http://neworleansinternetmarketing.com inlayout, LLC :: Doing Big Things in the Big Easy. Thu, 02 Feb 2012 22:45:34 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 http://neworleansinternetmarketing.com/internet-marketing/free-website-help-for-haitian-business/ http://neworleansinternetmarketing.com/internet-marketing/free-website-help-for-haitian-business/#comments Wed, 20 Jan 2010 15:14:45 +0000 Chris H. http://neworleansinternetmarketing.com/?p=221 ]]> http://neworleansinternetmarketing.com/internet-marketing/free-website-help-for-haitian-business/feed/ 3 http://neworleansinternetmarketing.com/web-hosting/webhostingtalkcom-gets-hacked-loses-6-months-of-data/ http://neworleansinternetmarketing.com/web-hosting/webhostingtalkcom-gets-hacked-loses-6-months-of-data/#comments Fri, 27 Mar 2009 13:10:36 +0000 inlayout http://neworleansinternetmarketing.com/?p=196 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.]]> http://neworleansinternetmarketing.com/web-hosting/webhostingtalkcom-gets-hacked-loses-6-months-of-data/feed/ 0 http://neworleansinternetmarketing.com/web-hosting/2009-best-dedicated-server-company-poll/ http://neworleansinternetmarketing.com/web-hosting/2009-best-dedicated-server-company-poll/#comments Wed, 18 Feb 2009 16:02:09 +0000 inlayout http://neworleansinternetmarketing.com/?p=146 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.

]]> http://neworleansinternetmarketing.com/web-hosting/2009-best-dedicated-server-company-poll/feed/ 1 http://neworleansinternetmarketing.com/marketing-resources/websites-for-therapists-therapysitescom/ http://neworleansinternetmarketing.com/marketing-resources/websites-for-therapists-therapysitescom/#comments Mon, 24 Nov 2008 22:38:14 +0000 inlayout http://neworleansinternetmarketing.com/?p=116 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.]]> http://neworleansinternetmarketing.com/marketing-resources/websites-for-therapists-therapysitescom/feed/ 2 http://neworleansinternetmarketing.com/web-hosting/first-solid-state-drive-ssd-dedicated-servers-become-available/ http://neworleansinternetmarketing.com/web-hosting/first-solid-state-drive-ssd-dedicated-servers-become-available/#comments Fri, 01 Aug 2008 19:50:38 +0000 inlayout http://neworleansinternetmarketing.com/?p=98 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.]]> http://neworleansinternetmarketing.com/web-hosting/first-solid-state-drive-ssd-dedicated-servers-become-available/feed/ 0 http://neworleansinternetmarketing.com/internet-marketing/how-much-should-my-website-cost/ http://neworleansinternetmarketing.com/internet-marketing/how-much-should-my-website-cost/#comments Sun, 06 Jul 2008 15:39:32 +0000 inlayout http://neworleansinternetmarketing.com/?p=90
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.

Types of Content Management Systems can vary considerably. Popular “out of the box” CMS systems these days are Drupal, Joomla, and believe it or not, WordPress. While the simple brochure site mentioned above can usually get CMS for a small additional charge ($1k-$2k), large corporate sites with CMS can get very expensive, in the “10′s of thousands” price range.

Ecommerce Websites
What about shopping carts? Depending on the amount of customization needed, shopping carts carry a heavier price tag as well. The simple solution, if you just have a few products for sale that won’t change, is to get a Paypal account, and use their built in system for the shopping cart. this can be done with just a few simple website edits, and is the easiest way to sell items online (a reasonable web designer might add in a few Paypal buttons for free with the initial design, or for about an hour’s labor if done after the fact).

Most ecommerce sites will have products with options, that change regularly, or limited inventory, or large numbers of products, all of which lend themselves to being better handled by some form of shopping cart script. Don’t let a web designer try to rebuild the wheel for you. There’s usually no need to program a shopping cart form the ground up, and most web designers don’t have that ability by themselves anyway. There are plenty of shopping cart scripts available that can be installed on a site and modified to match your site’s look and feel. Some popular examples are OS Commerce, Zen Cart, Cube Cart, and others. Modifications are what will drive up the price here. Out of the box, these things are simple to install, but modifications to the code and templates can eat up a lot of time. Expect your custom website / shopping cart combination to run anywhere from $5k – $20k, and make sure the designer or company has experience doing the type of ecommerce site you’re looking for. To save money here, go with a ready made template instead of custom design. For all types of website templates, check out Template Monster, TemplateWorld, and Open Source Templates.

Social Media Websites
Want to start a community? There are a lot of ways to do it these days. Social media is taking the web by storm, and a good place to get your foot in the door is by creating something for a small niche. Probably one of the oldest, popular forms of social media is the online forum. Again, like shopping cart scripts, there are scripts out there for forums as well. These are ready made forums that are relatively simple to install and manage. The three most common that I know of are PHPBB, VBulletin, and Invision Power Board. Similar to customization of shopping cart scripts, customization of bulletin board scripts can run up the price as well. Expect installation and customization of new forums to run anywhere from a few thousand dollars up, depending on how far the customization is taken and how many non-standard features are added. For forums as well, you can keep the price down by using a ready-made template from one of the sources mentioned above.

Believe it or not, there are scripts available for creating websites similar to MySpace, Digg, and Youtube as well. Just do your research on them before you decide on one. I always check out their support forums (if they have them), to see what kind of trouble people are having with the scripts, and to see how quickly their support staff responds. If you hire a company to create a site like this for you, be sure to check their references and past experience. You don’t want to be someone’s “test run” on creating a social media site.

What About Hosting?
Your web designer might offer hosting or some type of maintenance plan, or even some form of marketing at a monthly rate for your website. Make sure that you know exactly what you’re getting for the price you agree to pay. For the simple brochure websites, shared hosting is usually adequate, costing anywhere from $5 – $20 / month. But shared hosting may not be adequate when you move up to an ecommerce or social media site that will have many users interacting with it at the same time. For these types of sites you might need a “Virtual” or “Dedicated Server;” my favorite of which so far, has been LiquidWeb.

The amount of traffic you receive will be proportional to the effectiveness of the marketing you do. Don’t expect a flood of visitors just because you have a great website. It can take a lot of time and money to get decent traffic to your website, and there are a lot of different ways of going about marketing it, but that’s for another post.

So What’s the Total Price?
It depends. Good designers with a lot of experience will charge more. Look at their portfolio and check references. You usually get what you pay for, but it’s also easy to get ripped off if you don’t do due diligence. The advantage to going with the more experienced designer or company, is that they usually know what they are getting into before they give you a contract, and they can easily deal with problems that come up along the way. A less experienced designer is more likely to give you a lowball price, then either not meet your expectations, or have to ask for more money to get the site where you want it. That’s not always the case though.

The price goes up as you add features. So it’s important to consider the purpose of your website, its profitability, and what you can fit in your budget. Things like design quality, flash, ecommerce capability, and interactivity can really drive up the price, but they can also make a huge difference in the effectiveness of your site.]]> http://neworleansinternetmarketing.com/internet-marketing/how-much-should-my-website-cost/feed/ 4 http://neworleansinternetmarketing.com/web-hosting/reasons-to-use-website-monitoring-services/ http://neworleansinternetmarketing.com/web-hosting/reasons-to-use-website-monitoring-services/#comments Thu, 26 Jun 2008 16:47:18 +0000 inlayout http://neworleansinternetmarketing.com/?p=89 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. ]]> http://neworleansinternetmarketing.com/web-hosting/reasons-to-use-website-monitoring-services/feed/ 2 http://neworleansinternetmarketing.com/web-hosting/backups-redundency-everything/ http://neworleansinternetmarketing.com/web-hosting/backups-redundency-everything/#comments Wed, 18 Jun 2008 03:31:34 +0000 inlayout http://neworleansinternetmarketing.com/?p=83 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.

The local data is the stuff on my computers in my house. I have to think about things like “what if the house catches fire?” or “what if a computer goes down?”

The computer going down is the easy part.
Have a backup hard drive for each computer. And when a computer gets old and goes into retirement, so does the backup drive. I no longer keep reusing old backup drives because they eventually fail, and the older they get the more likely they are to fail. The other reason is that if you reuse it you might not have enough space to backup two computers with it and have to overwrite some of your older files. (Been there, done that, and regret it) Get a new backup drive, they are relatively cheap these days.

For my wife, who uses her laptop in a lot of different places, I got this neat, portable WD backup drive, that uses USB, and doesn’t require another power source. It’s really amazing, at about the size of a PDA, it stores 320 GB of data! A little pricey, but I was hoping that the convenience factor would encourage her to backup more often…the jury’s still out on that one.

The house catching fire is more of a problem.
(For obvious reasons…but not necessarily because of data loss) Keep all of your most important files on your computers you use daily, and use remote, offsite backup that runs on a daily basis. If your house catches fire you risk losing computers and backup hard drives, including those retired ones described in the paragraph above. Believe it or not, remote offsite backup is actually affordable nowadays. I’m now using a company called “Mozy” (thanks to DazzlinDonna) who offers unlimited storage for offsite remote backup for only $4.95 per month, and I use it on both of my computers.

Don’t “set it and forget it though” with offsite backup or any backup program for that matter. Check all of the settings and options they give you. Make sure that you are comfortable with how they are handling your data, and how it is being stored / updated / or deleted. Yes, many backup programs and services delete old files that are no longer in existence at the backup source. Try a test “file recovery” to see if you can get one of your backed up files. When I first started using Mozy, I found out I wasn’t backing up everything I thought I was. I’m glad I tested it!

Web Hosting Data

What if your web host catches on fire? Or floods? Did you see Cedar Rapids, IA go under water the other day? Apparently New Orleans isn’t the only place susceptible to this type of disaster. Such a disaster could easily destroy a datacenter. Here’s how I handle website backups:

WS_FTP, one of the oldest FTP programs around, is still going strong and has a backup scheduling feature. I have an always_on desktop machine setup specifically for backups and web browsing. With this machine I backup all of my important websites, some weekly, and some nightly, depending on how often files change and who changes them.

As for the databases. I’ve posted about this program before because it was such a blessing; I really like Navicat. With Navicat, I schedule backups of my websites’ MySQL databases weekly and nightly, depending on the frequency of change.

This all gets done on the always_on machine dedicated for backups, and all of those backups get backed up to the remote, offsite Mozy backup as well. I also have backup web hosting, but that’s another topic that I’ll probably talk about more in the future.

Time to Think.

It’s a lot to think about, I know. Is it overboard? No, I don’t think so. There have been too many times I’ve needed to have “backups of backups” in the past. I’m not paranoid, it really happens. Suppose Mozy catches on fire? It could happen. During Hurricane Katrina, a lot of people in the City of New Orleans learned some important lessons about planning and emergencies. You’re never too prepared when it comes to this stuff.

Think of all of the possible scenarios that could happen with your data or connectivity, that could significantly impact your business or personal life. Where’s the weakest link? For business especially, there should be no single point of failure that can leave you inoperative for more than a few minutes or an hour. If so, it’s a serious problem that needs to be addressed.]]> http://neworleansinternetmarketing.com/web-hosting/backups-redundency-everything/feed/ 1 http://neworleansinternetmarketing.com/web-hosting/5-great-advantages-to-hosting-on-a-managed-dedicated-server/ http://neworleansinternetmarketing.com/web-hosting/5-great-advantages-to-hosting-on-a-managed-dedicated-server/#comments Wed, 27 Feb 2008 03:35:08 +0000 Chris H. http://neworleansinternetmarketing.com/uncategorized/5-great-advantages-to-hosting-on-a-managed-dedicated-server/ 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:
   
2. Great Tech Support – I always get a knowledgeable tech on the phone within a minute or two of calling. I’ve never had to wait on hold for longer than two minutes ~ever~ and in the beginning, I had to call quite a bit. While I don’t have experience with LiquidWeb’s shared hosting, I can honestly say that as a dedicated server customer, you get treated with a lot of respect and get premium service. I never had that feeling in all the years I used shared hosting.
   
3. Ability to Customize Server Configurations – One of the most frustating things I had to deal with on shared hosting was the fact that the shared hosting companies had many different restrictions regarding what could be run on their servers, and settings they allowed. Aplus.net was particulary bad about this…I had to submit a support request every time I wanted a site to download an RSS feed from another location, they restricted the number of simultaneous PHP processes, causing all kinds of errors. With my dedicated server, I can change just about any configurable service I want and do some neat things I couldn’t do before like using PHP code in .htm pages.
4. More Control Over Email Functionality – With shared hosting you get email in a can, but with a dedicated server, you get a first class butler saying, “sir, what outgoing port would you like to use for your pop3 connection?” Many different aspects of email service are configurable through CPanel, much more so than what you’re probably used to with shared hosting.
5. Ease of Adding / Removing Accounts & Static IP’s – It’s never been easier to add or remove new websites to my account. Who knows how many this server will actually let me add? Another great advantage is that I can get static IP addresses for all of my sites. From an SEO standpoint, static IP’s are a plus, and I had no idea that I could even get static IP’s from different class-C blocks hosted on the same server – another great advantage.

While I was somewhat reluctant about moving my sites over to a dedicated server for quite some time, I can look back with confidence now knowing that it was one of the best decisions I’ve made as a website owner. The price was quite a bit higher than what I was used to paying, but the peace of mind, service, and flexibility all make up for it. The bottom line is that my websites are a significant source of income for me, and what is more important to a website than hosting? When hosting fails, everything fails – your whole business.
]]> http://neworleansinternetmarketing.com/web-hosting/5-great-advantages-to-hosting-on-a-managed-dedicated-server/feed/ 7 http://neworleansinternetmarketing.com/web-hosting/managed-dns-is-an-effective-solution-for-backup-hosting/ http://neworleansinternetmarketing.com/web-hosting/managed-dns-is-an-effective-solution-for-backup-hosting/#comments Sat, 05 Jan 2008 20:55:33 +0000 Chris H. http://neworleansinternetmarketing.com/web-hosting/managed-dns-is-an-effective-solution-for-backup-hosting/ 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.

The way it works is that you point the DNS for your domain name to the company or companies that manage your DNS, and they take it from there, telling web browsers around the world where your site is located. When a website is moved, you change the DNS from within the management company control panel – not the domain name hosting company. Since the management company can update all of their servers in a matter of minutes, you don’t have to wait for ISP’s around the world to get the message.

I recently got to make use of it when I had a traffic spike on one of my sites, and a lot of bandwidth was being used by people downloading video. The site makes no money at all, and I didn’t want it interfering with the bandwidth of my sites that do, so I switched it over to the backup server, and the change happened flawlessly within minutes. Talk about peace of mind.

I actually use 2 companies to manage my DNS, just in case there is ever an outage with one. There are a lot of expensive companies out there who do managed DNS, but I haven’t heard anything bad about the cheap ones, and they’ve been fine for me so far. DNS Park, and DNS Made Easy are the two companies I use.]]> http://neworleansinternetmarketing.com/web-hosting/managed-dns-is-an-effective-solution-for-backup-hosting/feed/ 5 http://neworleansinternetmarketing.com/web-hosting/2-month-review-of-liquid-web-dedicated-hosting/ http://neworleansinternetmarketing.com/web-hosting/2-month-review-of-liquid-web-dedicated-hosting/#comments Sun, 02 Dec 2007 01:28:26 +0000 Chris H. http://neworleansinternetmarketing.com/web-hosting/2-month-review-of-liquid-web-dedicated-hosting/ 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.

Here is the list of offenders:

• Aplus.net – the worst web hosting company I’ve used. Terrible technical support and regular downtime. They limit the number of PHP processes (???) causing 500 errors on database driven websites. And they don’t care about their customers at all, period.
• Media Temple – their marketing is hyped up way beyond what they can deliver. Significant down time, latency, long waits on hold for tech support., and database issues, especially on vbulletin forums.
• Mosso – sister company of Rackspace, offers what seems to be a great deal and cutting edge technology for people like myself that want to host a bunch of different websites, but when I started moving sites there I experienced latency issues with their databases. They admitted to it, and acted like it was a rare occurrence, but how should I know? I cancelled that account as well.
• Ipowerweb – poor technical support, not a lot of experience with them though.

So far, Liquidweb has put a dedicated server technician on the phone within 2 minutes of my call, no matter what time of day or night I’ve called. They were very helpful and professional, taking the time to help me diagnose even minor obscure server issues.

The server has been ultra fast, and had flawless up time. I have their free off-site backup configured, and a Raid 2 configuration that keeps a mirror copy of my hard drive available at all times. For extra added security, backups of important sites are stored on another server, and I use managed DNS to enable propogation-free switching between the two.

I can honestly say that moving to a reliable, managed, dedicated server company was one of the best business decisions I have made in a while. I did a lot of research on web hosting forums before I made the decision, talking to people about their experiences and searching through old reviews. Liquid Web was one of the few that had lots of really good reviews and few negatives.

http://www.liquidweb.com]]> http://neworleansinternetmarketing.com/web-hosting/2-month-review-of-liquid-web-dedicated-hosting/feed/ 4 http://neworleansinternetmarketing.com/internet-marketing/need-suggestions-for-hosting-companies/ http://neworleansinternetmarketing.com/internet-marketing/need-suggestions-for-hosting-companies/#comments Mon, 01 Oct 2007 23:53:01 +0000 Chris H. http://neworleansinternetmarketing.com/internet-marketing/need-suggestions-for-hosting-companies/ 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).

My problems actually started with a company called Aplus.net, where I had hosted many static html sites over the years. Aplus.net had the worst outsourced tech support you could imagine. Not that I need tech support very often, but their control panel had bugs, so it was painfully necessary to call them sometimes. When I started bulding more database driven sites, I noticed 500 errors on Aplus.net hosted sites. When I called, I was told that their servers “do not allow more than two simultaneous PHP processes at a time,” whatever that means…. I was running a simple serendipity blog that they had available in their control panel.

This is when it really got bad.
My spearfishing forums were on Aplus.net’s shared hosting, and I knew it was an accident waiting to happen. I had already set up the hosting account on Media Temple and begun moving my smaller websites there. The forums weren’t getting any traffic though, and the site would be hard to move so I saved it for last. That’s when the biggest spearfishing forum site on the web went down. The owner shut it down, purged a bunch of moderators, and basically pissed off a bunch of users. So where’d they come? My site, and you can probably guess what happened next. My site was crippled by the traffic. The aplus.net servers couldn’t handle it after the first few hundred visitors. I had to shut down the site and spend the next 24 hours moving it to Media Temple.

During the interim, some of the guys local to the spearfishing community on the big site, set up their own barebones vbulletin forums, on a decent server, and all of the traffic went there. It stayed there too of course.

Do you see why hosting is important? Suppose the same thing had happened to me today? No one’s going to stay on a site that takes 5 minutes to serve a web page.

I inquired into Rackspace dedicated hosting, and the cost will be over $500 for what I need (a little too steep). I also tried out Mosso, who is rackspace’s shared hosting sister company. They looked really promising at the $100 / mo. price. The services they offered seemed really cutting edge. But when I started moving sites there, I had trouble with their database servers lagging. They acted like it was a very rare occurrence, but how should I know? I need something reliable. I cancelled that account too.

So here I am, still frustated with hosting, looking for suggestions. If anyone has any I’m open to them. The thing is, I need to host a bunch of database driven websites, which I’ve found out – is a lot different from hosting a bunch of static html websites.]]> http://neworleansinternetmarketing.com/internet-marketing/need-suggestions-for-hosting-companies/feed/ 16