In my opinion, the worst thing that could ever happen for the web hosting industry as a whole would be if Google bought GoDaddy. Now before you write me off as being some crazy anti-corporation loon let me explain the web hosting industry’s doomsday scenario.

The Merger Begins

Lets say in this alternate reality, Bob Parsons (the man in charge over at GoDaddy) gets an offer he can’t refuse from the Google team. He decides to sell to Google for (well, insert large dollar amount here) and Google is now the world’s biggest search provider and the world’s biggest domain name register all in one smart business move.

A few months down the road, Google announces it will get into the web hosting game. They have the money, servers and resources to start doing serious web hosting at any given moment now. Some might say they already are with their page creator service - but I don’t really count that as it has yet to even really get any decent buzz. If they needed a base for it, they could always use GoDaddy’s hosting business as a starter. Yes, ladies and gentlemen we now have Google Daddy.

Google Daddy Takes Over Web Hosting

With their two tier plan, you can get unlimited disk space, bandwidth and resources for free. Then they charge you five dollars for a domain name and your web site is up and running. Where is the catch? Well Google’s main business is not search - it is advertising. To pay for the hosting, you will agree to put Google AdSense ads on your web site and split the profits with Google 50/50. They get half of your ad revenue (on top of what they take from AdSense profits already) and you get reliable free hosting.

The End is Upon Us

Over the next few months, web hosts would start to drop like flies. Nobody out there can compete with Google Daddy and in one year or so down the road (after that acquire the Planet, Rackspace and a few other dedicated server hosts) they control seventy-five percent of the hosting market. What Google was just a little over a year back for just search they are now for search, domain registration and web hosting.

That would be the ultimate doomsday scenario that would bring the web hosting world to its knees. Google Daddy controls the three things that pretty much defines the Web as we know it and there is not a major force that can stand in their way.

The magazine style theme for WordPress seems to be a more popular choice these days, with web sites wanting to look less like your standard blog and more like a professional web site. Here are three of my favorites from this unique theme category:

1. Revolution from RevolutionTheme.com

It will cost you around $80 for a single use license, but oh man - is it ever awe inspiring. One of the first to really make a name for magazine style WordPress theming, Revolution continues to be the top dog.

2. Grid Focus from 5thirtyone.com

This theme is a three column WordPress work of art. It also is distributed for free and is not dependent on having any certain WordPress plugins to work.

3. WordPress Magazine Theme from solostream.com

The name is simple enough, and this theme also delivers (as long as you wish to pay the almost $80 price tag). I do believe though this would be a good investment if you wanted a theme that made you look more professional and a little different than all the rest. Loads of banner ad space on this one too for advertising bliss.

As you can see there are loads of quality WordPress magazine themes out there if you know where to look. For more, the crew at Theme Playground has a nice roundup of some of the best of the best magazine themes available.

I hear you need a favor. You need a little something to listen to, to help pass the time at the data center you work at. Well, I’ll do you this little favor and provide episode 142 of the Web Hosting Show free of charge. I won’t even ask for a favor in return.

Download the Web Hosting Show, Episode 142!
Running Time: 12 minutes | File Size: 5.35 MB

Here are just a few topics from this week’s episode of the Web Hosting Show.

• Best of the WordPress Magazine Themes!
• Web Hosting Show is Nearly 3 Years Old?
• Google + GoDaddy = Web Hosting Armageddon!
• Server Status Monitoring with Firefox? (link)
• What is so Great About PHP 5 over PHP 4?

I am the Dick Van Dyke to your crazy web hosting musical. You won’t catch me hanging out with Mary Poppins or trying to convince people I’m a music man. I only have room for one passion and woman in my life and that lovely lady’s name is web hosting.

I like things that don’t suck - so when I found this web hosting tutorial that didn’t suck I had to watch. Cheap budgets aside, I do have to say this is one of the best explanations of web hosting I’ve seen on in video form.

By far, SimplePie is one of the coolest collections of code that helps you mesh together PHP and RSS feeds to create some really dynamic content. After downloading and installing - the number of things you an create with this is only limited by your imagination.

What is it exactly? Here is how the developers describe it:

SimplePie is a code library, written in PHP, intended to make it ridiculously easy for people to manage RSS and Atom feeds.

What Can SimplePie Do For Me?

As an example of what you could do, well - you know popurls.com right? It was made popular for delivering a lot of tiny boxes with content from delicious, digg, reddit and more on one single page. Using SimplePie you can make your own version of it.

Also be sure to check out the demo:

http://simplepie.org/demo/

Doesn’t do much (gives you a readable output from any RSS feed) but somebody with some imagination could put this or any of the other powerful things you could do with this to good use. If all this PHP and RSS stuff excites you and you want to develop a new way for people to view syndicated content on the Web give SimplePie a shot. It is hands down the easiest way to get this type of work done.

Without monitoring, nobody would know what is happening with the web server you are on. Is PHP running? Does MySQL need to be restarted? You would be without direction just in case a bad situation popped its ugly head. As you can see server monitoring might be the most important part of the hosting business.

Now with shared hosting, monitoring is a given. Most people have no clue what is going on. They just know their Joomla install isn’t working and they want it fixed. With dedicated hosting though monitoring becomes more important because the web host you go with may or may not “hold you hand” in this regard.

The basic things you need to keep your eyes peeled on are HTTP, FTP, SMTP, POP3. Then you have other services that are second tier to that and you go down the line service by service.

There are services out there that will monitor for you. SiteUptime.com is one service that comes to mind. Another one that I would highly recommend would be Wormly.com. If you remember I had an interview about Wormly with its founder back on podcast 105. Shared, VPS or Dedicated, if you are not sure how, when, where and why your own web host does server monitoring you might want to ask.

Yes, Yahoo has jumped in on the unlimited hosting bandwagon. For $11.95 a month (plus a $25 setup fee) you can grab a shared hosting account with unlimited disk space, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited e-mail storage, and 1,000 email accounts.

Now usually with an offer like this, I would be pretty mad because they are selling a service they can not possibly deliver. There is no such thing as unlimited anything in the web hosting world. Now why has Yahoo still not gotten on my bad side yet? Well, unlike other hosting companies they spell out what “unlimited” really means.

What is the Catch?

First thing first, they prohibit hosting any files that are not linked with your web site your hosting. That is a good thing. With unlimited disk space they spell it out like this:

You can now create as large a site as you like (you won’t face an upper limit, or “ceiling”), but we will place some constraints on how fast you can grow. In other words, you can add as much content as you want, but maybe not all at once. The vast majority of our customers’ sites grow at rates well within our rules, however, and will not be impacted by this constraint.

The explanation for unlimited bandwidth is also along the same terms. The FAQ for that says…

In most cases, if you use our service appropriately, visitors to your web site will be able to download and view as much content from your site as they like. However, in certain circumstances, our server processing power, server memory, or anti-abuse controls could limit downloads from your site.

So I have to give Yahoo’s web hosting division a pat on the back for actually putting it down in writing what unlimited means.