We’ve found that lots of web hosts, small and large, are eager to get the word out whenever they have news. A while back, I did some reorganizing and created a special page for those who want to tell the world about their new web hosting feature, product or what their company has been up to lately. The new Web Hosting Finds Submit area also lets you submit to our directory of web hosting resources. Check out the rules before submitting (don’t worry, they are not burdensome) and remember to be sure and submit something that you think all your friends and fellow readers here at the orange dog will be interested to hear about!

Does Google Love the Orange Dog? The Super Bowl Ad Contest page for Web Hosting Finds showed up at number 2 in Google search results for the phrase “super bowl commercial contest.” The 2 minutes of ranking fame has descended below the fold now, but I loved coming up higher than Yahoo!, Search Engine Watch and Digg! for something, even if it’s not web hosting related.

Good morning everyone! No worries, I’m not really up this early in the morning. I have figured out how to set the time stamp in WordPress to schedule a story for publication–a sweet feature!

Today is January 4, Web Hosting Finds’ 6 month anniversary! Back when our Independance Day was declared, I never dreamed that we’d go this far so fast. I just checked the stats and there are 990 news stories published by various sources. I have been involved in lots of web site projects and this one has been one of the most fulfilling, rewarding and just plain fun. I have met several fellow web hosting nuts, discovered some good and bad hosts, and learned a bit about designing and marketing a new site in a ferociously competitive industry. This year, I plan to have lots of fun with the site and include you as well. Thanks for being a Web Hosting Finds’ visitor!

We seem to spend a lot of time talking about the latest shared hosting provider. There has been buzz lately around companies like BlueHost, DreamHost, and many other who have raised bandwidth and disk space offerings. Some have been criticized for “overselling.”

A while back, we took some time out to turn our attention to hosting by an ISP that you wouldn’t normally think of as a web host: Earthlink. A large company with an established brand name can do things that other smaller competitors cannot. One example is the ability to stock a team of 24 hour customer support staff. EarthLink won the coveted CNET Editors’ Choice Award for web hosting last year. Take a look at the review we whipped up on EarthLink Web Hosting. Have you tried the service? Even if you haven’t hosted with EarthLink, post your comments please.

I would like to say that I really appreciate everyone’s comments about the web hosting reviews and other content on Web Hosting Finds. I hope that we are accomplishing our goal of making this site a truly useful tool for visitors. There are many pros and cons when choosing a hosting provider and it can be a mind racking event to try and pick just one even from the few we have featured here.

There seems to be a lot of discussion and interest surrounding the BlueHost offering, which I have used myself and felt fairly satisfied with their offering. I can be biased toward BlueHost because of the cPanel control panel. Some think that the 1&1 Interface is difficult to navigate. I definitely like 1and1’s domain registration service, mainly because the pricing has remained one of the cheapest available. Then, there is the prospect of customer service pampering from EarthLink’s 24/7 technical support via email, live chat via the Web or 24 hour phone support.

To all visitors, I would like to say that when you make your hosting decision, I would be very interested to hear back from you about which host you have chosen and whether the service meets your expections. So, please post your experiences here. Thanks.

How would you feel if Eddie Van Halen, Brad Pitt, Jay Leno or–insert your favorite celebrity–called you up and said that you rock? Well, that’s sort of what happened this week when Mitch Keeler, the undisputed rockstar of web host podcasting let it be known that WebHostingFinds.com was the choice for the Web Hosting Show podcast number 70’s Site of the Week. The show’s theme covers the subject of blogging and Mitch seems to like WordPress a great deal–my favorite blogging software by far and the what we use here on this blog. If you have the slightest interest in web hosting or just want to hear a creative voice in the industry, I recommend giving this unique podcast a listen here.

Or, better yet, you can listen to the current show here I believe:

One of the most perplexing things about 1 and 1 web hosting is not they their control panel is not user friendly or that they separate everything into “packages” or that they are not ostensibly as “hip” as Godaddy, but how do you spell the name correctly? I’ve narrowed it down to the below from references on the company site and other references on the Internet. Which one of these is the correct way to refer to the company?

1. 1&1
2. 1 and 1
3. 1and1.com
4. 1&1 Internet Inc.
5. “2″

I’ve decided to go with 1 and 1 because I don’t like the “&” character (must be the SEO in me). At any rate, we’ve made some notes about  the company’s web hosting offering and here’s a taste:

The 1 and 1 services offered to the small and medium enterprise are impressive. Their strength is their excellent value for money, in offering a very large array of services and features with their web hosting products for an extremely low monthly charge.

The 1 and 1 homepage is attractive and is set up to give clear information about their products and services and what they offer. There is a graphic showing very clearly the extras to be had for each package, helping reveal what stands out. This is definitely a plus in deciding which package to choose. The company track record is also clearly stated with financial summaries, and is rock solid.

Most folks think of BellSouth in terms of telecommunications or ISP services and that probably will not change anytime soon.

The BellSouth web hosting web site is one of the least surprising of the hosting home pages. The offering contains every feature required to set up and run a fully functional web site. Since Bell South is a telecommunications behemoth, the customer can be assured that they will be served by a stable and robust web host. As expected, the support for the web hosting is offered 24 by 7.

 A few bullet features bullet points from BellSouth:

More of our look at BellSouth Web Hosting…

Source: http://hosting.bellsouth.net/

We’ve taken a brief-and I mean brief-look at Rackspace web hosting and put a few thoughts about their goals and what they have to offer. This is general stuff, a mini-review that may help you if you’re thinking of going the dedicated server route.

Rackspace is a provider focusing almost entirely on the market for 100% uptime for web hosting. If their hosted services go down for network of hardware reasons, they will refund a percentage of the monthly costs to the customer on a ‘per minute of downtime’ basis, capped at 100% of the monthly fee. This is certainly putting their money where their mouth is, and it generates a great deal of confidence in their service offering.

More about Rackspace web hosting…

Well, if you’re a site builder, you know that it’s never really done. Never-the-less, I’d like to say thanks to everyone who contributed to building Web Hosting Finds. Todd Bemis created the ubiquitous blood hound graphic of the dog that will be forever sniffing, tracking and pointing out the most palatable hosts. Tristan Bergman contributed to the content. The mysterious “Suzana” (last name withheld by request) whipped up some of the buttons and other graphics. Also, I’d like to thank Google, Yahoo and MSN in advance for sending us lots of visitors who will enjoy the fruits of everyone’s labor–bring em on guys…

On the back end of things, I and many others are deeply grateful for the work of Internet rock star Matt Mullenweg in developing the excellent WordPress blogging technology that powers the blog and news portions of the site. Also, the WordPress theme called Almost Spring, by Rebecca Wei is used here as well (although with the shakey CSS modifications, it looks more like Almost Fall).

Thanks also to Josh for the comparison idea. I could go on and mention others who made this possible (our web host, bosses, and the writers of the U.S. constitution for the free speech amendment, etc). But, in the interesting of preventing this post from sounding like an academy award ceremony speech, let’s stop here!

Several ideas for a web hosting logo were tossed around by the design folks. After a few mockups were created, it became apparent that the current logo looked the best and conveyed the Web Hosting Finds message the most accurately. Not that it’s going to change, but what do you think of the logo itself and more importantly what should the name of our beloved mascot dog be? I’ve got some ideas but want to turn them over in my head a while before I post them. Do post yours here. 

I seem to be in the minority, but I really like the Toolbar button functionality that Google introduced many months ago. It allows site builders to throw together a 16X16 favicon-like button which appears on the Google Toolbar itelf as you surf. Of course, it’s not just for aesthetics, the button can be designed (like this one) to display news feeds from a site after it’s updated. So, this means you will be aware the site has been updated without even having visited it. You can get the latest Web Hosting news by clicking below to install the button to your Internet Explorer or Firefox browser. Okay, enough. Just click something and see what happens. If you like it keep it. 

- Add the Web Hosting Finds button

The button that should appear on your toolbar looks like the above icon, which you may recognize as the tail of the Web Hosting Finds mascot, the bloodhound who ever sniffs out the most delectable hosts.

RSS feeds are a big part of the Web Hosting Finds site experience. As one who has tinkered with many a RSS aggregator, I was pleasantly surprised after testing the myEarthLink Reader. I confess that I was not expecting to like the product. After all, aren’t there a slew of RSS Readers like Google, Yahoo, Rojo, Bloglines, etc. that should be light years ahead? Actually, the idea behind getting and reading your news with a RSS feed reader is seems simple

Some positives I noted about the myEarthLink Reader:

• myEarthLink Reader is free
• There are no ads on the interface page
• myEarthLink Reader is very simple, straightforward and uncluttered
• It features an OPML import/export list - this means you can bring in your existing news link list or take it with you

It’s simple, but sweet and I suppose it should be called a mini guide. This is the start of our web hosting guide:

1. What is Web Hosting?
2. Difference in Registrar & Host
3. Types of Hosting
4. Getting a Web Site Online
5. Choosing a Web Host
6. Glossary

The goal? To demonstrate web hosting basics tp aid newcomer site builders and hosters discern among the many hosting provider offerings. If nothing else, this should give some good questions to ask before buying.

This is insanely trivial but I wanted to mention that the Web Hosting Finds site is listed on Google China. Now, if each person in living in China would please click in, we’d get about 1.3 billion visits! What was this English speaking webmaster and web hosting enthusiast doing surfing Google China? Ahh, too many late nights in front of the computer…

Do you see it here?
http://www.google.cn/search?hl=zh-CN&q=webhostingfinds

July 4th seems to be an appropriate and symbolic day to declare WebHostingFinds.com’s independance from the monarchy of betadom. All the major components for phase one of the site are hereby declared free. What are they?

• The Blog - If you’re reading this blog post, I think you’ll agree that the blog is done.
• News - Web hosting news that the editor deems worthy can now be posted.
• Web Hosting Directory - We’ll be adding more categories and tons more sites that you submit as “finds.” Here are the categories so far:

  Domain Name
  - DNS
  - Registrars
  - Whois
  Forums
  Hardware
  Hosting Directories
  Hosting Help
  Hosting Service Providers
  - Dedicated Server
  - Low Cost Web Hosting
  - Reseller
  - Shared Hosting
  - Unix and Linux
  - Windows Hosting
  News and Reviews
  Organizations
  Podcasts
  Software
  Web Hosting Blogs

What’s missing?

One the very coolest accomplishments was the ability to work in RSS feed submission. So, now you can submit your own web hosting find to the directory and if the site has an RSS feed, we may be able to display it along side the other site info. Here’s an example for Web Hosting Gear. There are no guarantees that we can display a given site’s feed but we’ll certainly try. There are one or two cases wherein we were unable to get the feed items to display for some sites.

• Review content - We added a few feature hosts reviews that we’ve been looking at over time. For starters, there is an extensive look at EarthLink Web Hosting and other ISP related products.

What about phase two?
I want to sit back and catch my breath, but under consideration is:

• User web hosting news submission
• Top Ten host list rated by editors and hosting community experts
• Articles and tutorials to help you build and host a web site

Please comment on this post to tell us what errors or glitches you see and what else you think is needed.

Happy Independence Day!

The news section is now functioning pretty much exactly as wanted. This is a real web hosting news engine to get the latest headlines out to hosting enthusiasts at light speed. Please report any bugs via comments in this post. Thanks.

 As this site is obviously under development, the last thing on anyone’s mind was getting the site indexed by the Google search engine. First you build the site, then it gets indexed by Google, then visitors arrive, right? At least that’s the way Mom always said it should work. So how does a brand new site suddenly appear in the Google index?

Here are a few guesses on how Google could have discovered and indexed this site so early without the site being submitted to Google or linked to by anyone.

• It was discovered by the Google Toolbar
• Found via a ping from the test post when the blog was installed
• Google spiders newly registered domains

So much for the mythical “Google sandbox.”

Well, we’re almost live–live in the sense that you can see a few pages, but not officially live yet. For anyone curious, here’s what we’ve accomplished so far in terms of domain, hosting and design:

• WebHostingFinds.com domain is reserved
• The DNS has been pointed to our nameservers
• Web hosting service has been acquired
• The logo has been perfected and appears in the header
• The HTML validates (well, most of it)
• Web Log is functioning (right before your eyes)
• Robots.txt file validates
• No funky errors are visible in Internet Explorer or Firefox–a major victory for any web designer

Now it’s time to remove the Latin text and put the real content ideas up!