Most small business owners are concerned with their web design and providing information about their products or services to current or potential customers. Site design is very important and helps sell your products. However, site speed is an issue the small business owner needs to be concerned with. Perhaps the number one reason a visitor leaves your site will be speed. If they can not get the information they are seeking quickly, they will leave.

Knowing this, you need to combat speed issues in every facet. Web design, fast server, multiple networks, and location.

LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION
Why do you think Google has set up massive data centers around the United States and the World? They want to be the king of speed. Fast search results delivered to Googlers from geographically friendly locations help Google AdWords generate more revenue.

The closer the Data Center is to the end site visitor, the faster it is (considering the data center has decent network connections). Gamers typically are very picky about ping times for good reason. The slower the ping time, the slower their reaction times in an online game. Gamers are well ahead of the curve in terms of knowing that location is king for speeding up their online games.

As a small business owner, you should be just as concerned as Google and the gamers out there on the Internet. You should start looking for a Web Host with locations close to your end customers. If your business is international, you should consider a Web Host with multiple geographic locations.

3 TIPS IN SEARCHING FOR A GEOGRAPHICALLY DIVERSE WEB HOST

1. To begin your search, you should first look at stability. A stable company that has been in business a few years can’t be overlooked. Most Web Hosting companies are fairly new in terms of business years, but doesn’t mean they are by any means immature companies. In fact, most of the big Web Hosting companies average startup is around 2004. That’s not very long ago, but their expertise in mastering technology and management of such quick growth is a plus.
2. Look for a Web Host with a wide geographic footprint. There might be a day when your Web site needs to be hosted in more than one location (local offices / custom locally specific Web sites). You certainly don’t want to have to hunt for a new Web Host every time you want to expand your reach.  Ensure each location has the potential to host any of your needs.  A full complement of products in each data center is a sign of maturity for the company. It means they have the foresight to plan a data center correctly by giving customers all available options.
3. Check to ensure the Web Host has cross Data Center backup capabilities. You might ask why? Well, natural disasters of course. I think the past 5 years has shown that just about anything is possible. It’s best to run your Web site in one location and back up to a remote location as a precaution. FYI: Make sure you also backup locally as recovery from a remote location can take longer.

WE RECOMMEND…..

AYK Solutions hits the mark on everything we touched above. They have a tremendous catalog of cities based in the United States. AYK has the entire country mapped out with Google Maps and you can view their network and data center capabilities here.

1. Unified Products across Data Centers
2. Disaster Protection options (cross data center backups)
3. Unified Support across Data Centers

AYK Solutions has been in business since 2004 and has been growing fast. We highly recommend their services to your VPS, Shared, or Dedicated Server needs. A wide product catalog is available to choose from.

I have seen various reviews and pretty detailed summaries of just about every educational session from WebhostingDay 2009. The fifth annual edition of the conference ended last week in Bruehl near Cologne, Germany at the Phantasialand theme park. Rather than rehash the talking points from the sessions, I thought it would be more effective to simply list a few lessons I learned at WebhostingDay.

Lesson 1 – Everyone is interested in the Cloud. I wish that I had one Deutsche Mark for every time I heard or read the expression ‘Cloud’ or ‘Cloud hosting’. Not that this is the end-all be-all definition of the Cloud, but Cloudmark described Cloud Computing as: ”Cloud computing broadly describes off-premise, on-demand computing where the end-user accesses applications, computing resources and services provided by the Cloud operator via the Internet”. You can compare that to the Wikipedia definition of Cloud computing here.

Lesson 2 – Hosting professionals like to party and can drink an incredible amount of German beer. Okay, so this wasn’t exactly news to me – but there were a number of great social events at WebhostingDay 2009. The first evening prior to the show was the Get Together party. This networking event featured incredible food, tons of great beer, and music from the 70’s and 80’s performed live. The second evening saw a VIP party – smaller, with more expensive alcohol – but essentially the same. The final evening saw the African themed hotel on-site (Hotel Matamba) host a party for everyone with the theme Deep in Africa. The only complaint that I heard out of anyone was that occaisionally the crowd was too deep to allow one to grab a quick beer. I think that may be a compliment – now that I think about it.

Lesson 3 – European hosting is very different than its counterpart in the U.S. This was my first time attending WebhostingDay. The event has been getting stronger and gaining more traction each of its five years. There were many first timers like me there this year. When you examine the markets and specialization required in each geographical location, you quickly realize that hosting is not the same in Europe as in the U.S. Here is one example. I met the CEO of a custom managed server company in Switzerland. In addition to being able to speak English, French and German fluently, he also knew tons of technical jargon in each language. It turns out that Swiss companies are required by law to host their servers in Switzerland – giving this company a real advantage over outside competitors.

Lesson 4 – The worldwide financial crises hasn’t yet hit hosting. Time and again I heard glowing outlooks and reports about where the markets are headed in hosting. Here are a couple of examples. Keynote speaker Shannon Poulin, Enterprise Marketing Director at Intel said multiple times during his talk, ”hosting is a big growth area”. Similarly, Allen Clark is Industry Director Worldwide Software+Services with Microsoft. Mr. Clark mentioned during his talk that we are ‘’still in the early days” of this industry. Also, the show itself was completely sold out. There were 2,500 attendees, 50 speakers and 45 exhibitors.

Lesson 5 – Email security is actually halfway interesting. If there was one educational session that actually seemed to transcend the confines of the conference, it was the keynote address delivered by Jamie de Guerre the CTO with Cloudmark. Using cool lingo like ”fingerprinting algorithms” Mr. de Guerre pointed out that over 90 percent of spam originates from botted computers. That’s because botnets have infected up to 30 percent of all home computers. Mr. de Guerre also reminded me of something that I hadn’t thought about much – that a web hosting company’s brand can be negatively impacted by poor email services. Oh yeah, that’s right. I forgot that email is still the killer app. Great talk.

Lesson 6 – There are many great friends in hosting that I have yet to meet. It is just fantastic to meet with old friends and to be introduced to new friends. One small story. I was catching up with my friend Phil Robinson who is a brilliant developer with UK hosting company 34SP.com based in Manchester. Phil introduced me to a couple of new acquaintances to him – CEO Neil Barnfather and Operations Manager Gary Thomlinson from ehosting.co.uk which is also based in Manchester. We had a great time talking about hosting and walking over to get each other free beer. I know that we’ll be friends in the business from now on. This is what great networking at a hosting event is all about.

In summary, WebhostingDay 2009 was a great hosting trade event with quality content, great food and thousands of web hosting professionals from around the world. If you are a hosting professional that has any ties to Europe, I would highly recommend attending next year. Don’t forget to sign up early too – as it may be once again sold out.

You may not know what a Content Delivery Network is, but your online business can benefit greatly by using one. Imagine fast content-based delivery to the end-users who visit your web site from anywhere in the World. Typically, decreasing end-user load times is only achieved by having physical servers located in Data Centers strategically placed around the globe. CDN takes the place of physical servers and delivers content to your site visitors based on location. Quite simply, the closest proximity to the user determines what CDN node delivers the information to the site visitor. This would be quite costly if you needed to setup servers around the globe. Content Delivery Networks (CDN) drastically lower your cost and give you the same ability with minimal effort.

Wikipedia.com defines a Content Delivery network, or CDN for short as:

A content delivery network or content distribution network (CDN) is a system of computers networked together across the Internet that cooperate transparently to deliver content to end users, most often for the purpose of improving performance, scalability, and cost efficiency.

What kind of Content can be delivered?
Images, HTML, Flash files, MPEG, MP4, PDF’s and more can be delivered to your site visitors. Setting up a Content Delivery Network is much easier than you might expect. You can simply upload the images

What kind of Content can NOT be delivered?
Dynamic web site pages such as Database results. Databases and dynamic data must still be served from your Web Server.

Top 5 Reasons You Should Be A Using Content Delivery Network

1. Increased Bandwidth Delivery. Sum of CDN Bandwidth is higher than the network backbone capacity. This results in an increase in the number of concurrent users. Imagine your network backbone only has 10 Gbit/s total capacity, any requests over 10 Gbit/s are lost or placed in waiting. Let’s pretend your using CDN and your web site has a DIGG effect for popular download or video hosted on your site. EXAMPLE: By using a CDN with 10 locations all utilizing 10Gbit/s backbone connections, you now have a total capacity of 10*10 Gbit/s.
2. Location, location, location. The closer the content the faster the delivery. Site users will experience less network peaks and surges, and overall improved stream quality.
3. 100% Availability. A CDN can offer 100% availability, even if your Data Center is offline. Even in times with power, network or hardware outages.
4. Low Cost. Considering the cost of setting up servers in 10 Data Centers around the World, a CDN offers an inexpensive way to accomplish the same goal. CDN gives you increased reliability and the ability to deliver HD quality content with high QoS, lowering costs and reducing network load. Not to mention, fewer internal resources.
5. Easy to Setup. I personally tested CDN and can assure you that the interfaces are easy to use. Depending on the size of your content, you can be up and running in a matter of minutes.

Choose Your CDN Partner Wisely
Only a very few state-of-the-art Data Centers are currently offering CDN to their end-customers. If Web Site speed is important to your online business, you should only consider hosting in one of these facilities. Recommended CDN Data Center:

The Planet – Click Here for more information.

Points of Presence (POPs): San Jose; Los Angeles; Ashburn (Virginia); New York; Chicago; Dallas; Atlanta; Seattle; London; Frankfurt; Hong Kong; Tokyo; and Sydney. All POPs are located in Tier One data centers strategically located near primary Internet Exchange Points.
Benefits: Great infrastructure of core services. Low pricing for advanced technology. Knowledgeable staff. Experienced management team. CDN offering powered by EdgeCast.
Pricing: Check website for specific pricing based on your needs.

Even though the conference is still weeks away, WebhostingDay 2009 is looking like a huge success. Consider this, according to the show’s organizers there are over 2,000 attendees pre-registered and there are only 20 hotel rooms left within a 25 minute radius of the venue in Bruehl, Germany. The event location has a capacity of just 2,300 people – so it looks very likely that WebhostingDay 2009 will sell out prior to the event dates of March 18-20, 2009. These types of attendance numbers represent an 80% increase over last year’s event. This is the fifth annual WebhostingDay event.

Where is all the interest coming from? One would think that with the global economic crises, and the general dearth of business activity that a trade show would be the last thing on a business person’s mind. Being in Germany, the event presumably attracts attendees from greater Europe and even the UK. According to show creator and organizer Thomas Strohe, ”We are also happy about the fact that many people from abroad, even from outside of Europe, have registered to join the event. This stresses the international character – and importance – of the event. And a great percentage of the registered attendees comes from the CEO or CTO level, which is a sign of the event’s high quality regarding both visitors and exhibitors.”

The bottom line is that if you have any intentions of attending this year’s WebhostingDay event, you need to sign up immediately to ensure a spot. If you are interested in the agenda, you can view it here.

Still not sure what’s in store or why you might consider going? Below are a few comments from folks who are either speakers, attendees or sponsors.

Dimitar Avramov, creator and writer for the Daw Web Hosting Blog commented, ”As a media representative and blogger my expectations are a little bit different than those that other participants might have. Most of them will go to WebhostingDay to do business. I’ll be there to cover the event, and to network. An important issue for me is whether not the European web hosting market is going to globalize. In the European Union this means that certain regulations will be changed so that the single market can be further liberalized. You probably know that many EU member countries stand against liberalization in the telecommunication market. This means national states, and national bodies want to keep strong control over their IT markets, telecommunications, and Internet infrastructure. These policies impede the globalization of European hosting market.”

Phil Robinson is an attendee who is a programmer and developer for UK business hosting company 34SP.com. Mr. Robinson added, ”Since I have never been to a hosting conference before I don’t have a great deal of preconceptions. What I am expecting is to meet a great group of like-minded hosting professionals. It may be a bit like being back at University again with both lectures and social conventions.”

David Snead, who is a web hosting attorney and presenter at WebhostingDay 2009 had this to say, ”I hope to help European (and other non-U.S.) businesses understand how they can easily do business in the U.S., and to get the European perspective on hosting and hosting related issues. I find that the European hosting market is a bit different than the U.S. market, and many of the hosts have amazing ideas.”

I will be attending WebhostingDay 2009 as well. So if you happen to be there – look me up. See you in Germany!