Behind domain names such as www.google.com or www.yahoo.com are numbers called IP addresses. These numbers provide three important functions:

• Identification of all computers that are connected to the internet. Domain names such as google.com are translated by special servers called DNS (domain name servers) into numeric identifiers such as 74.125.45.100
• It is also an address, meaning it indicates the computer’s location on the internet
• Addresses are the information used by the bits of information (packets) flowing in the internet to move from one computer to another. This function is called routing.

The designers of the internet decided that IP addresses will be a 32 bit number or 232. This means that there are 4,294,967,296 unique addresses available. The current implementation of internet addressing is called IPv4 (IP version 4). However, due to various historical reasons, less than 4.3 billion addresses are actually available and the number of routable IP addresses is rapidly decreasing. It was already recognized in the 1980’s that address depletion will be a significant problem for the internet and was foreseen that by 2010, the effects of address depletion will be strongly felt.

One way of alleviating network address depletion is to use shared web hosting. Web sites on shared hosts use the same server along with hundreds of other sites. These site all have the same IP address. Some important internet services are not available to sites that are running on shared hosts such as SSL (secure sockets layer)

Web host providers also provide dedicated web hosting where only one website sits on the server. The IP address of the server is not shared by other sites and this makes it possible to implement SSL on this kind of site.

When you are operating an e-commerce site, you must be able to process credit card transactions in a secured manner. This is where SSL is useful but this option is only available to dedicated web hosting. SSL uses some form of cryptography. Important information such as credit card numbers are encrypted using implementations of well-known and very secure encryption algorithms such as the Blowfish as well as its successor called the Advanced Encryption Standard.

Merchant accounts use SSL to process credit card transactions. If you operate a site that is shared by hundreds of other sites, the owner of an e-commerce site may opt to use an electronic shopping service that is hosted on some other site like PayPal. This is something that most on-line shoppers avoid because they do not want to be taken to another site just to close the deal.

When a website gets notorious for hosting malware, pornography or other offensive content, the IP address of that site is banned or red-flagged by search engines. When the offensive site is located on a shared server, it will be unfortunate for the other sites sharing the server because their content will become red-flagged as well. Dedicated sites will never have this problem

A great advantage of dedicated sites is greater control of the server which goes all the way to complete access to the operating system of the server.

Another important service available only to sites on dedicated web hosts is VPN or virtual private networking. Implementing VPN requires SSL to operate properly. VPN is a great feature for companies who need a geographically widespread, secure environment for a shared, read and write access to documents and folders over the internet.

When the successor of IPv4 called IPv6 starts to become the dominant addressing scheme, network address depletion won’t be problem anymore. IPv6 is a very, very big number (2128), it has been estimated that up to 296 addresses are available to entire human population (6.5 billion) living 1996. IPv6 has been designed to address several shortcomings of IPv4 of which mandatory network security has been seen to have the most impact for e-commerce sites. Whether this will impact e-commerce on shared servers still remains to be seen.

When you start a new website there are two major things that you would want to think about before choosing a web host, bandwidth and storage space. The bandwidth is basically a representation of how fast your website will load and the amount of information that is loaded with it. The storage space is the amount of space you will avail of when getting a web host to accommodate all your web page information.

Usually when you look for a web host, the most attractive option is to get one with the most storage space. There are many web hosts out there that offer unlimited space for your website.  However, you must be careful in taking these offers and read the fine print that is involved in their service.  More often than not, the monthly fees that you will pay your web hosting company may come with extra charges for your unlimited space or even get your website suspended for using too many resources.

There are several advantages and disadvantages to getting unlimited web hosting. Some of the advantages of unlimited web hosting are:

• In terms of storage space, you will never again have problems in thinking about what to put in the web host server because there is unlimited space!  So whether you want 100MB pictures to load, or huge databases to put online, this should fit in the unlimited storage space that your web host will provide for you.  What you may not realize is that 99% of the websites in the world will never use nearly enough storage to even have to think about storage space.
• You can test out all the different applications, content server managers, database programs, and other cool and useful engines and applications that you can use in your website without having to worry about removing stuff whenever you update your site. You can simply store everything there and not worry about the space it will take up.

There are also disadvantages to the ‘too-good-to-be-true’ offer of unlimited web hosting and these are:

• The offer may just be too good to be true.  Web hosts may offer these great perks of using unlimited space, but eventually the space will run out at some point.  Technically, unlimited storage space is impossible to have on any given server.  Web hosts just offer it because they don’t expect you to use up more than the expected utilized space that is assigned to you.
• Bandwidth may not be too fantastic on a website with unlimited space.  Remember, you usually have to pay for bandwidth depending on speed.  When they offer unlimited web hosting, it doesn’t necessarily mean unlimited bandwidth where your webpage would load in less than 2 seconds!  There is a limit to bandwidth just as there is to storage space.

So, when shopping for your next web host, don’t be taken in too easily by the unlimited web hosting services offers.  Inquire about what the word “unlimited” covers and what exactly their in-house services, technical expertise, and standard procedures are that would cater to the security, back-up, and proper maintenance of your webpage space.  It is better to pay for good technical services and proper processes than to pay for unlimited web hosting that only offers lost of space but little of anything else.

McKremie Web Hosting is now offering a free domain name with the purchase of any of our 12-month or 24-month web hosting plans. This is not a limited time offer; this will be part of our standard options going forward. The free domain name applies to the following extensions:

.com

.net

.org

.info

Most of our new customers are starting a website for the first time. This will help them by saving about $10.00 per year in domain registration fees. This is all backed by our 24/7 US-based customer support. If you are not failure with out web hosting features here is a small list:

- 24/7 US-Based Customer Support (Phone & Email)

- 99.9% Uptime Guarantee

- 90-Day Money-Back Guarantee

- #1 Control Panel – cPanel

- PHP, CGI, Ruby, Perl, MySQL

- Unlimited E-Mail Accounts

- Wordpress

- Drupal

- Ruby (RoR)

More feature can be found here: http://www.mckremie.com/hosting.php

The World Wide Web is just one of the services that utilize the internet. Electronic mail, ftp, and gopher were some of the earlier applications that were used over the internet but never gained massive appeal. It was the Web that created the surge of users online, from a low of 26 web servers in 1992 to more than 200 million in 2009.

Yet, Tim Berners-Lee’ initial proposal for a “large hypertext database with typed links” written some 20 years created little interest. Berners-Lee however was not discouraged by this misstep and with the approval of his supervisor at CERN, Mike Sendall, began developing what later became the World Wide Web on his NeXT computer.

Berners-Lee’s motivation for creating the Web was solving the problem of data sharing among scientists working at CERN who were using different computers running on different operating systems and using different software to view data. At that time, CERN was an organization of more than a thousand talented people whose stay at the facility averaged only two years. Because CERN and the Large Hadron Collider involved so many people, many wondered how to keep track of such a large project.

By late 1990, Berners-Lee already had the system for the Web in place at CERN. His team at CERN devised the HyperText Transfer Protocol; HTML which is the language used in building web pages; a browser called WorldWideWeb; and a web server which was running on his Next computer. The first use of the Web at CERN was for browsing the institution’s phone directory.

In 1991, Paul Kunz, from the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center visited CERN and became acquainted with the Web. Kunz bought a copy of the server software back to SLAC where the librarian at that time, Louise Addis ported it to an IBM mainframe running on VMC/CMS operating system. This is the first documented use of the Web in the United States.

By 1992, the Web was still exclusively used by research institutions and universities. Most web browsers were non-graphical except for the one Berners-Lee developed on the NeXT computer. It was only after a team from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) created the Mosaic browser that the web’s popularity exploded. Mosaic was the first browser developed by a team of full-time programmers who developed a product easy enough for novices to install and use. But it was Mosaic’s ability to display graphics and play multimedia inline that really started the explosion in web use. Earlier browsers had to open graphics in separate windows and it’s not difficult to imagine how excited users got when Mosaic made it possible to display both text and graphics on the same window. Of course, the fact that Mosaic ran on Windows meant that the millions of users of the operating system will eventually experience the web and not on the clunky way earlier browsers did it.

Another important contribution from NCSA was a web server called NCSA HTTPd. When its lead developer Robert McCool left NCSA in 1994, the development of the server came to a standstill and further development came in the way of patches via email. This is the primary reason attributed how Apache Web Server got its name. Its origin came from a patchy server developed at NCSA. By 2009, more than 100 million Apache servers were used to churn out web pages.

Today, the web is ubiquitous and the population online is greater than most countries worldwide. Web hosting is a 51 billion dollar a year business and is forecasted to reach 73 billion per year in 2014.

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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
4. 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.

I know everyone in their mother has a list of good FireFox add-ons but I would like to share the top 7 FireFox Add-ons that we use here at McKremie.com.  We deal with DNS issues, mutliple websites, and other issues and these add-ons really save us tons of time.  We all have our favorites and these are in no puticulare order.  This list complments the social media tools that will make life easier, if you haven’t checked them out have a look.

1) ShowIP

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/590

Show the IP address(es) of the current page in the status bar. It also allows querying custom information services by IP (right mouse button) and hostname (left mouse button), like whois, netcraft. Additionally you can copy the IP address to the clipboard.  This is very helpful for anyone that works with DNS issues or SEO.  It is by far the most effient way to get the websites IP address without having to run a look-up.

2) SEO ToolBar by SEO Book

http://tools.seobook.com/seo-toolbar/

SEO for Firefox pulls in many useful marketing data points to make it easy get a holistic view of the competitive landscape of a market directly in the search results.  Inlcudes information about Google PageRank, website age pulled from Archive.org, Yahoo! linkdomain information, number of times a URL has been bookmarked on Del.icio.us, Technorati information, ALexa Information, directory listings and whois information. 

3) Domain Details

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2166

This one overlaps with a few of the others but has some great functions.  Displays Server Type, Headers, IP Address, Location Flag, and links to Whois Reports.

4) Screengrab

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1146

It will capture what you can see in the window, the entire page, just a selection, a particular frame, basically it saves webpages as images – either to a file, or to the clipboard.  This add-on will save you so much time if you don’t have it you are really missing out.  With this add-on you can grab screenshots or pictures within secounds.

5) Social Media for Firefox

URL: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/7888

6) Update Scanner

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3362

Monitors web pages for updates. Useful for websites that don’t provide Atom or RSS feeds. This tool is great for following compeditors and catching when a website changes their homepage.
You can select how often each site will be scanned and minor changes can be ignored, like date, time and whatnot.

7) User Agent Switcher

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/59

Adds a menu and a toolbar button to switch the user agent of the browser.  View the current page as in a different browser (IE, Opera, NetScape). This comes in handy when you want to check for Cross Browser Compatibility issues.

Many web hosting companies have hidden secrets that they don’t want you to know. These secrets are marketing gimmicks and in some cases very deceptive ways to get your money. Be careful as these secrets can end up costing you lots of money.  To help prevent that we have uncovered and shown you what to look for.

7. Free Domains

WOW, a free domain sounds great doesn’t it? Guess what some web host don’t want you to know? Actually, there are a few different tactics going on:

1) The domain is free but you don’t own the domain they web hosting company owns it. Do you know what that means? Yep, you are stuck either hosting with them forever or you have to pay them what is equivalent to a ransom just to get your domain in your name.

2) The first year was free and now when you go to renew it each year they often charge $24.95+ for renewal. That’s like a 250% mark-up over what the average coast of a dot com domain name usually cost.

Now all web hosts are like this and it’s best to ask questions in the pre-sales process to find out who owns the domain name and how much do their renewal fees costs.

6. Web Hosting Review

Web Sites Web hosting review web sites are created for the sole purpose of making affiliate income. Often times the reviews in these web sites are fake and created by the owners of the review website. It is no conscience that the highest paying affiliate offers have the best reviews and somehow make it to the top positions. As an actually web hosting company we have been told by numerous review web sites that we could get to the top of their list if we pay them the high affiliate payouts.

Web hosting review web sites dominate the search engines including Google. Often times you can find that more than half the web sites in the top ten of a hosting search are not a hosting company, but a review website. Why? Well, the web hosting industry has some of the highest affiliate commission payout’s around and some of the top tier review web sites receive up to $150.00 per affiliate sign up.

5. Unlimited Storage

Unlimited Storage sounds great doesn’t it? That’s what *most* web hosting companies want you to think. The real truth of the matter is that there really isn’t a thing as Unlimited Storage. Sure, storage cost have dropped significantly in the past few years but Unlimited Storage is a marketing gimmick that many people fall for.

Here is how web hosting companies get around it. Have you ever read the complete Terms of Service of your web hosting company? If you are like most people, you browse it, but don’t completely read it all. Buried in the TOS you will find a section that mentions Server/CPU Usage. To sum most of them up it basically says if your web hosting account uses more than “X%” of the servers CPU Usage your account then violates the TOS and is subject to termination.

Now, it’s important for just about every shared web hosting company to have something like this in their TOS to protect other accounts on their servers due to improper coding and whatnot. However, many web host are using the Server/CPU Usage to get out of offering the Unlimited Storage they promise in their marketing.

4. 100% Uptime Claims

Great, you have found a web host that has a 100% Uptime Guarantee but what does that really mean? Do you actually get your money back if the web host is not up?

Uptime Guarantees are a huge marketing gimmick and the consequences for the web host are generally so minor. In order to get a full refund for a months worth of web hosting, your website would have had to of been down for a week. The truth is most customer will never notice if there website was down for a few hours and out of those that actually notice only a small fraction will ever ask for some sort of credit.

Plus keep in mind what generally isn’t included are things like; Acts of God, Server Maintenance, Wars or any other natural or unnatural events. What is an “any other natural or unnatural event”? Your guess is good as our but as we read that in many of the TOS it makes us think, any can mean anything. (blame the lawyers)

Wait that’s not all, are you ready for the kicker? The real kicker is that many of the uptime policies are only valid for Network Uptime. Network Uptime means the entire network of web servers your web hosts has. So if you happen to be on the one server that isn’t working properly the Network Uptime Guarantee probably won’t apply.

3. 24/7 Email Support

Have you dealt with web hosting companies that claim to offer 24/7 email support but often don’t reply to your initial tickets for 8+ hours? And we are talking about a human reply and not some automated message saying they will get to your ticket. There is a reason many web hosting companies don’t offer 24/7 phone and email support. They can not deliver! So instead they offer their so-called 24/7 email support.

Let’s be honest, how are you going to know if they are actually working or sleeping? You won’t and often times many of the budget or small web hosting companies won’t reply to your tickets in the middle of the night. Occasionally, some web host can only get to your support requests after the company owner gets home from his day job.

We are not saying all web hosts are like this and a good way to check is to find out where the company is located and send them a support request in the middle of the night, their time. You should be able to get a human response back within an hour or two at most. If the response take longer then you might be dealing with a one main operation that will probably come up short on your support needs.

2. Testimonials

Sure testimonials can provide great information about a web host but can you trust them? Do you really think a web hosting company would put up testimonials that were bad for them? If a web host has testimonials on their website you will only find two kids:

1) Ones they made up to make you think they are great.

2) Ones they hand picked to make them look good.

Either way is this really helpful information? No way! If you really want to find out how a web host is doing try using Google or Twitter to search for independent reviews.

1. Web Hosting Awards

Web hosting awards are very much like the Review Web Sites. Actually, most of the web hosting awards come from review web sites. Want to learn why?

Review web sites only make money when they can get traffic from PPC or Search Engines. One of the ways they get their high rankings in the search engines is because of all the links they get. By creating web hosting awards they get links from the companies they give the awards to. Many of the award images are links that point back to the hosting review website. To a web hosting review website this is an easy way to obtain links. Some are even devious to write the code where the image will not display unless the link is intact.

We just started our 20% Off Spring Break Special.  This promotion will run for a few weeks only and can save you big bucks!Just use the coupon code below and save 20% Off your initial order of our web hosting services.

Coupon Code: SPRING

Tip: The coupon code is good off of the initial order only so save money buy paying up-front for your web hosting needs.  The coupon code will work for our prepaid 12-month and 24-month hosting plans.

*20% Off only applies to web hosting services and does not apply to domain names or other services we offer.

We (McKremie) just conducted an audit of our support tickets to give our potential customers an idea of how our response times are.  We went through the support tickets for January and February to see how fast or slow our team has been responding to tickets.  It took a little time but we went through the data and were quite pleased.

First off we knew that the response times have been good as myself and the management team often monitor tickets that comes through our Helpdesk.  But, I didn’t have an exact response time just a few estimations.  Anyway, I’m happy to report that our average response time for web hosting issues is 7.5 minutes.  What does this mean to our customers and potential customers?  If you need to contact our support team you can expect a response on average in a little over 7 minutes.  (currently) Our fastest response time was 2 minutes and our slowest response time was 17 minutes.

Not too bad for a 24/7 operation!