The Case for Cloud Hosting

My internet connection had been crawling the past few days. I’ve checked with my DSL provider, and my account seems fine. And for some reason, it’s not with all websites that I’m having difficulties. Then I just recently learned that an earthquake has caused faults in undersea cables connecting my region to the rest of the world. This means that accessing certain websites running on servers on the other side of the globe will be slower. Being in the Asia Pacific, this supposedly meant most sites out there, with the popularity of inexpensive US-based datacenters.

Still, I can access my Gmail without much fuss. Google searches return results at the usual super-fast speeds. And then I remember that Google uses multiple datacenters spread around the world. When you run a Google search, chances are you get directed to the datacenter nearest you. This is advantageous in at least two ways. First, you get faster access time, since data packets travel through shorter distances. Second, you are assured of service even if communication through the the main line gets severed or disrupted.

Shouldn’t your blog be running on a similar setup?

I had recently moved some of my blogs into a new web host, and one of the things I had to think about was whether to go for traditional hosting or those cloud hosting services like Rackspace Cloud (previously Mosso). Cloud hosting essentially does what Google does with its datacenters–it distributes the load across servers in different locations.

So assuming your website is in a cloud hosting setup, you are more or less assured of service, even if there are traffic spikes and server outages. If you’ve been fortunate to have been frontpaged on popular social bookmarking sites like Digg and Delicious, you’ve probably experienced some server downtime either due to the sheer number of visits, or a bandwidth exceeded error on your account. And even if it’s not your site that experiences this slowdown, if another site hosted on the same shared server gets massive traffic, then chances are your site will also slow down.

Is cloud hosting for everyone?

Considering the scenarios above, I can say that cloud hosting is not necessarily ideal for everyone. For one, there are cost considerations. Cloud hosting companies don’t usually charge a flat rate per month. Rather, they charge based on usage: bandwidth, space and even CPU cycles used. If you have a small audience, you might be better off in a less-expensive shared hosting environment. And if a good majority of your audience is located in one place, then you may not have to worry about undersea cables failing.

However, if you are planning to run a web application in which uptime is an absolute must, you should consider cloud hosting. This would also be the case if you run a really popular blog with a decent-sized audience. Or perhaps you are planning to start small, but you foresee the need to scale in the near future–then in this case cloud hosting might be right for you.

From what I’ve read, some hosting companies are moving to cloud-based setups, but some are still holding out, focusing on improving their traditional hosting business. What’s important for me is that consumers have a choice, based on need, budget and opportunities for growth.

image credit: flickr/eschlwc

How to choose the right web hosting for your blog

Getting the right web host for your blog is vital — get it wrong and your blog could be incapacitated, offlined or shut down, or you could end up paying far too much for the service.

Everyone has an opinion on the best web host to use, but here are some of the things you should be looking out for when it comes to choosing your host.

Features

Operating System / Web Server

What operating system and web server your web host runs is very important when it comes to easily installing your blog.

Some blog platforms can be installed on a variety of platforms, though some may need some expert coaxing, but if you’re planning on running WordPress you’re far better off using a host running a full version of the Apache web server (or lighttpd, before you complain I’d missed it out).

Get it wrong and you may find that the blog software can’t be installed or doesn’t work as expected, meaning that you’ll have to move hosts, wasting time and money in the process.

Disc Space

How much hard disc / storage space are you allocated? I’m always wary of web hosts that offer unlimited storage for ridiculously low monthly price, because there’s bound to be a catch or “fair use” policy in there somewhere, even if it’s not immediately obvious.

Ensure that the amount of disc space you have is enough to install all the software and databases you’ll need, as well as have room for your content.

A basic installation of WordPress may only require around 1.5MB, but bear in mind that you’ll probably be adding plugins.

The best hosts will let you start small and upgrade disc space as and when you need it. Obviously, if you’re going to host multiple blogs on a single account (and server) your space requirements will increase.

Memory

If you’re used to shared web accounts (where the resources you use are shared with other subscribers) you may not know much about memory usage, but just as your own PC has a physical memory limit, which in turn limits how many programs can be run at once, and how fast, so does a web server.

It’s worth bearing in mind that some unmodified blog platforms (WordPress particularly) are quite memory intensive. This will become apparent the more popular your blog becomes (or if you run multiple single-install blogs on the same server), and as several users try to access your sites at the same time.

The more memory you have, the better the Apache web server will be able to handle requests from each user and quickly serve web page content.

Lower memory can lead to “thrashing” problems, where the server tries to use hard disc space as virtual memory. Your visitors may find accessing your blog is very slow or even impossible.

Memory requirements are a real movable feast, but it’s definitely worth knowing what limits a web host has, and how easy it is to upgrade.

Some hosts, particularly those offering “unlimited” services, may well hide this vital machine information, and you’ll only find out there’s a problem when your site becomes unresponsive or inaccessible.

Bandwidth

Bandwidth dictates how much of your content can be downloaded in any given month, and therefore will be determined by how many visitors you have, how many pages they viewed, and what type of content was served up.

It stands to reason that if you’re hosting video or other large files, you’ll chomp through bandwidth far faster than running a primarily text-based blog.

As per disc space, be a little wary of hosts offering unlimited bandwidth, because in my experience there’s usually a catch.

Find out what happens if you exceed your monthly bandwidth. Will you be billed for the additional usage or will your site become unavailable for the rest of that month?

The best hosts will offer you some grace and easily allow you to upgrade your hosting to a more appropriate level.

There’s no point paying for bandwidth you won’t use, but at the same time you don’t want to be left without a web site, particularly if your blog is your business.

Shell Access

Even if you have no intention of getting your hands dirty “under the hood”, you may well want to enlist the help of someone else to perform hacks and tweaks to your blog, and that’s so much easier when you have shell access — the ability to access the command line and quickly accomplish tasks such as setting permissions, tweaking code, observing system resource usage and so on.

Some web hosts don’t allow shell access, or severely limit the command set, because it’s considered a security risk. Yes, it can be, but the decent web host will be set up so you’re not treated like a child, and that any damage you do only affects your site, and can be easily undone.

Databases

Ensure that your web host offers the right database support. This includes allowing databases to be updated by the blog software after installation.

I’ve used some large web hosts who locked down the main WordPress database after installation, making it impossible for certain plugins to create new tables. (It also showed up an appalling level of customer service).

Find out what sort of database your blog software needs (most likely MySQL) and what features are likely to be required, then ensure your host can handle that.

htaccess

On an Apache web server, you absolutely must have full control over the htaccess file.

Web hosts who disable certain key functionality such as redirects make it difficult or impossible to implement certain features on your blog, such as proper permalinks.

Scalability

You’ll be hoping that your blogs grow over time. As you add more content and more visitors come, the need for more resources increases.

You may start with shared hosting and need to move onto a dedicated server. Believe me, it’s a LOT easier to handle this if your web host can handle the transition for you. It will generally save you time and money.

So, unless you think you’ll never outgrow shared hosting, my advice is to look for a web host that offers a range of plans and types of hosting and makes it easy to upgrade (or downgrade) as required.

Backups

Does the web host enforce a rigourous backup policy? While this doesn’t absolve your own responsibility to backup your blog, it does mean that you have an extra safety net should data loss occur.

History and reputation

Consider how long has the web host been operating, if they have any prominent companies hosting with them, and what their overall reputation is.

Reputation can be a difficult one to gauge because, particularly online, negative reviews tend to outweigh good reviews. However, it’s not impossible to see who the better companies are.

Beware of reviews which are obviously linked to some kind of affiliate program. I’m not saying they’re inherently untrustworthy, but you have to wonder how impartial someone who’ll be paid for recommending a service is going to be.

Personal recommendation

Getting a personal recommendation or two from trusted friends or colleagues can be a smart move, but it’s worth trying to find people hosting similar types of content to you.

The requirements for a multimedia-rich site getting tens of thousands of visitors each day are going to be far different from a small photo blog averaging a couple of hundred visitors, and web hosts won’t necessarily handle both situations well.

Speak to Support

Though the fashion is to find a web host online and sign up straight away, bypassing all human contact, do consider speaking to someone at the company you’re considering.

If you can’t find anyone to talk to, or you can’t get past a pushy sales rep, that in itself should set alarm bells ringing.

However, if you can gain access to technical support (who won’t bombard you with language you might not understand), they may well be able to recommend the best package based on what you’re trying to achieve.

Conclusions

If you’re now expecting my recommendation of the best web host, you’ll be disappointed.

For the very reasons I’ve outlined above, your requirements could well be very different to mine.

I’ve learned quite a lot from experience (and some bad hosting either self-chosen or enforced upon me by my clients) what makes a good web host.

Taking the time to find a good web host means that you can spend more time blogging and less time fighting with a web server or moving hosts every time something changes.

What tips would you give for finding a good web host? Note that we’re not after actual recommendations here, just best practice for researching companies.

Sitepoint Marketplace becomes Flippa

Most of you have probably heard of Sitepoint, either from its books, tutorials, or their well established marketplace, but over the last few years, they have been finding the marketplace becoming a community of its own. At first, they split off the design work to a new site, 99designs.com and now it seems the buying and selling of websites will be moved to a new domain called Flippa.

Currently in Beta, Flippa looks like a whole break with the current Marketplace, where 99designs looked fairly similar in nature to the older design market. The good thing is that they’ve moved over the user accounts so anyone that has or had an account on the old Marketplace, can use Flippa.

Why change the Marketplace on Sitepoint? Details are already on Flippa:

Why Flippa.com? If it ain’t broke don’t fix it!

In a nut shell, the SitePoint Marketplace has outgrown its tab on sitepoint.com. For this marketplace to remain the #1 location for buying and selling web sites, and for us to properly service the needs of our buyer and seller community, it simply had to have its own identity – it had to be set free from sitepoint.com. Once you’ve had a chance to look around the site we’re confident that you’ll agree it was the right move.

So far, there doesn’t seem to be much real content on the new site, as people test out the new site. How will we be able to tell the real sales from the fake as they run this Beta? Not really sure, but one thing is for certain, Flippa is something we will all have to get used to, and hopefully it won’t kill the community that has grown on Sitepoint.

Domain names and self-hosted content still important in a Web 2.0 world

Is the old mantra of having a dot com domain name for your business becoming less important as social media takes hold, or is it still a vital and centralised piece of branding that must simply evolve to keep pace with the changing nature of the Web?

Mashable published an interesting article this week titled Is Social Media Making Corporate Websites Irrelevant? in which it suggests the merits of directing people to a social networking URL instead of a corporate web site.

I can understand the lure of promoting more “sticky” sites, such as Facebook, Bebo and MySpace, over a staid corporate web site, particularly if the company has managed to create something viral or otherwise of enduring interest to users.

However, my general take on the issue is that it’s not wise to decentralise branding and content to third party sites that may either restrict access to members (Facebook) or could close down or suffer technical problems that subsequently offlines a big chunk of your marketing efforts.

Instead, create microsites using domain names that you own, pointing to content that you host. Yes, incorporate Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and whatever other social networking and media tools you see fit, but don’t rely on them outright.

If you want to direct people to Facebook, why not do it via a subdomain that you have control over. In any case, not many organisations have vanity Facebook accounts yet. What’s easier to remember: facebook.yourdomain.com or www.facebook.com/people/Your-Name/123456789 ?

Web 2.0 sites are certainly a lot more alluring than the average corporate site, but there’s no reason why companies can’t create (or outsource) their own compelling content that embraces the social web but doesn’t relinquish overall control.

What do you think?

Enabling Visitors To Save Posts In PDF Format

Are you the type of blogger who publishes content on a regular basis that would be good to have in a portable format such as PDF? Sure, you could print the article off but then you have to store that paper somewhere. I think it would be much more convenient to have those PDF files on your PC. Thanks to a post written by Amanda on BloggingTips.com, I’ve discovered a nifty service called Web2PDF Online.

The service quickly converts HTML content to PDF for free which provides another means for your visitors to save your content. All you have to do is place the Web2PDF button on your website and the service will do the rest. When you sign up for an account, you get to choose how the PDF will look in terms of content margins and the orientation of the content (portrait or landscape). I know Joomla provides this feature out of the box so it’s nice to see a web service provide this functionality free of charge for anyone to use.

A Request For Google’s Webmaster Tools – Fight spamlink hacking head-on

For at least the last six months, one of my blogs has been hacked and I didn’t know about it. For all I know, it is still hacked.

As Aaron Wall pointed out over at SEO Blog, there is a sophisticated new method of link cloaking that hackers are using where only GoogleBot sees the hacker’s spammy xanax links.

I had guessed that my site was hacked around last August because the site was de-indexed from Google. However, I went to Google’s webmaster tools at the time to look at “What Google Sees” and didn’t see any spammy keywords. Then, I checked all the files on my webserver and didn’t find any obvious changes. Then I scanned the database for common spam hacker tactics. Nothing. So as a last resort, I simply deleted all the WP files off the server and re-installed a fresh installation of WP.

In the past, this methodology has solved all my spamhacks. But not this time. And to this day I still don’t know if I’ve solved the problem. What I do know is that the site has actually been hacked because now when I go to Webmaster Tools “What Google Sees” and look at the cache of pages on my site, I see lots of spammy phrases.

So, 6 months later, I’ve gone ahead and rechecked everything. I’ve run the Exploit Scanner plugin and it doesn’t see a problem. I’ve looked through the theme files, including functions.php and still don’t see the issue.

What makes the problem especially tough to identify is the cloaking aspect. Because it’s impossible to test whether you’ve fixed the issue in real time. Instead, you are left waiting for the next time Google caches a page on your site.

So here’s the request for Google’s Webmaster Tools…

Let’s tackle spamlink hacking head on. Let’s make Webmaster Central’s Webmaster Tools really, really useful by meeting these specs:

• Provide immediate email notifications if spamlink hacking is detected on a site.
• Because of the cloaking issue, allow a webmaster to request an immediate site review (just like you do for initial site authentication)
• Provide webmasters a robust toolkit of actions that they can take to remove the specific spamlink hack that’s detected on their site.

The fact of the matter is that spamlink hacking has gotten too sophisticated for even the average webmaster to keep up with. With widely distributed CMS software like Wordpress and sophisticated attack methods, web security is not as simple as it used to be. It’s time for Google to help us out. And this post is my plea for help

Do You Find Snowflakes That Are Falling On a Webpage Distracting Or Pretty?

The Old & Crusty Method To Building Links

My friend Dee Barizo gave me a great suggestion the other day. See, I have this problem. I have a 3 year old website that is stagnating, despite some truly great, cream of the crop content in it’s niche (I don’t say this lightly: I’ve hired an expert who’s creating a killer resource).

So I went to Dee because he’s got an amazing eye for how to effectively build links that actually affect search engine results. What was his suggestion to my problem? Well, he said that in many niches, it doesn’t work to do traditional link baiting. Not because the content doesn’t match, but because people in that niche rarely link out. In other words, within each niche there tends to be a link culture.

Get to know the link culture within your niche!

Dee pointed out that in this particular niche that I’m looking at, the search engine results are dominated by the old and crusty sites. You know, the ones that were built in the 1990s and are still running on html rather than some modern CMS. The problem is that these old and crusty sites tend to have a few things in common:

1) They do not have blogs, and thus are not actively in the business of linking
2) They either do not have link pages or they haven’t updated their link pages in years (or maybe even decades)

The Solution

If your niche is dominated by old and crusty sites, your best bet is to email them asking whether they take guest articles. Then, take some of your best content, rework it a bit, and send it off with a few links back to your site.

Take note: many of the old & crusty sites are run by actual experts, so you’ll need to make sure that you are offering them something that is truly valuable.

Using Information Architecture To Plan A New Website

Most people start a blog and only later start confronting the organizational structure. Obviously, content is king… so it definitely is important to create content.

But I want to suggest that your content will be a lot more effective, and flow more easily, if you take the time up front to organize your site’s conceptual structure and match it to navigational structure. This is called information architecture.

When you create “sections” of your site, you also create editorial expectations. Let’s say that you have a “How-To” section. Simply having a major section of your site titled “How To” will serve as an encouragement and reminder to produce how-to articles.

Over at the SeaWaves blog I wrote an article describing a specific instance of information architecture. It’s worth a look for a concrete example.

But here, I’d just like to describe the basic process of Information Architecture.

Step 1: Define the broad topic of your site

Step 2: Define 5-10 general categories that are collectively comprehensive enough to cover any topic you might write about. These will serve as the major sections of your site.

Step 3: For each general category, define one level of sub-categories

Step 4: Define relationships between information in the various general categories (some categories will have stronger relationships than others)

Step 5: Define relationships between information in the various sub-categories (intra and inter)

Step 6: Populate each category with content so that you can test the relationships you’ve defined

Questions To Ask Yourself When Planning A New Site/strong>

A) How will I highlight content throughout my site?
B) How will I show readers additional relevant information?
C) How can I make the categories on my site more than just content aggregators?
D) How can I present information to readers in the most captivating way possible?
E) How can I make navigation between sections as natural and smooth as possible?
F) How can I algorithmically relate information between categories in a useful way?

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