New Orleans Internet Marketing

If you or someone you know has a business in Haiti; I will offer my time and resources to help with their website. I can help with simple design work and website updates. I can host your site for free on my new server. Contact chartwell (at) inlayout.net.

Earlier this week, WebHostingTalk.com, one of the biggest forums on the web for web hosting discussions, was maliciously hacked. According to a WHT representative, the attacker got in through their backup, deleted it, and moved onto the main server from there. Apparently the reason they lost so much data was that they weren’t making “backups of backups,” something I posted about the importance of a while back. Just more evidence that you can never be too careful.

Well, maybe not masses. Not now at least :)

Over the past few days, we launched a new site that I am very excited about. This is a project that I’ve been wanting to do for years, and once I got the ball rolling, like with my first real blog, I had this nagging realization that:

1. It was something I should have started long ago.
2. There is no doubt that it will be successful.
3. That it has tremendous profit potential.

My interest in dedicated severs and the market began back in the Fall of 2007 when I was looking for suggestions for a new hosting company. If you follow my blog, you know I did my homework and ended up with my current dedicated server at LiquidWeb.

Since that time, the topic of servers has become of great interest to me, and I noticed that it was a niche not often written about in the blogosphere, but there are plenty of people out there looking for information. There are also plenty of dedicated server companies out there trying to reach these people.

This is where Dedicated Sever School fills its niche and accomplishes its task. The goal of the dedicated server school blog is to create a library of blog posts and information for the public on web server FAQ’s and solutions, while at the same time referring visitors to the dedicated server company best suited for their needs. We have a professional staff writer with experience in the industry, and brand new partnerships with the best and brightest server providers in the industry. Over the next few months we will be networking with other bloggers, to create a well known oasis for server information. So if you are someone who has an interest in the industry or a related blog, let us know! We should connect!

WebhostingTalk.com members vote LiquidWeb, Best Managed Dedicated Server Company (see poll)

If you’ve ever spent any time researching web hosting, at some point you probably ended up on WebHostingTalk.com, one of the largest forums on the web for hosting related discussions. If you venture there at any point in time during a weekday you might find 1500 or so users online reading and posting to the forums. The dedicated server forum in particular, can provide a wealth of knowledge due to the fact that many industry experts routinely answer questions there for newcomers.

It’s been over a year now since I signed up with LiquidWeb for a managed, dedicated server, and I knew it was a great service for me, but since I frequently recommend them to others I wanted to get a feel for what the web hosting community thought as well. Because who knows? Times change and so do companies. I decided to take a poll of WebHostingTalk.com members in the dedicate forum area to see who today’s leader is. Click below to see the poll results:

Best Managed Dedicated Server Companies: Poll

At the point I last looked at it, LiquidWeb was clearly in the lead, even ahead of well-known industry giant Rackspace. In fact, the only company that was even approaching their votes was a company called Softlayer that was put in the poll by mistake (they don’t offer managed dedicated services).

The poll requirements asked that people who vote had used the company for at least 3 months prior to voting, so if they are accurate, I think this serves as a good customer approval rating for LiquidWeb. The only thing I don’t like about these polls are that they are un-scientific – limited in generalizeability due to the fact that the forum software’s polling features are so limited. Another thing to consider is the fact that few so-called “experts” out there would actually use managed services. The real hosting gurus manage their own server if they have the time.

I’ve been seeing some ads around for therapysites.com for a little while now, and I thought it seemed like a great idea for therapists who want to have their own website built. They provide a lot of tools that make website creation easy, using their customizable themes and their pre-built content management system.


For a FREE Month, use coupon code “promoFMC”!

If you read my post entitled “How Much Should My Website Cost?” you already know that decent web design can start in the $2k range, and go up over time with different cost factors. The thing I like about TherapySites.com, is that while more expensive than just plain website hosting, you save all of the money that’s usually spent on the initial design process. Plus you get their content management system so you can easily make your own changes to the site.

The other thing I like is that the company seems focused on the business of therapists, which means they will likely be equipped to deal with common problems that therapists face when it comes to web design; usually companies like this improve over time also.

I haven’t tried their sites out yet, and I haven’t heard any feedback on them from my advertisers, but they offer a money-back guarantee, and a free month if you mention that you were referred by The FMC Directory (my other website), so it may be worthwhile to try if you’re in the market for a new site.

It’s no secret that I’ve been a big fan of LiquidWeb’s dedicated servers since I started using them last year. I got my invoice this month, and read a little further down the email where I was surprised to learn that they now have Zero Latency, Solid State Drives available for their dedicated servers! “What is that?” I first though. I put 2 and 2 together, because I know what latency is (and “0″ is a good number when you’re talking about it), and I know what “solid state” means (usually refers to circuitry as opposed to moving parts), so it became clear that they’re offering these brand new solid state drives (SSD) on their servers. Wow!

What’s the Big Deal?
One of the biggest bottlenecks on a computer is the hard drive. If the PC needs to access your hard drive, it slows things down considerably. This is why having enough RAM can speed things up significantly – with RAM, you eliminate the bottleneck of having to search and rescue data from a spinning hard drive. Well, Solid State Drives work like RAM. It’s like replacing your hard drive with a giant RAM chip :) the data becomes instantly accessible to the processor.

Can you imagine how great this will be for websites? Especially forums like mine. It should make them blazingly fast.

I had to call LiquidWeb to find out more. I talked to one of the sales guys, and he confirmed that “yes, the solid state drives are available for the dedicated servers, and LiquidWeb is currently one of only a few dedicated server providers in the world that have them available.”

So the almighty “RackSpace” doesn’t even have these things yet, and when they do get them, RS customers should be prepared to whip out their pocketbook. LiquidWeb will do the upgrade for $150 / mo. right now, with discounts for volume. Not cheap by any means, but I would imagine that it’s a nice performance boost for database driven sites. While it’s not in my budget right now, I can’t wait to try them out. Hopefully anyone with experience with them will post a review.

For more info on LiquidWeb’s SSD servers, click here.

A common question I get is, “Chris, we got a quote from this company for our new website and they want to charge us $XXXXX – is that too much?” “Well, what are they going to do?” I counter. “I don’t know, design our website!”

Simple “Brochure” Type Websites
The fact is, $2,000 can be too much or too little, and so can $20,000. It depends on what the purpose of the website is and what type of functionality you want it to have. The simplest websites to build are like “brochures” or “business cards” on the web. These have static content, meaning that if you want to change anything you need to have web design experience or have your designer make the changes. These types of sites generally go for $1k – $5k, depending on the experience and quality of the designer, and depending on if it will have flash, and how many pages it will have.

Content Management Systems (CMS)
The next upgrade is a site with some form of “content management.” CMS allows the site administrator or anyone else with permission, to login to the site and make changes to content and pages using a simple text editor. Website owners like CMS because it makes them less dependent on their web design company for changes. Changes to content can be made quickly and easily by the site owner or admin. Read the rest of this entry »

A few years back I decided to start using website monitoring services, and I’m grateful that I did. Since then, I’ve learned a lot about hosting and how good or bad the services I was paying for were. This was part of the progression that led me to get a dedicated server last year, which was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made as a web designer / developer. Website monitoring is also vital if you’re running a search engine marketing campaign.

What do website monitoring services do?
They check your website from different locations around the world during the course of the day to make sure that it is up and functioning. You can usually choose how often you want them to check, and different services have different options. These days I use a company called Alertbot, and I’ve been pretty happy with them so far, but there are plenty of others out there and it’s good to shop around to get the features you want.

Why is monitoring a big deal? Don’t you know when your website is down?

1. The problem is, I didn’t always know… you just can’t be on your website around the clock. Especially when you have multiple sites.
2. For search engine marketing campaigns, being unaware of downtime can cost a lot of money and skew conversion data.
3. Downtime is money. When you have profitable websites, you lose money while they are down, regardless of whether or not you’re running pay-per-click campaigns.
4. I had no idea how unreliable shared hosting was. Once I started monitoring my sites on the shared accounts, I realized that I was having regular weekly downtime of anywhere from a few minutes to a half hour.
5. Monitoring services give you information that can be used to diagnose problems through support. When I talk to support about downtime, I now have a record of exactly when it occurred, with the IP of the test site(s), and the length of time it occurred. This information can go a long way in helping to get to the cause of the problem, and it gives credibility to your complaint – especially with shared hosting providers.

I’m glad I started doing this because it’s standard practice for me now. At our firm we always recommend that clients monitor their sites, and set it up ourselves if necessary. If you’re running a search marketing campaign for someone else, how do you know if you had a bad day conversion-wise, or if their site was down for a few critical hours and no one knew about it? Things like that could mean the difference between keeping and losing a good client.

In the Fall of last year, Francis Ford Coppola’s computer and backup hard drive were stolen, and he lost 15 years worth of data, including writing and family photographs. He offered a reward for its return, but he never did get it back.

On a much smaller scale, last month I had a backup hard drive fail, which under normal circumstances should be no big deal. I should be able to buy a new one and just replace it, but the problem was that I had stored some data on it which was not stored anywhere else – so it’s now gone for good. I have the option of spending a few hundred dollars on data recovery to see if it can be recovered, but I haven’t been able to decide if the data is worth the price.

What About Your Websites?
Just 2 weeks ago, there was a terrible fire at The Planet, one of the largest web hosting providers in the world. The fire interrupted thousands of servers, but supposedly no servers or networking equipment was damaged. Let’s suppose there had been damage. Suppose that your web server and its backups at your hosting provider were destroyed. Most people who work on static websites have copies on their local machine that they FTP. But how many websites these days are database driven? Are you backing up your databases? I don’t know many people who do, unfortunately.

Here’s What I Do.

I’ve learned the hard way. I’ve lost too many irreplaceable files over the years. I now have a library of digital pictures of my growing family from the past 5 years on my computer. Losing these files would be a great loss for me. So here’s how I’ve come to handle local data. Read the rest of this entry »

When I moved almost all of my websites to a dedicated server at LiquidWeb about 4 months ago, I thought I would be getting some peace of mind, but I had no idea about all of the other great things that would result from having a managed, dedicated server of my own.

Here are some of the things I find really advantageous about dedicated servers as opposed to typical shared hosting that I was handcuffed by before.

1. Incredible Response Times – granted these differences are in milliseconds, but obviously there is a significant difference here. These two charts are my site monitoring results from my dedicated server at LiquidWeb, and my Gridserver (shared hosting) account at Media Temple. If you look at the scale on the left, you will see that the LiquidWeb dedicated server is about twice as fast on average. I should also mention that the Media Temple account has regular unscheduled downtime, still to this day.
   LiquidWeb Dedicated Server:
   
   MediaTemple Gridserver:
   
Read the rest of this entry »

I didn’t even know about managed DNS until I read about it on John Chow’s blog a long time ago. I could relate to the stress of DNS propagation issues though, and I thought it would be a good idea to try it out.

Today, I’ve been using externally managed DNS for about 4 months, and I’m very happy with the results. For my more important websites (the ones that make money), I decided to keep backup copies of them on a less expensive hosting account just in case my dedicated server ever goes down. I realized the need for this type of setup after years of dealing with shared hosting and unscheduled down time (inevitably at the worst possible time).

Under normal circumstances, a backup copy of your website on another server won’t do much good, because if you need to switch to the backup – you can expect a 24hr delay as DNS propagates. Not with externally managed DNS though. Now I can switch between the two servers in 5 minutes. No more having to wait until the next morning to find out if my site is functioning properly on the new server. Read the rest of this entry »

After struggling for years with the frustration of poor technical support, latency, and down-time, it appears that I’ve finally found the solution to my web hosting woes. Liquid Web’s Dedicated Servers have been nothing short of excellent for me so far. If you’re serious about your websites, and they are a source of income for you, it’s not worth the savings to buy cheap web hosting.

Read the rest of this entry »

I currently have many of my websites hosted on Media Temple’s Gridserver. If you click on the link, don’t get sucked into their slick marketing and hyped up “Grid Hosting” talk. Today my sites on those servers have been dead slow to respond all day long. About 15 websites. Since moving them to the gridservers they have also been plagued with database errors, even after upgrading to “dedicated” memory for my db’s (Grid Containers). I’m now spending a around $80 / month for two accounts, and I don’t feel safe keeping my sites there much longer. I lose money every time something like this happens, and it never fails, that it happens at the worst possible time (like the day you spent a bunch of time and money doing extra marketing to get people to your website).

Read the rest of this entry »