Agreed, it’s a pain in more places than one when you have to migrate from one web host to the other, but when your needs grow and your current host fails to keep up, it’s best to do the dumping as soon as possible. But before you sever all ties, you must protect what’s yours and make sure your site is up and running without a hitch at your new host. Here’s a list of 13 things you must do before you dump your web host:

   1. It’s obvious, but has to be said. Find a new web host and make sure that it meets all your needs.

   2. Check if you have enough storage space, enough bandwidth to prevent crashes and down times, support for the operating system and applications that run on your server, support for scripts and an adequate number of email accounts and auto responders.

   3. The next thing to do is back up everything on your server to a secure location. You don’t want to be left holding an empty tub looking like a fool when you realize you’ve thrown out both the baby and the bathwater. Make sure you get all your email, databases and website files.

   4. Upload all your files and databases to the new server and make sure you retain all the file permissions as they were on your old one so that you don’t end up with scripting errors.

   5. Get your new web host to test the scripts, contact pages, and databases your website before you make the necessary DNS change.

   6. Before you update your DNS to point browsers to the new location of your site, you need to plan for the downtime that results from this procedure. DNS updates take up to 48 hours to spread to all DNS servers on the Internet.

   7. Let your customers and website visitors know of this planned upgrade. Make the move when your servers are expected to be the least busy.

   8. To reduce down time as much as possible, make DNS changes before you move the domain. Before you do this though, check to see if your mail server is running on the new host so that you don’t lose any email messages.

   9. If your domain name was registered using a third party domain name registration company, you need to check if your domain name is a part of your old hosting plan. If it is, you must separate the two, since moving your site to a new web host means that your domain name company remains the same while your web host changes.

   10. If your site is dynamic, DNS update delays can cause havoc if you’re not careful. Some customers may see your old site while others have access to the new one. To minimize such occurrences, close down your old site with an alert so that it becomes static while the move to the new one is being made. You could also use a synchronization tool to get changes made on the old site mirrored on the new one.

   11. Check for incompatibility issues between applications on your old server and your new one.

   12. If you have more than one domain to migrate, make sure you start the process with enough time to spare for the DNS update delays.

   13. Make sure all the visitors to your old site are being redirected to your new site before cancelling your current web host. It’s best to keep both sites up and running in parallel for at least two weeks before saying goodbye to your old hosts.

This web hosting blog post is contributed by Sarah Scrafford, who regularly writes on the topic of web design schools. She invites your questions, comments and freelancing job inquiries at her email address: sarah.scrafford25@gmail.com.

Choosing between a dedicated servers and shared hosting brings up a lot of questions. Does your site need a dedicated server or is shared web hosting good enough? How can I tell? Should I save money or get a powerful server now? How much control will I have with each option? Today I will be answering these questions and hopefully helping to make the choice easy.

When Is The Decision Is Easy?
The decision is easy when you don’t have a choice… If your site is getting tons of visitors, if your current shared host says it is using too many resources, if you are running a lot of dynamic php mysql sites that demand a lot of memory and cpu, or if you can’t afford downtime because you are doing marketing on your sites that can’t be down. Any of these reasons make the decision to go with a dedicated server easy and the real question then becomes what type of dedicated server.

By The Numbers…
You should fit into one of these hypothetical situations… Just keep in mind these are very ruff and you should give your hosting company stats so they can decide.

1. I run WordPress or PHP/MySQL site and get over 500 unique visitors a day. Get a dedicated server. Under that number of visitors and you are probably fine on shared web hosting.

2. I run a static site and get under 500 visitors a day. Shared hosting is fine. Go dedicated or VPS if it grows a lot. Static is a lot easier on the server.

A lot of shared hosts will be fine with bigger sites but its borderline in most cases. I also tend to error on the side of caution. I’ve seen plenty of intensive forums with 3,000 visitors a day running on shared hosting for months and then one day something flukes to cause a spike and suddenly they have 10 days to upgrade.

By The Money
Shared hosting is around $10 a month while a dedicated server is at least $70. It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to make this choice. If money is a factor go with shared hosting.

I Want Control
If you want complete control of your hosting environment go with a dedicated server. Shared hosting will limit what you can do, what you can tweak, and what you can install. With a dedicated server you can do anything you want!

I work for UK2 and over the last ten years have helped a lot of people choose between the dedicated servers we offer versus our shared web hosting. It really just boils down to the above issues.

Yahoo reports that Online retailer Amazon.com’s Web site went down for more than two hours in the middle of the day Friday.

Around 10 a.m. PDT, the Web site shut down, giving an error code to anyone visiting it, according to Keynote Systems Inc., a California-based company that measures Internet activity.

One digg.com user asks:

Amazon’s down!!! What’s going on? Asks one Digg.com user.

Error message is: Http/1.1 Service Unavailable. Major update? Technical difficulties? What’s the deal?

Maybe they didn’t pay their 6.95 for shared cPanel hosting?

So you built a Web site? All done? Amrit Ray posts his thoughts on how to promote a Web site.

How do I effectively promote my website, is a million dollar question. And yes, it is no exaggeration. People all over the world are making millions by effectively promoting their websites and reaching out to thousands of potential businesses that they otherwise had never thought possible.

The advent of technology and its easy accessibility has changed the way people buy or do business online. All this has ushered in a new era of e-commerce where people’s perception towards online businesses has changed dramatically and they are ready to accept the concept of online businesses and feel comfortable buying from someone they have never met or probably will never meet in person.

Now this has opened up a whole new world of opportunities for businesses worldwide. Everybody is vying for a share of the million dollar online market. The first step of course involves getting an attractive website done highlighting the products you want to sell. A good professional web designer would be able to help you out here both with web hosting and design. The next step involves promoting your website so that it reaches its target audience.

There is no sure shot way or magic pill that one can use to promote their website. And in fact, no one knows for sure what works and what does not. All major search engines have different criteria or algorithm to judge how relevant a website is to its audience. No one knows the exact factors that make one website feature over the other on certain keywords. However some factors that could increase your search engine visibility are back links and good content.

Back links are links from other websites leading back to your own website. The quality of the website linking back to your site is also very important. Back links from negative websites could harm your websites image, so be careful about that. Now the question is how do you get back links? The simple answer is, ask them for it. Though, link exchange in my opinion is not a very good idea. Search engines will know that you have mutually exchanged the links and the link backs are artificial. Submit your website to Directories. There are thousands of them out there. It takes time and patience. Leave comments on blogs with a link to your website. This is one point that should never be over done. There is a fine line between promoting and spamming and crossing the line could be disastrous. No one likes spammers and neither do search engines. Too many back links in a short period of time can also arouse suspicion, so continue at a steady pace until you see your ranking improve. Another good way of getting back links is posting in forums as most of them allow you to use your website address in your signature.

Now when people start to find your website online it is important that your website has relevant and interesting content so that your visitors stay online longer. The longer they stay the more chances they will buy.

These are a few small steps one can take to promote ones website effectively.

What Websites are Hosted on this IP?

This is one of the best reverse ip tools I have ever seen. Most reverse ip tools do not show you nearly all the sites hosted on a server and sometimes there users are even charged for a premium service to use the full tool. At first, I thought it was capable of actually displaying all domains hosted on a server. However, it doesn’t because I checked one of my servers and it got only 3 out of 7 domains on ip address. But, in other cases it seems to list a long list of domains hosted on a server. Over at digg.com, users are having fun poking around on government and scientology sites to see what domains are hosted.

Using the You Get Signal “Reverse IP Domain Check,” you can see all of the other sites hosted on the same web server as a particular domain name. Try it.

Here’s more from YouGetSignal.com… and story at Digg.

I saw this story at Web Host Magazine reporting on Web sites that naively call for user input, then fail to put strict checks on what that input may be, are susceptible to SQL injection attacks. Security is an oft overlooked issue for many of us who own and operate multiple sites. Now just might be a good time to check under the hood of your server for any potential exploits. Procrastinate on other things, not your site security!

read more | digg story | Information Week Story

Could this be a new hacker tool?

Do you remember the power mishap in July that brought down 365 Main, the San Francisco datacenter? A similar incident took place at Rackspace, a Dallas, Texas Web host which serves several local companies.

I doubt that I will ever get around to building my own datacenter, but if I do, it will not be close to a highway. Yep, the security implications that this event brings to the surface are disturbing.

Now what?

How about a new cPanel feature: Truck Redirect

Valleywag | Techcrunch | Digg

Domain Squatter Wants To Give His Domains To Google In Exchange For A Job

Creative minds write not a normal application, they will ensure that you will be attentive to them!

That’s the first line of an open letter posted on adwordsgoogle.de, docsgoogle.de and six other domain names. The sites’ owner and letter’s author, German IT guy Sebastian Klein, wants to give his domains to Google in exchange for a job.

What’s better than desperate pleas? Desperate pleas in hilariously broken English! We can only hope Klein is using some bad translation engine to create the English version of his letter. He might have done well to hire a proofreader.

read more at PickyDomains or Digg

Godaddy.com needs a redesign, some say. My personal pet peeve in my navigations through Godaddy is the feeling that I may have stumbled into another type of site, that is a niche of ill repute other than web hosting. Attractive women posing with “no thanks” at the bottom of page in small print. I’ll stop here.

Anyway, if you have used Godaddy domain registration service or hosting products, you may have noticed the difficulty in to the final destination in checkout process. I’ve noticed some problems too. Here’s a pretty detailed criticism of GoDaddy’s 16-step checkout process which may be “brainless marketing at its finest.” A great article on the sheer stupidity of the GoDaddy checkout process. They truly are the 16 gates of hell. The author asks, “Why would a company do this to its customers?”

What is your impression of the current Godaddy.com site design?

read more | digg

Test a Website’s Availability & Performance Around the World with this Free Tool

I was just catching up on my reading at Digg and found this little tool for monitoring website availability.

The next time your host tells you your Web site is up when you know its down use this free tool that tests the performance and availability of your site from 11 locations around the world. You may even be able to use it to get a refund from your host!

Will Google Buy GoDaddy?

There has been a bit of buzz about the possiblity of accredited registrar, Google (oh and search engine giant too), buying Godaddy. Could this be possible? Looks Like Google might be lining up to Buy GoDaddy Inc the worlds largest domain registrar, a move that some speculate might help Google remove spam from search engine results. GoDaddy has applied for several patents in the past months. GoDaddy may be trying to attract Google as a buyer.

Read about it here and Here | via digg

There is a lot of talk about server clustering these days. Not that I understand this or that it is actually easy for us all, but I thought this tutorial from the folks at IBM was interesting. It shows the thinking that goes into constructing an Apache Web server cluster that spans multiple physical or virtual Linux servers in 5 easy steps with Linux Virtual Server and Heartbeat v2.

read the full article at IBM or check discussion on Digg

Been here before, but here are a few important items to look for in a host from GreatResponder.com. Web hosting is a major part in the success of your online business. By choosing the right web hosting company for your web site, your success will be one step nearer.

After finishing the first stage of preparing your web site online which is designing the your website in a way that knock out all the competition, the second step in creating your online presence is to decide on the way of choosing the best web hosting company that will fit your needs.

This decision needs many different factors that can make your final decision a success. We will summarize here the most important factors that effect your decision and you must look for when choosing a web hosting company.

read more at GreatResponder.com or at Digg

The 100 Oldest Currently Registered .COM Domains



The list appears a bit dated (ha, ha, ha), but it is rather interesting to see who jumped on the web early. I was surprised to see domains this old. It won’t be long and we’ll have the attention of antique collectors.read more about this | digg.com story

Now why didn’t I think of this? Maybe I did. There’s a Digg like site for every niche these days. Why not web hosting? I haven’t fully checked this out this Digg-Link web host rating site, Hostigg, but it looks interesting. Like Digg - but hosting!

Have you ever wondered what the world’s longest domain name is? How long can a domain be? It’s limited. It seems that a domain can be no longer than 63 characters minus the top level domain suffix.

Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogochuchaf.org.uk

thelongestlistofthelongeststuffatthelongestdomainnameatlonglast.com

Since the limit is on what precedes to top level domain name, breaking the tie is a matter of who has the longest TLD. In this case it’s .org.uk.

Congratulations!

Someone also attempted to create the longest blogspot domain:

read more | digg story

I suppose most anyone would be able to notice the trend in the number of social media sites such as Digg coming online. Have you spent any time on these sites? And for the site builders out there, would you undertake building a social media site rather than a static site or blog based site?

With a very simple concept, Digg.com has changed the fundamental nature of the news media and how millions of people access information. Digg (and its fellow social media sites) democratized the media…Now, argue about whether this is good or bad, but it’s now a fact of life.

read more on the subject…

According to a Forbes article, Microsoft supposedly wants to aquire Yahoo for a very large amount of money (more digits than my calculator can compute). This would be the largest aquisition in IT history, right?

Software maker Microsoft Corp. asked search engine operator Yahoo Inc. to re-enter formal negotiations for an acquisition that could be worth $50 billion, the New York Post reported on Friday.

What would the result look like? The first thing that comes to mind is the name? Would it be called YahooSoft or MicroHoo? And of course, would the new company then be able to beat Google in search?

read more of at Forbes.com | Digg story

Many months ago I was tagged by Mitch of the Web Hosting Show to reveal 5 things you don’t know about me. Who am I? I am still trying to figure that one out, but I’ll be glad to share what I know. However, I will still try and preserve the mystique around the true identity of the Web Hosting Finds Guy Behind the Scenes. Don’t worry, I’m not famous, but hey, let’s create some suspense!

First, my apologies Mitch, for taking so long. I have actually had this in my WordPress draft for many months. This year has been insane and I have finally gotten a handle on my work load (now we’ll find out if the boss actually reads these posts).

For those of you who are unfamiliar with Mitch Keeler, I’ll give you a quick summary. Mitch is the guy who makes the potentially boring web hosting industry interesting, funny and entertaining. Nuff said.

Okay here goes…

If you guys below haven’t already done this and want to continue the 5 things meme, please do:

Brian at The Code Cave
Harvey at RagePank
Jeff at Phraction
Kokul at Kokul’s World
Dave at Earthling

All networks lead to the Roman datacenter. This might be interesting to any of you who watched the HBO Rome series which ended last night. Hilarious list of parallels between ancient rome and the modern-day web.

read more | digg story