Serviceuptime – Great Find!
( The Best Web Hosting Service )- Every once in a while I search around on the internet for something that will be of real value to any website owner and today I have found a really good website that every webmaster should start doing business with. Why? Because, it is such a valuable service that you would actually have to be out of your mind to not invest the pennies that they are offering for their valuable service? So what is it?
Its Serviceuptime (serviceuptime.com) and they were established in 2004 and are providing website owners with a valuable service, in which you can monitor your sites uptime 24/7 and get instant alerts to your e-mail account (or SMS) whenever your site goes down. Why do you need this? Well, if you are like most people and your site goes down you tend to get a little on edge, you are losing money and more importantly losing a piece of your mind.
I personally, have dealt with this when I hosted with GoDaddy (see GoDaddy Review), and it was one of the most frustrating things you will ever deal with online.
Here is everything Serviceuptime will do:
Bottom line is Serviceuptime.com is a great tool that all webmasters should be using for their websites. The best part is you can sign up for a free account if you have no money to invest! It is really worth a shot and you have nothing to lose!
Webhost4life Sucks!
( The Best Web Hosting Service )- Wow, after doing my research and writing my Webhost4life review I just had to talk to their customer service team. They sounded so bad that I just had to experience those moments of agony for myself. Maybe I owe it to my readers or was just interested in seeing how knowledgeable they were. I basically just posed as a guy looking to transfer my site and I had some questions for them.
Thank you for contacting support. Please be prepared to answer your Security Question when we begin chatting. To enhance our security protocols, we’ll need you to provide the answer to your Security Question at the beginning of our conversation. If you have not yet set your Security Question and Answer, please log into your account now to set it up. Thank you. Please hold for the next available operator to respond.
You are now chatting with ‘Rosie Dean’
Rosie Dean: Hi Garen, My name is Rosie Dean, how are you today?
Garen: I am interested in transferring my site over to you; are there any transfering fees.
Rosie Dean: Unfortunately, there is no transfer fee.
Garen: isn’t that a good thing to have know transferring fee?
Rosie Dean: Yes, it is good.
Garen: I do have some other questions I would like to ask you about your service, as well.
Rosie Dean: Sure.
Garen: Now my site has two different parts with it one a root part where it has a lot of PHP and scripts. Also, a blog part with a lot of databases that will be need to backed up. Will you back up the databases? And which package do you recommend?
Rosie Dean: You have to backup the databases yourself and once it is done, you can import to our server.
Garen: ok, so there is no assistance for backing up my databases? Also, will the scripts be a problem?
Rosie Dean: You have to contact current server to backup the databases. Once it is done, we can give steps to import to our server.
Rosie Dean: There is no script issues.
Garen: ok and everything will work with cPanel right?
Rosie Dean: Yes, it will work. We do provide our own cPanel called as control panel.
Garen: so it is the standard cPanel or is a custom one?
Garen: I want to make sure my scripts work.
Rosie Dean: Yes, it standard cPanel.
Rosie Dean: Yes, you can work with php on our server.
Garen: Ok which plan would be recommended and how many processes do you accept at once?
Rosie Dean: You can use any plan which mentioned in our website at: http://www.webhost4life.com/ .
Garen: I know there are a lot of them?
Rosie Dean: Could you please let me know what exactly you mean by processes?
Garen: process are the amount of scripts running at one time. For instance, they will open and close and hosting companies usually have a set number.
Garen: It is a heavily scripted site.
Rosie Dean: Your script should run within one minutes.
Rosie Dean: There is no limit to run the script.
Garen: so I am not limited to processes?
Rosie Dean: There is no limit.
Garen: Hostgator limits you to 50 for shared.
Garen: That is my reason for switching, my site just bogs down
Rosie Dean: Okay.
Garen: So you don’t have a recommended plan for me?
Garen: I don’t know anything about web hosting
Rosie Dean: You can use ‘MS Power Server’ hosting plan.
Garen: ok is that a good one?
Rosie Dean: Yes, it is good.
Garen: Just interested in why you recommend that one?
Rosie Dean: You can host MySQL , MS SQL databases on our server. If you use only MySQL, you can use Unix plan.
Garen: doesn’t your shared plans have MySQL
Rosie Dean: Yes, we have it.
Garen: and there is never any downtime with your hosting right 99% uptime
Rosie Dean: There is no downtime.
Garen: has there ever been?
Rosie Dean: Yes, it will down. However, we will resolve it soon.
Garen: So the 100+ claims I have read on being down for 1-10 days at a time are a lie?
Rosie Dean: It was might be due to upgrade our server. Recently, we upgraded the server to our new server. However, it is resolved now.
Garen: i think i will do business with someone else.
Rosie Dean: Is there anything else I can assist you with today?
Garen: no
Your chat transcript will be sent to garen@deaddogdesign.net at the end of your chat.
Rosie Dean: Thank you for chatting with us. Please feel free to contact us at any time. We are available 24×7.
Chat session has been terminated by the site operator.
I noticed that they did recommend to me “MS Power Server’” there VPS package. One of there most expensive packages, too. I believe it was for $60 a month and they didn’t really ask me about anything for my site. They could have offered me a $5 a month package.
I had to wait 35 minutes and basically get real quick responses. By quick responses I mean one liners and about a 2-3 minute pause between them. After about 35 minutes with them I had enough. Not a very “educated” customer service team if you ask me. After evaluating them I stand by my Webhost4life review and would not recommend doing business with them. Should be called Webhost4ALittleWhile!
Is Your Website Accessible
( The Best Web Hosting Service )- If you have hired a web development company to create a website for you, you should not overlook checking on accessibility. Good developers often include that in their services, but you should make certain to plainly specify that so that you know what you get. If you want more information about the types of accessibility issues, you can visit the W3C Accessibility Guidelines. But even with a contract in place, you would want to test on your own to see if your site is truly accessible and if it complies with the relevant laws.
The W3C has issued guidelines and methods for accessible websites, which you’ll find on their Web Accessibility Initiative website. These are ways to build and test your site, which your developer should be familiar with. Here are 5 quick tests for your site:
• Validate HTML and CSS. Assistive technology, or software or devices that can help users with a disability, work well with a valid format. There are 2 simple techniques to check if there’s a problem with your site. The first involves installing add-ons or browser plug-ins such as the validation add-on for Firefox. Another way is to use the W3C validator, which tells you about marking errors on your website.
• View your website using a screen reader. A screen reader is a program that reads content of your website using synthesized speech. It is designed to assist people with difficulty in reading a screen. Freedom Scientific JAWS, a common screen reader, is rather expensive, but it can be used for free for a half hour at a time. The fangs add-on with use on Firefox can display text to be read by JAWS, a cheap and easy alternative. Still you can try Lynx, the text-based browser. Text browsers are very different form screen readers, but many problems you can encounter in screen readers are also evident in this browser. Also this is a great fine http://browsershots.org
• View your site using software to enlarge it. Using software that resembles a portion of your screen, there is Magnifier for Windows, and Universal Access Panel for Mac. These are both bundled with the operating system and explained in the Help section.
• Navigate to your site without using your mouse. For those who have difficulty in using a mouse, they may use the keyboards only or some other devices such as a joystick to navigate. You can test this by opening your web browser, then trying to navigate using the keyboard only.
• Use your best language. Your text should read naturally, and be easy to read. Remember sometimes you may have readers who have limited knowledge of English. There are those who use English as a second language, so there’s the problem of accessibility. You can try how you can read your site using the test tool Juicy Studio Readability, which uses several tests to assess your site content’s readability.
If you see you can navigate and use your website using these methods and the site is valid, then you know your site is close to being accessible. If you wan to take a step further, you’ll make sure that persons with disabilities are included as test users also, to provide a more definitive answer. You may need the services of a specialist as consultant in usability, as this is more complicated.
Duplicate Content – How Search Engines Are Changing
( The Best Web Hosting Service )- Every day, the many search engines are struggle the fight against duplicate content. It continues to spread like a virus, spamming and dumping search engine indexes and computer hard drives.
There is now the new standard of the duplicate content filter in search engines, to fight against these endless spam websites. These steadily grow such that it races against the search engines’ duplicate content filter processing speed.
Spam content still flourishes, but the search engine companies continue to grow their equipment, to work on improving their engines’ indexing algorithms and enhance their duplicate content filter.
We hope that one day this spam thing will be over when all spam websites are banned. If this happens, webmasters only have one thing to do—to manually build their websites from scratch, and provide unique, creatively written content.
It is better to make long-term websites, instead of the thousands of automatically generated spam sites, which get banned by search engines in time anyway. Besides, by just generating spam websites, webmasters are actually wasting their time, rather than doing original websites.
But what can you do if you do not know much about your website’s main topic to build upon? Today, the internet is the most widely used information-on-demand source. Wherever you are and at any time of the day or night, you can research on topics you knew nothing or little about, right away. For example, article directories are a good place to begin your search about certain topics.
Unique relevant content is a must for the business aspect of article marketing, and for building your relationship with search engines. These, in time, result in free long-term search engine traffic which you need.
Today, however, there are also tricks to confuse search engines, like in rewriting original material to make it appear like new content. This may be so different from the original, just with some switches of words and phrases, to appear like an altogether new article.
It is like having the same main topic, but spelling it differently. Is this considered spam or not? The search engines decide, which leave the spammers another advantage.
5 Tips For Backlink Building
( The Best Web Hosting Service )- A working backlink building plan is essential in internet marketing.
Or really any site this on the net! You could have the most professional-looking site created, with plenty of content, with jazzy graphics, and lots of interactive features. But you do need a backlink building strategy for your website, or you will never be found on the net.
The secret to internet marketing is showing up in the top 3 search results at least for specific keywords. So your location greatly matters. If your site does not show up on the first—or second page of search results, it gets harder to find you.
Sure, you can get a little traffic from article directories and blogs, or from people who really search more than page one of Google search. But those who have patience to go further than a few pages aren’t very many, and this traffic is hardly enough to create a sustainable source of traffic that can convert to sales.
It is possible to get one or two sales per month, or several dollars from pay-per-click advertizing. But honestly, we’re in internet marketing to make money, right? After spending countless hours on your website or blog, you hope to earn some hundreds, if not thousands of dollars per month in passive income.
If you follow an effectual backlinking strategy, then you know your internet marketing efforts are not useless, with thousands of visitors being driven to your site every month. This will convert to increased cash for you.
Here are 5 important rules to start you off in an effective backlink building strategy:
• Build many one-way, in-bound links to your website from related websites with high Google page rank.
• Build backlinks with the use of HTML anchor text which contains the keyword you want your site to rank for.
• Make sure the landing page your backlinks link to is optimized for that keyword you want your site to rank for. If this is not possible, you can create another webpage in your site which you can load with content optimized for the keyword.
• Backlinks can be used in articles, blog posts, social bookmarks, forum posts, and RSS feeds which you can use in various ways.
• Do not post duplicate content to different article directories. It is better that you send only one of its kind articles for different article directories. If you can learn to spin your articles, you can create unique content.
This is not a complete list, but you know you have the gist of the most common techniques to incorporate into your backlink building strategy when you want to get that high ranking in Google for your website or blog. You can also get help build your backlink building strategy with some internet marketing tutorials.
Please see this article on “how to get backlinks” for some good quality information.
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