Blogging2.0

In order to compete with younger, newer web companies like Google and Yahoo, Microsoft has launch a new line of Live products/services along with its new Vista operating system. There is Live Search, Live Spaces, Live Messenger, Live Mail and so on. What may not be as widely known is MSN Live Hosting. That's right, Microsoft also has a hosting service. What's more? Microsoft offers 500mb disk space/bandwidth and a domain name! This is an excellent opportunity for many bloggers to get their own domain name and start blogging. For reasons why you should pick a domain name and stick with it, just read this article entry.

Ironically, I first found out about Live Hosting from an advertisement in original MSN Hotmail - Live Mail does not have advertising. This should be different from free webhosting offered by other large web companies such as Geocity and Yahoo. Live Hosting should be very similar if not exactly like Yahoo Small Business rather than GeoCity - Microsoft has Live Space for that. The disk space and bandwidth plus a free domain name shows that Live Hosting is actual hosting. The signup process is more complicated than signing up for MySpace and there are options to upgrade to paid hosting.

I guess what I'm trying to say above is that Live Hosting should be a reliable webhost even though I have no experiences to back that up. So, I am very interested to hear from someone who decides to take the opportunity and check it out after this post or someone who has already signed up. If you find Live Hosting excellent or totally bunkers just email me at c_stavanger [at] hotmail [dot] com or you can always drop by and post at Blogcrowds.com.

Thanks!

Mirror at: Blogcrowds - MSN Live Hosting

As continuation on the topic of webhosting here are some general information about too more webhosting companies, HostGator and Dreamhost. Both are very popular and established webhosting companies and offer both shared (I'll only focus on shared) and dedicated hosting. Unlike my Yahoo! Small Business review, I have no hosting experience with HostGator or Dreamhost so I can only tell you what I heard about them.

HostGator
You get what you paid for, mostly the reviews for HostGator is excellent with a few bad experiences. Some large and I mean extremely large sites are hosted with HostGator, for example Sitepoint, a huge web development website/forum. Of course, when you have a website the size of Sitepoint you won't have to pay for hosting, you are sponsored :D.

Dreamhost
Dreamhost is another well established webhosting service, its prices is inexpensive compared to HostGator. In fact it is so inexpensive, many people consider Dreamhost to be a webhost that oversells. A full rundown of overselling is covered here, the basic idea is that Dreamhost assumes that most users will not use the 10gig maximum so they advertise higher to attract more users. If every users use 10gig, not only would the company be losing money but they will also have technical problems with their server capacity. Some Dreamhost users say that once their website grew Dreamhost were no longer able to keep up. There were times when they can't connect to their servers.

Even though Dreamhost is very generous with bandwidth and disk space, they put a restriction on CPU usage. You are not allowed to exceed one hour CPU usage on their servers. Of course Dreamhost does not advertise this restriction. The whopping disk space and bandwidth is included on their banners and the CPU restriction in their Terms of Service.

At this point you might be wondering what exactly is CPU usage and how would the restriction effect you. To be concise, it is suffice to say all websites other than those made up of just static HTML require CPU usage. For example, the search bar on you website needs CPU usage to use certain algorithm to return search results. If you are not given any CPU usage, your visitor would not be able to perform a simple search across your site. Most of the time, CPU usage is a given and not a limited resource.

One of the main theories that Dreamhost only allow you to use one hour of CPU of twenty four a day, is that this way the can limit the size of your website. Before you reach their limit for disk space and bandwidth you will probably hit the limit for their CPU usage. Then they can send you a message to upgrade your account and pay extra for more CPU time (or maybe disk space/bandwidth its hard to say). While this theory is debatable, I think its fair to say it better to host a large video streaming site rather than a java application of the same size with Dreamhost.

Mirror at: Blogcrowds - HostGator & Dreamhost

To give more insight into webhosting, I will share my experience. I personally host my blog website, Blogcrowds.com with Yahoo! Small Business. I use the basic package, for $11 a month I have Yahoo's shared server.

Before I hosted with Yahoo!, I received a couple of bad reviews. First someone pointed out to me that $11 for is very cheap comparing to , and that is the kind of service I'll get. On a more personal level, another webmaster told me his experience with Yahoo!. This person registered his domain and hosted at Yahoo!, when he decide to switch webhosts it was very difficult. Yahoo! won't release his domain information until after several phone calls and he had to cancel all his Yahoo! web related subscription. This is problematic since you need all these domain information to host your domain name elsewhere. I'm not sure if this is an isolated incident or not, but I registered my domain and hosts at Yahoo! as well; I'm prepared to make some phone calls when demands for Blogcrowds exceed what Yahoo! offers.

All the other review aside, I have hosted with Yahoo! for six month so far and here is my experience:

Pros
Overall, I must say hosting with Yahoo! has been very satisfactory. As stated above, Yahoo's webhosting service is considered cheap, but I am unaware of anytime when their server is down. Once I wasn't able to connect to Blogcrowds, I was like "oh shite, here we go". It turn out that my internet connection was screwy, I wasn't able to connect to any website, my ISP fixed this problem later. It would be interesting to see how things goes when Blogcrowds becomes much larger, so far it has been relatively small.

One feature that could be a big plus for hosting with Yahoo! is their promotional package offered with webhosting. This package includes some coupons for web promotion service and also $100 advertising with Yahoo! Publisher's network and $50 advertising with Google Adword. You might say this isn't much, but it does help to bring traffic to your brand new website when its trying to get on its feet. Its kind of strange, this promotional package is what stood out to me most about hosting with Yahoo!, but I haven't actually used it...

Cons
As I mentioned before Yahoo! hosting has been very satisfactory, the downsides of my hosting experience are mostly non critical and more of needs for improvement. With that being said, here they are:

1) Yahoo's webhosting control panel is spartan and bare bone compared to more robust CPanel. The file upload and account permission system is basic, but I don't really use it, FTP takes care of everything for me. I login into the control panel about twice a month but uses FTP almost daily.

2) Pretty much every website online nowadays requires a database some sort. Database failure could mean a huge catastrophe for any website. The reason I occasionally login to the Yahoo! control panel is to use their database backup tool. It would be great if Yahoo! automate the backup tool to once daily. As of right now you have to login to schedule a backup. As the my database grows I plan to use phpMyAdmin or direct MySQL to manage my backup.


Yahoo also has a traffic, resource tracking page for your website, but I have to say it totally flawed. On the traffic stats, I rarely have a day with one visitor. No one should take that seriously and most webmaster export traffic tracking to third parties such as Google Analytics anyways. On the same webpage as the traffic stats you can see my resource usage, the amount of disk space/bandwidth I'm using seems to be right.

Yahoo! offers popular third party open source scripts such as WordPress, phpBB for quick install with just a simply click. Beware though, as with other webhosts, most of the scripts offered are outdated, if you decide install them this way be sure to upgrade them afterwards or your website will be a sitting target for hackers. I had to upload phpMyAdmin myself, there is something seriously wrong with the one on site.

5) The final issue is not limited to Yahoo! webhosting but across the entire Yahoo! domain. How many time have you tried to connect to Yahoo! or login and get an unable to connect error? This happens to me often when I'm trying to check my email, Yahoo! News etc as well as Yahoo! Small Business. Every time I had to press the retry button several times before I could connect to Yahoo! or login. Once I login to Yahoo! Small Business control panel, I never had any connection failure. Thanks god Yahoo! takes cares of the business servers once you are connect.

Those are all what I consider needs for improvement. I do have one feature that I wish Yahoo! have though, that is to host multiple domains on a single account. Oh well, I guess I'll have to upgrade soon.

There you go, a review Yahoo! Small Business webhosting from the webmaster of a relatively small blog website. Overall rating 8.5/10.

Mirror at: Blogcrowds - Yahoo! Webhosting Review

Now that you have a domain name, its time to find a server to host your blog/website on. Most alternatively hosted blogs such as BlogSpot or TypePad users won't have to worry about this; they are already hosting by Blogger or TypePad, but it is still good to know about webhosting.

First off, a server is just a computer(s) which contains your website files that is always on and always connected. This way, the server can send your webpages to people half way around the world even while you are sleeping. The reason why sometimes you receive an unable to connect error from your browser is because the specific server that holds the information for the website you requested is not on or down for some reason. Because of the nature and speed of the modern Internet infrastructure, the location of the web server does not really matter. You can even use a spare computer as a web server. However as your blog/website out grows the capacity of your computer and bandwidth offered by your internet company/ISP, you will be looking for a webhost. Besides, its much easier to let someone else worry about the technical stuff while you write.

When talking about webhosting and servers there are two technical details you have to understand, disk space and bandwidth. Many people often mix the two since they are similar and both measured in megabytes - gigabytes, but the concepts are quite simple, let me illustrate with a MP3 file. Although most bloggers won't offer songs for download, I will use it as an example because everyone is familiar with MP3 files and how its 'exchanged' around the world. So, say you have a 5 megabit MP3 file on your server, then you would have used 5 megabits of disk space. The disk space usage won't change until you add or delete something on the server. When someone request the MP3, your server will send the file using 5 megabit of bandwidth. When someone download the MP3 file again, the server will use another 5 megabit of bandwidth adding up to 10 megabit of bandwidth for a total of two downloads of a 5 megabit MP3 file. Your bandwidth accumulates over the month while disk space quota remains the same until files are added or deleted. It is important to know these two concepts for that you pay for webhosting in terms of both disk space and bandwidth.

Webhosting services rent their servers in two ways. First, shared hosting, which means a number of websites/clients are hosted off one server sharing the space and resources. On the other hand with dedicated hosting you have control over an entire server and its up to you how many websites the server will host. In comparison, dedicated hosting naturally give you more control, disk space, bandwidth and needless to say, dedicated hosting cost a lot more than shared hosting. Most webhosts should several different hosting packages such starter, intermediate, pro for shared hosting and different server specs for dedicate hosting. Some webhost also has free hosting packages.

There are literally thousands of webhosts out there, so how do you find the one right for you? Some people trust big hosts like HostGator or Dreamhost while others prefer their local webhosts so when they have a problem they can talk to someone in person instead of waiting for a phone call or email reply. To find reviews for webhosting, you can visit http://www.webhostingtalk.com/ where many people share their hosting experience.

When choosing webhosts, just make sure you have enough disk space, bandwidth, specific features (eg. PHP & MySql for WordPress) you need and an option to upgrade later. Also check how reliable the webhost is, you don't want visitor only getting access to your site at one o'click in the morning. In the beginning, the minimal shared hosting package provided by any webhost should be sufficient. The price is usually for. There is one very important advice that should remember: you get what you paid for. Never signup for a host that only offers free hosting or free hosting that give you a whopping amount of bandwidth/disk space.

Never signup for a host that only offers free hosting? Why? Well, these kind of hosting usually only have one administrator and one server. In this scenario, some must-have server features such programming language or database support may be missing. Additionally, without monthly charges there are really only two incentives for the administrator to offer free hosting.

First, the admin wish to build a large user base so he/she could sell the hosting service quickly. To build a huge user base, administrators offer free hosting and often oversells (covered shortly). At sufficient level of membership built up from between weeks to months, the hosting service will exchange hands. Sometimes there will a lapse of service ranging from days to months as the new owner sets up. When the hosting does return, the new owner most likely will stop overselling and charge for webhosting. Those people who are attracted by free hosting and overselling will move on after these changes.

The other reason is just plain good will. I'm not saying there is anything wrong with the good will of the admin, I have found many admins taking hours a day to help people with their webhost. What I am questioning is without monetary incentive, how motivated is the admin to restore the server after it had been hacked or the database crashed. How motivated is the admin to make sure these disasters never happen again? Unfortunately, usually with only one admin, these disaster are more than common.

You should also avoid free hosting that offers a whopping amount of bandwidth/disk space, in other words as described earlier, overselling. The biggest problem with overselling is not that the offer may disappear soon, but the practice itself. As mentioned before, most free host only have one server and limited resources, yet they advertise as much as 5gig disk space/10gig monthly transfer (bandwidth). It would alright if the hosts limit the number of users to how much with how many 5gig accounts their server could take. Instead, these hosts assume that most users use less than the advertised 5gig/10gig. In a sense these hosts are selling more resource than they actually have, hence overselling. There will be serious problems when the host's demand exceed its resources. Stop signups won't solve problem, the users already signed up are expanding beyond their 'actual' limit but far from the whopping 5gig/10gig offered by the webhost. Overselling is the reason why some webhosts and their servers are often down or extremely slow.

Those are the reasons you should never signup for a host that only offers free hosting or free hosting that give you a whopping amount of bandwidth/disk space. People who uses these services usually have to switch hosts every few month. After reading that you might think that totally against free hosting, but that's not the case. For free webhosting, I recommend signup for a reliable paid hosting service that also offers free hosting. One example is awardspace it offers 200megabits of disk space. Honestly, in the beginning, that is more than enough. 50megabits for wordpress and a domain name, you are good to go with your blog. When you exceed the limit, you are doing very well and hopefully able to pay for webhosting.

Mirror at: Blogcrowds - Find The Right Web Host

Previously, I covered some aspects of domain names, now I am going go over the domain name of this blog.

As you probably remember with my bold paragraph, I emphasized a lot on bloggers to pick a domain name and stick to it...and here I am, hosting a blog on a blogspot subdomain...gasp, someone who doesn't practice what he preach! Well, it actually took some thoughts for me to decide on the domain name for this blog.

My intention for this blog is to write about various mumbo jumbo I will do or encounter in running/writing this blog. I don't think I'll ever move this blog to its own domain, even if I do, it will probably be integrated into my blog site blogcrowds.com under its own subdomain. Since an independent domain is unnecessary, I'm left with two subdomains blog.blogcrowds.com and something.blogspot.com. First, blog.blogcrowds.com is just weird. Furthermore if I am to publish this blog under my site, I will probably run WordPress because Blogger via FTP still lacks some crucial features. Despite some of its arguable shortcomings compared to WordPress, I am very adept in Blogger, especially coding and what really pushed me over to blogspot is yet again, my content. This blog will cover overall blogging, but sometimes focus a bit more on Blogger. Finally, I believe I can help Blogspot bloggers a lot more than WordPress bloggers. So to do as I preach, here I am hosted on a blogspot sub-domain.

After you choose the blogging platform that’s right for you, it time to decide your web address, URL or domain name of your blog. All three means the same thing, the http triple w etc etc referred to as domain name from now on. Your domain name is what the world knows your blog/website as. How else would visitors remember or get to your blog? All sorts of important information is attached to your domain name. For instance, your PageRank, links to your blog, bookmarks and so on. All these hopefully I will eventually cover in this blog, if you are unsure of what they are right now, it is suffice to say it takes a lot of hard work to improve your Page Rank, build up links and bookmarks etc. You definitely don't want to spend hours upon hours promoting your blog only to switch to a new domain names after some success and start all over again. I see many blogger do this, which is one of the main reason I emphasis bloggers to choose a domain name and stick with it. See here for the problem with switching domain names.

Usually a blog would either have a domain name or sub-domain name.

Domain Name
As mentioned before a domain name is http triple w thing(http://www...). For example, the domain name of my blog forum would be http://www.blogcrowds.com/. You can register an unclaimed domain name with ICANN through many domain registrars. Some domain names with certain ending are free, but they are not very popular. For more widely used domain extensions, .com .org .net, the price to register is relatively inexpensive ranging from $2-10 USD for an unclaimed domain name. Sometimes you may find deals or host package that will include a free domain name.

Sub-Domain Name
Like the name suggest, a sub-domain is a web address that is a level lower than a domain name. As an example, the web address of this blog http://blogcrowds.blogspot.com/. http://blogcrowds.blogspot.com/ is a subdomain of http://www.blogspot.com/. Sub-domains are identify by a period(.) separating the web address with no www(triple w) in the beginning. Sub-domains are often given with blog hosts or just free web hosts, so it maybe something similar to http://something.awardspace.com/.

Domains vs Sub-Domain
For obvious reasons, you should try to use a domain name rather than a sub-domain. A domain name give you much more control because technically, the subdomain belongs to the domain owner. For this reason, you cannot apply for certain web services with a subdomain. For example, if you wish to run certain ads, you should not have a subdomain. Some ad publisher programs online allow domains. Finally, a concise memorable domain name is much better than a long sub-domain name.

Many bloggers, especially alternatively hosted BlogSpot or TypePad bloggers will use sub-domains. Of these bloggers, some write about their personal life and their cats for friends and family while others are more ambitious and try to turn blogging into a full time job. Most of the bloggers who seek blogging as a career path usually start out with a subdomain with intention on moving to a domain after they have a steady number of visitors and traffic. The basis for this route of blogging is mainly financial, most bloggers want to earn enough money before seriously invest in blogging. Once they change their web address though, they will have to start all over promoting their blog and build traffic; however much money these bloggers made before, be it $10 or $100 a day, may be at risk. Redirecting traffic to the 'new' blog could be easy or hard depending on the content and reader loyalty. Nevertheless, easy or hard, when you have a steady readership, what you should do is write more quality content and not worrying about promoting the content yourself.

That, is the huge long reason why, if you ever want to have your own domain, you should buy it in the very beginning. In any case, a domain is not that expensive, well at least not in my currency. I sincerely hope everyone can get a domain name if they want to. If you can't purchase one, hopefully you can obtain one through webhosting packages, domain name give aways etc.

Choosing the right domain/subdomain
I won't dwell much on this topic, bloggers always do a good job on choosing domain names. Just choose something between 4-10 letters that is related to your blog and make it unique and memorable. There will be instances when the domain name you want is already taken by someone. Instead of paying an unreasonable whopping amount someone demand for it, just be creative. For example, del.cio.us or even my forum blogcrowds.com. At the time, my first pick domain name, blogcrowd.com was taken so I tacked on an 's' while still reflecting the same idea. I wouldn't add a 'z' though as many sites do because to me, that is kind of unprofessional.

One last thing when picking domain is the domain extension, the most popular being .com, .org, .net. There are many other domain extension such as .tv, .info, .tk etc. Selecting a domain extension is entirely a personal preference. Most people view the extensions .com, .org, .net equally and a category above all other extensions. Personally, there is no other domain extension other than .com with exception of 'location' extensions such as .co.uk (United Kingdom), .us (United States) or .ca (Canada). The reason for this personal blindness is that I don't think I'll ever run an organization .org and to me .net just seems like something people use when the domain name in .com is unavailable. You see, in my mind .net create a somewhat unprofessional image. You may think I'm quibbling over tiny matter of my own vanity and eccentricity, but heck, your domain directly reflects your blog/website.

To some it all up, pick a good domain name you like that will create a desirable image for your blog/website and stick with it!

For more reading at Wikipedia: Domain name, ICANN

Mirror at: Blogcrowds - Domain Names

It would be every blogger's dream to just start writing and never worry about anything else. While that would certainly be wonderful, most of the time we have to manage everything in running a blog. Fortunately, there are blogging service & blogging software/scripts/blogware out there that take the most tedious and technical out of running a blog. In fact, sometimes you might just be able to setup your blog with a few clicks and start writing (rest of the time is where blogcrowds comes in :D). Since blogging service/blogware can make your job incredibly easier, it is crucial to choose the one right for you.

Social Blogging

There are some distinction between different types of blogging, one of the being social blogging. That is if you are blogging about and sharing your personal life like your cat, your calendar etc with friends and family. As you can see, this is very close related to Social Networks and most major social networks have a blogging section. The largest social networks MySpace, Facebook dominate this side of blogging while MSN Space, Yahoo 360 also draw a crowd with their email, IM service etc. Signing up these services is very simple usually you just need an email address.

Blogging

For those who does not need as much social element, you can sign up for blogging service such as Blogger, Live Journal.

For even more control in blogging, you can host a blog on your own server with a blogging script/software. If Blogger is the most popular blogging services, than WordPress would be the most popular blogware. Other blogware includes Drupal, MovableType. While setuping WordPress can be a tad more complicated than signing up for Blogger, its not that much more complicated and the enhanced feature/control is certainly worth the few extra clicks.


Happy Blogging!

Mirror at: Blogcrowds - Blogware & CMS