Running a successful ad campaign isn’t an easy thing to do. You have to do a lot of experimenting and a lot of trial and error before you find something that works best for you. Both Web hosts and any other person on the Web today can run an advertisement so here are my top 7 ad design tips and tricks.

Seven Ad Design Tips to Learn From and Try Out

1. Decide if you want to keep it serious or make it a little zany. Serious ads hold a lot of respect, but funny or creative ads might lead to more clicks.

2. If your not a well known name inside of the business that you are advertising to, include your domain name on your ad somewhere so at least if the people don’t click on your ad they now have that domain in the back of their head.

3. Try something different. Most Web hosting ads have a picture with a server on it and the world “unlimited” plastered all over it. You could go down that route, but try something new as well.

4. Experiment with four or five different ads and see how they do. You might even want to try more than that if you have the cash to do so. This way you can see which one works best.

5. Talk to and target your audience. If you are running and ad on a Web development forum for a Web hosting company, you could focus the user on the fact that after they learn the basics, they can come to you for the hosting. Now the only hard part is to figure out a way to put that into a 160 x 600 ad space.

6. Put up some text link ads as well and try them out. Graphical ads are highly ignored these days because people are used to them and tune them out on Web pages. Text link ads give you yet another alternative and space to try to capture somebody’s attention.

7. Don’t ask me to punch a monkey, midget, baby, Paris Hilton or George Bush.

Related Podcast Link: Listen to Episode 107!

Web hosting, along with many other companies out there today is largely based around the relationship of a business with its customers. Without one, you can not have the other. Just think of it as the yin and yang of how our economy works.

Douglas is one of the customer service experts or gurus out there that does his best job to improve that relationship between a company and its clients. Think of him as a therapist for customer relations. I just recently started reading through his Service Untitled blog on the subject and honestly I can not stop reading it.

Here are some of his most recent posts that I found interesting.

• The Step by Step Guide to Support Email
• Personalize Customer Service
• Skill Level Based Routing

From Web hosts to Web hosting clients - I promise everybody will walk away from listening to this Monday’s interview with him with a ‘bit of knowledge you didn’t know ahead of time.

Related Podcast Link: Listen to Episode 107!

Well, who are the worst Web hosts in the world?

That is a pretty strong claim to make against any company, but if you have the information and proof to back it up, well that is a different story all together. Ben over at Web Hosting Unleashed sent me an E-mail a little earlier this week wanting me to check this list he put together out.

While it isn’t shocking for me - if you are a customer of any of these hosting companies it might be shocking for you. Ben is a brave man to put this list together - and I have to say I trust it as much as I trust his top Web hosts list as well. Here you have the top five worst hosting companies, by the reviews given on WebHostingUnleashed.com.

Top 5 Worst Web Hosts

1. RegisterFly - 4% Recommend - 107 Negative Reviews - 5 Positive Reviews
2. 1T3 Online - 9% Recommend - 50 Negative Reviews - 5 Positive Reviews
3. Globat - 6% Recommend - 46 Negative Reviews - 3 Positive Reviews
4. DataPacket - 9% Recommend - 41 Negative Reviews - 4 Positive Reviews
5. Dot5 - 6% Recommend - 31 Negative Reviews - 2 Positive Reviews

You can check out the full list of thirteen worst Web hosting companies on Web Hosting Unleashed. If you are one of the 13 on the list and you want to say something in defense of yourself or to point out something good - I will given you an open mic and open invitation to come on the Web Hosting Show podcast and give us your thoughts.

Related Podcast Link: Listen to Episode 107!

Customer service is what the Web hosting industry is all about - but it doesn’t exactly have the best track record for it. Today I’ll interview Douglas Hanna and he’ll tell you how you can make it all better no mater if your a Web host or a lemonade stand on the street corner.

Plus we have stuff for trekies, the world worst web hosts and tips to help you create the ultimate clickable ad right here on this edition of the Web Hosting Show.

Download the Web Hosting Show, Episode 107!
Running Time: 20 minutes | File Size: 8.84 MB

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

• Learn to Become One With Your Customers
• 7 Tips to Creating Better Ads
• Interview with Customer Service Guru Douglas Hanna
• Who Are the World’s Worst Web Hosts?
• Lunarpages New “Star Trek” Radio Skit!

Here we are again you and me ready to go tripping through the Web and trying not to fall flat on our faces. It isn’t easy these days making sense of all this Web 2.0 junk and hosting terminology that goes on behind closed doors.

You can think of this podcast as your hand rails to help you along that long proverbial World Wide Web flight of stairs.

Link of the Week: Apache at 56 Percent? - /home/liquidat

Alex over at Sliqua Enterprise Hosting created all the Web Hosting Show fans a special group over at Facebook. If you have an account on Facebook or you have just been looking for a good excuse to create one, here ya go.

Go ahead, join up and say hi to some of the other Web Hosting Show fans and friends. I’ll be interested to see how many people interact here. You can add me as a friend too. We are all buddies, right? RIGHT?!

+ Web Hosting Show Facebook Group!

I have to say I am pretty excited about the upgrades coming to cPanel and WebHost Manager.

As one of the leading control panels out there today, cPanel has never been a really nice thing to look at visually - in my opinion.

They are taking some major leaps and bounds with both style and substance in the next version.

Here are a few words about the cPanel and WHM 11 release right from the cPanel folks.

cPanel and WHM 11 brings the most extensive update ever to the cPanel and WHM software package. With upgrades in nearly every section of the product, this version enhances the feature packed, security minded and highly stable platform for web hosting.

From the blog on Web Hosting Unleashed, I got these details.

Major Changes And Features:

• Security Center with comprehensive security tools
• Substantial Back-end code upgrades
• Apache 2.0.x and 2.2.x support
• Increased interface speed
• Web disks
• Site Owner Interface Upgrade
• Site Owner “Getting Started Wizard”
• Upgraded branding and better language support
• Easy Perl, PHP and Ruby module installers
• and much, much more

You can test drive both WHM an cPanel yourself here. Hopefully the cPanel team will continue to surprise us all with these upgrades. One might say being leader of the pack means they don’t need to really compete - but from the looks of things it doesn’t look like they will be laying down the crown anytime soon.

Related Podcast Link: Listen to Episode 106!

Not all domain name extensions are easy to register. Now your .com, .net, .org are all easy enough to lay your hands on.

What about your .nl? Your .pt? You can’t forget about the .bf either. How you you lay your hands on an oddball domain name extension? Well listen up - I have an easy solution.

I don’t use Wikipedia for much, but this is one area where they really excel at. Here you can look up all the top-level domains and find out a plethora of information about each one. For example, lets look at the .at extension.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.at

Now you know that this is the internet country code top-level domain for Austria. It is administered by nic.at. Now by going to nic.at or any of the other domain extension administrators and find out where and how to register it.

Related Podcast Link: Listen to Episode 106!