Busby SEO Challenge Hotting Up
Posted in Busby SEO Challenge by DB
Its the start of the July 4th weekend, there is a little over 55 days left to go in the Busby SEO Challenge and without a doubt the action seems to be hotting up. I decided to join the contest last week and have a lot of catching up to do with the leaders at the moment. My entry for the Busby SEO Challenge is currently hovering in the sixties, position 67 to be precise, which is a small gain from the nineties that I was at the end of the first week of my participation in the contest.
My biggest competitors would be the sphere team and the team from Indonesia. The sphere team has close to 25 individuals pooling resources to help one another. A huge advantage and a great boost link wise. Not far behind is the team from Indonesia with 15 members. The top 20 is pretty much websites from these two teams. Beating these two will require considerable resources especially if you are going it alone. But hey, what in life is not a challenge.
Many of the participants in the Busby SEO contest have clear cut strategies. Some have setup entire websites devoted to the seo challenge, some are concentrating on a single page within an existing website. Some are using external resources such as hub pages and some are cleverly embedding you tube videos and images all optimized for the key phrase “Busby SEO Challenge“.
While On Page optimization is an important aspect of search engine optimization, external factors such as relevant incoming links will in the end determine the winner. It is interesting to note the various participants going about accumulating incoming links in creative ways. The sphere team is even advertising on Google AdWords asking for links. This is where pooling resources will act as a slingshot to your challenge campaign. For example, If you have 10 participants coming together to form a team and each in the 10 have about 5 websites each. That is about 50 websites at your disposal to use to rank for the term Busby SEO Challenge.
I’m hoping some of you readers will be kind enough to link to me and hopefully many of those websites are good authority sites. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to be picky, any link will help, targeted or otherwise. Let me know if you have an issue in setting up a link back.
A big Thank You for all who have already linked to my SEO Challenge entry. Keep coming back for more updates and news on the Busby SEO Challenge.
Busby SEO Challenge Participation
Posted in Busby SEO Challenge by DB
Yesterday I wrote about the Busby SEO Challenge, the latest SEO contest that seems to be drawing in the crowds to win the $5000 in prize money. I’ve been thinking about trying my hand and was a little skeptical about my schedule and a little worried if I will be able to put in the times required to run an effective SEO campaign for the contest key phrase “Busby SEO Challenge“.
I spent some time thinking about it today and finally decided to throw my hat in the ring as well. The way I see it is that the publicity and the acceptance is far greater than the eventual prize money. After all in the SEO world, clients are very selective (read non existent) is disclosing that they do indeed use the services of an SEO consultant or firm.
Busby SEO Challenge Goals
So what are my goals? Well, the most obvious one is to win the contest. Second and this is more of a wish list is the opportunity to interact and compete with some of the better SEO’s around. Too often in the real world you achieve the rankings you aim for far too easily and this I believe brings on complacence. And while the Busby SEO Challenge organizers are calling for ethical SEO tactics I have my doubts. After all you only need to keep that ranking for a day and you could care less if Google threw your website out of the index after the contest ends.
That said I hope the contest will turn out to be fun and I sincerely hope I will be able to put in the time that the Busby SEO Challenge contest deserves.
Busby SEO Challenge Challenges
- The first challenge is the fact that I’m starting 23 days after the contest has kicked off. It remains to be seen if I can make up for lost time. The last I checked there were more than 350K websites competing in the index for the key phrase “Busby SEO Challenge.”
- A few contestants are participating as teams. This means you are trying to beat all the resources (read links) that a collective group of individuals bring to the table. While this is a challenge, this also makes the contest interesting.
- I’m committed to follow the ethical rules laid down by the Busby team. No black hat or anything that will cause irreparable damage to this site.
- The fact that I’m using this blog limits me to a certain extent. I’m talking about on page optimization. I might not have the freedom to structure my content in the most ideal manner.
Help me win the Busby SEO Challenge
Can you help? Yes you can, infact I’m counting on it. At the end of the day, this contest will be won by the person with the most number of targeted relevant links. I would appreciate it if you, my readers decide to help me out by linking to this blog from your websites or blogs in a show of support. Please note that this is a request only and let me be clear that there is no obligation or pressure.
Now if you do decide to link back to me, all I can say is thanks. To make things easy for many of you I decided to be creative and include a collection of links you can use on your websites. Pick any one of the following and stick it up on your website.
- Supporting the Busby SEO Challenge
- Track the Busby SEO Challenge
I will keep adding more to the above. You are completely free to use whatever you want on your links, this includes the anchor link text and the anchor link options.
I see the Busby SEO Challenge as an opportunity to build a base for a good reputation. I would urge you to strongly think about participating in the challenge.
See you at the top and wish me luck.
cheers,
Busby SEO Challenge
Posted in Busby SEO Challenge, News, Optimize And Monetize, SEO, Web Master by DB
August 21st Update
Less than 10 days left for the contest to finish. Not much of a change in my ranking. Still hovering between the 7th and 8th position on the search engine results. By the way I rank number 1 for the term “Busby SEO Challenge” on the Indian data center. Actually I have been Number 1 for the past 3 weeks. Not that it’s gonna do me any good because the official data center for the Busby Contest is the Australian one. Lot of things can happen in 10 days, let’s wait and see how it goes.
Continue reading for complete information on the biggest SEO contest ever.
What is Busby SEO Challenge?
Busby SEO Challenge is the name of the latest SEO contest that seems to have captured the imagination of many SEO’s and webmasters. The Busby SEO Challenge is sponsored by Busby Web Solutions, a 100% subsidiary of Hire Intelligence Limited. No surprises then as to the target key phrase of the challenge. All contestants are aiming for that top rank on Google for the key phrase “BUSBY SEO CHALLENGE“.
Official Busby SEO Challenge Video
Busby SEO Challenge Rules
The rules are pretty straight forward.
- The contest started a while back, actually 21 days back, June 1st 2008. It shows how swamped I’ve been of late to be blogging about a contest that is 21 days into the running.
- The contest ends on 31st August 2008 at 12:00 midday, Western Australia time. The website that is number 1 on Google at exactly 12:00 pm on 31st August 2008 wins the contest.
- The contest judges have listed that only ethical SEO techniques may be used. There is no further explanation of the term ethical techniques but from conversations in the forum I gather that any contestant using blatant unethical SEO read blackhat techniques will be disqualified.
- All participants must register and registration is free. You can have more than one website in the contest but remember there is only one prize per person. So if you end up with all the three top spots, you still get only one prize.
- All contestant website pages are required to have the following anchor text in black 10 point Arial font. Participant in the Busby Web Solutions Search Optimization Challenge.
- You can use either new or existing websites. However and this is important, no part of the domain name or sub domain name can contain the key phrase “Busby SEO Challenge” in any form.What this means is that you cannot have a domain in the competition that has say “SEO” as part of the domain name. Now this rule does not apply to the file names and folder names. So if you are looking to enter make sure you do NOT have either Busby or SEO or Challenge in the domain name but optimize your webpage by using Busby SEO Challenge as the file or folder name.
- And of course the standard no illegal behavior, pornography and discrimination of any form is permitted.
By the way for all those following this contest and in particular this entry, I also write about search engine optimization (SEO) on my SEO Blog as and when I have time off from the myraid of SEO Services that I keep myself busy with.
Busby SEO Challenge Prize Money
The winner of the contest gets $5000, the runners up takes home $2000 and the third on the list gets $500. At last count about 250 odd participants had already signed up and since we are already 21 days into the Busby SEO Challenge contest we can see quite a few websites already ranking on the SERP’s.
There is no word at the moment as to how the prize money will be transferred to the winning contestant. Busby have promised to work out the mode of payment with the winners in whatever mode suits the participants.
This contest is a good learning experience for many webmasters starting out and I would urge anyone starting out in SEO to think hard about joining the contest. If not for the prize money, the experience alone will be worth it.
Strategy and keen planning will be paramount and the one with the best off page optimization will ultimately win but nevertheless the contest will have taught you quite a bit. This ultimately is the real value in entering such a contest. So go ahead and register, pick your domain wisely and optimize wisely for the key phrase Busby SEO Challenge.
Official Busby SEO Challenge Results
The official results for the contest will be announced at mid day Western Australian time on Aug 31st using the following data center.
Top 10 Results for Busby SEO Challenge Key phrase
Top 100 Results for Busby SEO Challenge Key phrase
Top 10 Expanded Results for Busby SEO Challenge Key phrase
Busby SEO Challenge Update – June 29 2008
I decided to participate in the SEO Contest earlier this week, June 23rd to be precise. I wrote a quick post about the same and also in the post asked for the support of my readers to help me with some link love. I must say its been a little over 5 days and I’m overwhelmed by the number of people that contacted me via email and wished me the very best in the contest. Many even mentioned that they would be putting up links and referring back to this post to help me in this SEO endeavor. I just have one word for all you guys, actually two words “Thank You”
I’ve decided to put out regular updates about the contest on this particular page. Rather than creating a new update post each time, I felt it would be more convenient for a reader to read the entire Busby SEO contest updates on a single page.
Like I mentioned earlier a lot of people got back to me with intentions of helping me out. I don’t see a single link yet on Yahoo’s site explorer but I’m sure some of them are out there already. Yahoo takes its time and is always a little late in updating or even finding all the incoming links to a post/page or domain. Another one of those reasons where Google scores over Yahoo but the good thing about Yahoo is that it shows you all the incoming links to your domain or page whereas Google intentionally does not. Infact it usually is a while before Google even starts showing any incoming links.
Back to the contest, the contest 5 days back had about 200K odd pages and in the span of 5 days has gone to about 350K pages in the Google index. It pretty much indicates the number of people that are spewing out content about the Busby SEO Challenge contest. Here is a screen shot of the top six on the leader board right now.
So where does this site stand on the contest. I had a quick look and surprise surprise its on position 98. Actually its on 96 if I check the SERP’s directly. Not bad for a 5 day effort especially since I started almost a month after the contest. That said, I wouldn’t be surprised if I completely disappeared from the SERP’s over the next week or two once Google starts to apply its filters. Here is the screenshot that shows this site at position 98.
All in all a good start, obviously this is not good enough. Hopefully with all the link love you my readers will provide I’m confident we’ll do better. Stay tuned for more updates on the Busby SEO Challenge.
Busby SEO Challenge Update – July 16 2008
Its been a while since I gave an update about the ongoing SEO Challenge from Busby. Looking at the leader board I see my entry at 24th, so basically the third page. Here is a screen shot showing of this page on the leader board results.
Decent improvement since my last update. I gained about 70 odd positions in a little over 2 weeks. Still it is a long way to go and of late I must confess that I haven’t been concentrating a lot on link building. I sense that I might soon see the effect of this on the SERP’s. I wouldn’t be surprised if I go back a few spots in the next week or so.
The team from France seems to be holding steady with the team from Indonesia and Philippines giving them close company. Infact barring a few like me, I believe the top 100 spots are pretty much full of the entries from these three teams. After all the French team is about 30 people, up 5 from the last time I checked. The Indonesian team is still about 25 from my estimate with the team from Philippines getting close to about 20.
Now remember there is no limit on the number of entries each contestant can have and with incoming links being one of the most important factors if not the factor in this contest, every SEO in the contest is churning out pages by the dozen. That said, remember its quality that matters over quantity.
Let me end this update by thanking all those that have linked to me. As you can see I still have some way to go in this contest. Do continue to link to this page, ideally with the anchor text as Busby SEO Challenge. Hopefully the next update should see me in the top 10 and with a real chance to win the Busby SEO Challenge.
Busby SEO Challenge Update – July 18 2008
Quick update, I’m now ranking first for the Busby SEO Challenge on Yahoo search. 
Had you going there for a bit huh!! Not that its going to do me any good as Google is what matters as far as this contest is concerned. It took me around 20 odd days from the start to reach position 1 on Yahoo. Here is a screenshot of the results on Yahoo
Enough of the self praise and gloating, back to focusing on Google. Stay tuned to the contest folks. It sure is getting interesting.
Busby SEO Challenge Update – July 28 2008
The challenge is entering its last month and things are more or less the same at the top of the leader board. My ranking is kinda all over the place depending on which Google data center you check which is natural because Google has increasingly started to geo target all its queries. On the data center that matters I am currently 26th which is not great but then I had gone back to about 40 a few days back. I’m still steady at position 1 on Yahoo not that it matters.
As we enter the final month of the Busby SEO Challenge, you can expect everyone to make a big push to the final line. All the big guns and bag of tricks will be unleashed over the next 30 days to take that number 1 spot on Google. I have pretty much put in motion all of my plays and now its all about waiting and watching.
Keep tuning in and track this fascinating contest as it unwinds to a close. On a closing note, once again Thank You for all the link love you have given me.
Keep that link love flowing folks!!
Busby SEO Challenge Update – Aug 02 2008
29 days left for the contest to end. Pleased to announce that my entry (this page) stands currently at number 11 on the official results. Actually 10 if you discount one of the double results. This site is doing much better than 11 on many of the data centers but again no point in dwelling about that. An interesting point is that my Yahoo search ranking has dropped to the second page. So while I moved up 15 odd places on Google, I dropped about the exact number of Yahoo. Only goes to show that how fine the line is when you try to optimize for more than one search engine. Some of the changes I made over the last couple of days must have not gone well with Yahoo or it is a temporary blip and should be back up again. Let’s wait and watch.
This is the USP’s of SEO contests. It gives you the opportunity to try out things in real time and against fierce competition. While the Yahoo search results is no where relevant to the Busby Challenge unlike some of the other SEO contests in the past, it gives me the platform to experiment and fine tune my knowledge and skill.
Stay tuned for more updates on the biggest SEO challenge of them all, the Busby SEO Challenge.
Busby SEO Challenge Update – Aug 04 2008
Less than 26 days left for the Busby SEO Challenge contest to end. The past two days has seen considerable churn in the top 10. The French team flagship blog seems to be heading down whereas the Indonesian team looks to be on the rise. The top 10 Google results for Busby SEO Challenge is made up of 6 Indonesian participants and 3 entries from the French. The last remaining entry is mine. I dropped a couple of places today to 10 from 8. 24 hrs of non activity is all that it takes to see a shift in your rankings, only goes to show how hard fought this competition is. Read through the entire post for all the information regarding the contest and periodic updates on how this entry is faring in the challenge.
Busby SEO Challenge Update – Aug 08 2008
Not much in way of change. My entry has been hovering around the 8th and the 9th position for the past 4 days. Currently it is 9th. The top 3 spots have not seen any changes over the past 6 days which kind of tells you that whatever the French team is trying, it is not working so far.
The next couple of weeks is crucial and the site that cements or takes the lead will be hard to catch in the final week unless you have a few PR 8’s in store. I thought I was done in terms of tweaking the site but I guess not. I plan to ring in some additional changes that should help me see climb but that remains to be seen.
Busby SEO Challenge Update – Aug 10 2008
I figured that it would make for some interesting reading to see some statistics of other contestants in the Busby SEO challenge contest. I’ve put together some statistics for the top 5 on the SERP’s list as of today. Keep in mind that the rankings will change constantly and so will some of the stats that I’ve collected on each individual contestant. See the Analyzing The Busby SEO Challenge Competition block at the end of the page for detailed analysis.
Busby SEO Challenge Update – Aug 17 2008
There has been some churn at the top in the past two days. However things are back to where they were at the time of writing this. Indicates a lot of effort that is being put to usurp the top ranked listing. The contest has been tainted of sorts with some of the contestants claiming their bandwidth is being deliberately used up using automated tools. These allegations are indeed serious but with no clear pointer as to who is doing it I don’t believe anything can be done. It is a shame that a few contestants or teams can resort to this kind of tactics to get to the top.
On another note, I’ve created a series of videos for this SEO challenge. I call it the Busby SEO Challenge Video series. These videos are basic tips and suggestions that might be of interest to the many observers following the contest.
Keep tuned folks and watch this space for more updates on one of the most closely fought SEO campaigns ever.
Amazon Web Services Introduces EC2 High-CPU Instance
Posted in Web Master by DB
Today Amazon web services has made available a fourth option in EC2 instances called EC2 High CPU instance. Amazon’s EC2 thus far had three standard instance options and clearly the computing resources offered were not enough. Read about the other three options in Amazon EC2 in here.
The High CPU instances are different from the standard instances in the fact that they offer more CPU resources than memory. The High CPU instances come in two flavors.
- High CPU Medium Instance
- High CPU Extra Large Instance
The High CPU medium instance is on a 32 bit platform and has 5 ec2 compute units with a total of 1.7 GB memory. This has the same memory resources of a small EC2 instance but more than double the storage and 4 times the computing power. The cost is also double with the High EC2 medium instance costing about .20 cents per instance hour as compared to .10 cents per instance hour for a small EC2 instance.
The High CPU Extra Large instance is on a 64 bit platform and has 20 EC2 compute units. I know I know that is a lot but you will be surprised by how many startups are maxing out on computing resources for their stealth projects. The 20 EC2 compute units is made up of 8 virtual cores with 2.5 EC2 compute units each. The storage is the same as the EC2 large instance at 1690 GB and the memory is less than the standard EC2 large instance at 7 GB.
With Amazon Web Services also working on persistent storage (one of the current main bottlenecks), a feature that is currently released to only a select few, we are looking at more wide spread acceptance in the near future. Amazon continues to push the envelope and offerings and today are the clear leaders in cloud computing.
Do You Care For Browser Compatibility?
Posted in Optimize And Monetize, Web Master by DB
Ensuring browser compatibility is something most of us strive to achieve. Yes, newbie designers often disregard the need for cross browser compatibility but this is getting to be lesser as more and more people start adopting alternate browsers such as firefox, opera and safari to name a few. A relatively new browser such as Flock has had more than 4 million downloads since launch tells you that people are more open to experiment with various options available to them.
That said, it came as a real surprise to me when I recently found that sify.com (a hugely popular portal in India and a listed company on Nasdaq) does not follow even the basic principle of cross browser compatibility when designing their website. A site that is ranked 449 by Alexa simply falls over when you try and access it using Safari.
Here are some screenshots of sify.com when viewed using Safari
Sify.com on Safari Browser Image 1
Sify.com on Safari Browser Image 2
Sify.com on Safari Browser Image 3
Now for some screenshots of how the designer originally meant for the website to look. A far cry from the above pics.
Sify.com on I.E Browser
Sify.com on Firefox browser
Again folks, a listed company on Nasdaq, that earns all its revenue from advertising and other internet related monetization should be looking to maximizing its revenue by increasing its traffic and increasing its revenue from that traffic. Sadly it seems that the Safari browser is taboo or maybe sify.com has simply decided to ignore Apple and its increasingly popular browser. Small wonder then that the stock price is $5.2, a far cry from the glory days of $380.00
This article is written by the author of the popular fan blog of the up and coming singer Asia’h Epperson
Web Hosting – Can You Pick The Right Host?
Posted in Hosting by DB
Choosing a web hosting provider is like playing the lottery especially if you don’t have enough hands on experience in understanding hosts and the hosting industry. Infact I would go so far to say that even for someone who has relative experience the task of choosing a web hosting provider often proves to be a hit or miss affair. I can’t explain why many experienced webmasters get it wrong but I suspect that they are driven to picking a host based on one thing and one thing only. Money!!!
I can’t really blame them. When you have customers actively searching on the internet and keeping tabs on the rock bottom prices that are prevalent in the hosting industry, your job of suggesting a quality host get a tad difficult. After all how much can you argue the quality and support factor when your client has one thing in his mind and that is to get his running costs down. Push this long enough and you soon will have your client turn around and question your rationale in pointing them to whom you consider to be a quality host.
Does this sound familiar? When you have a client that does not understand hosting or should I say has not had a bad hosting experience, you are essentially in a lose lose situation. Even if you manage to convince your client to go with a quality host you client will always have that feeling of being suckered into it. This will indirectly affect any related or unrelated work you are doing right now or will do so in the future with the same client because I can guarantee you that you will be up for some price concessions from your side.
On the other hand if you do cave in and go in for that cheaper hosting option, what do you think will happen when the hosting company drops the ball? You will be left scrambling all over the place to get the situation under control and by the way you will be at fault. After all you recommended the host. All the customer suggested was the price point. Like I said it’s a lose lose situation.
Imagine then the plight of a complete newbie looking for hosting. How do you pick a host? Can you trust that material you read on the many hosting review sites that pop up every day. I truly believe that there is a need in the market to objectively rate a host and so far I have not seen one example of a truly unbiased source of information.
Picking a hosting company is at best an exercise in immense faith. My suggestion is find someone with sufficient hosting experience to be able to objectively understand your website and customer needs before suggesting the right hosting plan for you. I would love to hear if you believe you are experienced enough to pick the right hosting plan and ofcourse the right hosting company. What are your main filtering points? Do you only go by the host reputation? Are you application specific? Do you consider freebies in your decision? Are you clear about your host’s infrastructure? Oh!! I could go on and on …..
This article is written by the author of the popular fan blog of the up and coming singer Asia’h Epperson
Changing Hosting Companies? How To Move Your Blog Without Any Downtime
Posted in Anatomy of a Blog, Hosting, How To, Web Master by DB
I spent some time yesterday moving one of my blogs (no, not this one) over to another Web Hosting company. I figured this would be a good topic to talk about on Web Hosting Plans and tips as I’m sure some of you might be contemplating the same thing and not sure how to go about changing web hosting companies.
Changing hosting companies could be for a variety of reasons. Either the hosting company is not good enough or the hosting setup is just not right for your blog or you are realigning your portfolio. Don’t ask me yet what I mean by that last one, I will tell you guys one day. Whatever your reason, if you are looking to change your blog hosting provider then simply follow the steps listed below and you should be good to go.
Did I mention having no downtime is important? I guess I did not, to me that is implicit. After all downtime means lost business, lost credibility and more importantly lost rankings. Yes, downtime can and will affect your SERP’s. This is why it is critical to select the right hosting company, one that is known for its consistency and support. Of late I have started to compile and list select hosting plans from various companies on here. Look at the recommended hosting section and the others if you are shopping for hosting.
Back to moving your blog. Follow these steps in the order listed below. I’m assuming that you are hosted on Linux and have Cpanel as your control panel.
- First would be to take a backup of the existing blog. Let’s start with all the files. I use FileZilla as my ftpclient and find it really good. Its free and reliable and really simple to use. Download the client version and connect to your current blog hosting provider. Download the entire contents of your “public_html” folder onto your local machine. Yes, the entire “public_html” folder including the themes, plugins and the admin files.
- Next is the database backup. You need the latest and greatest version of your database. If you are using the database plugin from Il Filosofo then you should already have a database backup file created on a regular basis. I always set the frequency to daily and set it up to be sent to my email. You can get the plugin from here ( http://www.ilfilosofo.com/blog/wp-db-backup/ ) if you don’t have it already and want to use it going forward.Generating the latest backup directly from your CPanel / phpMyAdmin is a straightforward process. Log on to your hosting account, select “MySql Databases” and launch “phpMyAdmin”. The link to launch “phpMyAdmin” is all the way down at the bottom of the page. Select all the options as shown below and export your database backup.
- Now its time to setup your new hosting account. I’m assuming you’ve already done the review and selection process and selected a hosting plan that best suits your needs. One important selection criteria to choose a blog hosting provider would be the option for a one touch install of your favorite blogging platform (WordPress in our case). Many offer this option as part of Fantastico but only a few offer the latest version of WordPress (2.5.1). I’ve always found HostGator to be really quick in updating their hosting setup to accommodate the latest releases from WordPress.You should already have access to your new Hosting Account and CPanel to continue. Launch CPanel and click on Fantastico and create a WordPress blog. The database name will never be the same unless you have the same username and it does not matter. Do a quick check to see if your blog is installed correctly by launching your blog from CPanel. Remember you have not yet changed your DNS and so you cannot use your domain name yet.
- Now that you have the shell of your WordPress blog installed its time to import your backup. Lets start with the database. Go back to your new hosting account CPanel and launch “phpMyAdmin”. You will see that you have one database in there which is your blog database.Select the import option on “phpMyAdmin”. Select your database backup file and click on the “Go” button. If you’ve done everything correctly so far then the database should be imported without any errors.
- Next its the turn of the files. Use FileZilla and connect to your new hosting account. Navigate to the public_html folder and upload the entire contents from the backup you took earlier in step 1 EXCEPT for the wp-config.php file. The “wp-config.php” is found directly in the “public_html” folder and take care to avoid overwriting this file. This file has your new database and login details and must be left alone. Overwrite every other file from your backup. Set the overwrite option to yes so that all existing files are overwritten.This should not take more than a few minutes depending on your internet connection. Once you are done uploading the files you are 95% done. Yes, that’s all there is to it. The only step left to do is to change your domain nameserver information. Before you do that launch your website from CPanel and check if your blog is exactly the way it should be.
- Finally when you are finished double checking your new blog, simply log on to your domain registrar control panel and change your name server information to point to your new hosting account. I debated to include a screenshot for this but then decided against it as there are too many domain registrars out there and most have detailed steps on how to change your website’s nameserver information.Once you’ve changed the nameservers you probably have to wait 24-48 hrs for it to propagate. It usually will be a lot sooner but waiting 48 hrs is best. Ping your domain from your command prompt at frequent intervals and you will see if your domain IP Address has indeed changed.If you run a really popular blog you might want to take another database backup from your old blog and import it back into your new blog to ensure all the latest comments are captured and transferred as well.
That’s all there is to it. Following the above steps should enable you to migrate your blog over to a new hosting company or plan without any downtime and keep all your subscribers happy. Changing your blog’s hosting provider is a big step but not necessarily a complicated one.
Bookmark this page, you never know when you are going to need it. Do come back for more tips on website hosting and don’t forget to subscribe to this feed.
Amazon Web Services Ringing In More Changes.
Posted in Hosting by DB
Some more good news for all Amazon EC2 and S3 users. Amazon has announced that they are slashing bandwidth charges effective May 1st 2008. You can read more about the exact price difference in here.
Amazon seem to be rolling out quite a few improvements and changes over the past month. First it was Elastic IP Addresses and Availability Zones. Amazon followed that up with AWS Premium support, a paid support agreement between Amazon and it’s web service clients. Amazon Web Service users can choose to pay for Silver or Gold level support. The latest from the Amazon stable is the drop in data transfer pricing.
While all these are great, I cannot help wondering if Google’s latest foray into cloud computing space seem to have been the trigger for some of these changes / improvements from Amazon. It is astonishing what good serious competition will do. Ah well, the customer always benefits when there is competition so I’m looking forward to more from these two. It is refreshing to see Amazon take Google very seriously and not rest on their laurels.
On a completely unrelated note, some of you might have noticed a new addition to the sidebar. Since this blog is all about web hosting and as I initially promised I will start to list website hosting plans that are currently being offered by some of the more illustrious web hosting companies out there. By aggregating these hosting plans into a single section I’m hoping many of you will find it useful and a time saver.
I will be adding more categories and more features in the future. I also plan to add a feedback or review hosting plan feature. Until that is done please use the contact form to send me details of your experience with a particular hosting plan or web hosting company. Because this particular feature is generally the target and most abused by spammers, I will be getting in touch with the reviewer to be completely satisfied that the hosting review is genuine. So please make sure to include your contact information along with your hosting review.
Have fun browsing through the list of web hosting plans. I would love to hear from you on this latest addition to website hosting plans, tips and optimization tricks.
Using Amazon S3 To Host Your Media Files.
Posted in Hosting, Web Master by DB
Amazon Simple Storage Service or S3 as it is more popularly known is an extremely cost effective way to store and manage your data. Your data could be anything, from simple normal every day work related files to your hosting or database backups. The only limitation Amazon S3 has is that the file size should not exceed 5 GB.
I recently wrote a post on website hosting on how important data backups are and today I wanted to talk about Amazon S3 and how to start using Amazon S3. From a hosting or a webmasters perspective, one of the better uses of Amazon S3 is to use it effectively to offload all your resource hogging files such as your video, mp3 and image files from your current shared or dedicated hosting servers onto Amazon S3. This short tutorial will show you how to do just that.
First step is to obviously sign up for Amazon S3. After you sign up you will have access to your accounts key two access identifiers.
- Access Key ID
- Secret Access Key
To keep this simple, I’m going to suggest we use freely available tools to upload our data to our S3 account. The one I use regularly is ”Cockpit”. Cockpit is a stand alone application built using JetS3t, a free open source java toolkit and application suite for Amazon S3. But for the purposes of this demo I’m going to use a really cool Firefox plugin for S3.
Once you’ve installed your Firefox plugin you are now good to go. Open up the plugin and click on Manage Accounts on the top left.
This will bring up a popup where you need to enter your Access Key and Secret Key. Think of the Access Key and the Secret Key as your Username and Password. Once logged in, the plugin will open up three split panes which is really self explanatory. The right side pane is your S3 account area.
Before you begin to transfer your data files you will first have to create a “Bucket”. Think of a bucket as a folder, a way to group like files together. Simply right click and say “Create new Directory” and a new bucket is created. Internally however, a bucket is a sub domain within Amazon S3. For this reason you will sometimes find that you cannot create a bucket with a name of your choice because that particular name already exists and always use small case when you name your bucket.
Navigate to the newly created bucket. Select the files you want to be copied from the left pane and click on upload. You can track the progress at the bottom. It’s really no different to using any FTP program. Change the file permissions to allow read for everyone if you would like to access the file from an external system such as your web page.
All you need now is the url to the file. Right click on the file and select “Copy URL to Clipboard”.
This will give you the url to use from your html page. The syntax for the url will be ”http://<bucket-name>.s3.amazonaws.com/<file-name>”
That’s all there is to it folks. Now you can offload your media files onto S3 and save a ton on bandwidth charges. Do keep coming back for more tips on website hosting and make sure you subscribe to this feed.
Getting Started With Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
Posted in Hosting by DB
Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud web service sure did take the web hosting industry by storm when it was launched nearly 18 months ago. While many other companies have already entered or are entering the Cloud computing space, Google being one of the more notable names, Amazon continues to be the preferred choice and holds sway. However with Google also entering this market I wonder if we are going to see a shift?
How can I get started with Amazon EC2? Is it the right choice for me? What is the learning curve with EC2? I’ve noticed that I’m being asked these questions more and more frequently. I figured this will probably make a good topic as I’m sure many of you folks out there have the same question.
Getting started and ramping up your applications with Amazon EC2 is slightly more difficult when compared to Amazon S3. With Amazon S3 many of the finer details are further abstracted if you use an application such as Cockpit, a graphical java application to manage your data in your S3 account.
Signing up for an EC2 account is easy enough. Simply go to the web services section on Amazon and signup. One of the reasons why Amazon EC2 is sought after is because you are only charged for what you use unlike a traditional hosting account or dedicated server and of course the fact that you are on the same infrastructure that Amazon uses. The billing for your EC2 is done monthly and is based on the resource usage, the instance type, uptime and the data transfer.
Amazon Ec2 gives you three options for instance types
- Small Instance
- Large Instance
- Extra Large Instance
Amazon EC2 Small Instance
This is the default instance type. Each small instance has about 1.7 GB of memory and 160 GB of storage on a 32 bit platform with 1 EC2 Compute unit. Each EC2 compute unit is equivalent to 1.2 Ghz Opteron or the 2007 Xeon Processor.
Amazon EC2 Large Instance
With the large instance you get more processing power, memory and storage. Each large EC2 instance has about 7.5 GB of memory and 850 GB of storage on a 64 bit platform with 4 EC2 Compute units. Now this is some serious processing power.
Amazon EC2 Extra Large Instance
Now if for some reason a large instance does not meet your requirements (can’t imagine why) then you have the extra large instance to fall back on. Amazon’s Ec2 extra large instance has pretty much double of everything that a large instance has to offer. With an extra large EC2 instance you get 15 GB memory, 1690 GB storage space and 8 EC2 Compute units. (whew!!)
For those that are interested click here to calculate the monthly estimated cost for running an EC2 instance depending on your preferred instance type and bandwidth.
In most cases it is best to start with a small instance and evaluate if your data and processing needs are being met. Remember all that it takes to start a bigger instance is a few words of syntax. I currently use a small instance and I’ve found it to be extremely fast. Needless to say I’m completely satisfied. In the coming weeks I’m going to talk more about EC2 and working with an EC2 instance. Continue to keep reading and do subscribe to Website Hosting tips tricks and optimization.
