Ever wanted to meet others who listen to the Web Hosting Show, to discuss the podcast, share links, debate who the greatest web host is, or share cookie recipes? If so, then you my friend need to go join the Web Hosting Show’s group on Facebook.
Right now we are discussing the Web Hosting Show reaching #78 in the top 100 software how-to audio podcasts on iTunes, sharing our web site URLs, discussing who might be current hosting our own site and a lot more. All that I ask you do is join, introduce yourself, and I hope this ends up delivering to you one more way to meet people inside the industry we are all interested in learning more about.
I wanted to kind of give this side-project a re-launching because I think there is a demand to want to know more about the hosting world – and with my fine audience here, we have a wide enough spectrum of beginners to experts that everybody should find something to learn from. Join and say hi!
I have been hard at work for several hours today updating, posting and hacking away at WebHostingShow.com. Working from a long list of suggestions you have sent my way, plus releasing a few new updates to some old favorites… Well, here are some of the updates we are rolling out today.
I know a few of you have complained in the past about the previous text being too small to read, so I have bumped it up some so that you, my wonderful viewing and listening audience, can better enjoy this entire Web Hosting Show experience.
E-mail Subscriptions, Front and Center
You can now subscribe to the Web Hosting Show by e-mail on the top of every page on WebHostingShow.com. Just fill in your e-mail address into the text box and hit “subscribe” or click this link. Following our updates here could not get any more simple.
Login to Comment from Twitter or Facebook!
Thanks to Disqus, you can now login and comment via Facebook, Twitter or Disqus.com. With this new system in place, the commenting system will be much more dynamic too – providing you with a few more features:
Threaded comments are here, so you can reply to somebody else’s reply to help, give feedback or answer somebody else’s comment.
More profile pictures with your comments. If you add a comment with your Twitter handle, your Twitter profile picture will show up. If you add a comment via Facebook, then your Facebook icon will show instead.
Send in video replies, and if you do so – I might post them on the next edition of the podcast!
Subscribe to a comment thread by e-mail.
I hope you enjoy all of these new additions and upgrades, and I am sure there will be more to announce soon! Also if there is something you’d like to see added to WebHostingShow.com be sure to let me know. I would love to see you test out this new comment system I just put in place!
Not to sound like an over-hyped sales man, but we do have a great show for you today. From ten of the best free web site hosting solutions, to news about web hosts being attacked because of their relationships with torrents it is like a bonanza of web hosting news, tips, and tutorials you can not do without. The Web Hosting Show is now on the air and ready for download.
Largest Datacenter in the US to be Built in Texas – Dallas-based Capstar Commercial Real Estate Services is investing millions of dollars to redevelop a former telecommunications equipment plant in Mesquite, Texas into what it says will be the largest data center in the country, according to a report by the Dallas News.
Trivia Question – What “celestial based” web host calls Texas its home? (to find out the answer, be sure to download and listen to this week’s podcast!)
I hope you fully enjoy this week’s podcast. If you have any show feedback or suggestions be sure to leave a comment or drop me an e-mail at mitch@mitchkeeler.com. Enjoy it, share it and listen again and again!
Are you searching for a web host that offers nothing when it comes to uptime? Well, while many think they might be currently hosted on that host in question, I can say you are wrong. Why? Because you are not hosted with No Uptime Hosting.
NoUptime.com promises you nothing at all. For web hosting fans, this web site is really hilarious. Anybody outside of the web hosting world though, probably will not understand what the fuss it all about. Take their three plans for an example:
Hosting Package 1 (the I’m-Poor plan)
Hosting Package 2 (the Take-My-Money plan)
Hosting Package 3 (the Resell-Our-Crap plan)
As they say, “We are constantly working to improve our server downtime. Keeping you awake at night is our number one priority.” Oh, and you can’t forget their testimonials with such gems as, “I want my money back”. How do you get your content to them? FTP? No, that is so old school. Here is how they suggest you send it:
Don’t like uploading your files via FTP? No problem! Send us your files on a floppy and we’ll upload it for you. It’s one of the many ways we do our best to accommodate your needs. Just remember, our floppy system does not accept Windows, Linux, or Mac floppies.
I could spend hours discussing this one great parody of a web site, but I will save you the time and just point you towards NoUptime.com. It is a fun site for anybody who is in or has dealt with web hosting one on one.
We are all falling on tough economic times, so what better way to save on some hosting than to look towards a few free hosting sources. Now, free web hosting does come with some downsides. You are not going to be able to host the next Digg or YouTube, however if you need a small space to get started with learning the web hosting ropes, free hosts can often be the best way to get your feet wet.
Here are ten free sources for web hosting out there today.
100webspace.com – Here you get 100 MB of web page, 3000 MB of bandwidth and a lot of extra features like MySQL databases, SSL, SpamAssassin, POP3 and web e-mail and much more. It also allows for FTP or FrontPage access too.
Frihost.com – This free web host is offering you 250 MB of disk space and 10 GB of bandwidth per month. It is hosted on a Unix OS, with access to MySQL, cron jobs, raw logs, backups and more.
HelioHost.org – Your monthly bandwidth will be limited to 2500 here, and 250 MB of disk space. However, they do offer Ruby on Rails, Fantastico, and both MySQL and PostgreSQL databases.
It looks like after the people involved with the Pirate Bay web site were convicted of copyright infringement earlier this year, the IFPI is starting to threaten other torrent sharing sites by threatening their web hosts.
To give you a little more information about the key players here, the Pirate Bay, a torrent sharing web site, provides what you could call the “path” to be able to download copyrighted materials. The IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry) is the music industry’s lobby group who is doing some of their heavy handed grunt work when it comes to shutting down web sites like the Pirate Bay.
The new tactic here is that the IFPI are skipping over the web site owners and are now going directly to the web hosts who host the torrent web sites in question. They want to get the web hosts on a charge of assisting copyright infringement, which is a decision that has yet to be appealed.
There is one web host who has yet to given into the demands of the IFPI. The Swedish provider Portlane has filed a complaint in the Swedish Market Court. Now true, sharing copyrighted materials might be wrong, I will leave that judgment call up to you.
What is to be admired here is a small guy standing up against the establishment, showing the IFPI and the world that we should be a society who serves the people’s best interest and not the best interest of the one with the biggest wallet.
I have heard about Squarespace from a number of different sources the past few weeks, so I thought I would give it a look. For those of you who may be new to the service, it is a fully hosted, completely managed environment for creating and hosting a web site.
The service really does a great job a breaking down the parts of your web site down into bricks. You kind shift and move the bricks around, make make your web site look the way you want. The designs to choose from are great too, and you can customize them to suit your needs.
Along with hosting, and design – they also provide you with real time visitor analytics and stats about all of your pages. That way you can work on marketing yourself better too.
At $8 a month, the service really has a lot going for it, if you are looking for a mix of hosting, plus a quality content management system. Try them out for free, at Squarespace.com.
There is a lot of talk these days in the various web hosting social circles about cloud-based products and services. One big name that seems to be gaining a lot of traction in this area is The Planet, so I could think of no greater company to contact to discuss the issue.
On today’s show we have The Planet’s General Manager of Storage and Data Protection, Rob Walters, to discuss cloud storage.
Here are some of the topics we cover in today’s interview:
What is and what are the benefits of cloud storage?
How is The Planet’s cloud storage business different?
Why is creating the “shortest path” between clients and servers important?
There are five things customers should evaluate when choosing a cloud platform.
Performance – It is important that you match the platform with the performance needs for your application. Many cloud storage platforms only provide 2-3 Mb/sec, which is fine for most backup and archiving use cases, but is likely not sufficient for production data. It is also important to run multiple tests and measure the variability between tests, as cloud storage platform performance can be inconsistent.
Ease of integration – The ease of user access is critical to product adoption in web applications. Most cloud storage products provide proprietary APIs for integration. This means you will need to specifically develop for that cloud storage platform. This makes integration more difficult and increases switching costs. Check if the platform offers any standards-based integration software that allows access via CIFS, NFS, FTP or HTTP.
Where you want your data – Most cloud products do not offer specific locations for data to reside. In fact, these companies offer the data “in the cloud” as if “the cloud” were a location rather than an access medium. While in many cases the physical location of data is unimportant, there are occasions when being able to select a location is beneficial. For instance, if you are building a disaster recovery plan; working to reduce download times for a specific customer; or attempting to pass strict security audits, then where data resides is critical.
Flexibility – One of the most appealing features of cloud storage is the flexibility of its on-demand design, which manifests itself in two primary traits: scalability and elasticity. Most cloud storage products should free you from the task of capacity planning, hardware budgeting and upgrading. Capacity is available on-demand, as required. Watch out for commitments for minimum usage levels as these can negate this inherent benefit . Cloud storage products should provide elasticity, with capacity that grows as your business requires, and scales back as soon as this excess capacity is no longer needed.
Usage-based billing – Paying only for what you use is certainly appealing. The primary aspects on which to judge the pricing of a cloud storage product should simply be: how much storage capacity you used and how much bandwidth was used to access your data. Keep a sharp eye out for “hidden” fees, because in many use cases they can add up quickly to be as much or more than the primary elements of your bill. “Hidden” fees to watch out for include: connect fees, account maintenance charges, and “puts” and “gets” charges. Cloud platforms should offer simple and predictable monthly bills.
For the second show in a row, we have the chance to talk with one of the big names in the web hosting game, so I hope you tune in to hear more about cloud storage and how The Planet is serving it up to you. If you would like to come onto the show to talk to the entire hosting industry about what you do, how you host or anything else be sure to drop me a line at mitch@mitchkeeler.com.
A leader in the world of reseller hosting services; Fasthosts is not only flexible, they are fast too. Joining us on the show today is Steve Holford, the Chief Marketing Officer for Fasthosts Internet Inc. So what separates Fasthosts from the other reseller hosting options you might have? What can you learn from them?
Those questions, and many more, will be answered for you on this week’s edition of the Web Hosting Show.
Thanks to Steve for joining us on today’s show. If you would like to come onto the show to talk to the entire hosting industry about what you do, how you host or anything else be sure to drop me a line at mitch@mitchkeeler.com.
The reasons as to why Yahoo! dropped the ball with Geocities will be a great debate over the next year or so. However, I feel the main reason Geocities ended up fading off into the sunset is that Yahoo failed to evolve the product into what people needed.
Did Shared Hosting Kill Geocities?
In 2008, according to a survey by Compete.com, the domain geocities.com attracted at least 177 million visitors annually. So with those numbers, how could they go wrong? You can not argue the point that the lowering in price of shared hosting accounts made the Geocities hosting look less favorable. Users could pay as low as $4 or $5 a month and get a lot more than they were getting from Geocities with a shared web hosting provider. Free hosting might be totally obsolete these days.
Did MySpace or Facebook Kill Geocities?
Many are even saying that Geocities could have easily evolved into a Facebook or MySpace. Looking back at the original Geocities, it was all about community and sharing your pages with others. This is much like it is today, except badly designed free sites have been replaced with goofy zombie versus pirates or mafia wars games.
Did Yahoo! Kill Geocities?
In 2001, Yahoo decided to start offering a “premium” version of the Geocities product. To give users something to pay for and upgrade to, they had to turn on the free hosting service. This is when they started to limit the monthly data transfer or bandwidth to the free Geocities users. Following that, Geocities was just another free hosting service. Nothing more.
Yahoo!’s overall feeling towards the Geocities free users was distain and disgust. They failed to realize or even try to turn the direction on the proverbial Titanic in front of them. Could Yahoo! of saved Geocities? Maybe they could have or possibly they could have killed it off sooner than now. However, at least then we would be left with a general feeling they at least tried.
I have been hard at work for several hours today updating, posting and hacking away at 
Not to sound like an over-hyped sales man, but we do have a great show for you today. From ten of the best free web site hosting solutions, to news about web hosts being attacked because of their relationships with torrents it is like a bonanza of web hosting news, tips, and tutorials you can not do without. The Web Hosting Show is now on the air and ready for download.
It looks like after the people involved with the Pirate Bay web site were convicted of copyright infringement earlier this year, the IFPI is starting to threaten other torrent sharing sites by threatening their web hosts.
There is a lot of talk these days in the various web hosting social circles about cloud-based products and services. One big name that seems to be gaining a lot of traction in this area is The Planet, so I could think of no greater company to contact to discuss the issue.
A leader in the world of reseller hosting services; Fasthosts is not only flexible, they are fast too. Joining us on the show today is Steve Holford, the Chief Marketing Officer for Fasthosts Internet Inc. So what separates Fasthosts from the other reseller hosting options you might have? What can you learn from them? 
The reasons as to why Yahoo! dropped the ball with Geocities will be a great debate over the next year or so. However, I feel the main reason Geocities ended up fading off into the sunset is that Yahoo failed to evolve the product into what people needed.
