Bloggers are looking for the best value web hosting available. For a long time, shared web hosting was the only option available for individuals looking for a cost-effective way to have an online presence. Shared web hosting is possible because one server box is able to host hundreds of different web sites. The cost of maintaining and administrating the server is shared among the hosted sites. Likewise, shared hosting implies that each site is allocated a portion of the server’s resources. When there is a surge in web traffic to one of the sites sharing server space, it is usually the administrator’s option to temporarily make unavailable the site receiving increased traffic.
A cost effective alternative to shared web hosting is grid hosting. A grid is composed of over the counter computers connected to a network. One notion of the grid is scalability. Grid hosting is highly scalable simply because the computers comprising the grid are essentially stand alone units. The network operating system is responsible for handling out tasks to each member computer. Each member of the grid contributes to the completion of the grid’s overall task.
When the network load approaches grid capacity, all it takes is just a flip of a switch to bring additional computers to life thus scaling up the grid’s output.
Grid hosting is able to handle traffic surge gracefully. Behind the grid are possibly thousands of commodity hardware assigned to do specific tasks like serving email, providing web services and database querying. Increased load due to spikes in web traffic are simply distributed to the grid members.
The main difference between shared web hosting and grid hosting is scalability. Shared hosts have fixed capacities. It is somewhat ironic that popular sites on the shared host are punished and may face temporary unavailability of web content. There is no such thing as fixed capacity on grid hosting. An unknown site on a grid host may consume fewer resources. Over time, the same site may gain popularity but the site is allowed to increase its utilization of the grid’s computing resources.
Because of scalability, popular sites served by a grid host are allowed to consume more computing resources. Popular blogs on grid hosts won’t be taken down no matter how often they get slashdotted or dugg. Of course such sites may get higher monthly billings but the increased cost of hosting a popular site is always justified by the value of having a continuous online presence.
- In 1996, Americans spent an average of 30 minutes a month surfing the World Wide Web.
- The average American Spends 27 hours a month online, this according to Nielsen’s Three Screen Report for the 4th quarter of 2008.
- The Web was invented in 1989 by a British physicist named Tim Berners-Lee
- It is just one of the many services that operate on the Internet. Other services include e-mail, newsgroups and FTP.
- The Internet, in turn, was created by ARPA to connect computers of various researches geared towards regaining technological over Soviet Russia after the Russian space program successfully launched the Sputnik satellite. It was on October 29, 1969 when 2 computers from UCLA and SRI International got connected thus realizing what the internet became later, the ARPANET.
- The first proposal for a “large hypertext database with typed links” was written by Tim Berners-Lee on 1989 but generated little interest
- Berners-Lee saw the Web as a network based means of sharing information that works on any computer running on any OS
- The first Web site was built at CERN. CERN is the French acronym for European Council for Nuclear Research and is located at Geneva, Switzerland.
- A NeXT computer was the world’s first Web server
- The first Web server software was CERN httpd
- The first browser, also invented by Berners-Lee was called the WorldWideWeb. The first successful build was released on December 25, 1990
- Mike Sendall was Berners-Lee’s boss at CERN. He approved the purchase of the NeXT computer where Tim wrote the beginnings of the Web.
- The first Web browser was already capable of downloading and displaying movies, sounds and any file type supported by the operating system. The concept of stylesheets was already in place when the first browser was released.
- The first browser was also the first editor for creating web pages
- WorldWideWeb was programmed with Objective C
- The first browser could already open http:, news:, ftp: and browse local file: spaces
- The World Wide Web took advantage of things already available on the internet like TCP/IP and DNS. TCP/IP took shape way back 1973 through the work of Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn. DNS was created in 1983 by Paul Mockapetris and his friends. In fact, before the Web, email was already using TCP/IP and DNS.
- Hypertext came out as an idea way back in 1945 by Vanevar Bush. The term hypertext was actually coined by Ted Nelson
- Hypertext is implemented in the Web as links in the browser window. Links are references to text that the user wants to access. When a link is clicked, the referenced text is displayed or bought into focus. The World Wide Web is the most extensive implementation of hypertext but it is not the only one. A computer help file is actually a hypertext document.
- What Tim Berners-Lee did when he invented the World Wide Web was to figure out a way to use hypertext and connect it with DNS and TCP/IP so that links found in other computers can be displayed in the browser.
- The website of the world’s first web server is http://info.cern.ch/
- The URL of the first web page was http://nxoc01.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html. Although this page is not hosted anymore at CERN, a later version of the page is posted at http://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html.
- A screenshot of the world’s first browser running inside Tim Berners-Lee computer can be seen at this page: http://info.cern.ch/NeXTBrowser.html
- In December 1991, the first institution in the US to adopt the web was the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC). True to the Berners-Lee vision, it was used to display an online catalog of SLAC’s documents.
- The first browser that made the web available to PC and Mac users was Mosaic. It was developed by National Center for Supercomputing (NCSA) led by Marc Andreessen in February, 1993. Mosaic was one of the first graphical web browsers and led to an explosion in web use.
- Near the end of 1992 there were only 26 web servers around the world. In October 1993, the number of web servers worldwide grew to 200.
- April 30, 1993 is an important date for the Web because on that day, CERN announced that anyone may use WWW technology freely.
- Marc Andreessen started Netscape and released Netscape Navigator in 1994. During the height of its popularity, Netscape Navigator accounted for almost 90% of all web use.
- The first International Conference on the World Wide Web was held in 1994 at CERN.
- It was also in the Conference Dinner in May 26, 1994 where the first Best of WWW awards were given. It was by pure coincidence that the jazz band that played during the awards was called “Wolfgang and the Were Wolves”
- The best overall site for 1994 was NCSA’s web site.
- Microsoft released Internet Explorer on 1995. This event initiated the browser wars. By bundling Internet Explorer with the Windows operating system, by 2002, Internet Explorer became the most dominant web browser with a market share over 95 percent.
- The latest entry to the browser business is Google Chrome on September 2008
- As of July 2009, Microsoft Internet Explorer accounted for 67.68 percent of all browsers used. Mozilla Firefox was used by 22.47 percent of all users.
- The browser wars refer to the battle for dominance in the late 1990s between Netscape Navigator and the eventual winner Microsoft Internet Explorer. Currently, the browser war is raging between Microsoft Explorer and emerging competitors like Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Google Chrome and Opera.
- When Netscape opened for public trading, on the first day, Jim Clark, co-owner, earned $663 million.
- The top thee dominant Web servers according to NetCraft’s July 2009 Web Server Survey of 239,611,111 sites are Apache HTTP Server (113 million sites), Microsoft IIS (56 million), and qq.com’s QZHTTP (30.3 million)
- Apache web server was the first to achieve the 100 million installation milestone. This was achieved on 2009.
- Open source technology dominates the web. The most common software used for webserving is called LAMP standing for the Linux operating system, Apache web server, MySQL database and PHP scripting language
- Google has its own web server called the Google Web Server or GWS. As of July, 2009, only 14.2 million sites worldwide use GWS and is the fourth widely used server.
- Apache HTTP web server has been the most dominant server since 1996.
- The development of standards for the World Wide Web is managed by the W3C or the World Wide Web consortium.
- The W3C was founded in October, 1994 and is headed by Tim Berners-Lee
- The need for standards arose when the web gained popularity, various vendors were making different versions of HTML thus making web pages incompatible with each other. The primary mission of the W3C is to ensure compatibility and agreement among industry members in the adoption of new standards.
- The first White House website was launched during the Clinton-Gore administration on October 21, 1994
- Even though worldwide is a valid English word, WWW is spelled World Wide Web not Worldwide Web. For a while there was a hyphen in the name: thus World-Wide Web. The hyphen caused a lot of confusion for people who were not so grammatical. Tim Berners-Lee decided to drop the hyphen.
- WWW is often abbreviated to W3. Another way of abbreviating World Wide Web is to use Web.
- However, the author of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams once said that WWW is the only abbreviation he knows that takes longer to say than what it actually stands for.
- Contemporary media uses the words World Wide Web and Internet interchangeably. However they are not one and the same. The internet is the hardware and software infrastructure used to connect computers while the World Wide Web is just one of the services running on the internet
- The “www” part of a website (www.google.com) is optional and is not required by any web policy or standard.
- Computers who are connected to the internet all have IP addresses. By using this addressing scheme (called IPv4), each computer in the internet is capable of reaching up to 4.3 billion other computers.
- Despite IPv4’s 4.3 billion unique addresses, it is forecasted that by 2011, the address space will be consumed. A newer scheme called IPv6 is slowly replacing IPv4 in some countries. IPv6 has the capability to address 2128 computers. To give perspective to this very big number, the world’s population of 6.5 billion people as of 2006 can be given 295 unique addresses.
- The blue colored links on a web page is just a browser default although way back on the days when monitors only had 16 colors, blue was the darkest color that did not affect text legibility.
- As of August 22, 2009, the most popular website according to Alexa.com and Ranking.com is Google.com. Next is Yahoo.com
- Google is named after googol, which is 1 followed by 100 zeroes. According to Google’s web site, their name reflects the company’s mission to organize the vast amount of information out there in the World Wide Web
- The supposed reason for Google.com’s sparse homepage was that its owners did not know HTML well enough that even the first versions of the homepage did not contain the submit button. The only way to make Google start searching was to hit the Return or Enter key.
- Although Google and Yahoo are today’s top search engines, they certainly were not the first. One of the earliest search engines, Gopher Search Engine, was already working since 1991.
- Gopher was another application working on the internet and was an alternative to the World Wide Web. The main reason for its present day obscurity is that web browsers are much more user friendly and, unlike Gopher, are able to integrate text and graphics
- The oldest, still working .com website belongs to symbolics.com. It was registered way back March 15, 1985.
- Vice President Al Gore’s misinterpreted statement about taking the initiative to create the Internet was one of the main causes of his defeat during the 2000 presidential elections.
- Al Gore was credited by Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf as the first political leader who recognized the importance of the internet.
- The number of hits returned by Googling “internet” is 1.6 billion.
- If you Google “sex”, the number of hits is approximately 637 million while “money” returns 913 million. It’s kind of reassuring though that “love” returns more than 1.4 billion hits while family has more than 1.1 billion hits.
- The business of web hosting in 2009 is estimated to be almost 51.2 billion dollars.
- The largest market is in Asia with a value of 15.7 billion
- By 2014, the value of web hosting is forecasted to be more than 73 billion dollars.
- Intel’s rival chipmaker AMD estimated the number of internet users in January, 2009 to be 1.4 billion.
- Vint Cerf coined the term internaut to refer to any technically capable professional user of the internet.
- All three letter word combinations from aaa.com to zzz.com are already registered as domain names.
- There is a race to register generic and sellable domain names. This practice is called domain name speculation and is the intent of the owner to sell them later for profit. Recent domain names that have been sold for a million dollars include business.com and sex.com
- 1 million domain names are registered every month
- Domain name speculation using the names of famous people is considered cybersquatting and could be a violation of intellectual property laws in some countries. Bruce Springsteen, Kevin Spacey, and Julia Roberts, all have at one time been victimized by cybersquatters.
- 100 percent of the top 10000 family names are already registered as domain names.
- In 1996, Yahoo’s front page did not include email. It was only in the 3rd quarter of 1996 when the first webmail site Hotmail was launched. The webmail service that came to be known as Yahoo Mail was launched much later on October 2007.
- According to AT&T vice president Jim Cicconi, 8 hours of video is uploaded into YouTube every minute. This was on April 2008. On May 21, 2009, YouTube receives 20 hours of video every minute.
- YouTube’s bandwidth requirements to upload and view all those videos cost as much as 1 million dollars a day and growing. The revenues generated by YouTube cannot pay for its upkeep.
- The bandwidth consumed by YouTube in 2007 is comparable to the entire bandwidth consumed by the whole internet in 2000
- There is a company named Universal Tube and Rollform Equipment, a manufacturer of metal machine tubes and pipes. Its website, utube.com often got overloaded by traffic meant for YouTube. The website was later renamed utubeonline.com
- The contents of most of today’s active websites are stored in databases which are largely invisible to search engines. Termed the Deep Web, it contains data such as book prices, airfares and other stuff that will never surface unless somebody queries for that information.
- The Deep Web and all that hidden information is what prevents search engines from giving us a definitive answer to simple questions like “How much is the cheapest airfare from New York to London next Thursday”?
- The size of the Deep Web has been estimated to be 400 to 550 times larger than the searchable web
- In a recent survey conducted by security specialist Symantec of the 100 dirtiest websites, 48 percent feature adult content
- Around 75 percent of the music that is available for download has never been purchased and it is costing money just to be on the server.
- Of the 13 million music files available on the web, 52,000 tunes accounted for 80% of download.
- Naked women make up 80 percent of all the pictures on the internet
- By 2012 it has been said that there will be 17 billion devices connected to the internet. In most of Asia, mobile phones are leading the way to internet connectivity
- The maker of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg, born 1984, is said to be the youngest self-made billionaire
- He is the 321st richest person in the US
- Zuckerberg lunched FaceBook in his dormitory room while still in Harvard
- The online population of Facebook, 250 million users worldwide, and MySpace, which had 100 million accounts by 2007, are bigger than the populations of many nations worldwide
- On April 2008, Facebook overtook MySpace in terms of monthly visits
- It took the Web only 4 years to reach 50 million users. Radio took 38 years while TV made it in 13 years.
- Amazon.com was formerly known as Cadabra.com
- Bit torrents, depending on location, are estimated to consume 27 to 55 percent of all internet bandwidth as of February, 2009
- Blogger Kyle MacDonald who through a series of trades over the Web, managed to get a house from a paper clip.
- After the deed to the house was signed in MacDonald’s name, his girlfriend accepted his proposal and the engagement ring was made from the original red paperclip.
- Mahir Cagri achieved internet fame by way of his endearing use of broken English in his website. The banner of his site reads “This is my page….. Welcome to my home page!!!!!! I kiss you!!!!!”
- It was estimated that 1 of 8 married couples started by meeting online
- An image search on Google for “241543903” will show heads in freezers
- It is said that there are 5 porn pages for every single normal page
- Typing “the” in Google search results in 11,360,000,000 hits. In October 2004, the number of hits was 5,890,000,000
Just because you have a website for your business doesn’t mean you have branded yourself online. You may even have a web presence and rank for some keywords via the search engines but online branding is much more than that. In order to become a well know brand you must dominate a majority of these seven areas.
Video
One of the best ways to get maximum exposure online is to get a video to go viral. Creating an interesting or funny video can grab the attention of people everywhere. People love to watch videos on Youtube and the funnier the better. One suggestion we give is to create a parody and integrate your product or service. Including your brand name in the title, description and logo at the end of the video. As the video goes viral and spreads your business name and logo can reach further than most advertising can.
Videos are relatively cheap to produce you just need to put your thinking cap on. Once you create a great video you can leverage social media websites to help spread your video.
Social Media
Some people think social media has become the biggest thing since sliced bread and they are right. On the World Wide Web there has never been a better time and better vehicles to promote content. Websites like Digg, Reddit, Mixx and Twitter can become powerful tools to help reach people faster than ever before.
Videos are good but some of the most popular websites launched with interesting articles and graphs and those can work well too. Remember that the content has to be great or your efforts won’t get any traction on the social media websites.
Once you have created great content you will need a Social Media Marketing expert or enthusiast to help promote it. On social media websites like Digg and Reddit if the average person submits great content it’s a waste of time. In order for your content to take off you will need someone that has good connections for each of these websites.
Domain Name
What’s in a name? Everything! If you really want to separate your online business from the millions of others in your niche then you need a name that will stand out. Find yourself a unique domain name that can be branded. Too many online business owners go for name with their main keywords in them.
Example:
www.dogtoys.com
www.webhosting.com
www.shoes.com
While these are some great domain names and can make for gaming the searches engines a little easier, that’s all their good for. If you truly want to build a strong brand online you need to separate yourself from the keyword domain names. It is extremely hard to brand a domain like Shoes.com, as customers will get confused with other websites:
Shoe.com
Shoes.net
Shoes.org
Tips: Domain names are very cheap when you find the right name be sure to purchase as many of the domain extensions as you can. As a general rule of thumb we buy the following extensions; .com, .org, .net, .info, .us, .me and .biz.
Search Engine Rankings
Ranking number one in Google, Yahoo and Bing can help your company become a brand. Often searchers see the first few rankings as market leaders within that specific search. Ranking at the top of the search engines can carry more benefits than just leads and sales. 42% of all searchers click through to the website that is listed at the number one position. Ranking for this gives you much more visibility and free marketing. Bloggers will blog, tweeple (people that use Twitter) will tweet about your website and other webmasters will list you as a resource.
When you’re just starting out, establishing your brand via search engine rankings can be hard to achieve. Most websites will not rank well until after years of trust and lots of organic looking links. You can learn about search engine optimization yourself through places like SEO Book or you can hire a reputable Search Engine Marketing firm.
Adwords / PPC
One of the quickest ways to have a web presence in the search engines is to use Pay-Per-Click Marketing. In PPC you pay to have your website listed in a box market “Sponsors” on the search results pages.
PPC can be used to get your name out there while people are searching for related products or services. If you have a big enough budget you can do what some of the car companies were doing a few years back. A few of the big auto makers made ads and choose every keyword they could. For about a week no matter what you were searching for online you would see an advertisement for their new car.
Communities In Your Niche
In every industry there are a handful of successful blogs and forums. This is where people in your niche are looking for some type on information or like to contribute themselves. These communities are perfect for getting your brand name out there.
Become active as much as you can. If it’s a successful blog you could make useful comments on as many post as you can. This works out best when you are the first person to reply to a blog post. Same thing with community forums, people join these places for help so be helpful.
If you have a decent advertising budget you may want to consider banner advertising. While banner ads don’t convert very well for sales it can however get your name and logo out in the community. Just make sure the banner is in a place where everyone is going to look. Banner ads on the side bar of most website will get ignored by the majority of the readers. Sometimes you can get advertisements within articles or on the center of the page.
Blogging
One of the best ways to create an audience is to give them a reason to keep coming back. Creating a blog on your business domain can increase keep readers coming back over and over again. I recommend you add a blog as a sub-domain or a folder.
Example:
http://blog.yourdomains.com
http://yourdomain.com/blog/
Just starting a blog is not good enough you need to give people a reason to come back often. Ideally if you can schedule blog posts for every day you will have a much better chance of growing your readership. Your goal for your blog should be to become a leader within your industry.
If your content is good it will attract people to talk about you, mention you on their tweets and even blog about you. Creating great content will give you free advertising ever time someone links to your website or mentions a blog post of yours.
Advertising itself is not marketing and building a brand is not a one step process. You will need relentless pursuit of each of these seven steps in order to become a true online brand.
Increased traffic in your blog is desirable right? You crave recognition but when the moment arrives when your articles get slashdotted and dugg, your server inevitably crashes. What your readers get is an error message saying that the website is unavailable. This story has happened a hundred times already such that a name for it was invented. The “Digg effect” has even caused dedicated web accounts to crash majestically.
The pages of most websites today, especially blogs and social networking sites, are generated dynamically using PHP and MySQL. Assembling dynamic content requires more server resources compared to pages based on flat HTML. Fortunately, there are ways to optimize your server so that it uses fewer resources such as:
- Maintaining a cache of recently created content. Generation of dynamic content is a long process involving database queries and piecing query results with HTML and CSS. If a cache is enabled, what the server passes on to the browser when the same URL is accessed is content consisting of readily accessible HTML. This is good because aside from faster response times when serving HTML pages, server resources are not used to put together dynamic content.
- Optimizing the design of database tables as well as creating more efficient queries thus lessening the demand on your server’s resources when generating dynamic content. Make sure to index table fields that are used as foreign keys as well as those fields that are part of joins and used in forming query criteria.
- Making appropriately sized images and using the most acceptable JPEG compression is another effective way of lessening the demand on your server’s resources. If you use images as plain-colored backgrounds, CSS can do this task for you without the cost of reading an image file and positioning it somewhere on your web page. CSS can also tile images such that there is no need to use one huge image to serve as backdrop to your web page
- Using compression to reduce the size of data transmitted between the server and the reader
Preventing your site from crashing because of traffic surges is actually doable and is being practiced by experienced bloggers and site administrators. As you may have read, some of the tips mentioned are very simple like enabling the cache while others may require more experienced hands such as query optimization.
So the next time your site crashes the tips on this articles might help you solve this problem. If not help is readily available on the web.
Social Media Marketing can bring in huge numbers of visitors, leads and links. This post will discuss a blog post / video that went viral via social media websites. The owners of the video and blog did not pay to get their content marketed. However, this goes to show you that great content plus having someone active in social media can really increase results.
I often hear that social media marketing cannot be measured or can be difficult to measure. Frankly this is completely not true! I can show you hundreds of examples of effective marketing campaigns and their results. Some good ways to measure social media marketing are:
- Visitors
- Leads
- Backlinks
- Tweets (Twitter)
- Blog Postings
- News Articles & TV
In order to promote something via social media you need at least two factors:
1) Great Content
2) Social Media Marketing Guru
For our case study we will use the “JK Wedding Entrance Dance” video. You are probably one of the 18,393,159 people that have seen this video online. If not go check it our here.
This video was submitted to a few of the social media websites (Digg, Twitter, etc.) on July 19, 2009. Two days later when a social media guru came upon that video it only had 1,200 views on YouTube. Don’t get me wrong, 1,200 views is nothing to frown upon but imagine that number multiplied 5,000 times! (yes it happened)
The original person that submitted it to Digg was not that well connected and therefore within the first 24 hours the video only received 12 Diggs. This is nowhere near the amount of diggs that something would need to hit the front page. In order to get something “popular” on Digg it has to have somewhere between 39 and 250 diggs within a 24-hour period.
This goes to show you no matter how good the content is if you don’t have a person that is connected in the social media circles your good content will go nowhere. My analogy of this is landing a spaceship on the moon and you call a press conference and nobody shows up. Sure, you did a great thing that is news/buzz worthy but you didn’t have the connections to get the media there. Social media marketing is the same way.
The JK Wedding Entrance Dance video did however get a little traction on Twitter. Outspoken Media did a great blog post called “The Power of the Unexpected” that is about thinking outside the box. They used this video as their inspiration to go along with their write up.
This is where the power of social media takes off. An active Digg User submitted the blog post to Digg and within hours the story and video went popular. (hit the front page) As you can see the story gained more than 5,000 diggs. Plus going viral all over the Internet on websites like Twitter, Facebook and Myspace.
Why didn’t the original video make it to the front page by itself? Again, it takes two things to get stories popular on social media websites Great Content + Social Media Marketing. The original person that submitted the video to Digg has just over 1,200 diggs but less than 10 friends on Digg. It can be very dificult to get stories popular without more connections.
If you are lacking one of these elements then what you are trying to promote will almost certainly fail.
The true power of social media websites like Digg, Reddit, Facebook and Twitter can be measured. Below are the staticics from the video and blog post.
Youtube:
First and the easiest are the views the video received on YouTube. The first two days it had about 1,200 views and the next two days it went from 1,200 to just over 6,000,000 views. Now the video is over 18,000,000 views.
Backlinks:
Backlinks are when other websites link to your website. The blog post from Outspoken Media started that day with ZERO backlinks. As of writing this blog post you can see according to Yahoo that single blog post has been linked to over 1,110 times. Why does this matter? Backlinks are what help your website rank high in the search engines. This blog post is only a few weeks old and it’s already ranking for some great keywords in Google.
If you pay a search engine optimization firm to get you over a 1,000 backlinks this can easily cost in the tens of thousands of dollars.
Unique Visitors:
We do not have specific numbers of how many visits came to their blog post but you can see that it quickly became their most popular post of all time.
Twitter:
As you can see from their blog post that specific page has been “RT” or Re-Tweeted 841 times. You can also use http://twitturly.com to gauge how many tweets your URL received.
News Papers & Media:
A few days after the video went viral several news stations through-out the country had stories on the video. This brought in loads of extra exposure for the makers of the video and even a few national TV interviews.
It has been twenty days since this video hit the Internet and both the blog post and video will continue to gets page views. This is a great example of when you combine great content with social media marketing to achieve outstanding results.
