Is there a scenario in which managed web hosting could be a major component of your hosting plans? That is a question many would do well to ponder. This assumes several things that must be in place before the question even becomes a question: are the needs of the site or sites large enough to warrant the expense, are there dedicated servers involved, and would managing these servers be something you or your staff could not or would not want to handle? Let’s look at some of the reasons why a webmaster might get web hosting with a managed plan.

Server Administration – Being solely responsible for managing a dedicated server is enough to give many system admins pause, particularly if it is a large site with much at stake. Opting for managed web hosting in cases like this makes a great deal of sense. The hosting company provides expert technical assistance ensuring that the servers are running at optimum efficiency, and are able to handle nearly anything that comes down the virtual pike. While it may seem very enticing to have the freedom that complete control of your server may provide, ultimately there is a trade-off, and you simply have to determine if it’s worth it to your company.

Site Monitoring – With a managed dedicated hosting plan, you will have the advantage of having your sites monitored 24/7 by a group of very savvy network technicians. They are constantly looking at the server, hardware, network and other systems to ensure they are delivering the type of performance you expect, with no downtime. If problems arise, they are dealt with then and there, often with the owner not even knowing there was an issue!

Server Security and Customer Service – One of the paramount reasons webmasters choose managed web hosting in the first place is the better security that is necessarily in place. You are paying for a premium service, and not only is security a high priority but likewise customer support is significantly enhanced. You normally have a dedicated account manager, who ensures that everything is running smoothly both on your site and your account. Compare that to experiences you may have had with shared hosting, and you may be reaching for your credit card already!

Guarantees – At this level of web hosting, there are performance guarantees and service level agreements in place. They deliver what you have contracted for, with seldom a quibble. And usually, there is little need to even look at the guarantee!

Choosing a web host at this level really comes down to a basic question: are you both capable and willing to handle the day to day business of running your dedicated server, and do you have the absolute need to control your server yourself? If the answer is no, then your choice is obvious. Managed web hosting will make your life easier, and very likely save you money in the long run from the benefits of having onsite network professionals keeping an eye on your server. Something to consider!

Unlimited web hosting is a relatively recent arrival on the scene, as the capabilities of servers grew exponentially in the last few years. Back in the day, (just a few short years ago) you got a certain amount, which wasn’t much, and you had to live with it, or have a number of hosting accounts. Since the expansion of web space and the greater availability of bandwidth, competition among web hosts has become more intense, and offers of greater web storage space and data transfer (bandwidth) began to make their appearance. This didn’t cost them much, and it was a smart way to increase the bottom line without drastically affecting expenditures.

Also a nifty way to grab greater market share. It wasn’t long before most every web hosting company was doing it. So what exactly does this mean in real terms? Well, when you see an offer that advertises unlimited domains, this is very likely true, at least technically. You are constrained by the amount of web space you actually have (more on that in a minute) and most people will never come close to approaching the numbers it would take to raise any red flags here. In relation to web space, however, this is an entirely different plate of pasta.

Just remember: there is ALWAYS a limit. It just probably won’t be written down anywhere you can easily access. Hosting companies, who are in the business of selling just as many web hosting plans as they can, routinely oversell their servers, many employing this “unlimited” tactic to do so. They are betting (and usually winning these bets!) that the vast majority of clients will never come anywhere close to using a large amount of space, and thus it becomes a bridge they don’t normally have to cross. Occasionally a client will grow large, and then is usually found to be in violation of the terms of service (TOS) in one way or another. Many of these TOS docs are written in such a vague manner as to leave the definition of what constitutes “unlimited” entirely at the web hosts discretion, never mind Webster!

Then they are sold a “better” plan more suited to their needs. A similar scenario plays out when it comes to bandwidth. There is another aspect to this one though, and that is when you are on a shared server, and one of the sites has become a behemoth, and hogs most of the available bandwidth for that server. The others are left to scramble for the bits and pieces not allocated, and your site’s performance can suffer greatly. So the best you can really do is to look as closely as possible at the host’s terms of service, and try to decipher for yourself what they really mean. Failing to do so could leave you scrambling to keep your site visible and functional. Suffice it to say that the word “unlimited” as it relates to web hosting should be considered as a politician’s campaign promises: good as gold – as long as it serves their purposes!

You’ve finally made the leap and decided to go for

No more worrying about spam attacks, or hackers getting access to the server and thus into your (and your clients’) personal information. No more stress wondering when (or if) your support issues will be attended to. Server downtime will likely become a thing of the past, as there are far fewer things that can go wrong. You effectively ascended to another level, where these concerns are no longer a part of the picture!

Some of the biggest advantages of dedicated web hosting are that your sites load a great deal faster. Not having to share web space and bandwidth with a boatload of other sites on a shared web hosting account makes for a much better experience for your visitor in the end. Your content shows up more quickly, and you make more money as a result, not to mention that Google and the other search engines are starting to reward fast loading sites with higher rankings.

Another way you can benefit from a dedicated web hosting arrangement is that your hands are not tied when it comes to which applications you want to use and run on your sites. Shared web hosting plans often come bundled with a pre-set assortment of features and applications. Not the case when you have your own box. You can install most anything you like, and as long as either you, someone on your team or the hosting company can configure and keep it playing nice with your sites infrastructure, you are home free. No more begging a host to install a script that they deem too server intensive!

Perhaps the most important benefit of using dedicated web hosting lies in the security it can provide your customers and clients. With server attacks becoming ever more frequent, a secure web hosting environment is a high priority. Your customers and clients need to know that their sensitive information is safe with you, and that you are on top of things. Failing to make this so even once can be disastrous for your business and reputation!

Some may think that a dedicated web hosting solution is overkill, and perhaps too expensive for your needs right now. On the other hand, in all likelihood, you probably have plans to grow bigger, and it may enable you to grow faster and with far fewer problems if you know that your hosting is secure and scalable.

Dedicated web hosting is not only a commercial web hosting solution, it can be a lifesaver for your business as well!

Many people wonder whether or not they should utilize web hosting reviews in their quest to compare web hosting, and with good reason.

So, just how does one spot a self-serving web hosting review? One very telling way is by taking a quick look at the links either present in the body of the content, or in a resource box, profile or some other link designed to send interested seekers elsewhere. If that link is an obvious affiliate link, and the content was entirely or almost totally sold on the web host in question, then I would be wary.

Does this mean all web hosting comparison sites are suspect? No, but it does mean that you should exercise caution when you come upon a site that benefits if you buy from them. Their view is likely to be skewed in favor of the web host.

Also note where the reviews are posted. Many top web hosting companies own several different web hosting firms, and it’s not uncommon for them to “cross-pollinate”, and send visitors to one of their other hosting companies as well. Obviously, a review of the host on it’s own site should be treated as an advertisement.

If however, the review strives to present a balanced view, I’m far more likely to pay attention, even if there are affiliate links present. I just want to know the bad along with the good!

Some other ways to find out some of this information are to conduct a simple web search for the company, and see what surfaces. Very often if there are negative aspects, you will find search engine entries detailing them. You can also search in internet marketing and web hosting forums for much the same purpose. You will get a wide range of opinion, from people out to crucify the host in question, to others who just can’t say enough good things about them. As always, take each on balance, and remember that everyone has an opinion.

You can also see if the host has a Facebook fan page, (many top hosts do now) and see what the tenor is like there. Tweeting about the company will also get you some feedback, both good and bad.

Web host reviews can be useful as a starting point for gathering information, as well as the salespages of the hosts themselves. There is a lot to consider, as far as features, and that along with opinions can give you a good beginning. Once you’ve collected a wide ranging sampling of web hosting reviews, tweets, posts and rants about the web host, you’re in a far better position to assess if they’ll work for you and your site!

Presumably, the reason you’re in the market for an eCommerce web hosting plan is that you’d like to make some money with it, so let’s look at several of the absolutely crucial aspects of an eCommerce web hosting provider that must be in place in order for you to see any money at all!

While features abound on most ecommerce plans these days, from the latest in shopping cart technologies to the ability to calculate and fulfill orders, to the ability to set up complete transactional sequences, shipping and more; there remains the need to make sure that the backbone of your site is sound, or you will suffer the inevitable downtime that will not only torpedo present sales, but possibly future orders as well.

You need to find an ecommerce web hosting company that is reliable and dependable. This is not as simple as it might seem. When bombarded with hype surrounding any web hosting solution, (usually engineered by the host themselves!) you can find yourself badly in need of some truth. Take reviews on these hosts with a grain of salt; many were written by the host themselves or their affiliates, who stand to profit if you buy this hosting.

Probably the best way these days is to find some untainted opinion, and the best ground for this is in the various internet marketing forums. Some of the better ones are The Warrior Forum, SitePoint, DigitalPoint and Web Hosting Geeks. Asking around on these will get you a good sampling of experiences, some good; others not so good. Make sure to view things in balance, before rendering judgment. One or two bad experiences may not be totally reflective of the quality of the hosting overall.

Be sure to evaluate, as closely as you might, the level and quality of the support team. Support is important for any website, but on an ecommerce site open 24/7 for orders, site issues make for lost sales. Phone support is critical, and someone on call 24/7 is preferred, since leaving things to the next day can be disastrous, and you might be well down the list of issues they need to deal with, taking you far into the day. Make sure you get into the help pipeline ASAP!

When choosing an ecommerce web hosting plan, it’s important to note that while price is a factor, it should not be the deciding one. Small hosting companies may offer what seems to be terrific pricing, but you later find that essential elements are considered “add-ons”, and must be added to the total, drastically affecting the overall price.

Make sure you know what items you need going in and shop around. There are a number of great web hosting companies out there, and securing hosting for your new ecommerce site should not be a problem. Just hold their feet to the fire, and see who doesn’t burn!

The Internet in 2020- Predictions We Can Count On

More People Will Use the Internet

In 2010, there are 1.8 billion Internet users and a world population of 6.7 billion. In 2020, it is estimated that there will be five billion Internet users.

The Internet Will be More Geographically Dispersed

The estimated world population in 2009 was 6,767,805,208. The estimated number of Internet users on December 2000 was 360,985,492. The latest data shows the current number of Internet users at 1,802,330,457. The penetration of the Internet into the population is 26.6 percent. The growth of Internet users from 2000 to 2009 was 399.3 percent.

The Internet Will be a Network of Things, Not Computers

Today, the Internet has 575 million host computers. Expect billions of sensors on buildings and bridges to be connected to the Internet by 2020.

The Internet Will Carry Exabytes, Perhaps Zettabytes, of Content

Internet traffic will grow to 44 exabytes per month by 2012, more than double what it is today. The exaflood refers to the rapidly increasing amount of data that is being transferred over the Internet.

The Internet Will be Wireless

The number of mobile broadband subscribers is exploding. The number of mobile subscribers will increase by 85 percent each year for 3G, WiMAX and other higher-speed data networking technologies. There were 257 million subscribers in the second quarter of 2009. There will be 2.5 billion by 2014.

More Services Will Be in the Cloud

Cloud computing is leveraging third-party computing capability over the network to cut costs, increase scale, improve agility and access best practices. Cloud computing will generate more than $45.4 billion in revenue by 2015.

The Internet Will Be Greener

Annual electricity use in the U.S. for the Internet is 235 billion kWH for PCs and monitors, 45 billion kWH for data centers, 67 billion kWH for modems and routers and 0.4 billion kWH for phone networks. In the U.S., it accounts for 9.4 percent of total U.S. electricity consumption. Annual electricity in the world for Internet use is 588 billion kWH for PCs and monitors, 167 billion kWH for modems and routers, 112.5 kWH for data centers and 1 billion kWH for phone networks.

Network Management Will Be More Automated

Lack of built-in network management techniques is one of the biggest weaknesses in today’s Internet. There will be automated ways to self diagnose, track events and reboot systems as well as finer-grained data collection in 2010.

The Internet Won’t Rely on Always-On Connectivity

Researchers are looking into communications techniques that can tolerate delays or can forward communications from one user to another in an opportunistic fashion, particularly for mobile applications. There’s even research going on related to an inter-planetary Internet protocol which would bring a whole new meaning to the idea of delay-tolerant networking.

The Internet Will Attract More Hackers

In 2010, more hackers will be attacking the Internet because more critical infrastructure like the electric grid will be online. Among hacking incidents in 2009, 57 percent were in North America, 23 percent were in Europe, 6 percent were in Asia, 4 percent were in the Middle East, 2 percent were in South America, 2 percent were in Australia and 6 percent were in New Zealand.

In 2007, there were 0.6 million new malicious code threats. In 2008, there were 1.6 million malicious new code threats.

First of all, understanding the dynamics of a forum is helpful. People come there to learn, share, sell, trash and otherwise vent. There is a great deal that can be learned from a lively, active forum, but there is also the need to take things with a grain of salt. Not everyone there has good intentions, and there is a bit of marketing going on, some subtle, some not so subtle.

There are the “flamers”; people who are dead set on trashing a product, person or company, and they can be very destructive. When seeking information on a web hosting company, it would be wise to use a wide angle lens when viewing this material, as you may not be able to tell who has an axe to grind and who doesn’t. The marketers are usually easier to spot.

If you find a preponderance of negative comments and horror stories, proceed with caution! Many of these are people just like you who’ve been seeking good hosting for themselves, and you need to hear what they have to say. Don’t however, take one negative review/rant and use that as a basis for passing on a host. There are two sides to every story! Get a good sampling.

Now, in terms of a great web hosting forum, here are five places that are worth a visit!

DigitalPoint Forums – One of the major internet marketing forums online, they have accumulated more than 13.5 million posts online. You can learn something here!

SitePoint – Another of the good internet marketing forums, this one leans a bit more to the technical side, but is a great resource!

The Warrior Forum – A terrific forum for all things internet marketing, you will find all levels of marketers here, and answers to a great number of questions quickly!

Web Hosting Geeks – One of the top two web hosting only forums, they have a wealth of reviews, articles, tutorials and more about the subject of web hosting.

Web Hosting Talk – The other one. This one is huge, with nearly 240,000 registered members, and over 6 million posts about web hosting!

There you have it! Web hosting forums can be a great way to find your new hosting company. Just remember to get a fair amount of opinion, before pulling the trigger on a new professional web hosting provider!

A template is a shell that your web site resides within, the look that is evident to the public at large when they bring up your site. It’s important not only to have a web hosting template that is reflective of your product, service, or subject, but also that it is search engine friendly, and doesn’t actually hamper visitors from coming around. Let’s look at some of the things you’ll want to make sure are in order.

Your web host may indeed have site templates for you to use. There is good and bad here. The good is that while they are very likely to be quite easy to install, they do have some shortcomings. First, you will probably be sharing the same template as many other website owners on this host, and while this isn’t in and of itself the kiss of death, it does keep you from standing out in a crowd.

Then there is the fact that most of the time, these templates are not very SEO-optimized, and could in fact be hurting you on several levels. They may lack metadata, the code may not be clean, and many other factors could be weighing against you before you even upload any content.

There are a number of sites that sell web hosting templates, and many of these have been optimized and constructed well. There are also many templates out there for various purposes, like affiliate templates, squeeze page templates, video templates and more. The bottom line here is that what you might find for free in the area, should automatically be suspect. Assume the worst; be surprised if that’s not the case. But the deal is, you probably wouldn’t even know if there was a problem until it was too late. Not worth it in my book!

Spend a little time and a few bucks, and get a web hosting template that will not only be search engine friendly, but also relatively unique and good looking. Try and avoid flash and javascript if your site will be textually driven, as the search engines have a hard time indexing through those two.

If you are using a blog, especially WordPress, the news is a lot brighter. WordPress “themes” (their name for templates) are very well optimized and clean coded out of the gate. Further, they are constantly updating the software. Your biggest problem with WordPress will be in choosing; there are literally thousands of themes out there, and many of them free. Do try and make sure that the theme you choose plays nice with the latest release of WordPress. Many of the older themes still out there won’t work well with it.

It’s not just about looking good, though that is very important. You want your web hosting template to be SEO friendly, fast loading, readable and useful. Find one with all of that going for it and you’ve got a winner!

What’s YOUR Programming Language?

New programming languages have been introduced regularly over the past 50 years. In 1954, it was Fortran, and in 1958 it was ALGOL and LISP, in 1959 COBOL and in 1964, PL/I was introduced. BASIC began in 1965, BCPL and Simula in 1967 and LOGO in 1968. B was introduced in 1969, Pascal and Prolog in 1970, C in 1971, Smalltalk in 1972 and Scheme in 1975.

The 80s saw Common LISP (1980), ADA  (1983), C++ (1985), Objective-C, Objective Pascal and Eiffel (1986), Haskel (1987) and CLOS (1988). Java was introduced in 1994 and C# in 2002.

What Does a Programming Language Do?

A programming language is used to write computer programs such as applications, utilities, servers and systems programs. A program is a written as a series of human-understandable computer instructions that can be read by a compiler and linker and translated into machine code so that a computer can understand and run it.

Most Popular?

Debate over the most popular programming language can become an emotional, almost religious, battle.

Ford or Chevy, Stihl or Husky, Coke or Pepsi- let’s face it. We all get passionate about our tools. There are a number of ways to measure the popularity of a programming language. They may be based on the number of new applications written in the language, the existing applications written in the language, the developers that primarily use the language, developers that ever use the language, the number of Web searches, the available jobs that require skills in the language or the developers’ favorites.

Top 10 Shares

Java is used 17.96 percent of the time, C 18.19 percent, C++ 10.38 percent, PHP 9.07 percent, Visual BASIC 5.66 percent, C# 4.78 percent, Python 4.10 percent, Objective-C 2.36 percent, Delphi 2.57 percent, Perl 3.29 percent and all others 21.66 percent.

Tiobe.com

Tiobe is a popular site for ranking programming languages based on world-wide availability of skilled engineers, courses and third-party vendors. Tiobe uses Google, MSN and Yahoo! Search engines to measure the Web “Chatter” in order to decide the popularity of each programming language.

Tiobe.com Top 10

According to Tiobe.com, In May 2010, C was the number one programming language, followed by Java (2), C++ (3), PHP (4), Visual BASIC (5), C# (6), Python (7), Perl (8), Delphi (9) and Objective-C (10).

In May 2009, the most popular programming languages were somewhat different. C ranked number 2, Java (1), C++ (3), PHP (4), Visual BASIC (5), C# (7), Python (6), Perl (9), Delphi (11) and Objective-C (39).

In 2006, the most popular languages were similar. C ranked number 2, Java (1), C++ (3), PHP (4), Visual BASIC (5), C# (7), Python (8), Perl (6), Delphi (10) and Objective-C (45).

In 2000, the programming language landscape was far different. C ranked number 1, Java (5), C++ (2), PHP (31), Visual BASIC (3), C# (21), Python (20), Perl (6), Delphi (11) and Objective-C didn’t rank.

In 1985, only three of the top 10 programming languages of 2010 showed up on the list. C was number 1, C++ was number 10 and Visual BASIC was number 4.

The Hall of Fame

The Hall of Fame awards one language with the title of Programming Language of the Year. Go was the winner in 2009, C in 2008, Python in 2007, Ruby in 2006, Java in 2005, PHP in 2004 and C++ in 2003.

Objective-C

A relatively new programming language, Objective-C entered the TIOBE top 10 for the first time in May 2010 with a rating of 2.3 percent. This is quite an achievement, especially if one bears in mind that only 13 different programming languages had a top 10 score since the start of the TIOBE index. The main (and probably only) reason for Objective-C’s popularity is that it is the only language in which you can write applications for the iPhone and iPad.