But after googling around for “rackspace cloud server reliability” and having read the what WebDevNews have posted about their experience with RackSpaceCloud, I’ll need to think twice and do more research before moving to cloud.

Apparently, WebDevNews didn’t have good experience with Rackspace Cloud, when they moved their blog onto cloud servers on RackSpace cloud and they had very bad problems with the WP Cache, MySQL and .htaccess – the essential elements on a popular Wordpress blog. And their blogs had about 600+ pageviews a day (about less than 10% of my gadget blog) during the time when they were on RackSpace cloud.

So shall I move to cloud after reading the bad experience of WebDevNews? I guess I need more research before making the decision. The RackSpaceCloud starts at a basic of $11 per month and the bandwidth is additional cost that costs 7¢/GB in and 22¢/GB out. So, how much bandwidth do you need for a blog that has 5-6K daily unique visitors? It seems like you’ll only know once you’ve got onto cloud for a start first then you’ll be able to know how much you need. And increase from that on……

Btw, does PageRank matter? Yes Pagerank does matter!!! When you have higher pagerank, your blog posts or articles tend to get into Google index faster and rank pretty high, normally on the first page of the search results. So Pagerank also means better traffic to your blog or website. Of course, you will need better contents and continue to add more contents to keep more traffic or visitors coming. Now you have higher pagerank, it’s so much easier for your articles or blog posts to be indexed by Google faster and they will appeared on the search results much faster.

But once you’ve gained certain pagerank value, avoid doing the followings:

1. Do NOT sell text links. Something like TextLinkAds is very attractive lets say you have a pagerank 5 and above which you’ll lots of buyers of text links and place on your blog or website homepage. If you do not know textlinks, they are simply hyperlink with the anchor text to certain keywords that the advertisers wish to rank in search engines. By selling text links, you’ll then be de-ranked by Google or may finally get penalized down to pagerank zero!

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2. Do NOT exchange links excessively Don’t exchange links. The old time’s of exchanging links is over. Google no more values reciprocal link exchanges. If you have more links carried on your homepage or the blog roll in your homepage, you’ll be considered as link farm, or spam link farm, which Google will finally lower your pagerank. When you lose your pagerank, you’ll also lose your organic traffic that brings you sales and income.

But you’ll need to have more incoming links to maintain or go for higher pagerank, how to do that? Submit more articles to article directories, embed a hyperlink back to your website or your blog with the anchor text you want. If you operate a website, selling interesting products such as gadgets, do consider ask some bloggers to blog about your products by sending tips to them. They’re hungry for contents!

But if your website is new, your budget is slim and it’s just a small business, PPC can easily burn your butt if you ain’t know the know-how on controlling cost or twisting keywords or bidding for better ad position by paying less.

Lucky are those in the old days, which you could pay search engine to include your website in search engine indexes. Once paid your website will appear in the search engine in about 24-48 hours. And the paid search engine will come back to reindex your website and web pages every 48 hours throughout the entire year.

Paid Inclusion could have been all gone these days but there are some which’re still doing it, such as ExactSeek. I’ve been a subscriber of ExactSeek newsletter, I’ve recently received an email saying that their Paid Inclusion Program costs you only as little as $24.95 for full year for the first URL and additional URLs for $14.95 a year. And the ExactSeek will re-index to ensure your website and web pages in their search engines in every 48 hours. And also ExactSeek claims that your website and web pages will appear as organic search results of their search engine network that consists of 50+ search engines that have about 120 million searches a month.

The 50+ search engines of ExactSeek are those like ABCSearch.com, ExactSeek.com which are very very much smaller than Google and Yahoo. But 50+ of them bring about 120 million searches (average of 4 million searches a day), which could be only 1% or less what Google is getting. According to Wikipedia, Google is getting several hundred searches each day.

But a 4 million searches a day could be pretty significant for a small business which may be able to get you few hundred visitors each day. So I decided to folk out $24.95 to try out this website/blog HaveYourBusinessOnline.com. And I’ve setup Google Analytics to measure the traffic and continuously to add good content. So In maybe a few days’ time or a month or longer, I shall be able to add a few blog posts as follow-ups to this blog post, to track the effectiveness of the ExactSeek Paid Inclusion. So, stay tuned with me, if you’d like to know if a small investment of as little as $24.95 per year is worth and what is the percentage like in return you could get compared to PPC.

CPanel is the main control panel that is given to a Linux web hosting plan. If you’re on a Linux web hosting plan, you should have been given a CPanel that lets you manage almost everything you need. There are lots of small tools within a CPanel, ranging from a Preferences to Advanced sections, which shall get you little dazzled if you are a beginner. But for simplicity, you just need to master the 5 small tools we’re going to tell you here then you should be able to manage almost everything for your website.

1. File Manager – grouped under FILES section. This is an online File Manager that presents you almost the same look and feel of a Windows File Manager. You can use it to browse, edit, delete, upload new files and create new folders instantly within your web hosting file directory. To upload file into your web folder, you just need to use this File Manager to browse into the public_html or www folder within your home directory. The File Manager is an alternative to FTP software for managing all the files online by using a web browser only.

2. Backups – also grouped under files section, this is the essential tool to carry out your full backups either locally or remotely. It’s highly recommended that you always need to access or click on the backups icon and generate your own backup frequently. And it’s best you do a remote backup. The remote backup allows you to set a remote FTP server for remotely backing up all the data and web pages in your web hosting account to a remote FTP server. The backup will be generated in a .tar.gz compressed format and remotely transferred over to your FTP server.

3. MySQL database wizard If you’re using a CMS such as Wordpress for your website or blog, you will definitely need to configure MySQL database that is required by almost every CMS software. The MySQL Database Wizard that is under the Databases section, allows you to create a database and assign a database user with password to the created database, which you can then use to configure your CMS config file.

4. phpMyAdmin While you’re on a CMS, occasionally you may need to use phpMyAdmin to administer the database used by the CMS. Such as using it to create certain indexes to improve speeds of certain SQL queries of your CMS or using the phpMyAdmin to export your database file as a backup or to be transferred or imported to other databases within other web hosting account. (Please note, the same exported file will also be included when a full backup is carried out as mentioned in Backups)

5. Logs Lastly, the logs section which has a few useful tools such as latest visitor and bandwidth that allows you to know latest visitors that have just visited your website and what bandwidth has your site consumed respectively. And also the awstat allows you to view the access log of your website in highly graphical manner including various charts by days, months and countries etc. And also on the left side bar of your CPanel, you can also have a quick glance of the total bandwidth and storage capacity that you web site and web pages have consumed before it’s too late that leads you get suspended by your web hosting provider.

The MIVA Merchant shopping cart software is now available as an add-on, which customers can add to to the existing web hosting plans of LunarPages including dedicated, VPS and shared hosting at a price of $19.95 per month, plus a setup fee of $75. This saves about $700 per year. The package also includes an online credit card processing system which will also be added to LunarPages hosting plans which are using Miva Merchant 5.5.

If you haven’t heard about Miva Merchant 5.5 yet, it’s claimed to be the best e-commerce storefront software which allows an online store to customize their own shopping cart and integrate it to their online web store. It also includes credit card processing on the checkout page. Currently, the MIVA merchant 5.5 has been deployed on more than 200K online storefronts worldwide.

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In order to be successful using Twitter to promote your products and services, you need to have tons of followers. The number of followers more than 10,000 will be kinda little sufficient to have your products and services known by your followers and in return, it could generate lead or sales. The more the better.

As simple as that your followers are simply your listeners of what you’re gonna say or introduce everyday. Here are a few simple tips below that tell you how you can get more followers:

Industry Tips – If you have expertise in one field, you can make use of Twitter to showcase your expertise and build your credibility. For example, if you’re an expert in how to make money online, you can create a list of high value tips to send out one or two everyday. If you have the time, you can do it manually or alternatively you can have a free tool such as TweetLater.com to schedule and send it out for you everyday. If those “Tweets” sent out by you are interesting, you will get “Re-tweet” by others, which will then send to their list as well and in return get you lots of followers.

Tweet your business – Once you have sufficient followers, you can consider tweeting about your Business, your products and services on Twitter. But DON’T overdo it. If your Twitter account is full of tweets about your products and services, it’ll definitely be considered boring, people will stop following you. You need to keep your followers, a 80/20 rule of Tweeting about your products and services should be good enough. Such as you have eight tweets about things other than your business and two tweets about your business, which should be just nice to keep your Twitter account active with followers.

Send Thanks to Retweets – When you get “Retweeted”, it means what you’re tweeting is worth to be shared by the person who re-tweeted you to his or her list of contact. It’s always best to send the “Retweeters” a short tweet of thanking them.

Quotes – Quotes are useful on Twitters and it’s also a way to get you more retweets. Similarly, you can use TweetLater.com to setup quotes for a month and watch your retweets happen. An example of quotes:

Invitations – On Twitter, you can open an online seminars and invite others to join. If you could provide useful, high value, low-cost info, then people love to join you and you will get lots of retweets.

Personal – The last thing is include some personal things in your life. But you don’t have to share your deepest inner thoughts or too much detail about your family. Tweeting about pets, food or hobbies shall be just nice and fruitful.

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Live chat support provided by a web hosting company offers the convenient contact to the support and sales of the web hosting company at cheaper cost, at anywhere you like and some even offer 24×7 hours of support. And of course, using live chat is easier for you express yourself and tell precisely to the technical support what’s gone wrong with your host. Such as an URL can be copied and pasted on the live chat, which should normally tell more precisely than speaking over the phone.

34SP.com, the UK Web hosting company recently has adopted the SmartTrack Customer Service Helpdesk software, which is a nice app that enhances the company support to their customer. And the great thing is the software provides live chat feature, meaning you are able to contact their technical support without needing to make expensive phone calls. And the best is when you’re on the run, you just need to have a netbook/laptop or a mobile device that has a full fledged web browser which you can use to hook up to their live chat service on their website.

The company has also mentioned the adoption of the SmartTrack software with the live chat feature, has dramatically increased the customer satisfaction levels as it’s led to ultra fast response time with the live chat feature. And some more the live chat allows capturing or recording of the chat session between the support and the customers, which allows the company to further analyze the chat session and texts which can then lead to further improve their services or future prevention or anticipation of such a problem to happen again. Find out more here

Verio is the company that has been providing various web, application hosting and SaaS (Softwar as service ) services. They have now added a new category of web hosting service called the Advanced Business hosting which aims to let small business to have chance to get their business online, but maintaining the hosting quality at enterprise level.

The Verio Advanced business hosting actually makes use of VPS (Virtual Private Server) technology which allows customers to have dedicated containers isolated from other customers, but with a price that is similar to traditional shared web hosting.

Having a dedicated container provided by the VPS allows you to have better resources for your web pages. Especially suitable for web pages that were developed using PHP and MySQL technologies. One good example is a web site or blog powered by Wordpress which experiences pretty high traffic of 3-5K unique visitors a day. And some more VPS ensures better security, it’s very much different from a shared host or container which some vulnerable scripts (e.g PHP pages) within one of the customers, will affect or get other customers to be hacked.

Lets look at the price range offered by Verio Advanced Business web hosting package. They are classified into Foundation Web, Pro Web and Advanced Web

Foundation Web – $9.95 per month; Ideal for businesses with a simple need for a turn-key
solution to host their web site. Private email and web server space and the
ability to host up to 4 unique web sites.

Professional Web – $29.95 per month; Ideal for the businesses requiring more resources and
flexibility for e-commerce, multi-media, and other resource intensive needs.
Private database server space, in addition to web and email server space and the
ability to host up to 8 unique web sites.

Advanced Web – $84.95 per month; Ideal for the growing businesses that understand that the
web is critical to their business operations. They want to maximize all
available email, web server and database resources to cover periods of high
usage/growth and provide the highest level of turnkey performance without
migrating to a private server solution. Ability to host up to 16 unique web
sites.

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In a nut shell, Twitter is a microblogging service that allows you to post messages or micro blog posts that each has only 140 characters. But due the short messages, many people are more darling to post on Twitter than writing long articles or blog posts. And this of course encourages more people to use Twitter and it’s even become a habit that you need to be hooked on Twitter to tweet your daily life, updates, what you’re doing and follow others about what they’re doing and what interesting things that they may have found on the Internet or in their daily life.

Twitter, besides using it as your personal daily update and followings of your friends’ updates, it can be used for promoting online businesses. Many companies have been doing that, we’ll provide some upcoming news and history about Twitter to get you more convinced about it first before looking into how you could use it to promote your online business.

Putting aside all these, lets look at the most recent in the news about Twitter. The latest news is Twitter plans to add new service called a analytics dashboard which allows companies to monitor their “Tweets” about their business. And Twitter itself wishes to generate revenue from this new service. This announcement also proves that Twitter is getting more solid to allow you to promote your Internet and offline businesses. It’ll start getting itself equipped with the necessary tools to help you out to make your business to achieve more sales and more profitable. And in June this year, Twitter has already reached 20.1 million U.S. users, according to researcher ComScore Inc.

via techchee source

What does Good URL structure mean? A good URL structure will be the URL that contains the descriptive category and filename of the document or blog post. Such as this blog post, the permanent URL is as follows:

It presents the date of when the blog post was posted and followed by the descriptive post title. This URL also presents the user more meaningful words on the URL itself, which users tend to click more when they’ve searched this out from the search engines. And it’s recommended this kind of URL is considered easily indexable by search engines.

Google SEO guide also recommends NOT to use URL structure as follows, which may hinder search engines to crawl and index it. And also lengthy URL with many funny parameters and unnecessary session ID many also hinder the user to click on it.
1. Some web CMS may present you URLs for your articles/blog posts/product pages with complex URLs that contain many parameters (separated by ? and &) and also very long session id e.g

So, do remember, when you choose a CMS for your web store or blog, do consider if it has a feature to produce you with pages or posts with friendly or good URL structure.

2. Google also recommends to keep your URL structure as simple as possible, which is good both for the users and the search engines. In the above example, the URL of this blog post can even be simpler, such as

Which has the date omitted, so user can easily remember and it presents a timeless manner to the user. If you wanna do this in your Wordpress blog, you gotta go to Settings –> Permalinks, then choose Custom Structure under Common Settings, and key in as follows, as shown in the picture below