What’s going on with web host advertising lately?

Earlier this year Clickfire News broke the story about the questionable Media Temple ad that appeared in the Web Host Industry Review. Some wondered whether it was degrading to women and why a mainstream web hosting company would risk their brand with such an ad. That one is still kind of hanging out there unresolved, at least in my mind.

Not long after this, I picked up my copy of PingZine and saw the above HostGator ad, I believe on the back cover. I thought it seemed, well, not your ordinary web hosting ad. It features the blue and yellow HostGator mascot next to a burning skyscraper that represents “Leave a Message Web Hosting.” The Gator is getting ready to take a bite out of it, hence the title of the ad:

“We eat up the competition, Run… Web Hosts Run”

Anyway, I scanned the pic so I could think about it and post my thoughts. I kind of forgot about it and the picture of the rather unusual HostGator ad has been sitting on my desktop since January.

Today I stumbled upon my friend and fellow web host blogger Dimitar’s blog and saw that he’d posted about the ad. He has a lot to say about the “cubbish” ad, so do check it out. But before you do, take a look at the pic above, ponder and post your thoughts. I’d like to know what the ad communicates to you. I’ll eventually post my thoughts in more detail as well.

One thing to note is that I am not showing this image to denigrate HostGator. Goodness knows these hosts get enough pummeling, deserved or not in the comments of our web host reviews here. I am not saying anything here about HostGator’s products, but their advertising. HostGator has been one of the few hosts to receive a perfect rating of 5/5 stars in our review of their shared hosting service not too long ago.

So tell me, what does this ad say to you?

What could be more stimulating than reading a web host review? How about a host vs. host comparison of two highly rated web hosts? This benefits webmasters who suffer the angst of having researched and narrowed their choices down to just two web hosts. If you’re in this difficult position and especially if you are considering HostGator, don’t flip a coin. Check out some host vs host comparisons:

• BlueHost vs HostGator
• HostGator vs DreamHost
• HostGator vs Lunarpages
• HostGator vs 1&1

Thanks to my favorite web hosting personality and friend, Mitch Keeler of Mitchelaneous.com and the Web Hosting Show for asking me some really interesting questions in this interview. This is my first interview ever and I enjoyed it so much that I’m thinking of asking some of you for interviews. That’s what blogging is all about, isn’t it? People. Here’s a sample, but I suggest spending some time exploring Mitch’s sites to get the full impact of who he is as well.

How did you get your start on the Web?

Emory: My path into the web began in the mid 1990’s. I was a fairly uninspired surfer and email user until I discovered online multiplayer gaming. Meeting others and competing with them in a virtual world fascinated me. I spent a lot of time gaming back then when I should have been reserving domains like games.com. Looking back, I guess you could say that playing multiplayer games was my first online social networking experience. But, instead of the polite introductions we have with today’s social networking sites, you broke the ice by joining a game and chasing people around, taunting and blowing each other up.

There are many hundreds of Half-Life 2 servers to choose from on any given night. This night, I joined WebViper’s Skul’Shock South server. Like a lot of PC gamers, WebViper creates his own custom maps. He even has his own mod of Half-Life 2 running on his server. A custom map maker creates his own environment, placing weapons, determining respawn points and inserting his own props to maximize gameplay. Custom map making can consume a great deal of time. I know because I made a few maps for Duke Nukem 3D a long, long time ago when I should have been doing things like, oh, say reserving domains such as business.com. But, that was a different stage of my life. In-game advertising just might be a sweet way that mappers and modders can get paid for all their hard work and creativity.

Unlike other servers, we don’t beg for money. It’s 100% free!

So, I join the game and begin fragging my opponents and what do I see on the billboard in front of me? Someone wants me to know that a company called GH1.com offers web hosting services. I took some of the screen shots below to share with you. In fact, I risked my virtual life to grab these images as several times I found myself respawning after curiously staring at these web hosting ads which would have been ignored had I seen them on an actual Web page. There is not much leisure time for sight seeing in Half-Life 2, if you know what I mean.

GH1 web hosting site — the website image in the bottom left corner does not appear in the actual game, I just superimposed it over the screen shot here so you can see what GH1.com looks like in a browser should you visit the site. Read more of this post »

Tired of web hosting reviews? Well, can I interest you in a free web hosting template then? I promise it is truly free and no pixels were harmed or code malformed during its creation.  This template is valid xhtml 1.0 and css with original photshop psd inside. It is commented and contains SEO elements. You can see from the screen cap that it is businessy but also kind of gothic for lack of a better term–just in time for Halloween.

The web hosting template is part of a batch of free website templates we decided to give away in the countdown to our 10 year anniversary. Customize, enjoy, save precious time and build yourself a cool web hosting site. Post your comments below por favor.

Thanks to Douglas Hanna for the HostingCon 2007 coverage…

HostingCon is all over, but I still have two pictures from the Future of Web Host Marketing session:

Read more of this post »

Clickfire HostingCon 2007 coverage by Douglas Hanna

A bit old, but still relevant:

11:15 AM - 12:00 PM - Session 102 - Room 327

Speaker: Derek Vaughan, Chief Marketing Officer, TechPad Agency
11:16 AM - session is full.
11:18 AM - introduction. TechPad Agency is an ad agency for web hosting companies.
11:22 - web hosting is a “what was” industry. Early adopters were technically savvy and the sites didn’t require much.
11:23 – Four “Megatrends”

Read more of this post »

Thanks to Douglas Hanna for the HostingCon 2007 coverage.

Here are some pictures from HostinCon day 2. If any of them are blurry, my apologies. It’s really tough to take good pictures when it’s dark in a big room.

Some of the Web Hosting Talk water bottles.

Read more of this post »

HostingCon 2007 coverage for Clickfire by Douglas Hanna

Session Title: SEO Techniques to Boost your Google Ranking
Session #105 | 8:30 - 9:15 AM | Room 327

Read more of this post »

Thanks to Douglas Hanna for the HostingCon 2007 coverage

Room 327 | Session #103 | 2:00 - 2:45 PM

Moderator: Isabel Wang, Principal, IsabelWang.com
Panelist: Sam Fleitman, Chief Operations Officer, SoftLayer Technologies, Inc.
Panelist: Doug Johnson, Director Marketing - Hosting, SWsoft
Panelist: Dallas Kashuba, Head Honcho, DreamHost

Read more of this post »

Douglas Hanna covers HostingCon 2007 for Clickfire.

Some pictures from this morning and the Mini Workshop: Metrics That Mean Money And How To Track Them session.

This is one of the screens around HostingCon providing updates. Read more of this post »

Greetings fellow web hosting freaks of all shapes, sizes, bandwidths and disk capacities. I have never been to a web hosting conference and could not attend HostingCon this year held on July 23-25 at the Navy Pier in Chicago. My understanding of what takes place at these conferences is simply that a bunch of  people who love web hosting get together and talk about web hosting. Simple enough description?

What’s the next best thing to being at HostingCon? I am excited that Douglas Hanna will be live blogging HostingCon 2007 for Clickfire this year! Douglas is armed with a Nikon D80 camera, a Palm Treo 700wx smart phone and a whole lot of knowledge and enthusiasm for the web hosting industry. Not only is Douglas going to physically be there, but he is speaking at one of the conference sessions. Douglas’ session will be on Wednesday July 25th at 4:30 and entitled: Customer Service as Your Competitive Advantage. Other hosting industry professionals will be speaking at sessions that I that I hope to hear about are:

• Ben Fisher and Neil Patel, Modern SEO/SEM Site Clinic
• Isabel Wang, Green Web Hosting…
• Jim Boykin, SEO Techniques…
• Derek Vaughan’s Future of Web Hosting
• Richard Jimmerson’s ARIN
• Troy Augustine, Future of Hosted Services
• Adam Eisner, Rethinking Domain Name Search
• Nicholas Mailer, Guinesss World Book Record…

Douglas has written several web hosting reviews and articles for Clickfire. He’s also written for quite a few well known web hosting sites. His blog is Service Untitled and he has a lot to say about the all important subject of customer service. He also interviews some well known execs from Dell, Best Buy, HP, Rackspace and elsewhere. I like to describe Douglas’ treatment of web hosts in his reviews here as “tough love.” I’d like to say thanks to Douglas and I hope you all enjoy the coverage.

Hello from Chicago!

As promised, over the next three days, I’ll be covering HostingCon 2007. Expect some live blogging from the sessions, pictures, and who knows what else.

This is Navy Pier, where the HostingCon 2007 conference will be held.

–Douglas Hanna

The web hosts reviewed at Clickfire this year have been sorely lacking in ratings. The highly rated BlueHost and HostGator passed moons ago. I kept wondering when we would see another winner. Things have changed. Lunarpages has so far eclipsed the other web hosts reviewed here in 2007. Why? They have one of the highest bandwidth offerings I have ever seen, several distinct features not offered by others and a respectable 24 hour customer support. Excerpt:

The Lunarpages Web Hosting company got its name from a Star Trek episode. I am not sure which episode or series, only that it involved images of a moon, planets and lunar material, if that helps narrow it down. After discovering this trivial fact, I set out on mission to go where no reviewer has gone before: determine whether Lunarpages’ hosting performance is stellar.

I did some probing of Lunarpages and found that the company got its start in the late 1990’s giving out free web hosting on the planet earth. Even when Lunarpages began charging for hosting, the competition was no where near what we see in the web hosting industry today where we see hosts piling up like tribbles. Over the years, Lunarpages began adding dedicated, VPS and Windows hosting to their shared offerings. Lunarpages determined to grow at a slow pace rather than risk crossing the neutral zone at warp speed. Timing and business acumen seem to have been critical factors in the company’s growth. Lunarpages host review is here.

Been assimilated? Either way, I want to hear about your experience with Lunarpages.

What would a world without web host reviews look like? Honestly… I don’t want to know! We all need a web host and we often seem hasty to make decisions as hosting consumers. Just give me the login so I can start uploading the files for my new site! Well, I’ve learned a lot about web hosting both from my past mistakes and from evaluating hosts here. These few things come to mind:

• How or rather where web hosts try to hide things
• Don’t take web hosts at their word–test what they say by initiating communication
• Listen to a variety of sources before forming an opinion about a host

It’s fascinating and at times entertaining to watch Douglas Hanna spring into action and pounce the daylights out of an over promising web host provider. Douglas’s background in customer service–the Achilles heel of web hosting–makes him a doubly dangerous reviewer. If there is a weakness, he’ll most likely find it.

Conversely, it is also a joy to find that rare host that goes the extra mile and delivers beyond their promise. I am perpetually looking for hosts like this. Must be the webmaster in me. The reality is that most hosts seem to fall somewhere in between the poor and outstanding.

Here are two fresh reviews from Douglas Hanna: midPhase and AN Hosting. Enjoy.

For those of you who haven’t seen an ad somewhere or experienced the company’s services, 1and1 is large domain, web hosting, and e-commerce provider. When 1and1.com stormed the U.S. back in 2003, I was one who signed up for one of the company’s free professional hosting package. Skeptical, I wrote this circa 2005/2006:

I signed up for a 1&1 (1and1.com) account a while back and have been evaluating their web hosting and domain registration service for over one year. A few observations so far are that the 1and1 web hosting speed and uptime appear good. Customer service is mediocre (that’s stretching it, really stretching it). The 1and1 web hosting control panel is slow and a seems underfeatured when compared with others like cPanel.

I am happy to report that I’ve noticed some nice improvements in speed, usability and backend processes in my basic 1and1 hosting account. I discussed some of the changes that are taking place at 1and1 with Joshua Sloan, Director of Online Marketing for 1and1 Internet Inc. and definitely agree with him that “1and1 has come a long way since first entering the U.S. market.” It’s always nice to see a company improving products and services. Someone at 1&1 is listening, I’d say!

I still have my original 1and1 hosting account and plan to keep it. Also, I am a big fan of the 1and1 domain registration service and plan to continue using it due discounted price $5.99 per year and free private registration.

Check out the 1&1 review. Have you tried 1&1 hosting ? What are your impressions?

I like this definition of inaccessability from the Wordweb dictionary:

The quality of not being unavailable when needed

Over the past week or two, I have noticed several of my favorite social sites I routinely visit not “not being unavailable when needed.” To put it plainly, I had difficulties accessing Digg, LinkedIn and TechCrunch for a brief time. I know what you’re thinking. It’s my fault. I should contact my ISP. However, the errors appear to be related to the sites themselves.  I am not going to try and analyze them and speculate as to the cause, but I am willing to bet they were all related to traffic spikes. It’s a reminder of how important web hosting and network connectivity is for all of us site owners.

I’ve been watching RealMetrics for a while and want to tell you what I’ve learned so far about this hosting metrics service. If you’re into scrutinizing web hosts like us or have done hosting research to find a home for your blog, you will have at some point read the uptime claims which are almost always reported by hosts in my experience as 99% or higher. Uptime is important for any prospective hosting customer for obvious reasons and may be dealt with in the service level agreement (SLA) of web hosts that want to set customer expectations and cover themselves if something goes wrong. Given Douglas Adams’ statement that “a day without sunshine is like night,” then a day without uptime would be a very dark night for both customer and host.

One way that web hosts instill confidence in their uptime performance is through server monitoring services like that offered by Alertra. These services are designed to detect and notify the host and customers about outages. Alertra provides a server status (okay, warning, critical) for things like ping, MySQL, http, dns, cpanel, etc.

RealMetrics seems to go beyond monitoring and tries to show you performance of each web host over time. The service ranks and graphs uptime, speed and technical support of web hosting companies by establishing actual accounts and running tests. It’s currently broken down by the categories shared, VPS, email and dedicated hosting. I won’t venture into the details of the methodology here, but it appears that RealMetrics is making a sincere attempt to discover and organize objective data about the hosts they monitor. I noticed that they are using multiple locations and time intervals in their measurements. The results are displayed in graphs so you can spot trends. Read more of this post »

“Thank you for your order from BlueHost.Com! We are excited to have you as our customer! In order to ensure your happiness we will make every effort to give you the best support available. ” –excerpt from the BlueHost welcome letter Sun, 8 May 2005

I discovered BlueHost about 6 months ago and have been wanting to share some thoughts about this rising web hosting company that claims to have industry leading tech support and award winning hosting packages (what’s a host without an award). The feature that most piqued my interest was the ability to host six domains on one BlueHost account ($6.95 Per Month). BlueHost does this via cPanel control panel software. I set up a few domains and made a few customer service calls to Bluehost.com and overall received positive responses. I’m beginning to reach the conclusion that it’s beneficial to catch a web host while they are in the early stages of high growth.

We’ve now published a comprehensive hands on review of BlueHost. I’d like to think of the review as not just a snapshot, but ongoing. So if you’ve had experiences with BlueHost, positive or negative, please feel free to express them here.

On another note, Matt Heaton President and CEO of BlueHost Inc. began a blog a few days ago for the purpose discussing the Genesis of BlueHost and to write about some of the issues affecting the hosting industry in general. Matt’s first post has over 300 comments as of today. Nice batch of comments for a few days, I’d say!

Douglas Hanna logs onto an Easy CGI account, pokes around the “control panel,” uploads scripts and even calls customer service to test the product. I’ve posted his analysis of Easy CGI after the tires have been thoroughly kicked.

Easy CGI is by most standards, a fairly large host. Founded in 1994 as an ISP (the hosting section came four years later), they’ve prided themselves on providing word class support and services. At first glance, Easy CGI’s web site isn’t bad - it’s easy to navigate, easy to get information, and all of the things you’d expect from a web site. While EasyCGI.com not visually stunning, it does work.