Who Is Hosting This

For small businesses looking to connect with today’s e-savvy customers, a smart and engaging website is essential. Yet before you hang out your electronic shingle, you must choose the right web hosting solution for your business. Depending on your needs, you’ll most likely choose a host from among the four most popular hosting options—dedicated, shared, virtual private server (VPS) and cloud.

Dedicated Hosting

If you are particular about the hardware and software, or simply want exclusive and direct control over the server hosting your site, then dedicated hosting is for you. Since your site receives its own server, it won’t need to share resources or processing power with anyone else’s site. You can configure the setup with whatever operating system (OS) and security features you like, without having to worry about adjusting your content or code to fit a cookie-cutter mold.

As you might imagine, all this exclusivity comes at a price: dedicated hosting is the most expensive option, and might be outside your budget if you’re just starting out. As you’re effectively paying rent on the hardware you’re using, in addition to the cost of whatever bandwidth you purchase, expect to pay $100 or more each month. Also, while dedicated hosting provides a more stable hosting experience than shared hosting, going it alone means you’re on the hook for any software and hardware maintenance (including upgrades and repairs). It also means, should your server fail, your site will be inaccessible until you can rebuild the server and restore your files.

Shared Hosting

Shared hosting is the most popular method of hosting in use today, and the most affordable as well. When you purchase shared hosting, your website is allotted space on a server along with several others. You can choose from among several plans scaled to suit your budget and needs. HostGator, for example, offers three levels of shared plans, starting with “Hatchling” at around $4 a month (offering support for a single domain, unlimited bandwidth and basic website building tools, along with unlimited email addresses) and climbing to “Business,” which costs three times as much at $12 a month but offers support for unlimited domains and adds a toll-free number for your business into the bargain.

As with dedicated hosting, you have control over your own content, but because you are just one of many companies using the same piece of hardware, you don’t have to worry about maintenance or repairs to the software and hardware (of course, you won’t have a say in choosing the operating system, port configuration, or updates to system software, either). Also, sharing the server means sharing resources, too. If another site on your server draws a lot of traffic, every other site hosted on that same machine may slow down (or even crash) if the server can’t handle the load.

All that said, shared hosting remains a solid option for businesses with smaller budgets or those just getting started on the web. Think of shared hosting as the equivalent of renting an apartment rather than owning a home. You’re paying a lot less each month, and you don’t have to worry about keeping up the place, but you also can’t control your neighbors or tack on a new wing whenever you like.

VPS Hosting

If your website draws moderate to heavy traffic and want to control every aspect of your server and site configuration, but you’re wary of spending hundreds of dollars each month on hosting, VPS might be the solution.

Bridging the gap between shared hosting and dedicated hosting, VPS hosting provides the advantages of a fully-customizable server at a (relatively) low price by creating virtual machines (VMs) that share space on a single powerful system. You’re sharing space, but because each VM runs in its own isolated memory space and receives a predefined partition of system resources, your “server” is protected from crashes or heavy traffic on other VMs, and can be configured with whatever OS and other software you like. Plus, because everything is software-driven, your server can be cloned on the fly, meaning server downtime issues are (if you’ll pardon the pun) virtually nonexistent.

With no hardware to lease, VPS hosting can be had for as little as $20 a month. Virtual hosting company VPS.net offers a basic plan at that price with a dedicated 1.2 GHz processor, 376 MB of dedicated RAM, 10 GB of storage space, and three TB of network transfer. As with shared hosting, the options scale with your budget. Seriously power-hungry users can purchase a dedicated VPS with literally ten times the power, space and transfer of the basic plan for $140 a month.

Cloud Hosting

Much has been made in the media of late about “the cloud,” the ephemeral and yet ubiquitous place in the electronic ether that stores our music, backs up our files and, thanks to advances in multi-source processing and file management, hosts our websites. It might sound more like a nebula than a nexus, but what we call “the cloud” is in fact a decentralized network of computers working in concert to process, store, and serve up information. In other words, much of the cloud is the Internet itself, or at least the massive processing and bandwidth capabilities it provides.

Hosting services in the cloud combine the features of the other three popular services. Because it’s totally virtualized, it doesn’t have hardware costs, and as with a VPS, you can back up, clone, move, or delete your content on the fly without your users ever being the wiser. Scalability and pricing are extremely flexible; hosts like Rackspace offer managed hosting for $100/month (plus use) or  “pay-as-you-go” plans that save you money by charging you only for the storage, processing and bandwidth you actually use. You only pay for as long as your server exists, and most hosts will be more than happy to customize your configuration to meet your needs and budget.

But it’s not all laserbeams and pixie dust in the cloud. The same virtualization that makes this option so flexible also limits its power. While moderately priced cloud servers can match or even exceed low-end dedicated servers, they still lag behind their pricey super-powered silicon-and-steel brethren in terms of raw processing power.

Decentralization might provide a hedge against system failure, but it’s hardly a guarantee. If the cloud system hosting a variety of services fails, it can create a cascade effect, taking down anything and everything it hosts (cloud-loving behemoth Amazon learned this lesson the hard way in the summer of 2012). And, while having a server that’s easy to manage, clone and configure from just about anywhere is a definite plus, putting all of one’s eggs in the cloud basket means trusting that you’ll have reliable access to that basket. It also means trusting whoever’s holding the basket not to drop it, lose it or—worst of all—give away your eggs to anyone who comes asking.

Choosing the Host that’s Right for You

In a hurry? We’ve created this chart to help you sort through your options and find the right hosting solution for you.

One of history’s richest men, Andrew Carnegie, was worth nearly half a billion dollars at his death in 1919. Adjusted for inflation, his fortune would total more than $90 billion today. His contemporary, John D. Rockefeller, was even wealthier, having amassed holdings worth more than $1.4 billion (between $231 and $330 billion in today’s money) when he died in 1937.

Rockefeller’s fortune accounted for 1/65th of the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP) and was enough (had he been so inclined) to provide every person in America with $10 (a princely sum in a time when steak could be had at $0.20 a pound and a gallon of Rockefeller’s very profitable gasoline was a dime).

Wealthy enough to give old Scrooge McDuck a run for his money, these men and their peers made the tech titans of today seem downright impoverished. Yet even in a world haunted by the twin specters of austerity and sequesters, these latter-day denizens of the financial heights (corporations with empires consisting of silicon and data instead of oil and steel) have managed to amass positively enormous piles of cash.

As the United States economy struggles back from the worst recession since Rockefeller’s era, federal belt-tightening has boosted domestic recovery while the gradual return of consumer confidence has given modern technological megaliths enormous profits.

Collectively, the top five tech companies—Apple, Microsoft, Google, Oracle and Cisco—have a cash surplus of $333 billion, or enough to give every man, woman, and child in the world almost $50. While a collective decision to fork over a “fast fifty” to the entire population of planet Earth is as unlikely as Rockefeller slipping the American people a sawbuck each, it can be diverting to contemplate the potential purchases made possible by such funds. After all, one third of $1 trillion is more than enough cash to educate millions, feed an army, or even buy up an entire city.

 
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You’ve heard lots of people say WordPress.org is the way to go when building a site. Heck, we’ve said it here. It’s a powerful content management system (CMS) that just about anyone can use. The back end interface is very user-friendly, and by choosing a theme and adding plugins, you can easily customize your site without writing a single line of code. Yes, WordPress.org can make life easier for any publisher.

If you have the time to build and manage a site.

Whether you’re building a blog as a hobby, or you’re an entrepreneur who needs an e-commerce site, your time may be limited, taken up by work, family, and other obligations. If you want a high quality site, but you don’t have the time to dedicate to it, premium WordPress hosting may be the solution for you.

What is Premium WordPress Hosting?

It’s like regular hosting, and then some, meant to cater specifically to sites running on WordPress.org. In addition to offering a place for your site to live and thrive, premium WordPress hosts – like WP Engine, Page.ly and Synthesis – will essentially run your site for you—the back end, anyway. They won’t be writing any blog posts for you, or sharing your content on Twitter. That’s still up to you.

What they will do is make sure all your data is backed up, that all your plugins and WordPress itself are up to date, monitor security to help prevent hacking or virus attacks, and generally keep your site up and running, freeing you up to write those blog posts and engage your audience on Twitter.

Do You Need Premium WordPress Hosting?

That’s a question only you can answer. Do you have time to learn how to use WordPress? Even if you have the time, is it something you want to learn? Or would you rather focus on the more creative aspects of your website and business, and leave the technical stuff to the experts?

If you’re a do-it-yourself kind of person, you may want to dig in, and learn everything you can about running a site on WordPress. If that’s you, then more power to you. But if it’s not, that’s perfectly fine, too, and that’s when you may want to consider premium WordPress hosting.

The Benefits of Premium WordPress Hosting

Still wondering what’s in it for you? Plenty.

Performance

Most premium WordPress hosts, like WPEngine.com, offer superior performance benefits such as near-100% uptime, fast page loads, and the ability to handle traffic spikes that may crash other sites. Your readers and customers will never land on your site and find it down for repairs or maintenance.

Security

In addition to protecting your site from hackers, denial of service attacks, and many other insidious online dangers, most premium WordPress hosts, like Synthesis, will also repair your site should one of those hackers happen to somehow get through the protections put in place.

Support

Have questions? Need help to do something specific with your site? Having problems with your website? Rather than spending hours—maybe even days—reading help files and support forums to try to figure out how to fix your site yourself, when your site is run through a premium WordPress host, like Pagely, all it takes is one email, one support ticket, or one phone call, and someone will be there for you.

Peace of Mind

With premium WordPress hosting, you never have to worry about your site going down, causing you to possibly lose customers and revenue. Even if you’re on vacation, you can rest assured that your site will remain up and running because premium hosts, like Flywheel, monitor your site’s status. The minute something goes wrong, they’re there to fix it, keeping you—and your customers—happy.

Time

Quite possibly the business owner’s most precious resource, time cannot be replicated, extended, or expanded. If you’re talented or skilled, you can always make more money. But once your time is spent, that’s it—you never get it back.

You already put so much time into running your business, wouldn’t it make sense to spend a little of the money you earn to create more time for yourself and your family?

Regardless of how easy WordPress.org makes it to create and run a website, you still have to learn how to use it if you never have. But even once you know how to use it, just like anything worthwhile, running a website takes time. While you could build a site and then just add posts now and then, never making another tweak to the functionality or structure again, that’s not the best way to manage a website.

You must put time into it.

But if you can’t, there’s always premium WordPress hosting to take the burden off your shoulders, and give you back some of that precious time.

Resources

WPEngine.com
Pagely
Synthesis
ZippyKid

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Love domains but hate the cost?

Us too – we own HUNDREDS of domains, and it gets expensive fast. Our renewals bill is $1000s/year.

Of course, you can’t just choose the cheapest registrar around. Just ask anybody who lost domains when RegisterFly went bust.

Network Solutions has been selling domains for 18 years. Alas, they were also one of the MOST EXPENSIVE registrars.

Until now.

As of today, Network Solutions is offering domain registrations for just $0.99 (and, yes, that includes .COMs).

Here’s the special link.

What’s the catch? They hope some of you will buy Web hosting one day, too. Maybe you will, maybe you won’t. That’s entirely up to you!

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Spring forward, spring cleaning…how about some spring savings? Those April showers are over, and now everything’s in bloom—including your website with this fantastic deal from HostGator.

It doesn’t matter how well designed your site is, how great the content is, or how fantastic the products or services you’re selling on your site are. If your hosting can’t handle your site traffic, guarantee uptime, and offer you outstanding customer support, you’re risking losing customers and revenue.

That’s where HostGator. comes in. They offer a 99.9% uptime guarantee, 24/7/365 customer support, and a ton of other extras that make them one of the most reliable and popular hosting solutions available to publishers. As if that weren’t enough, though, now they’re offering an attractive money-saving deal on all those hosting amenities.

How to Save 30% at HostGator

Here’s how to claim…

#1. Visit HostGator.com with this special link.

#2. Choose any hosting package you like

#3. Enter “spring30” (without the quotes) at checkout.

You’ll receive 30% off your hosting.

Don’t have a domain? Don’t worry. You can add a domain to this package, and receive $1 off the usual domain price. Already have a domain? Transfer it to HostGator, and save even more.

If you’ve been thinking about creating a new site, now’s the time to take advantage of this spring special. Not a designer? Don’t let that stop you. HostGator also offers its customers the easy-to-use SiteBuilder tool.

But even if your site has been around for a while, you may want to consider switching to one of the most popular hosting services on the Internet.

Either way, don’t wait. This special deal expires May 15th 2013. Secure your domain and get your hosting set up, and you’ll be on your way to building your new blog or e-commerce site, just in time for the summer shopping season.

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You’d think with as Internet-literate as most people are now, copyright infringement wouldn’t happen as often as it probably did in the early days of the Web. Topics like intellectual property and copyright are covered pretty frequently both in blogs and traditional media, so more users than ever before are educated about them, or at least aware of them, if even just peripherally. Not to mention, the more technical search engine optimization (SEO) side of things is more commonly known as well, including issues about duplicate content and how it can be detrimental to a site’s rankings. So why would anyone still copy someone else’s work? And what can you do about it?

We may never be able to discern why someone would steal content. Laziness comes to mind, as does a desire to take a shortcut and achieve a goal in the least amount of time, which is just another kind of laziness. Regardless of the plagiarist’s motives, you do have the power to take action if you find someone has copied content from your site. It comes in the form of a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) notice.

What is a DMCA Notice?

The answer to that question begins with an explanation of the DMCA. It’s basically an addendum to United States copyright law, written for the purpose of complying with the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Copyright Treaty and the WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty. But Internet publishers are more concerned with the DMCA’s other purpose, which was to strengthen copyright law as it pertains to intellectual property and the emergence of new technology—namely, the Internet.

U.S. copyright law first came into being in the late 1700s, and is now governed by the Copyright Act of 1976. When the Internet came along, legal questions arose regarding whether existing copyright law could protect content published on the Web, or more specifically, the rights of those who create that content. Hence, the DMCA, signed into law by President Clinton in 1998.

If you find someone has copied content from your site, you have recourse through the issuance of a DMCA notice, also called a DMCA takedown notice.

What makes a DMCA notice so effective is that it’s not issued to the plagiarist. Think about it—if someone had the audacity to copy your content in the first place, receiving a notice asking them to take the content down probably won’t carry much weight. Instead, a DMCA notice is issued to the Internet service provider (ISP) hosting the site that contains the plagiarized content.

In addition to giving you the power to protect your content, the DMCA exempts ISPs from liability for copyright infringement perpetrated by its users. However, that exemption is provided conditionally, one of the conditions being their responsiveness to and cooperation upon receiving claims of copyright infringement.

The exemption and its conditions provide an incentive for ISPs to comply with DMCA notices, thereby further empowering you to take action should you discover your content has been stolen.

Who Can Issue a DMCA Notice?

Anyone can—including you. Upon finding your content on another site that has published it without your knowledge or consent, you are well within your rights under the DMCA to issue a takedown notice to the ISP hosting that site.

How Do You Issue a DMCA Notice?

Another way the DMCA offers protection to publishers is by not requiring an attorney or any other legal entity to issue takedown notices. You can do this yourself, in letter format, as long as the notice contains certain pieces of information:

• Location of the content infringing on your copyright: the URL where the plagiarized work is found; the title; any other identifying information
• Location of the original content: the URL, the title
• Your contact information: this allows the ISP to contact you while investigating your claim
• A “good faith” statement: this basically means you have good reason to believe use of the content you’re citing in your notice has not been authorized by the owner—you
• An accuracy statement: your word that the information you’re including in your DMCA notice is true to the best of your knowledge
• Your signature: it’s best if this is an actual manual signature, and not an e-signature

Some online entities, such as Google, Creative Commons, and Automattic (the parent company of WordPress.com), make it even easier for you by providing DMCA notice forms that you can fill out and submit directly to them.

Where do You Send a DMCA Notice?

If the ISP you must contact doesn’t provide an online form, you may have to mail the notice via postal service. Per the DMCA, ISPs are required to name an agent to respond to takedown notices, and to provide that agent’s contact information to the Register of Copyrights. Your DMCA notice must be sent to the appropriate ISP’s agent. If you’re unable to find that contact information on the ISP’s website, you can look it up here.

Do Paid DMCA Notice Services Exist?

Yes. Few things in this world can’t be accomplished by a third party and a nominal fee. If you own a personal blog or a very small website, you may not want to incur the expense of a service when you can simply write a letter yourself.

But if you’re a major publisher with dozens of websites, many or all of which have had content stolen, using a DMCA notice service can save you a lot of time and effort. Protecting your content is worth the investment.

Does the DMCA Only Apply in the United States?

Technically, because the DMCA is rooted in United States copyright law, it only applies within the country’s boundaries. However, this is also where using a DMCA notice service can be beneficial, even if you are a single-site owner.

Some DMCA notice services maintain relationships with ISPs around the world, and can help you if your content ends up on a website hosted outside the United States. In addition, some services can also help you if you don’t live in the U.S., and regardless of where your stolen content shows up.

Should you ever discover any of your content has been stolen, before you take any action, it’s best to explore your options and choose the DMCA notice method that’s best for your situation. If you decide to pursue a DMCA takedown notice, do not communicate directly with the owner of the site where your stolen content appears. Use the legal avenues made available to you to protect not only yourself, but your content. You have every right to do that.

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You have a fantastic idea for a blog, service, or affiliate marketing niche. All you have to do is set up a website, and you’ll be on your way. You know WordPress is a powerful yet easy-to-use content management system, so that’s your first stop. Oh, and look—they offer free hosting! You won’t have to buy a domain, pay for hosting, or spend a dime. All you have to do is choose a name for your site, pick a free theme, and you’ll be open for business.

Whoa, hold on there, quick draw. Sure, free sounds good. Everyone likes free stuff. But free doesn’t necessarily mean better, or even good. And in the case of WordPress.com (not to be confused with WordPress.org), free is most definitely not the optimal choice, for several reasons.

No Advertising

Even if your only ambition is to build a blog where you share personal stories with friends and family, it’d be nice to put up a small ad or two and earn a few bucks, wouldn’t it? And a lot of affiliate marketers swear by WordPress because it’s such an easy platform to customize, offering the ability to transform a site from a simple blog into an e-commerce powerhouse. That is, if you don’t use WordPress hosting.

For one thing, advertising—specifically third-party advertising—on a free WordPress.com site is prohibited. You’re more than welcome to use WordPress.com’s own advertising program, but only if you have “moderate to high traffic,” although their policy doesn’t specify what qualifies as such. Also, WordPress.com VIPs can place ads on their sites, but the VIP program costs $3,750 per month.

Get your own hosting, and use WordPress.org instead, and you can put as many ads as you want on your site. Google may not like that too much, but that’s another post.

No Plugin Control

Part of that customization affiliate marketers—and just about all publishers, really—love about WordPress comes from plugins. Thousands of plugins created by developers and members of the WordPress community allow you to add all kinds of functionality to your site, from including social media sharing buttons to shopping carts for e-commerce sites. Some are paid, but most are free to use. The thing is—you guessed it—you can’t upload plugins on WordPress.com.

When you build a free site on WordPress.com, a small bundle of plugins is pre-loaded. As WordPress.com puts it:

“We include and configure the plugins for you, so you don’t need to worry about them.”

Well, gee, that’s nice and all, but maybe you’d rather be able to choose your plugins yourself, or add plugins beyond what comes standard with a free site. When you load WordPress.org onto a self-hosted site with your own domain, you gain access to a huge library of plugins that will help you customize your site down to the very last detail.

No Control Over Your Domain

This one’s a deal breaker. Think of a website as online real estate, your own little chunk of Internet-land to do with as you please. Just like real-life real estate, owning has advantages over renting. When you rent, the landlord calls the shots about what you can and can’t do with the property. The landlord can also kick you out whenever he likes. In real life, a landlord has to give you notice. On the Internet, anyone who owns your domain can delete or suspend your site at any moment, and that includes WordPress.com.

How would this happen? WordPress, like any other service, has terms of service (TOS) to which every user must agree in order to use it. Now, be honest—how often do you actually read the entire TOS before you click that little button agreeing to it? Right. So for all you know, you’re violating the WordPress.com TOS the minute you set up your site. If you are, and WordPress catches up with you, they can suspend your site with no notice. Not only that, their policy says:

“If a blog has been suspended for violating our terms, its domain/URL and content will not be returned.”

Own your domain, pay for your hosting, and you never have to worry about anyone coming along and shutting down your site, potentially causing you to lose readers and revenue.

Now, all that said, WordPress.com does have some advantages.

It’s Free

There’s just no getting around the satisfaction of being able to build a website with no out-of-pocket expense whatsoever. If you’re just starting out and don’t have a big budget, or you truly just want a simple blog and aren’t worried about ads, plugins, or other bells and whistles, you can’t go wrong with free.

Be aware, though, that if you start a site on a free WordPress.com domain, and then move it to a self-hosted domain later, you run the risk of breaking any backlinks to your site. In addition, one of the factors search engines look at when ranking sites is domain age. The longer a site has been around, the more authority it has. When you buy a domain and build a site on it, you are building authority from day one, which will help people find your site later on.

Automatic Backups

Servers occasionally crash, and when they do, you run the risk of losing every bit of data on your site if it’s not backed up. With a free WordPress.com site, you never have to worry about that because it’s regularly backed up for you.

Automatic Upgrades

From time to time, just like any software, WordPress is upgraded. So are WordPress plugins. When you build a site on the free platform, all of those upgrades are performed automatically for you. You don’t have to worry about backing up your site first, and then upgrading everything yourself. It’s one less thing on your mind.

With the options your own hosting brings, and WordPress.org as a powerful content management system, you can build a useful, attractive, and functional site that will help you reach your goals, and your audience. Any decision calls for weighing the pros and cons. But when it comes to choosing whether to build a free WordPress.com site or get your own hosting and maintain control of your site from the get-go, the decision should be an easy one.

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The cloud is everywhere these days. Thanks to its convenience and cost, there has been exponential growth in the market over the last few years. For most, it’s not a question of whether you move to the cloud, but what can and should be moved and when it should be done.

However, security concerns have grown too, particularly in light of media coverage of high profile security issues. Are you files and documents safe stored in the cloud? What questions should you be asking cloud computing providers? Who can you trust? Have you chosen strong enough passwords to be protecting yourself?

Just how safe is Cloud Computing? This infographic from Memset examines the topic…

The world’s favourite virtual currency has been on a rollercoaster ride this year. On 1 January, one Bitcoin was worth $13. By April, they were trading for $266, before a sudden, spectacular collapse.

(Not familiar with Bitcoin? See this handy beginners guide at Gizmodo).

The virtual currency has had a history rich in peaks and troughs. Fortunately, Forbes have constructed a handy guide to the many and varied downturns: An Illustrated History of Bitcoin Crashes to guide you through them.

However, there is one subject that few people touch on. And that is the volume of real-world (ie, not speculative) transactions that are *cough* legally problematic, and the impact that will have on Bitcoin’s future.

Buying drugs, weapons, or other contraband are all possible with Bitcoin. The most infamous marketplace is Silk Road, an enormous drug marketplace that’s had more column inches than most legit e-commerce startups. It’s also a prime mover in the Bitcoin economy.

What would it mean for Bitcoin if Silk Road goes out of business? We explore that in this infographic…