Time to open that proverbial Web hosting newspaper to see what all the hosting gurus around the world are talking about. I use a very complicated measurement of buzz to find the most important stories of the week. It involves lottery balls, midgets and other scientific stuff. Now that I have done all the heavy lifting, I can share with you the spoils of my hard work.

Web Hosting Talk Redesigned - One of the most popular set of forums on hosting has been given a new look. If you haven’t navigated your way towards WebHostingTalk.com recently, you really should give it a look. It has a cleaner feeling to it, doesn’t feel as cluttered as it used to be. They have also added a news section, where they are putting stories taken from the WHIR in there. Looks like they might be trying to develop more “portal-like” features to keep people staying there and to bring new people into the fold. All in all, I give it two freaky thumbs up.

cPanel Training Seminar 2007 - Panel will be hosting their second annual Training Seminar in beautiful Houston, Texas on May 30 - June 1, 2007. Last year’s seminar was a success with their partners, and direct customers learning in depth technical details about cPanel software and facilitating open dialog between technical support representatives and developers from cPanel. For more information about the event, check out cPanel’s Web site at cPanel.net.

Geek Certified Goes Up for Sale - This is a story that could go three ways. It could end in a really good result, a really bad result or no real change at all. One of the more popular “host certification” Web sites, GeekCertified.com is going up for sale. I’d buy it, but last time I checked I don’t have much venture capital cash laying around the Web Hosting Show headquarters. It should be a good resource for whoever gets to add it to their portfolio.

Have hosting or Web development news you’d like to share with the masses? Let me give the midgets and lottery balls a break and send ‘em my way to mitch@mitchkeeler.com.

Related Podcast Link: Listen to Episode 103!

What if you had your own personal Web hosting guru that you could lock up under your house and ask questions to whenever you needed to? Well I can’t promise I’ll live in your basement but I will answer some of your most frequently asked hosting questions.

What can I do if I want to host my Web site on a server that has no adult material on it? I don’t want to share a server with some pervert.

The first thing you can do is get over it. There is hardly any way you are going to know who your neighbors are on a server, and neither will the outside world. Your safe!

Do all Web hosts support Ruby on Rails (RoR)?

A lot do, but I don’t think it is an industry standard just yet. PHP and MySQL are easy to find, but you might have to ask if Ruby on Rails is available on the plan or as an upgrade to the hosting plan.

Are there any Web hosts out there that will deliver me a custom Web hosting plan?

I am sure there might be, but I do not know of any right off hand. Most Web hosts will allow for a few upgrades here or there, but for the most part you will be locked into the plan you have or the plan that is packaged over or under the one you have - depending on if you want to upgrade or downgrade.

What is the best forum software out there today?

I like Vanilla and SMF. Two good options and I am pretty sure both are totally free.

I plan on hosting videos on my Web site. Should I go with hosting the files myself or putting them up some place like YouTube?

The best way to go would be to go with the “YouTube” option. There are a lot of video hosting solutions out there to go with - and it will give you more exposure outside of your own little empire of Web sites. Also you don’t have to worry about the huge disk space and bandwidth limitations either.

Related Podcast Link: Listen to Episode 103!

Now this is a ‘bit of a new segment idea I figured I would try launching this week to see how popular or not popular you might make it. There are a lot of goofy and silly things out there hosted Online, and every so often I figured it might be my duty to highlight them for you. What is the first “Thats Really Hosted?” spotlight Web site?

Badgers! Badgers! Badgers!

That’s right, BadgerBadgerBadger.com gets the honor of being the first entry into this hall of oddly hosted material. If you haven’t checked it out before, you really should. It is mind-numbingly addictive. After stumbling across it, I played it for my three year old niece and she couldn’t get enough of it. After it went through the second or third loop I kind of felt like I might be making brain melt from the badgerness of it all, so I had to turn it off.

It is addictive as well. After hearing it once, the rest of the day you are going to have “Badger, badger, badger…” going through your head till you watch it again. You will wake up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night, run to the computer and watch it again. You will start missing out on family time around the TV so you can sneak back to your office and watch it over and over again.

You might even miss recording a week’s worth of hosting podcast because of.. well, that hasn’t ever happened before of course, but it could. So point your browser in the direction of BadgerBadgerBadger.com and when you do make sure you let them know that the Web Hosting Show sent you there.

Related Podcast Link: Listen to Episode 103!

One sticking point in Web hosting that is hard for some people to wrap their heads around is server resources. Now this usually stand for the amount of CPU and RAM your Web site can use on the server that you are on.

So why is this such a confusing topic, and why do so many hosts not want to talk about it? Well, it might not be as taboo ask you might think.

Now as an example of what server resources means to you and me, think of it like your computer. Lets say you have ten programs open and running. You are browsing the Web, checking your E-mail, running a chat client, burning a DVD and more. Now running all those programs at once can be a little taxing to your machine if it is not powerful enough. Power for a computer (and for a server) is often measured by the CPU and RAM it has access to.

Now lets say your DVD burning program starts to go wild, it is using up so many resources that it slows the rest of your programs down to a crawl. What would you do? You’d shut down the DVD burning so your other programs could come back from a near death experience.

Now if you have a Web site that is using too many server resources, you could experience the same effect. On one server you have many Web sites hosted. Each one would be like a program, using it’s share of the server’s resources. If one uses too much, it is usually “turned off” so the other ones are not effected. A Web host can much easily deal with one mad customer. When you have an entire server filled with pissed off people, well - lets just say that is no fun at all.

Now how can you fix this? Well moving up in plan type can often give you more resources to work with (if you can not bring your resource use back down). Going from a shared hosting environment to a dedicated one can give you a fighting chance because a dedicated plan has a smaller amount of Web sites on it. What does that mean for you? It means you have more server resources to work with.

So why don’t Web hosts tell you how many of the server’s resources are available to you? It is because the number in most cases is very low. It isn’t exactly a good selling point, so they are not going to share that information with you.

Also many servers are setup differently.

Server number one might be able to take a little more punishment than server number two. So that makes it really hard for a Web host to give you an exact number. Most scripts and services you would install on a Web hosting account these days are really good at managing your resources for you so they do not get out of hand. Every so often though, you might run into an issue like this - so it is good to know before hand what your situation is so your not yelling at your host saying “Where did my Web site go?”.

Related Podcast Link: Listen to Episode 103!

When one talks about server resources many people feel like they are being lied to or are being told things that fly right over their respective heads. I’ll bring the talk back down do a level we can all understand and let you know what it is all about.

Tune in and hear what happens when badgers attack! Episode 103 is on the air.

Download the Web Hosting Show, Episode 103!
Running Time: 16 minutes | File Size: 7.15 MB

Here are just a few topics that we discussed on this week’s episode of the Web Hosting Show.

• The Web Hosting Talk Redesign, Whats New?
• How Limited Are You by Server RAM and CPU Usage?
• Some More of Your Frequently Asked Hosting Questions!
• cPanel Training Seminar - When, Where and Why?
• More Badgers Than You Can Shake a Stick At!

Time to limbo through the Web hosting world, and seeing how much of this jargon and sales stuff I can bring back down to a level we can all understand. There are tons of topics that pack themselves under the Web hosting tent and I do my best here week after week to let you know what it all means for you.

Link of the Week: HosterTalk.com

Now I often get asked which top 10 list is better than the best, and honestly it is pretty hard to tell these days. Inside of the Web hosting industry it seems like everybody and their grandmother has a top 10 list of Web hosts.

How can you tell which ones are just there to reap the rewards of affiliate links and which ones really do some work to figure out which host is best?

Well the first tip that I can share with you when it comes to learning how to read these lists is to look for a good explanation about how they figure out who is the best. If it is not on the Web site somewhere, E-mail them and ask how they figure out the rankings. One good example of this in action is over at WebHostingUnleashed.com. Here is how they explain the top hosts list they have.

“These hosts have more than 15 positive reviews and are recommended by at least 90% of the reviewers.”

That sounds like a reasonable and fair explanation. Now the kind of explanation you want to stay away from would be like this.

“We have a secret lab where we hire midgets to pull lottery balls out of a bucket with the Web hosts’ names on them, and then sort those by the midget’s height.”

Who are some of the other good top 10 lists that I trust? Well, I tend to like the comparison shopping engines a little better than the top 10 lists personally. My favorites there would be:

• FindMyHosting.com
• HostQuote.com
• HostVoice.com

There are others out there as well that give you good results. So what do you think is the most important thing to watch out for with these top 10 lists? Do you think they are all crooked or are some of them honest?

Related Podcast Link: Listen to Episode 102!

It has been a while since I found any hosting freebies, but this one deserves the attention.

The folks over at ResellerGuide.com have got you covered if you are looking for a free design to get your hosting business off the ground. Just this past week they lanunched 12 free layouts for Web hosting companies. Some of them have multiple pages included and PSD files so that you can edit it and make it your own.

This could be a great helping hand for any small hosting company trying to get off the ground.

First impressions are everything, so having a good Web site layout is a nice start to building that relationship with your future clients as they browse through your links.

What is the only thing that they are asking for in return?

All that we ask is that you leave a review of the hosting company you are using and help the community with advice. Plus maybe you can link to us or email me with an article or idea for an article from time to time.

Sounds like a pretty good deal to me. Check out all 12 designs and when they ask you who sent you to them, make sure that you let them know that the Web Hosting Show sent you there.

Related Podcast Link: Listen to Episode 102!