Thursday, February 25, 2010

Join us for Part 1 of the MySQL in the Cloud webinar series with Jimmy Guerrero and Mike Frank of the MySQL group at Sun Microsystems. In this presentation we will explore the benefits and some specifics related to deploying and managing MySQL in a “cloud” environment. We will discus several cloud computing platforms suitable for hosting MySQL, including the Joyent Public Cloud, Amazon EC2 and Windows Azure. Included will be a discussion of cloud enabling technologies like VMWare and Xen. If you are interested in learning how to leverage cloud computing with MySQL, this webinar is for you.

WHO:

• Jimmy Guerrero, Sr Product Marketing Manager – Sun Microsystems
• Mike Frank, Sr Product Marketing Manager – Sun Microsystems

WHAT:

MySQL in the Cloud – Part 1: Introduction to Deploying MySQL in the Cloud web presentation.

WHEN:

Thursday, February 25, 2010: 10:00 Pacific time (America)

The presentation will be approximately 45 minutes long followed by Q&A.

Reseller hosting is a shared server setup, meaning your accounts will be placed on the same server as others from other customers. This is probably the number one thing to watch out for with reseller hosting. Since you have no control over the other customers, or their customers, you have to be able to trust that the provider is setting things up properly, securely and and monitoring/maintaining the server and network properly.  Things could go wrong if not done properly… insecure setups can lead to others getting to your data, a spammer could get onto the server leading to blacklisting, or an account could suck up all the bandwidth or cpu resources. These are just a couple examples of what could go wrong. Since you’re not in control of the server, you need to be able to rely on the provider to watch for it and fix it quickly should it happen.

Leaving the server administration is also one of the biggest advantages as well. This is especially true for new hosts who probably don’t have the experience or manpower to administer servers on their own. It is also considerably cheaper to go the reseller route. A decent reseller account can be had complete with control panel, possibly some billing software to handle collections from your customers, installation script, etc. for $10 to $15 per month.

When looking for a reseller account, be aware of the disk space and traffic (often incorrectly call bandwidth) that are included. Some reseller accounts can get so large in these stats that they rival small VPS accounts. When choosing you want to selection on that meets your needs and provides some growth room. You also want to make sure that the provider will upgrade the account without having to migrate and without penalty.

A nice feature, if you can get it, is a dedicated ip address or two for your accounts. This does a couple things for you. One it limits the impact if a spammer gets onto the server. Blacklists usually are at the single ip level unless it’s so rampant on a network that they block the whole network. It also does something else… The larger hosts probably have multiple physical servers.  By having your accounts to a single ip address, migrating the account, say for load balancing the servers, becomes significantly easier WITHOUT changing ip address. If your account shares ips with other accounts, that option is out the window…

If you’re serious about growing your business, a reseller account is a good way to get started with minimal cost.  But be sure to check with the company that they will support you should you need to move up to a vps or dedicated servers. That dedicated ip address can help there too. Once the vps is up and running they can copy the data over and move the ip to the new server. We’re talking minutes of downtime… a lot easier than if you had to backup the accounts, download the backup, upload to the new server and then change dns, and potentially wait hours for dns cache to die.

If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment here to ask or email me at rob -at- lagniappeinternet.com

Online education has been steadily growing. But you need to watch out… Many of the names you’ve heard are for profits (nothing wrong with that in itself), that worry more about selling courses. There’s the problem… a typical large name accredited (we’ll talk more about that in a minute) online school that’s not part of a state university system charges upwards of $40 to $50 thousand dollars for a undergrad degree.  Let’s take the University of Phoenix, most courses run 3 credits $ 530 per credit hour plus a $85 fee for online ‘resources’, or $1675 per course. To satisfy the 120 credit hour requirement (124 in Kansas), that means 40 course… or a grand total $67,000 assuming you came into it with no credits… That’s a chunk of change.  The value of a degree is substantial, but that’s a big hole to dig out of from the start.

And there’s the time requirements… Usually you can’t take more than 16 hours or so at a time. That will take years to complete the degree! And if you’re working at the same time, it’s even slower.

But there’s another way… the WGU way. I’m currently enrolled in their IT – Software Development program. I started last October 1st. To date I have completed 41 comptency units (their equivalent to the credit). I’m working on another 17 before the end of my term at the end of February. If you were paying attention, you noticed that’s a long term – 6 months. WGU is a continuous enrollment school. Terms start every month on the 1st and go for 6 months. Since you’re working on your courses individually with the help of others in the course as well as course mentors, you get to set the pace. WGU requires you take 16 credits and pass 12 of those every semester to maintain “Satisfactory Academic Progress” or “SAP”. You have to also pass 2/3rd of everything you take… Fortunately, you can add courses as you need. So you start out with the required 16 CU’s at the begining of the term (which figuring in breaks and such as almost twice as long as a normal semester), then as you complete courses you add others in.

Courses are divided up into ‘Objective’ and ‘Performance’  Assessments. For objective assessments, you will take a final exam after completing the course work (or are able to show you are ready). You will go to a testing facility  available at Prometric, most universities, and many libraries  for proctoring.  You will be given a certain amount of time to complete the exam and take it online under the supervision of the proctor. If you’ve ever taken an industry certification exam, that’s what these are like. Actually many of the IT courses use industry certifications as their assessment from known names like Microsoft, CompTIA, CIW, Sun, etc.  A quick word about industry certs at WGU… WGU has decided to place a limit of 4 attempts on an industry cert (1st 2 tries are included in tuition:) !) afterwards, you will need to choose another degree program. I support this move. It prevents people from going over and over until they pass, in something they apparently are prepared for…  but some others were upset about it.

Performance evaluations are another matter… it’s all about the work. You will be given a set of tasks to complete. For example, you may be asked to complete a slide presentation, write a paper, and perform an experiment complete with journals, etc. and submit that to graders. They will use a rubric to evaluate your work and tell you if any revisions need to occur. There are 2 types of tasks, the ‘required’ tasks are more like course-work and can be submitted multiple times. You’ll do this as you go through the course text. Then after you’ve completed those, the final task(s) will be opened for you. These are the what you’re actually evaluated on… You can only revise them once. So you have to pay attention to what you’re doing. Afterwards, a different task is used for the course.

One of the things you need to pay attention to in looking for online college degrees is the school’s accreditation. There are too many ‘degree mills’ out there, and you won’t be well served by them. Others, like the big names, do have accreditation from the DECT – a nationally recognized accreditation authority. There are also many other accreditation bodies, many of whom have no authority to do so see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unrecognized_accreditation_associations_of_higher_learning  … The “gold standard” though is “Regional accreditation” (the same you’re local state university uses) see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_accreditation. WGU is DETC AND regionally accredited through the Northwest Commission. Additionally for teachers and nurses, WGU holds NCATE and CCNE respectively. Actually WGU is the first and only exclusively online university to hold NCATE accreditation. The CCNE accreditation helped me getting approved for tuition reimbursement actually… Just be careful when choosing a school, get DETC at a minimum and preferably regional.

Lastly, let’s talk about cost… WGU has a fixed cost of just $2890 per 6 month term, plus a few fees for library, etc. So figure about $3000 a semester – it varies a little with lab fees, etc. To use me as an example, I’ve already completed 41 CUs, so my cost per CU (credit) is already down to ($3000/41)  under $75. And if I complete the others in time, it will drop to just over $50/credit. I’ve found no other university that even comes close…  Not to mention my goal is to go from zero credits (it’s all too old to count anymore really) to done in a year to a year and half. So my total cost will be $6 to 9 thousand, instead of $50 to $60 thousand! And I’ll have TEN industry certifications to boot!

If you decide you want to apply, email me at rob -at- lagniappeinternet.com and I can get you the application fee waived… Disclosure: I’d also get a Amazon credit for $50 or so (I forget the amount) as well towards books… BTW, most books are included or eBooks. If you want printed copies you have to buy them, and for a couple (2 I think in my case) you will have to buy books period. Those are not included in tuition, but that’s pretty normal.

eBay is a great source for most anything… especially for computer releated items. For example, we’re often looking for a particular RAID controller, type of ECC memory, or other part that you won’t find down at your local computer shop. BUT eBay’s search function leaves something to be desired, at least until you start learning some of the nuances.

For example, we’re always on the lookout for deals for certain series of Xeon processors we use. For example one of the servers will use several of the X3000 series quad cores. eBay has a nice feature that you can save searches and it will email you the results daily. But the search itself takes some practice. In  our example we’re looking for a Xeon X3210, 3320, 3350 or 3360 processor. But if you type “xeon x3210 x3320 x3350 x3360″ into the search box, ebay will politely tell you “Your search returned 0 items.”  But we know ebay has some of these on there, so how can that be. It’s the Boolean logic that eBay uses. It is searching for an item that has ALL of those terms in it, and there aren’t any.  What we really want is “xeon” AND ( “X3210″ OR “X3320″ OR “X3350″ OR “X3360″) and may want to narrow down which categories we search under, but we’d be pretty close to right on with just that alone. So how do we tell ebay to use “or” logic?   We put a “,” between them, but we also need to separate them out from the term “xeon” we do that with parentheses.  The resulting search string becomes “xeon (x3210, x3320, x3350, x3360)”  which as I write this results in 15 auction and 37 store items, of which all but a dozen of which are what we’re looking for. The others happen to be IBM X3350 servers which use xeon processors (but not the xeons we are looking for).

To get eBay to email you, use the “save this search” feature near the top. Sign in if needed, and tell it how often and logn to email you.

In case the power or connectivity is turned off, your servers will become unavailable and unless you have planned for disaster recovery with a secondary backup data center your business will most likely be damaged. It obviously depends on what kind of business you are in and what the servers in colocation are used for, but on the short term clients could be unable to find you and do business with you while in the long term it could damage your reputation due to your site(s) and/or services being unavailable.

Furthermore if the colocation provider is filing for bankruptcy and all the assets are being held back in the bankruptcy estate, you might be unable to get your servers and more importantly data until the attorney handling the case has an overview of the colocation business. He obviously needs to validate that the servers are actually owned by you and not an asset owned by the bankruptcy estate, usable for improving the financial situation for the creditors. In such a situation you could risk having to purchase new equipment and set up from a backup at a new colocation data center if the process takes too long.

Therefore make sure to raise the topic of financial stability with the colocation data center before signing a contract, to see how they respond to it and how they feel about their own financial situation and if they have taken any measures to ensure that things keep on running and that you can get your servers and data in case problems should occur.

Going with a large provider with a good reputation and perhaps even several data centers is therefore often worth considering. Checking for business and data center certifications is also a smart thing to do, as it often is a good signal if the data center is SAS 70 audited, tier 4 certified, PCI compliant or has taken other measures of that kind. Make sure to google the provider and check industry forums and blogs to see if there are any bad reviews, outages or other negative things about the company you are considering using.

Colocation providers can easily be found via tools such as Data Center Map, where you can search for colocation data centers.

The most important thing that comes to my mind and you should also know about it is it’s trustworthiness and safety are really well documented when having a talk about Linux Dedicated Servers. They are well known to keep running for months, giving consistent performance and you need to forget only one thing, that is maintenance.

When you are thinking about normal servers that run on normally used servers or even thinking about coded software, one thing you should always keep in my mind is that, Linux always performs much better and longer than other and this is the most important think you need to think about when it comes on something that will stand the test of time. For people who are working from home and using a in house server, crash occasionally and need to reboot is not a big deal and what to keep in mind is that when it comes on talking about some one who is running a business online, this can be terrible and they may loose thousands of dollars on a single day when there website goes down.

They occasionally route the problem by having a ghost server running an exact duplicate of website on the same server but with different hardware, and what will happen if the main web host and all its channels are affected, and if your ghost server is build on a same hardware and what if there could be a universal crash and loose all the data that is inside together with any transactions or any type of financial information as well and this is really very important. So you need to have a server that are reliable, provide some security to the customers on who are running a e-commerce site.

These are all the reasons you should think about “Why you should use Linux Dedicated Server?” One more thing that you should know is that Linux Server is able to communicate with a host of operating systems pretty easily and efficiently, and this a good when you need to connect the server with other platforms to configure a network where business can really operate.

If you’re struggling in the rankings and are losing business as a result, you may well be tempted over towards the dark side. But be warned, Google won’t often be fooled, so quick fixes to fundamental problems will often only exacerbate the situation. But if you’re not familiar with black hat techniques there’s a chance you could be falling into this trap by accident, so here are a few of the main pitfalls to avoid.

Keyword Stuffing

A cardinal sin for any copywriter or website. Keyword stuffing was all the rage in the not too distant past; in fact even up until a few years ago it was still reasonably common practice, despite search engines clamping down on it severely. Today though it is very much frowned upon. Copy that has been filled with keywords is difficult for visitors to read and more often than not the search engines will punish your site accordingly.

You should be safe with a keyword density of around 5%, but don’t become obsessed by their frequency. As long as they are included in the onsite content and behind the scenes HTML, you should have enough to gain the search engines’ attention.

Hidden Text

If you don’t want to ruin the visible content by filling it with keywords you might be tempted to sneak in some invisible text to fulfil the same person. Don’t! This is sometimes referred to as white text, or hidden text, but essentially it refers to any copy present on a page but can’t be read.

By having the font colour the same as the background, the copy, for all intents and purposes, is invisible. This is a major black hat faux pas and will almost certainly be punished with the sophisticated site crawlers that search engines now employ. Whilst this too was fairly common in the past, don’t be tempted to bring it into the present. It’s not new and it certainly isn’t clever.

Doorway Pages

In an effort to gain additional traffic to your website you might also consider setting up a secondary, often highly simplistic, site with the sole intention of pushing visitors to your primary site. Because this additional platform has no obvious affiliation with your original site, you may choose to optimise it using more risque black hat techniques, targeting certain phrases that will gain traffic.

This is certainly an underhanded way of gaining visitors, one which most people landing on your site may not be too happy about. Additionally if search engines uncover that you’re hosting both, you may well suffer a dip in rankings or expulsion from their listings entirely.

Cloaking

As with doorway pages, cloaking is a way of trying to fool the search engine about some of the content on your website. This is pretty much impossible to do ‘by accident’ so it is often held in very low regard, despite the apparent ingenuity involved. Essentially a cloaking site will be able to identify when a search engine spider is crawling a site and provide an alternative version of the site.

Admittedly this is often done to cover up something illicit, so it is unlikely that you’d ever even consider it. But cloaking can also be used for doorway pages, and is fairly regularly, to ensure that only the content you want to be indexed is ever seen by search engine crawlers. But as this is a clear violation of the rules set out by the leading search engines, the risks far outweigh any potential gains.

Implement Suggested Changes

Finally, if you’ve gained some SEO advice, make sure you implement the changes. It sounds simple, but search engine marketing professionals have experience in helping sites move up the rankings. It can be frustrating when this doesn’t happen immediately, but keep the faith and keep making those changes. If nothing else, it will at least give you reason enough to go and seek other SEO advice or implement changes of your own.

Depending on the current state of your site, SEO can take some time and does require a modicum of patience. Even if you hire a professional SEO agency, they will need to analyse your site, work out where it’s failing, highlight key terms and then go about implementing it all. Search engines won’t index everything immediately and as a result, your rankings may only fractionally fluctuate. But don’t lose patience, get the advice you need and certainly don’t try any of the black hat techniques explained above, it really isn’t worth the risk.

Stephen Logan works as a Copywriter for leading Hampshire-based SEO Agency Impact Media. They offer a full range of search marketing solutions including expert SEO services.

“The Long and Short of Assessing Cloud Computing Providers”
http://www.ctoedge.com/content/long-and-short-assessing-cloud-computing-providers

Unlike the far broader techniques of general search engine optimisation, local search allows you to filter out much of the wider competition and appear for pre-defined areas. I say pre-defined, because it is entirely up to you how you choose to optimise your website and how wide your want the sphere of influence should be.

Geo tagging is one of the newest and most innovative ways for modern websites to optimise for localised search. Rather than leaving a visible imprint on the site itself, geo tagging allows you to implement global positioning coordinates within your HTML code. So when a search engine spider crawls your pages, it will know exactly where it is that you’re based and will help you rank higher in searches specific to your area.

Better still you can actually adjust these coordinates across the various pages of your website. Therefore if you’ve got offices at different locations throughout the country, you can adapt the pages that are specific to them to reflect this. Simple, but extremely clever.

To get started though, you might just want to tweak the content on your website. This is easy enough to do, simply add phrases like ‘London-based’ or ‘located in Central London’, will give your pages a clear locality and will influence search engines to feature your business for searches in that area. Don’t interrupt the flow of your copy though, only integrate terms where it will either blend in or compliment existing text.

A simple way of getting your location found by the search engine spiders is simply by including your address on each page. Contact details help customers find you quickly and easily, so will be a major benefit to the usability of your site, as well as optimising for local search.

Going down a slightly more traditional route, one that has been used for offline businesses for years, you could sign yourself up to Internet directories. This will help you gain additional keyword strength, provide a vital link back to the site and, yes, show search engines where you’re located.

So if you’ve invested time in optimising your site for local search, just what are the benefits? Well, first and foremost it could well provide you with a new stream of traffic to the site. But more importantly than this, the visitors will be looking for the services you provide in your area, therefore if you are ranking well for the associated key term, you could well find yourself improving your customer conversion rate.

With the Internet being such a competitive marketplace it is essential that any online business performs exhaustive SEO; local search is one element of this. Whilst SEO will help you rank for certain key words or phrases, local search will narrow this down further, integrating the SEO keyword work but for a specific location.

By narrowing your focus, you also eliminate much of the competition. Whilst you may have dozens, even hundreds of direct competitors, you can bi-pass most of these for those searching in your location. With consumers looking for local services more and more, you could be well placed to capitalise on this trend by optimising for local search.

Stephen Logan works as a Copywriter for leading Hampshire-based SEO Agency Impact Media. They offer a full range of search marketing solutions including expert Local Search services.