In the last article I went into some detail about shared hosting. Today we’re going to talk about the other types of hosting that are most applicable to bloggers, starting from the smaller and going all the way to having your own dedicated server and so on.

Just to do a quick recap, shared hosting is where many people get together to share a webserver. Everyone is guaranteed a certain amount of space and bandwidth, but that’s it. However what’s not mentioned is that all other resources are shared. So for example, if someone is abusing their account and overloading the other computer resources (processing power, etc.), then you’ll probably feel the effects. Now with cheap hosts, since they’re generally already overloading the servers, this will happen fairly often, which is why I recommend going with a more reputable host and paying a little more.

VPS (Virtual Private Server)

What do you think the next level up from shared hosting is? Pretty much the exact same system except that you’re now also guaranteed a minimum level of computer resources. So for example, you’re guaranteed at least X amount of memory, X amount of processor performance, etc. This is great in that you now know the minimum performance you’ll get!

However there’s an additional bonus with this. Since we all know that most people don’t use their full resources, the people who designed this technology decided to let unused computer resources be shared with other accounts on the same computer. In un-technical terms, if for example you’re allocated 500Mb or memory and you only use 100Mb of memory, the system will give away your unused 400Mb of memory to whoever wants it. If all of a sudden you need that memory back, it gives it right back to you! It only shares what you don’t need, nothing more.

Why is this great? It doesn’t really help you if your the person using less than your minimum guaranteed resources, actually you wouldn’t notice anything at all! But if for some reason you use more, maybe you get a spike in traffic at 3pm every day, or you’re growing faster than your resources, you can now temporarily have access to other people’s unused resources. So although you may only be guaranteed 500Mb of memory, you might end up using 1Gb of memory (1GB = 1000MB) or more. The disadvantage is that it’s not guaranteed, it can be taken away from you at any moment. So all of a sudden your site might be performing well then it gets really slow because you had to give back the extra resources that weren’t really yours, and back and forth. It also almost acts like a buffer to give you some warning for when it’s time to move up your account, to make sure that you get those resources consistently!

This type of hosting also gives you a virtual root access. It acts as though it’s your own computer. You get what’s called root access. You can modify the webserver settings for your own little VPS (the keyword being “virtual” private server). Therefore you can host multiple domains with one VPS account, you can configure the server to your liking, etc. This is great if you need some more advanced features.

Of course, as you can expect, VPS hosting is more expensive than Shared Hosting. Firstly, the hosting company needs to purchase software to manage the VPS accounts (so that the resources are correctly guaranteed). They also now need to guarantee the computer resources, and have some additional resources to run the software to manage the VPS’s. Generally, expect to start paying around $50/month for a decent VPS. I’ve seen it as low as $20/month, but I can tell you from people I know who’ve used these cheaper accounts, you get what you pay for.

Now VPS accounts can quickly climb in price. They can get into hundreds a month. It’s possible to get some very large VPS accounts that are more powerful that dedicated servers (which we’ll talk about next)! The good news with VPS is that you can start with a smaller package and work your way up. Generally all you need to do to move to a higher plan is tell your host. They just change your account settings to increase the minimum guaranteed computer resources and you’re ready to go.

Dedicated Server

This is the next level of hosting, and most bloggers never get here. However I think it’s worth mentioning because it offers some great advantages. A dedicated server means your the sole account on the whole computer. You get the full resources! But what’s more than that, you can configure it however you want! You basically get a full computer server to do with as you want.
Very powerful! You no longer have to worry about anything but your own mistakes!

Dedicated servers come in two flavors, managed and non-managed. Managed means that your host will apply the latest patches for you, check your server here and there for certain things, etc. The one thing to remember about managed solutions is that they’re not all created equal, there are some large differences in what they offer. It’s important to look at what you get when you choose a managed solution, as well when comparing the prices of different managed solutions.

An un-managed solution means that you’re responsible for everything on the server, including installing the patches, upgrading the operating system, etc. Basically you have to take care of everything. Of course this type of dedicated server solution is generally cheaper as you’re paying for resources and bandwidth.

I won’t get into any more details of dedicated servers, but needless to say, its a nice growth path for when you outgrow VPS hosting.

In terms of cost, dedicated servers will be more expensive than VPS as you get the full machine. Managed is more expensive than non-managed. After that, other issues play different roles. The type of machine you get makes a very significant different. What type of processor, how many. How much memory? How much disk space? And so on. These greatly affect the price, probably more than anything. Then it comes down to the hosting company. What type of service do they offer. What type of internet connections do they have (redundant, etc.). What about backup generators, etc.

All in all, expect to pay at least $100/month for a dedicated server, but closer to $200+/month for a decent system. For a higher end system, you can easily go to $500-1000/month and more!

And Beyond

Although I won’t really talk about it, I’ll just quickly give you a teaser of what’s next. The next level is renting a “rack”. This is basically space in a Data Center. In plain english, you can rent a physical rack to stack up computer servers in a building that’s made just for this (for example it has multiple connections to the internet backbone, etc.). You bring in your own computers and do what you want.

As well, you can also rent multiple dedicated servers. That’s another option. Have them all acting as one through something called clustering. You can also separate your dedicated servers into a database servers and web servers, etc. You can do a lot with multiple dedicated servers!

After that, well you get into another level where only corporations go!

So now that we know about hosting, what’s next? Well, we need a website. How do we start blogging? That’s the next topic in this series.

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Some big news for those of you who are familiar with the very popular social networking site Reddit.com, it was acquired by Conde Nast (owners of Wired magazine and several websites). I don’t know what the implications are yet other than the staff of Reddit.com will be moving locations.

Either way, I suspect we’ll see some changes in the near future on Reddit.com.

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In the last article on about how to start blogging, I ended the post with “Ok, now we’ve got our domain, how do we get it to point to our IP address? How do we get an IP address? That’s the answer to the next article in this series…”. Well the answer to this question is that you need to use a hosting service that will lease you space on a computer (with an IP address) to host your website.

What does this mean? Well before we can answer that, let’s backtrack a little again. Every website, since it’s beginning of internet time, has to be hosted somewhere. And that answer is that it’s hosted on a computer. Yes it can be hosted on a home computer, but I’d strongly suggest against that. In the early days many people did that, even I did that when broadband first came out. Today it’s not advisable, and some ISP (Internet Service Providers) will disconnect your internet access if you do this. As well, it does require a decent amount of technical skill because you need to be running a webserver, incorporate substantial security measuers, etc. So for now, let’s assume we need to lease space on a computer somewhere on the internet to host our webpage from a company that specializes in this.

Ok, so if we don’t do it ourselves, where do we find such a service? Through a “hosting company”. There are litteraly thousands of hosting companies on the internet. I don’t think there it’s even possible to list all the hosting services on any one webpage as there’s so many, and they change all the time (just like there’s new gas stations opened everyday). There’s also many different types of hosting services, which we’ll discuss shortly. If you do a search on Google for “Hosting”, you’ll find millions of entries.

Anyways, for now, what a hosting company does for you is provide you with space on a computer that runs a webserver to transmit your webpages. Without being too technical, a webserver is a software application that’s always running in the background waiting for people to request webpages, and when it gets the requests, it sends the appropriate webpage. So for example, if I type in http://www.FollowSteph.com, it knows to send back that particular webpage. Now it’s a little more complex than that, sometimes the webpages don’t really exist and their created one the fly, that is they are dynamically created by the webserver, but for now let’s assume that it just sends a webpage.

So what a hosting company does for you is provide you with space on a computer that has internet access to let everyone access your webpages. Not too complicated so far. So let’s add another piece to the puzzle. Every computer on the internet can have one or more IP addresses. The IP address that we talked about in the last post is the address of that hosting computer. The webserver, using it’s internal magic, will convert the IP address, plus the remaining part of the webpage address to send you the specific webpage you wanted that’s stored on it. So for example, if I go to http://www.LearningCentre.com, the computers relaying information on the internet, convert this address into IP 207.58.160.157 and the webpage index.html (if you don’t specify a webpage, it assumes the webpage you want is “index.html”). Just to confuse the issue a little, it’s also possible to have more than one domain on an IP address, but we’ll ignore this for the scope of these articles. At the end of the day, the webpage address is telling our hosted computer what page to send back, which in the last case is “index.html”. Had we put http://www.LearningCentre.com/somepage.html, it would return the contents of the file “somepage.html” that we had on our webserver. in our case, since LearningCentre.com is dynamically created, instead of sending “index.html” it creates a new webpage on the spot and pretent it’s “index.html”.

If this isn’t all clear, don’t worry about it, it will become clearer with time. Right now I’m just trying to explain what’s going on, more to help you later make the links between what’s happening behind the scenes. But if its not clear, don’t worry, a large percentage of successful bloggers and website owners don’t know these details.

At this point, I’m sure you’re wondering where you can find a hosting company, and if all hosting companies are the same. If you think about it for a second, you can image that Ebay, Google, Microsoft, etc., have very different hosting needs than a single person’s blog does… So the answer is that no, there are many different types of hosting companies and services. And this will be the topic of my next article in this series.

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Ok, now that you’ve settled on which name you’d like to use for your blog, you need to register it. Why? What does this mean?

Let’s take a step back here, let’s look at what a domain is in the first place. A domain is a name that identifies one or more IP addresses. Ok, so what are IP addresses you ask? IP addresses are like phone numbers, except that rather than pointing to a specific phone, they point to a specific computer. So for example, LearningCentre.com’s IP address is 207.58.160.157. This IP number is the address at which you can find the computer hosting LearningCentre.com. If you’re interested in how an IP address works, what the numbers represent, you can visit this link for more details (each section of number represents something else much like the area code part of a phone number represents which geographical area you’re trying to call to).

Alright, now that we understand what an IP address is, how is that related to a domain? The reality is that IP addresses are hard to remember, much like phone numbers. So wouldn’t it be much easier if we could just remember a string, a piece of text, like LearningCentre.com? Which is exactly why domain names where invented. So now when we type in LearningCentre.com in our browser, it automatically converts it to 207.58.160.157 for us behind the scenes. Too bad they don’t really do this with phone numbers too…

The next question is, how do they do this? How do they know that LearningCentre.com goes to that address and not another. And what if 100 people want that same name? This is where registrars come in. The first person to register a domain name gets it. You usually get it for a specific time period, the most common being one year, after which point you can renew it (you always have first rights!) If you don’t renew it, it goes back up in the free market for anyone else to buy.

So if you have a name, you need to register it with a registrar. This of course costs the registrars something, and so on. I won’t get into the details of the registrar business, but needless to say expect to pay a little bit of money. From my experience, you should be able to pay less than $10 per domain. Initially when the internet started there was NetworkSolutions.com and two other major players. A while back, the registrar business was opened up and now there are litterally thousands of registrars. So which do you choose? Honestly, I’ve used several and I’m pretty happy with GoDaddy.com. Every registrar has it’s issues, and their price is good (at the time of this writing a domain costs $8.95/year).

Assuming the domain is still free, you just go through the process of registering your domain and paying for it. Some registrar will try to upsell you, of which GoDaddy is probably the most famous for (I’ve yet to see as much upselling on any other site as GoDaddy), but you can generally just be happy with the domain and no other add-ons. The only upsell I can think of is to make the domain registrant information private, much like paying for a private phone listing. Otherwise I’ve never really seen any benefit to most of the other upsells.

As well, make sure that your contact information is correct. It’s possible that they’ll need to contact you. Some registrars might only try once. You need to keep this updated.

When you’re registering your domain, I generally suggest to people I know to auto-renew the domain. This means that when your time period expires, the registrar will automatically purchase the domain for another time period for you (generally 1 year). This is a nice feature because it helps to prevent you from losing domains just because you forgot to renew it. However the onus is now on you to cancel the auto-renew if you decide you don’t want to renew it. For me personally, I’m much more apt to forget to renew a domain than anything else, so I use this feature a lot!

Ok, now we’ve got our domain, how do we get it to point to our IP address? How do we get an IP address? That’s the answer to the next article in this series…

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As many of you already know from the previous posts on this blog and the comments in the forums (as well as how prolific this news is online), Google’s purchase of YouTube.com for $1.65 billion is massive news. I did a little bit a digging into it today, and I found this very interesting post on Reddit.com which really helps explain more what’s going on.

As me and Scotty mentioned in our seminars, it’s better to have one large site with momentum than many small sites each fighting to gain any market share. There’s a lot to be said about momentum and getting to the critical mass, the tipping point. What I personally think is happening here is that YouTube.com has the momentum that Google was looking for with Google Videos. At first Google Videos was the clear leader but they fell behind, and the momentum (or trend if you will) is just so massively in YouTube.com’s favor that Google decided to take it. If you haven’t already seen it, the Google Trend search graph comparing Google Videos and YouTube.com is pretty telling, so check it out!

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Yesterday while I was looking at Digg.com, I found a very interesting little online tool. By simply entering in a domain name (or an IP), it allows you to see all other domains on that same IP. Although it’s not entirely accurate (which I can attest from my own personal testing), it does a decent job. Better than any other such tool I’ve seen before. I also found it seems to be more accurate for older domains.

In any case, it’s another tool that’s good to have in your arsenal

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Great news! Starting today, we’ve decided to go ahead and open up the LearningCentre.com forums to the public for FREE. In the past we charged a one-time time of $100 for a lifetime membership, but for now we’ve decided to remove that sign-up fee and make it FREE! As both me (Steph) and Glenn Scott are both too busy to fully give the forums the time needed to properly market them, so we’ll let it build itself through word of mouth and participation (this blog is already experiencing exponential growth). Therefore I highly recommend you sign up now while it’s free.

We’re still going to be the two biggest posters, I have no doubt about it! We’re pretty prolific posters. It’s now almost become our main way of communicating ideas between the two of us, so you’ll probably find some great tips in there!

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Today I just came accross a post by Darren Rowse where I just found out that WordPress.com is now offering free “VIP” hosting which is not available to the public, only high profile bloggers with lots of traffic. The hosting package is pretty nice, with some features including version control, SSL, etc. What really struck me though was the price, $500 setup fee and a $250/month hosting charge. I find this extremely steep, and Darren is already suggesting that it’s being criticized by the blogging community. I don’t doubt it!

For example in comparison, the hosting package that I’m offering through my company is similar, except that you don’t get version control, and of course the bandwidth and server load is not balanced (which I have some serious doubts about how they really do this myself), but I do install WordPress, I setup Askimet for you, I setup your domain, I’ll install one theme and a plugin or two (within reasonable limits). I also don’t force you to put a “Powered by…” link on every page on your website, or force you to put statistic hooks so that I can know your metrics.

I also only charge a $20 setup fee, and $100/year for hosting (that includes 200mb of disk space and 10Gb of bandwidth). After that, the second domain is only $50/year. I charge a little more than the really cheap hosting services for the same bandwidth, but that’s because I provide a higher quality and more reliable service. I also refuse to overload the bandwidth on the server! That’s something I personally really hated when I first started out, so I refuse to do that. I’ll charge a little more instead since it’s worth it, trust me I know from experience! Downtime, or an unresponsive server, is money lost. By the way, if you’re interested in getting a hosting package from me, you can contact me directly at: steph@followsteph.com

Anyways, it really struck me as an expensive hosting solution. For that price, I’d be ahead just getting my own managed dedicated server. It would cheaper and I’d have more power and options!

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Sometime over the last few days ago I came accross a very interesting article about subliminal spam. At first I thought it was an interesting concept, but I certainly couldn’t imagine it being that prolific in the real world. Well to my surprise today I got my first subminal spam email, well at least the first one I noticed. It behaved exactly like the article suggested!

I don’t think it’s very effective, but we’ll soon know for sure (like I’ve always said, there’s no better way to know than to try). In any case, I just wanted to make you all aware of its existence to possibly help shield you from any of its effect. Not that I think it will work on you guys since you’re already ahead of the curve, but it doesn’t hurt to know…

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Having created and managed several websites (LandlordMax.com, FollowSteph.com, etc.) over the last few years, I’m getting pretty good at predicting a website’s chances of success, as well as which areas will generate the most traffic. I have to admit that this website (LearningCentre.com) completely through me for a loop. I expected the main page to get the most traffic, followed by the blog (free valuable content), then followed by the forums, as this last section costs $100 for a lifetime membership. Was I ever wrong!!!

The forum, based on the number of unique visitors, never mind hits, gets a little more than twice as much traffic as the blog and the main page! Yes, the paid content gets almost double the amount of unique visitors! That really surprised me, in a good way.

So all this to say that you no matter how much experience and expertise you have in creating and managing websites, you can never really predict what will happen until it goes live. The more experience you have, the more likely you are to be an accurate predictor, but you can never know for sure without trying it out first (test test test).

Another interesting tidbit of news about LearningCentre.com, we’ve already beaten the traffic (in terms of unique visitors) from last month and it’s not even half way through the month! Not bad for a brand new site.

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