There has been an enormous amount of business press devoted to energy and energy-related businesses in the past few months. As oil prices and gas have risen, businesses that depend on these commodities have suffered as well. For example, the automobile manufacturing industry has been hurt dramatically as consumers either shift into gas sipping cars – or simply opt out of buying a new car altogether. Likewise, the airline industry has seen its profits evaporate as fuel costs eat away at the already slim operating margins of the major carriers. One notable exception is Southwest – which has held operating costs low and cleverly hedged against volatile energy swings.

So what – if any – impact will higher energy costs have on the web hosting industry? At first glance this question may seem mute. Web hosting doesn’t appear to be an oil or gas intensive industry. However, a closer look at the operating costs of any large web hosting operation will reveal that there is a significant operating expense in all large data centers that is energy dependent – electricity usage both for running the computers in the data center, and also for the cooling and air flow within the data center.

Using research statistics provided by the United States Energy Information Administration, I checked on what electricity cost in 2000 versus 2006. Of course we all know that energy prices have risen even more dramatically recently. It turns out that in the year 2000, electricity cost commercial operators an average of 7.43 cents per kilowatt hour. In 2006 that price had risen to 9.46 cents per kilowatt hour. That cost represents an increase of 27%. When you also consider that the price of fuel for backup generators and any driving trips between data centers has easily increased by over 30% over the past year, and also that employees probably want and need pay increases to keep up with fuel costs of commutes to work – then it is clear that prices to end users must increase at some point.

There have been price increases here and there in the web hosting industry, but rising prices for overhead have been tempered by increased competition. Therefore, consumers have not seen an increase in the overall cost of web hosting. The other considerations at work are the differences in energy usage between dedicated server offerings, VPS hosting, and shared operators. If energy costs continue their upward march, it is just a matter of time until most or all of the major web hosts bring prices up to accommodate the increased operating costs.

What do you get when you combine one of the world’s most powerful technology companies with its biggest and most expensive advertising campaign ever? The answer is…Jerry Seinfeld.

Various news outlets including Reuters and the Wall Street Journal are reporting that Microsoft is gearing up to spend $300 million in advertising to bolster the flagship ‘Windows’ brand. The theme of the campaign is reported to be ‘’Windows, Not Walls’’ and is expected to focus on how people connect ideas together when barriers are removed.

The Windows brand and Vista in particular have been the subject of a series of impactful and (in my opinion) really funny bashes by Apple – as depicted in recent Mac advertisements which feature a hipster (‘’I’m a Mac’’) and a Bill Gates look-alike (‘’And I’m a PC’’). You can view the campaign ads here: http://www.apple.com/getamac/ads/ (fair warning: you can spend a lot of time viewing these as they go back several years – and they’re really entertaining!).

So to bolster its tattered Vista / Windows reputation Microsoft is turning to another powerful icon: Mr. Jerry Seinfeld. The company will pay Mr. Seinfeld a reported $10 million to participate (and one would assume make sure the ads are really funny). Guess who else is starring in the ads according to the reports? Mr. Bill Gates! Wow, so he’s not really retired at all – he’s just career shifted into television advertising work.

This has the makings of an epic advertising battle – and I for one can’t wait. As a marketer for the VPS and dedicated servers hosting experts at HostMySite.com, I have dreamed of going up against a huge iconic company like Microsoft armed with only a paltry few tens of millions in ad money and my sense of what the marketplace will respond to.

I expect Microsoft to hold its own quite well in this advertising battle. After all, it is much harder to get users to switch than to just sit pat. The real shot across Microsoft’s bow has already been dealt in the form of the iPhone – a device which Microsoft has no current answer for. The advertising campaigns seem to be merely stating the obvious: that a new era of mobile, always-on, always-connected computing which relies less and less on the operating system of the local device, and more on ‘the cloud’ has dawned.

So what is Microsoft’s answer to this game-changing shift? Maybe Jerry Seinfeld can come up with one.

I’m pretty new to Blogs in general and really had no idea they were so popular. Even Google thinks they are important and it seems blogs tend to rank higher and be updated more often within the search index. 

I thought it might be good to write an blog article on finding a good Blog Web Hosting company and how to locate one. You might ask yourself, why should I pay for blog hosting? It’s no secret you can get a free account at WordPress and any number of other similar providers.

TOP REASONS TO PAY FOR BLOG WEB HOSTING

1. Use your own domain (www.yourdomain.com)
2. Robust hardware to handle the Digg Effect
3. Ability to customize and install widgets

You worked hard on your domain name, you should use it for your blog. Not everyone chooses to do this and I’m not sure why.

In addition to using your own domain, you want the ability to handle the DIGG Effect. I’ve attended several WordPress Camps and learned if you have a popular Blog, you can suffer from the DIGG Effect. For those of you who do not know, DIGG is a popular headline site. Readers submit stories and depending on how popular the story is, it can be featured on the home page. The avalanche of traffic you receive can bring the free WordPress account to its knees. When this traffic comes your way, doesn’t it make sense you should have the capability to maximize the positive results by staying online?

Surviving this onslaught of traffic depends on your budget. If you can afford your own dedicated server, I recommend getting one of those. If shared hosting is the only thing you can afford, I have some suggestions below on what Web Host you should consider.

Another good reason is the ability to install and configure custom widgets. I’m not 100% sure you can install all the cool little widgets you can find at the WordPress Plugins Directory on a free account. Some plugins require you have certain permissions not available on the free plan.

So what makes a good Blog Web Hosting company?

Obviously one that provides the basic resources of WordPress, b2evolution, and LiveJournal. Below I recommend companies for a variety of hosting scenarios. A company that offers a robust and solid network. Try not to be fooled by the lowest price, there might be some corners cut to provide that pricing. 

Probably the most important requirement from any Web Host is quality technical support. You want a company who understands Blogs and how they work. If you have questions concerning your blog, it would be nice to get an answer. Make sure to contact any hosts sales department and clarify that they will assist you if you need help setting up your blog. 

BLOG WEB HOSTING OPTIONS

1. Dedicated Server (Medium to Hight Cost) – The choice of high profile bloggers. You need to have some server admin experience here. There are many companies you can select here that offer quality hardware. I recommend:

LPdedicated.com 
Superbhosting.net

2. Shared Hosting Account (Low to Medium Cost)- A good cheap alternative if you choose the right web host. Perfect for bloggers who don’t want to admin their own server. If you don’t pick the right shared host, you’re back at square one and won’t achieve the additional traffic from the Digg Effect. 

lunarpages.com
HostGator.com

(Day 2) – Discover Search Engine Rankings

It only makes sense to find out where Host Discussion currently ranks on the search engines. If we do not know where we stand, how can we plan on where we wish to be? Our goals are simple, increase participation in our forums and gain new posters. Gathering this initial data will make optimizing Host Discussion much easier so we can reach our goals.

This morning I loaded up RankSense and clicked ‘Discover Rankings’. 

I was greeted with a helpful tutorial explaining the bells and whistles the software provides. Pages like this are common within RankSense and really help with understanding the entire SEO process.

I then clicked ‘Start Task’ and the software went to work discovering keywords and how Host Discussion ranked.

You might grab a cup of coffee during this phase as the software is going through Google, Yahoo!, Live Search, and other search engines as well as your log files (if you provided them).

After watching the software work for 4 minutes it then came back with 187 keywords people use to actually find Host Discussion on the various search engines.

Not as many keywords as I was hoping for, but we are just building our content and this number will grow rapidly as new content comes online and is indexed. We hope to use RankSense to accomplish this goal.

Search Engine Coverage

The next part of the process is seeing not only what keywords are bringing visitors to your site, but where those visitors are being sent to for each keyword. Matching landing page to keyword will help you immensely in your optimization efforts. The software will also gather indexed pages, unindexed pages, visited and not visited and display them neatly under a tab system for each of the search engines. Current search engine tabs are Google, Yahoo!, Live Search, Ask.com, and Gigablast.

I did not find any setting where I could customize my own search engine within the preferences. This is not a big deal though since the big engines are all covered. However, if you are looking to market within niche search portals, this would be a nice feature to have.

Since your website may have thousands of pages, an exciting feature is “Search Depth”. Search Depth allows you to select how many pages deep you wish to go to discover your indexed pages. Again, this is all automated and has been “Point and Click” and the author has suggested. I click Start Task and expect to wait awhile as I chose the maximum amount of Search Depth ‘1000′.

To discover your search engine coverage, RankSense sends queries to the search engines and also crawls your log files to discover which pages have been indexed. I clicked Start Task and decided to take a lunch break. 

After about 20 minutes the process is complete. RankSense has found and categorized indexed, unindexed, visited and not visited pages.

Detect Problem Pages

I now move on to detecting problem pages and click ‘Start Task’. Detect Problem Pages does exactly what you think it does. Checking for bad links within your web site, it hunts for errors that can prevent your website from being indexed altogether.

Problem Pages found:

../register.php

2008/07/how-important-is-a-live-chat-tool-on-your-website/register.php

2008/07/how-important-is-a-live-chat-tool-on-your-website/sendmessage.php

2008/07/how-important-is-a-live-chat-tool-on-your-website/faq.php

tags/cell+phones.html

2008/08/case-study-review-seo-improvement-in-30-days-or-less-using-ranksense-software-getting-acquainted-day-1-of-30/blogs/

2008/08/case-study-review-seo-improvement-in-30-days-or-less-using-ranksense-software-getting-acquainted-day-1-of-30/members/list/

2008/08/rackspace-hosting-launches-ipo/blogs/

2008/08/rackspace-hosting-launches-ipo/members/list/

2008/08/hostingcon-2008-nintendo-wii-giveaway-goes-to-green-friendly-server-vendor/blogs/

2008/08/hostingcon-2008-nintendo-wii-giveaway-goes-to-green-friendly-server-vendor/members/list/

2008/07/web-host-friendly-hostdiscussioncom-launched/blogs/

2008/07/web-host-friendly-hostdiscussioncom-launched/members/list/

2008/07/iphone-20-blues-9383-error/blogs/

2008/07/iphone-20-blues-9383-error/members/list/

NEXT UP DAY 3……

Today introduces the first in a series of 30 day reviews for Host Discussion. Our new review series will take an in-depth look at various software available to webmasters. Each day we will Blog our progress on learning, using, and implementing what we learn. In addition, we will also feature random Interviews with the authors of the software or service used in our case study. Our first such case study will review RankSense. 

RankSense promises “Point and Click” SEO simple enough for even beginning website owners use. The author promises ease of use similar to that of Word Processing software. 

RankSense System Requirements:
Microsoft Windows Vista/XP/Windows 2000/2003 Server 256 MB 

RAM or as required by OS 25 MB of available hard disk space for installation 
Pentium 4 or equivalent recommended 

Prelude: Everyone wants their website to rank higher in search engines. Most webmasters look to software they can manage on their own. Others look to expensive SEO management firms to do all the work for them.

In todays Internet, webmasters are torn between handling online orders, answering questions from potential customers, managing AdWords campaigns, to accounting and other matters. SEO seems to take a backseat since you can buy “keywords” on Google if you are willing to pay enough. You need to ask yourself “Why should I only buy keywords when I can also rank organically for free?”. Granted, you’ll pay for the RankSense software, but that’s less than one day of our current budget here at HostDiscussion and I’m sure it’s close to the budget of those of you reading this article. RankSense starts at $25/mo with free updates as they occur. 

I’ve always felt that if you first understand how a process works, you can learn to do it on your own and be successful at it. My hope is that the RankSense software can give me the insight and tools to handle SEO more effectively. I need software that not only simplifies, but also provides results with less effort. 

(Day 1) - There is not an OS X compatible version of RankSense yet. Although this is disappointing, I decided to install this on a VMWare Virtual Environment running Windows XP with the latest security patches.

After downloading and installing RankSense own Windows XP, I launched the application. 

Step 1 :: Add New Website

On day 1 we will keep things simple and simply add a new website and review the software options. I have chosen to add HostDiscussion.com as the new website to optimize.

All of the fields are simple and you add you can choose your main home page. There is also a check box at the bottom of the initial page asking if the website is a Blog. Since HostDiscussion.com is a WordPress blog and also a vbulletin forum, I felt it best to contact the author, Hamlet Batista before continuing the process. 

Q ”Hamlet, We’ve set up our HostDiscussion.com site differently than most sites. Our home page area is a Word Press blog. However, we have a SEO friendly vBulletin site directly linked. I selected ‘blog’ on the web site creation page. It did not find the vBulletin pages. Did I do this incorrectly?”

A ”Chris, You have a rather unusual setup. For the moment you will need to create a separate project for your vBulletin pages. The reason for this is the posts and pages of your blog are being pulled via the Wordpress API.”

Hamlet responded quickly to my query and you can see his response above. I was able to continue the process of adding HostDiscussion.com to RankSense. In this instance, I added two separate sites: HostDiscussion WordPress and HostDiscussion vBulletin.

When checking “This website is a blog” and clicking next, I was able to add my WordPress logins. RankSense then connected and retrieved all articles within the HostDiscussion blog. In addition, I was able to add in Google Analytics data for HostDiscussion.

Choose Landing / Conversion Pages
The next step of adding a website is to add the landing pages you wish to begin optimizing. As most of our articles are high in editorial content, I selected all of them and then removed some of the WordPress test pages.

After clicking ‘Next’ I was asked for a conversion page. As our conversion goal is to simply gain a new user to our forum or a comment to our blogs, I decided to go with the forum and the confirmation page used when a new member completes registration.

For our HostDiscussion vBulletin new site I was asked to provide FTP information and select the main home directory of the site. I also again provided the logins for Google Analytics. The software then again went through the process of determining what landing pages existed. In this instance, it only found the forum.php as the home page which I had to manually add. It did not find any of the other pages within the vBulletin forum (there are many thousands of pages within the vBulletin forum).

After selecting forum.php as my only landing page, I clicked next and added the same conversion page as used in HostDiscussion WordPress.

NEXT UP…..DAY TWO

Managed hosting company, Rackspace, launched its public stock offering last week to mixed results. Despite the fact that the market has struggle of late, and that only three technology companies have gone public in 2008, Rackspace proceeded with its IPO and the stock first traded on August 11, 2008.

The ticker symbol is ‘RAX’ and the stock trades on the New York Stock Exchange. The stock price and company market valuation can be seen via Google Finance at: http://finance.google.com/finance?q=RAX&hl=en. Rackspace competes with managed dedicated server companies HostMySite.com, The Planet, and Fastservers.net among others.

The stock was issued using a ‘Dutch Auction’ technique that was also used to price the Google IPO. While the stock was initially priced at $12.50 for launch – it quickly dropped 20% on the first day of trading to close at $10.70. As of the end of the first week of trading the stock was priced at $10.69. While this may be a disappointment for some, it still values the overall Rackspace enterprise at $1.23 billion. That’s billion with a ‘B’.

Rackspace is profitable, however, at the current pace of earnings the stock trades at over 60 times   earnings (P/E ratio of 60.06). Compare that with Google (P/E of 33.53), Microsoft (P/E of 14.87) or Yahoo (P/E/ of 28.42) and the stock still seems richly priced by comparison.

Regardless of this first week of trading, the entire web hosting community will be closely watching to see how Rackspace fairs in the marketplace over the next few quarters. That is because investor sentiment regarding Rackspace will most likely spill over into the broader hosting market. So it would seem that what’s good for Rackspace is good for hosting – at least in the near term.

HostDiscussion.com and the entire FindMyHost, Inc. staff recently made the trip out to Chicago, Il to visit HostingCon 2008 held at Navy Pier. We decided it would be cool to have a sweepstakes and give away a brand new Nintendo Wii. Our main goal with the Wii giveaway was to gather as many Web Hosting related contacts as possible. Needless to say we had hundreds of contacts generated and some solid client leads.

It was our first year with a booth at HostingCon and it will not be our last. Response and turn out was great. We were able to make new connections and also meet with clients and old friends.

Congratulations go out to Ilya Stolyar who was selected in our live drawing. You had to be present to win and we cycled through a few cards before landing on Ilya. What’s even better, Ilya only had to walk a few feet to participate in the draw. Ilya is Vice President of International Computer Concepts, Inc.

I encourage everyone to check out their web site at international computer concepts if you are searching for green friendly web hosting servers. Ilya’s booth had a cool example showing a server using less power than a light bulb! Cool green friendly products like this are needed badly to help combat rising energy costs.