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The Best Web Hosting Companies

With more than 5,000 web hosting companies on the Internet, consumers are looking for a short cut to finding the best service for their business and personal requirements. A little known secret from the “geek” community can greatly simplify the process of finding the perfect match for you.

Since the mid-1990’s, a company in Bath, England called Netcraft has been providing free research data and analysis on many aspects of the Internet. They are a respected authority on web hosting providers, operating systems, ISP’s, electronic commerce, encryption, and content technologies, to name but a few. Netcraft is the place where webmasters and other information technology professionals go when they want answers to solve real-world problems. Fortunately, one of the best reports Netcraft produces is an on-line near-real-time web host performance report. It provides performance data on about 50 of the top web hosting companies on the Internet. Incredibly, the report is free and updated every 15 minutes.

Netcraft’s Hosting Providers Network Performance report [http://uptime.netcraft.com/perf/reports/Hosters] can best serve those who are seeking to locate a reliable hosting service. It tracks outages over the past 24 hours providing the hours, minutes, and seconds of outages. Performance monitoring agents are operating in the USA and the UK so that the network performance can be determined from different points. Web hosting performance is comprised of the time to process the http GET request and return the page contents. The time reported depends on the speed of the processor, the size of the data, the number of concurrent requests being processed by the web server and so forth. Dynamic content generally requires more time than static content. During the http GET request Netcraft records four times: (1) DNS (2) connect (3) first byte, and (4) total.

The DNS category provides performance information on the time it takes for the Domain Name Service (DNS) to lookup the hostname. The customer’s local name server as well as the authoritative name server for the domain affects DNS response time. Due to the wide variability of this performance parameter it is not part of the total time recorded. The connect performance parameter is the first phase of the http GET request when the TCP/IP connection is made to the web hosting server. Connect is typically reflective of network latency but if the web host is under heavy load the time recorded will increase. The first byte performance parameter is the time from when the last byte of the http GET request is sent until the first byte of the response header is received. Although many different factors, including application associated processing, are involved this performance parameter is generally useful in determining how fast the web hosting server is responding. From a performance perspective this is the silver bullet because studies have shown that consumers purchase more often and in higher dollar amounts from fast performing web servers. The last performance parameter is the total, which is the time from when the http GET request is started until the last byte is received.

Can selecting a great web hosting provider really be so simple as looking at web hosting performance reports? Well, yes and no. If you are simply looking for the best virtual web hosting company using Netcraft’s web hosting performance report can help you select from the 1% of hosting companies who are so confident in their service that they pay Netcraft to monitor and publish the results for everyone to see. The chances are very good that companies willing to do this will do everything possible to keep their operation running as competitively as possible. Of course, you still need to determine which of these best 50 companies can satisfy your needs in terms of operating system support, programming languages supported, and so forth. You can save yourself lots of valuable research time by using iTechGuide’s Top Performance Web Hosting Companies table [http://itechguide.com] to help further identify the best web hosting company for your needs.

2007 Peach ePublishing, LLC,http://www.peachepublishing.com
About the Author

Jason Canon has authored numerous technical publications including: photonic switching, gigabit networking, VoIP E9-1-1 and others. He is an expert author for EzineArticles.com. E-mail: jmc at canon dot org.

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By HOST KING
March 10, 2010

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Domain Names: Discover the best kept money-making secret on the Internet

Everyday thousands of domains names expire with the site owners simply abandoning them as one would an old rusted car at a junk yard. Why do they simply walk away? For some it may be that they have lost interest, while others it may be that they are not reaching their intended goals. The bottom line about all this is that this piece of junk now can serve as an opportunity for you to capitalize on.

So why would you and how do you take advantage of an abandoned website?

Firstly, you will need to search for domain names that are about to expire. There are numerous sites that will provide to you for a small fee a list of domain names that are about to be thrown on the junk heap. Once you have a list, search for some domain names that are relatively close to your own. Chances are that the same site visitors that visited the site may be interested in your site. So you can take advantage of the site traffic from this forgotten site. Sure, it may not be much but even if it has a steady trickle of traffic you can make something out of it.

Once you have found a few domain names you think you can work with, you should then evaluate the power of the name. You can do this by checking its Google page rank. Many site owners spend a considerable amount of time and money building their page rank. Next, type in the URL of the domain in any search engine and see how many external sites are linking into the site. Link exchange programs take a long time to build, here again you can take advantage of another site owner’s effort.

After you have purchased the domain name, the only thing to do is to have the site traffic redirected to your website. This is easily accomplished by making some customized changes in your control panel which is usually located with your host company.
About the Author

Learn how you can make a fortune from simple domains.Click Here!

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By HOST KING
March 10, 2010

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How To Use A Tell A Friend Script To Drive Traffic Today

More and more webmasters have the recurring dilemma on how to increase the flow of traffic in the websites. During the past few years many methods that been developed to solve this predicament. While most of them would work there are those that would not make even a small impact.

One of the methods that have spawned many success stories in driving traffic into websites is viral marketing. Viral marketing makes use of the tendency of a person to share something to find informative, entertaining or amazing.

Many companies bank on this behavior to spread their products and increase the popularity of their company or their website. Viral marketing makes use of many mediums in enticing this behavior. It might be in the form of an interesting story, an addicting flash game, an amusing video and many others that may catch a persons fancy.

This ingenious form of marketing is typically low cost and is a wonderful tool for any company to utilize. The benefit greatly overshadows the cost or efforts to initialize this marketing scheme. Any website would greatly benefit that viral marketing.

Tell A Friend Script

One of the easiest methods in viral marketing is using a tell a friend script. This is a simple programming script that you can attach to the programming of your website. Generally, tell a friends script are installed in pages where a media is placed so that a person can easily send the media to any of his friends or his family members.

The basic concept of a tell a friend script is a script wherein a person may input his name, e-mail address, the recipients e-mail address and send the media to the intended recipient much like an e-mail with an attachment. As the recipient receives the e-mail he wouldnt think of the mail a spam mail because he would see the senders name as someone he or she knows and trust.

Tell a friend script eliminates greatly the chances of being blocked because they use the information inputted by the sender. This allows for wider spreading of this marketing method. It can be quite sneaky but it is very effective.

With the e-mail sent and opened the sent media will either be read, viewed or played. Also along with the mail would be a brief description of the company or site that sponsors the media sent. This allows for the introduction of either the site, company name or its products. The along with it is another tell a friend script.

Then the process begins again. As more people use the tell a friend script, more and more people will know of the existence of the sponsoring company or site. People who read the ads inside the mail who liked what they see would go and click on the link and visit the site. This drives traffic into the site resulting to great number of potential customers.

Tell A Friend Script Availability

A tell a friend script is very simple and does not require a complicated method of programming. In fact, you can copy paste a script and simply put it on an intended page. Finding one is even simpler. All you have to do is go to a search engine and type in the search box tell a friend script then press enter or click go.

In the search results page you will see many links that will direct you to a site where you can get a tell a friend script. It would just be a simple matter of looking and searching for the script and copying it to your intended web page.

With a tell a friend script viral marketing strategy you can drive traffic into your site which could potentially spell profits. This is a simple harmless script that offers great benefits for low cost paired with great creativity and foresight.

It is imperative that you have patience in using a tell a friend script. If your chosen media doesnt get the mileage that is expected of it, it may take some time before it gets spread or shared. But surely many people will see your ads and there is great probability that they will visit your site increasing your traffic flow.
About the Author

Drive Your Traffic runs an informative Web Traffic site that looks into all aspects of Web Traffic from SEO to The Site Itself.To find out more visit Domain Traffic

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By HOST KING
March 10, 2010

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Types of Web Hosts

To the uninitiated, the term “web hosts” probably conjures up images of creepy-crawly spiders. The truth, however, is quite innocuous. A web host provider is one that leases web space and bandwidth to website owners. The host sets up an account for its customers that can be used to upload HTML documents, PHP scripts, graphics and so on.

Do a Google search for “web hosts” and you’ll be astounded at the results. It is estimated that there are over 6 million of them and you’re probably wondering who they are. That’s not surprising, because there are no real “brands” in the web hosts market. That does not mean that they are clones, with little differentiating one from the other. Web hosts vary in the size and variety of services they provide. Check this out.

Minimal shared hosting services: Minimal shared hosting services provide very little storage space and bandwidth. Such services come with limited features, often with no support for PHP, multiple email addresses or web statistics. While this might be adequate for a maverick teenager’s personal web page, minimal shared hosting services are not suitable for any kind of serious website activity.

Shared hosting services: These are the most popular web hosts in the market, and can be compared to a high rise apartment. Nearly all small and medium businesses need only a small part of the resources of a web server. Using this type of service allows users to share the cost of a fast internet connection, pretty much like how tenants in the apartment share costs of maintenance and overheads. It also supports all types of features such as PHP or ASP, MySQL, multiple email addresses, large storage space and high bandwidth. There is however, the threat of lower security due to the number of other clients on the same server. There is also a limitation in the number of email addresses, databases and domains that can be supported, similar to the shortage of parking spaces in the apartment building.

Unmanaged dedicated servers: This serves the need for large storage capacity and bandwidth. A dedicated server does not limit the number of databases and email addresses that can be created. Bandwidth is much greater and users are typically allotted 500-1000GB per month. Users needing extra storage space may have to order a new hard drive for their server.

Managed dedicated servers: Managed hosting provides varied facilities at a wide range of prices depending on the required level of security, reliability and support. Users are well advised to thoroughly research the internet or inquire from trusted associates before choosing a managed dedicated web host or entering into a long term contract with one.

If you ever need to decide on a web host, pay careful attention to the unique needs of your business. Different websites need different solutions, depending upon factors such as the need for reliability, security and the volume of data management. Careful research is necessary before identifying a vendor.

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By HOST KING
March 10, 2010

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Linux – speed up your IDE hard drive

Linux systems usually use conservative default IDE driver settings that could be significantly slowing down your system. By default they are set to most safe settings guaranteed to work. However you may reconfigure them to increase the read speed of your hard drive. In most cases this will not speed up serving of your website significantly, but it is nice to know that you can get the most out of your hardware.

To benchmark the read speed of your IDE drive execute the following>root@newserver [~]# hdparm -Tt /dev/hda
/dev/hda:
Timing buffer-cache reads: 696 MB in 2.00 seconds = 348.00 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 60 MB in 3.00 seconds = 19.80 MB/sec

Timing buffered disk reads can be very slow. This may be as a result of high CPU load or extensive hard disk swapping. Check apache optimization section first if the read time is too slow.Now lets’ see what are the Input/Output settings of your hard disk. Execute the command /sbin/hdparm -v /dev/hda

# /sbin/hdparm -v /dev/hda
/dev/hda:
multcount = 16 (on)
IO_support = 0 (default 16-bit)
unmaskirq = 0 (off)
using_dma = 0 (off)
keepsettings = 0 (off)
readonly = 0 (off)
readahead = 8 (on)
geometry = 9729/255/63, sectors = 156301488, start = 0

This are the current driver settings settings. Lets see what your hard drive is capable of. Execute the command /sbin/hdparm -i /dev/hdaroot@cpanel [~]# /sbin/hdparm -i /dev/hda

/dev/hda:

Model=ST380011A, FwRev=3.06, SerialNo=5JV18H2Q
Config={ HardSect NotMFM HdSw>15uSec Fixed DTR>10Mbs RotSpdTol>.5% }
RawCHS=16383/16/63, TrkSize=0, SectSize=0, ECCbytes=4
BuffType=unknown, BuffSize=2048kB, MaxMultSect=16, MultSect=16
CurCHS=16383/16/63, CurSects=16514064, LBA=yes, LBAsects=156301488
IORDY=on/off, tPIO={min:240,w/IORDY:120}, tDMA={min:120,rec:120}
PIO modes: pio0 pio1 pio2 pio3 pio4
DMA modes: mdma0 mdma1 mdma2
UDMA modes: udma0 udma1 udma2 udma3 udma4 *udma5
AdvancedPM=no WriteCache=enabled
Drive conforms to: ATA/ATAPI-6 T13 1410D revision 2:

* signifies the current active mode

Significant I/O performance increase has been reported when setting drivers to DMA, 32-bit tranfers and multisector mode. Note that the drive support DMA modes. Lets turn DMA mode on, this will speed up timing buffered read by a factor of two

#/sbin/hdparm -d1 /dev/hda
#/sbin/hdparm -c3 /dev/hda (I/O support set to 3 – turn on 32bit transfers on your first HD by typing )
#/sbin/hdparm -m16 /dev/hda (choose data transfer parameters 16 as MaxMultSect=16)
#/sbin/hdparm -a16 /dev/hda (choose read ahead setting 16 as MaxMultSect=16)

Benchmark the hard drive performance again.
root@cpanel [~]# /sbin/hdparm -Tt /dev/hda

/dev/hda:
Timing buffer-cache reads: 724 MB in 2.00 seconds = 362.00 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 154 MB in 3.01 seconds = 51.16 MB/sec
Lastly you may tweak UltraDMA settings for those who have Mode3/4 IDE controllers with EIDE or UDMA HDs. It is possible to enable the Mode3 or Mode4 PIO and UDMA. This is too risky in my opinion for a web server so we skip this part. In a sample above UDMA is already enabled.

After you reboot the server these settings that you have just applied will not be saved. You may edit /etc/rc.d/rc.local file root@cpanel [~]# pico /etc/rc.d/rc.local
and add these commands to this file. rc.local is run after all other command are already executed when linux server is started up.
Note: standard settings are guaranteed to work. If you are not sure what you are doing and you prefer stability of your system for extra speed do not apply the above commands. We have these optimized settings applied on a couple of our servers including Filesland.com and several servers for other mid to high traffic sites.
About the Author

Nick is a webmaster for Filesland software download archive

Posted in Web hosting. Tagged with .

By HOST KING
March 10, 2010

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