by Rod Armstrong, May 1st, 2008 | 1 Comment
This Mother’s Day season we’ve launched quite the web hosting special: we’ve boosted our space/bandwidth specs by an additional 24% and are offering a full 24% off of any order. Why 24% percent you ask? Well how about 5 + 11 + 08 equals 24? It’s like the “Lost” numbers only in savings form.
So when you think of Mother’s Day and all its festive trappings, admittedly Web Hosting probably doesn’t immediately come to mind. Luckily, I’m here to defend a web hosting package as a perfect (or at least highly reasonable) gift for mom by presenting my first ever list of Things Web Hosting Makes a Better Mother’s Day Present Than:
1. Gift Cards to Chain Restaurants
While Applebee’s, Bennigan’s, Olive Garden and all their glorious ilk provide a delicious dining experience, the scrumptious and entertaining dreams they provide are, sadly, all too fleeting. On the other hand, web hosting is both delicious and long-lasting.
2. Pocket Digital Photo Albums
Why carry around thousands of digital photos in a 1 inch x 1 inch key-dangler when you can just upload them to your own awesome web space?
3. A Cool New Cell Phone
Cell Phone companies seem bent these days on convincing the general public that a new cell phone is the perfect gift for Christmas, Easter, Graduation, Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day and other obscure holidays cell phone companies will probably soon invent. When, in fact, it is a horrible gift for almost any occasion. Mother’s Day is no exception and they have ads featuring candy-coated cell phones dropping from flowers and are repainting old phones weird colors all to get your hard-earned M-day money. Don’t fall for these corporate tricks. Just sneak her phone away long enough to spray paint it hot magenta and opt for the much cooler gift of a year of web hosting: it’s a double whammy of appreciation! Not to mention you’ll be showing Big Cell Phone what’s what.
4. Homemade Coupons
(Unless they’re homemade coupons for web hosting.)
5. Thunderheart on DVD
Not until there’s a 3-DVD collector’s edition, at least.
6. Flowers
Ah, yes. While technically the perfect Mother’s Day gift, flowers are just so cliche. Why not go with a more timely and impressive gift - one that shows your caring Mom just how in touch you are with modern technology and the magic of The Internet?
7. Grand Theft Auto IV
Just kidding. This one’s a tie!
8. Richard Simmons’ “The Complete Collection of Sweatin’ to the Oldies” Volumes 1-4
I got my Mom the sequel volume of this Richard Simmons fitness masterpiece as a Mom-Day Gift when I was 5, back in the Sweatin’ craze of the late 80’s (on VHS… before DVD’s even EXISTED.) Although I’m sure I meant well, my 5-year-old self really missed the mark on this one. SttO, while providing an awesome core workout, is really just a terrible gift and probably potentially offensive in subtext on multiple levels. Grab this gem for yourself, but leave Mom out of it.
9. Stuff That Says World’s Greatest Mom on It
This stuff is currently only cool if worn or displayed ironically. Hip youngster wearing World’s Greatest Mom vintage t-shirt? Hilarious! Mom? Sadly not with the times.
I could keep going, because web hosting is pretty much better than everything. But in all seriousness, we wish the best to all the mothers, wives, grandmothers out there and their families. Enjoy your holiday (and probably a new copy of GTAIV.)
by Kevin Hazard, March 14th, 2007 | 1 Comment
Everyone knows that Site5 trains it’s servers in a secret underground training facility before we introduce them into our ornate workshop, hidden amongst the foliage of a forest of magical technology to be worked on by elves, but we have never explained the declassified information about where find new members for our all-star team of systems administrators. In the Top 10 post, I explained a few claims to fame in the company (skim down to #3 for a refresher), but we recently added a few new people to the Site5 team, so a hazing blog post is in order.
First and foremost, we would like to officially welcome Graham , Lou, and Tomas to the Site5 team!
Each member of the Site5 team brings something unique to the table with regard to his/her skills and past experience, but you would never believe what these three did before joining Site5 (not because I made it up or anything but because it is so… unbelievable):
Graham
Graham was an integral part in fighting the age-old “no ending sentences with prepositions” rule. An ardent believer in the art of wordsmithing, Graham enjoys both lexiconography and translating popular culture news and events into Sanskrit. Often referred to as “that guy who has been sitting at the same table for a decade” by the librarians at the Library of Congress, Graham world-renowned for his understanding of the subtle nuances of the word “their” and contraction “they’re,” but he hasn’t let that fame take over his life.
Is it a coincidence that “Graham” and “Grammar” look and sound similar? He was destined to be a Grammarian.
Lou
In many circles, Lou is adored — nay, worshiped — for prowess and expert ability to talk to electronics (or more specifically, a “Circuit Whisperer”). Don’t believe me? Call up the Sultan of Brunei and ask him who he calls when any of his electronics need to communicate to him… Oh, what’s the matter? You don’t have the Sultan of Brunei’s telephone number (which, not surprisingly, is given only on 24 karat gold business cards)? Well Lou does.
You may doubt the abilities Lou claims to have received after being struck by lightning for a third time in the span of two months, but he proved these skills unequivocally in his interviews with Site5. Call it magic, call it crazy, or call one of the telephones he has spoken to… Whatever you want to call it, he sure impressed us.
Tomas
Tomas was a key acquisition in Site5’s long-term goal of becoming a globally-renowned speed-typing powerhouse. You may be under the impression that Barbara Blackburn is the worlds fastest typist, but Tomas has matched Barbara’s records… with one hand…
Unfortunately for Barbara, Tomas has two hands, and has been clocked as fast as 316 words per minute. You may ask why Tomas has not been featured in the Guinness Book of World Records, and it is simply a matter of humility. When he is not concentrating on avoiding the limelight, Tomas replicates the works of Shakespeare, Thoreau, and Tolstoy (War, What is it good for?). Want a fresh copy of Thoreau’s 14 volume journal from Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts? Tomas can get those two million worlds on paper for you this weekend.
You can try to ask Graham, Lou, or Tomas about their past lives, but they might not recall many details.
All tomfooleries and shenanigizing aside, we really are happy to welcome Graham, Lou, and Tomas to our team. As you finish the 20-minute standing ovation that invariably follows the conclusion of your reading of one of Site5’s blogs, add an extra few claps in honor of the new folks (obviously, your arms will be tired after ovating for such a long time, but that makes the final few claps mean so much more).
by Kevin Hazard, August 22nd, 2006 | No Comments
So you’ve decided to take the plunge into the unknown world of web hosting. What next? Buying a book on programming? Calling your “techie” friends to “help” you get started?
At Site5, we heard the cries of the web hosting youngsters, and we include several easy-to-use, “Don’t run away scared just yet” features to help you get started. In this post, we’ll show you how to get through the order process, log into your account the first time, create a forum and set up a picture gallery.
Your new site can be up and running with content that you created within an hour, so what are you waiting for? There’s nothing to it but to do it!
A Picturesque Tour of a New Site5 Account
For a larger view, click on the screenshots below.
From the Site5 homepage, after evaluating your hosting options and deciding which plan fits you best, click the “Get Started Now” button.
In the first step of the order process, you will select a plan, a term length, and enter your desired domain name.
In the second step of the order process, you can check the ownership of your desired domain name, verify the plan details and order cost. Assuming everything is correct, you will enter your personal information and payment information (and for you tricky credit card thieves out there, no, I’m not going to show you a screenshot of my billing information).
After entering any applicable promo codes and answering two quick questions about how you heard about Site5, we ask that you read through the Site5 service agreement and agree to the terms to complete the order.
Congratulations! You are now a part of the Site5 community. Let’s get started on your site.
Immediately after signing up for your new hosting account, you can login to your Backstage account manager with the information you receive in the order confirmation email you receive at the email you used in your order.
In your Backstage account manager, you can modify your billing information, manage access to your websites, and essentially control the universe… Well maybe not the last one, but you get the point. To begin working on your website, simply click the domain on your Backstage dashboard (this will open the site’s NetAdmin control panel).
This control panel is where the magic happens. If you are an advanced user, you can modify your site’s settings and server information, but for this walkthrough, we will use a few of the free scripts included in every Site5 plan to create a forum and a photo gallery. To start these insallations, click the “CGI & PHP Scripts” link in the menu on the left side of the page and follow the “Fantastico” link.
In Fantastico, you can easily execute one-click installations of blogs, content management systems, forums, and more.
In order to show the process of installing one of these features, we will walk through a phpBB forum installation. To begin, you can click on the phpBB2 option under “Discussion Boards.” After entering the required information, you can click a button and install the forum! That wasn’t too hard, was it?
In order to check the installation, you can navigate to the directory in which you installed the forum. In this case, it was http://www.halfwaynowhere.com/forum.
To create a photo gallery, you can navigate back to Fantastico and select one of the Photo Gallery installations.
Fill out the info and in the click of a button, http://www.halfwaynowhere.com/photos/ is up, and you are ready to upload photos.
Quick and Painless
You’re now a website owner with your very own forum and a photo gallery. You can easily install one of several blogs to keep the digital world up to date on your life, and you can set up your very own email address (pick-a-name@yourdomain.com)!
If you have been reading this blog post apprehensively assuming that your own website was still out of reach, you have no excuse now… Get Started with Site5!
by Kevin Hazard, July 21st, 2006 | 3 Comments
When you understand how web hosting works and what you will be using to get your own website on the net, you run into one of your most significant tasks: choosing a web host. Instead of pitching Site5’s service to you as the end-all, perfect service, it is important to understand what you should look for in any hosting provider. When selecting a plan from the thousands of available options, the biggest concerns you should have are “Will this company help me if I need it?”, “Will the service (and space) be good enough for me to not need help?”, and “Will the host keep up with the technology changes in the industry?” These three questions are very basic and intuitive, but finding a company to consistently say, “Yes!” to both is not an easy task.
Making the Right Investment
As with most other service-related industries, new customers need to be assured that they are making a good investment, and they need to know that they can try the service risk-free for a certain period of time to ensure they made the correct decision. A common guarantee to assuage those fears is the “Your satisfaction is guaranteed with a 30-day money-back guarantee.” These guarantees hold the host accountable to ensuring that you are 100% satisfied with the decision you made in choosing their service since you have many options in choosing a “home” for your website.
The Ups and Downs of Uptime
In addition to a money-back guarantee, hosts will also advertise an uptime guarantee to pledge that your site will be up and accessible whenever you need it. A 99.9% uptime guarantee would suggest that your site will be up and running virtually every time it needs to be accessed. This guarantee is a necessity both because well-maintained servers are very dependable and should be online as close to 100% of the time as possible and because you cannot afford to have the site down. Imagine you invented the season’s most popular gift and thousands of people flock to your website every day to buy the gift directly from you. If your website is ever down, not only are you losing business for that short period of time, you are also appearing unprofessional to those prospective customers (which is likely more damaging than the lack of business). Clearly you trust your hosting provider with your site, and they are responsible for your site’s availability and performance, so the uptime and performance guarantees provide a basic peace of mind in making your decision.
It is important to understand that the idea of a full 100% uptime guarantee, while nearly impossible, may not be a great thing because downtime is often necessary when hosts make hardware and software upgrades on your server. If your server is never taken offline, you may worry about your host’s commitment to keeping you (and your site) up to date with the fastest and most secure systems.
Who You Gonna Call?
GHOST BUSTERS!! (Sorry, I had to…) After you understand a host’s guarantees, it is important to note the host’s availability in case you run into problems. The industry standard is to provide 24×7 technical support. This standard is a necessity with the understanding that people could be accessing your site from anywhere in the world at a given time, and you should be able to work on your site with immediate response at any time. Technical support comes in many forms: email ticketing systems, live chat with a support representative, and phone support.
While you would assume “the more the merrier” with regard to available avenues for technical support, Site5 has found email support as the most effective means of solving technical problems. Commonly, hosts will advertise the availability of live chats with technical support representatives (also known as system administraors) or phone support, but the nature of many website and server-related problems are easiest to solve when you (as the customer) can fully explain your situation and the representative can address the complete problem.
This finding is counterintuitive: you would imagine immediate responses to your questions in the form of live chat or phone support would get you an answer quicker, but we found that support representatives can be overrun with several requests at the same time. In these instances, the rep’s responses may not fully solve the problem (if he/she even knows how to solve the problem). Complicated site problems and complex problems (which require the “sysadmin” to track down the root cause of a problem in order to solve a continual problem) can take as long as an hour, but the nature of live chat and phone support require that the rep get you an answer quickly and give you the impression that the problem is solved upon concluding the chat or phone call. Because the availability of these two options led to a poorer quality of customer service in our experience, Site5 removed those avenues with the commitment to immediately and fully address problems within thirty minutes via email. This practice allows the support representative a little more time to make sure problems are fixed while allowing time to investigate each individual problem more carefully if necessary.
Who’s Helping You?
In-house Sales/Billing/Support teams have (unfortunately) become a lost characteristic in the web hosting realm. In order to keep up with all of the requests that are generated by hundreds of servers worth of clients, several larger web hosts farm their sales, support, and billing teams to call centers or to other companies. This practice is not surprising when you consider that many hosting companies offer phone support and live chat support which both require a significant amount of manpower to maintain… You are more likely to get a quicker response, but you are less likely to get a quality response.
Sitting at the Trendy Table
No one likes the buyer’s remorse feeling when the rose-colored glasses are taken off and reality hits like a ton of bricks. The internet is constantly changing and evolving, and if your web host is not dynamic and flexible, you could find yourself frustrated with static resources. Becoming a web host is as simple as buying a reseller plan, but becoming a good web host requires an uncommon measure of control and experience. Cookie-cutter control panels, confusing account management systems, and outdated hardware can be dangerous for customers. Site5 is one of a handful (if that many) web hosts with an Engineering team dedicated to ensuring that our customers always have the latest and greatest that the web hosting world has to offer. Obviously, it is not necessary to look for a host with a team dedicated to addressing system-wide developments, repairs, improvements, and replacements, but you certainly want to make sure your host has the ability to control and fix everything it is offering. For example, if there is a security hole in the cookie-cutter control panel you are given by your host, it is important that the host can patch that hole or at least provide the necessary fix as soon as it is available or you run the risk of someone hacking your site (which can be as gruesome to your site as it sounds).
Nota Bene (Latin for “mark well,” so pay attention…)
Now all of those cynics out there just thinking I am peddling Site5’s service under the guise of a helpful post about choosing a good web host, I do concede that there is quite a bit of overlap between “a good host” and Site5… The company’s guarantees are very similar to the characteristics of a good host (not much of a coincidence, since we are trying to be a great host). The Site5 team is committed to being at the top of the web hosting industry, and we honor this commitment by remaining accountable to the basics of “What Makes a Good Host.”
…
See what I did there… Tied the title into the end of the post… As Kevin Nealon’s character said in Happy Gilmore, “It’s circular. It’s like a carousel. You pay the quarter, you get on the horse. It goes up and down and around. Circular. Circle. With the music. The flow… all good things.”
by Kevin Hazard, July 19th, 2006 | No Comments
You are at your computer. You type “www.site5.com,” and in a few seconds of internet magic, a beautiful (and most likely redesigned in the past week or two) website appears on your screen. No, this phenomenon does not happen because Al Gore invented the internet and somehow embedded a secret binary code that will forever index any possible domain name you can enter. There is a relatively simple behind the scenes process that happens each time you access a website, and when you begin to understand how domains, servers, IP addresses, and content work together, it is a lot easier to understand what web hosting is.
What Happens Behind the Scenes
When you type a domain name into your browser or click a link, you are calling that website’s data from a server. Your browser knows where to find the correct server because each domain has a DNS (Domain Name Service) entry and an IP address. DNS will tell your browser the IP address of the website you requested (basically where the website lives), and the browser retrieve the content you requested from the server at that IP address.
The Server Shuffle
A server is simply a computer responsible for giving (or serving) information to anyone trying to access it. Everyone with a website could theoretically own and maintain their own server for their sites, but because the cost of maintaining the server and ensuring top performance at all hours is typically too high for an average user’s income (and because a server has the ability to host hundreds of sites), most website creators “rent” the necessary space to serve their websites. The company or individual that is allowing others to rent space he/she controls is the web host, and the web hosting industry is essentially the amalgamation of everyone trying to get customers to rent their space. In the web hosting industry, you will run into a three major divisions: shared, reseller, and dedicated.
Shared Hosting
Shared hosting is the most affordable, most available, and easiest to use among the three divisions. Several providers offer this type of hosting for free if your sites feature their advertisements, but these providers usually cripple your ability to expand and enhance your website in a quick and easy manner.
A standard shared hosting account as of July 2006 has around 2 gigabytes of space for a monthly fee of around $10. For most beginners, one of these plans is the perfect stepping stone into the world of hosting because the plans are usually upgradeable if you need more space, and they will not break the bank if you take your time to learn more about the technologies (which, as I said, is not a requirement to get a solid site up and running).
Reseller Hosting
The second major division of web hosting industry is reseller hosting. Essentially, reseller hosting gives you a bit more space than a normal hosting account with the intention of allowing you to “resell” the space you are renting. If you have a group of friends who all want to have their own website, you can order a larger reseller hosting plan and split it up into several independent plans (which would be equivalent to individual hosting plans). This option is very popular because you can have your site up and running, and if you have your own customers who pay you a set fee monthly, you could theoretically not pay anything for your plan (since you just use their money to pay your hosting provider) or you can make money on the deal (bring in more money from customers than you pay to your provider). A common fear among new resellers is “How do I charge people? That sounds complicated and too much of a hassle,” but new reseller accounts commonly provide a billing system to assist in this process.
Dedicated Hosting
The third main division in the web hosting industry is dedicated hosting. With a dedicated hosting plan, you are paying a hosting provider for your own server that they will monitor and maintain for you. This solution is most commonly used for larger businesses or customers who need more space and/or freedom for their website. When you pay for dedicated hosting, you are renting an entire server (which the provider could have split up into a few hundred shared accounts if it was being used for shared hosting), so the cost will be significantly higher than that of a shared or reseller plan.
A Little More About Hosting
In each of the hosting plans, you will see variations in price based upon disk space, bandwidth, and features. Disk space is exactly what it sounds like: the amount of space you have to put your files on the server. The more complicated variation is bandwidth, which is a limit on the amount of information going to or coming out of your account. Every time someone accesses your site to read your weblog (also known as a blog or online journal) or to download a family video, the amount of bandwidth they used is the same as the amount of data they transferred. More simply, if someone downloaded a 10 megabytes video, they used 10 megabytes of bandwidth (You will have also used 10 megabytes of bandwidth to upload the video). Clearly, users need more bandwidth than they do space, but for new users, most disk space and bandwidth levels are considerably higher than the user will ever use or need.
In general, hosting has become a commodity based upon space and bandwidth, and features have more or less become standard. You could theoretically host your site from a command line interface (try not to shudder as you remember the blinking cursor of the MS-DOS operating system), but several control panels have been created to help you easily control your site, so the majority of hosts will offer one of the common systems. This fact is not necessarily a bad thing, but the reliance on third-party control panels alleviates the need for development of new systems. In these control panels, you can control the creation of email accounts (yournames@yourdomain.com), the ability to add and remove files from your site, and the other basic functions you would typically need for a basic website. Unfortunately, the hosting industry has resigned itself to the idea that customers are experienced, know what they need (or at least what everything means), and that the current systems are entirely sufficient for what those customers need.
In the Next Installment
Next we will look into what you should look for in a new host. As I mentioned, there are thousands of options, and theoretically, all of them do the same thing… But hopefully we will be able to sort out characteristics of a host you want.
