Potatograss is a trademark belonging to AusBusiness Review Pty Ltd – an online company based in Perth, Western Australia.
Many of you would know that I no longer work for Fast Hit. After ten years of running the company I had to re-assess my goals and priorities, went back to uni to complete my MBA (at Curtin University) and currently look for a job, for a place to join another exciting team.
In the mean time, I thought I would do some web development work. I’ve got a lot of experience with Wordpress and running SEO/SEM campaigns. So, this is how Potatograss – web design Perth – was born. And here is our first commercial Wordpress site developed under this brand: Glass Pool Fencing Perth (The Glass Fence People).
So, if you need a site, or have too much to do – send some work my way.
There are thousands of web hosting companies on the internet offering a wide range of services for all types of small and large websites (see web hosting reviews). With the development of virtualization technology and reduction of hardware prices, companies are now offering dedicated and virtual private servers (VPS) hosting. Dedicated hosting offers more power and security but it is not always the best option to choose for hosting of your business website.
Shared Hosting
Shared hosting is the most common and the least expensive type of content hosting. It’s called “shared” because multiple websites and multiple database and email users share the same server hardware. Hosting technology is very well developed and allows single servers to be shared among many customers without breach of security of individual websites. Normally clients use a “control panel” that allows them to add domains, create websites and access their files from a browser.
Dedicated Hosting
Dedicated hosting is more expensive than shared, purely due to the fact that instead of hundreds of customers sharing the same server, the server is dedicated to one client. This client has full administrator access to the server and is normally responsible for server security maintenance, updates and server backups.
Shared is Better Than Dedicated
Unless there a specific need for a dedicated server hosting, shared accounts is a far better option for many websites. With shared hosting customers get more support, free server maintenance, server backups and server monitoring. Let me clarify this a little further:
With shared server, web hosting companies are responsible for the uptime of all websites hosted that each machine. And to maintain that, they normally perform the following maintenance tasks on shared servers:
Hardware monitoring, for example watching out for RAM failure, hard drives, etc.
Software monitoring – making sure that web server, database, email services continue to run.
Service monitoring – if web server becomes unresponsive, failed services are automatically restarted and service logs investigated in order to fix the problem and prevent it from happening in the future.
Powerful account management tools, including data backup and restoration features.
There are some companies that offer managed dedicated hosting, but additional services are usually included in the price that customers pay for their servers. Normally, at its best, dedicated servers only include hardware maintenance, and even that, customers need to know what failed before they can request a fix. So, with dedicated server customers need to organise the following service for an additional cost:
Hardware monitoring (how will you know if your ram is faulty or the whole server is overheating?)
Service monitoring. If your website goes down, who is responsible to login and bring the site back up?
Security maintenance. If the server is hacked, who will login to investigate the problem?
What about backups? How backups are preformed and what is the procedure to restore them on a new server?
As you can see, shared hosting is a better option for most of business and personal websites. Unless there is a specific need for power and security and the client has appropriate budget for security and backup maintenance.
The current shape of the Internet is heavily dependent on domain names for accessibility and online searches. And with the introduction of more and more new domain extensions, domains are here to stay. When buying a new domain it is important to understand the nature of the new website and select the online name appropriately. Here are a few suggestions that may be useful for beginners.
The Nature Of The Website
Ask yourself a few questions. What do you want to achieve by setting up a new website? What kind of website this is going to be? Is it for your existing company or a completely new venture? What is more important, being found by search engine or for the domain name easily remembered?
If you are setting up a website for an existing company, it is recommended that the domain name matches the business name as closely as possible. It is likely that customers will try to go to your-company-name .tld or similar URLs before they start searching. If your name is already taken, try to add “online” or “site” suffix to the end of the name. You will also find that search engines will favour websites that are closely relate to the business name on the contact page and next to the copyright sign in the footer of every page.
However, if you are registering a company or setting up a totally new online venture and will heavily relate on organic search engine traffic, it is suggested to register a domain name that contains keywords and key phrases that you think people will use when searching for your products. In this case longer domain names can actually be more beneficial than shorter ones as you are able to include whole words in it.
Geographical Location Of Target Audience
What, who and where is your target audience? Where do you expect your visitors to come from? Is your product or service region specific? It is critical to take into account the fact that the domain extension (e.g., .com or .com.au or co.uk etc) and location of the server that your site is hosted on, have significant effect on your online engine search results. For example, if your target audience is in Australia it is highly recommended to register a domain with an .au extension. In the same way, if your market spans across the world, you should not register a country specific domain name. There are some exception to this rule, however. Search engine webmaster tools allows website owners to specify the target market in their webmaster tools control panel. This feature, known as “geotargeting” however, is only available to top level generic domain extensions like .com or .net. In this case, if you use a generic extension and don’t specify your target market, the search results will default to the country where your server is hosted.
So, to sum it up:
Choose a country specific domain extension if you targets this particular country.
If using a generic extension, make sure your website in hosted by a hosting provider in your target country.
If targeting worldwide audience, use a generic tld, such as .com or .net.
Waiting Period For New Domains
Search engines prioritize their searches based on the website (and domain) age and the number of external back links. When setting up a new site, keep it easy on SEO and other online promotion activities. You may see some good results at the start, but if you overdo it, you’re likely to be banned or “sandboxed” by search engines for a few months. Though questionable, many website owners report that this is the case. As with any other business idea, online marketing and promoting new websites take a lot of commitment and perseverance. Stay focused, have a plan of attach and make sure you devise an appropriate strategy before you launch on your online venture journey.
Online Marketing Report: 45% of respondents said they would prefer to receive ads targeted to their interests.
Were they told that in order for Google (and other ad providers) to do that, they need to collect web surfing data from each individual people’s computers? Privacy issues? Ethics?
Anyway, this is the data.
“The report’s findings provide a clearer picture on user habits that need to be considered when developing a campaign, such as, actively avoiding advertisements that automatically play sound by turning their volume down and not watching videos more than five minutes in length.”
You can register a pty ltd company online. It’s amazing. The process only takes about 20 mins and you get share certificates, company constitution and the minutes of the meeting (the meeting that you had with your computer?).
Then, you can apply for ABN and TFN online too!
No more high accountant fees for something that you can so easily do online.
The current explosion in popularity of social networking is not new. It started long ago in the 1996 with the launch of Hotmail webmail service in the US. Hotmail made people independent from their ISP as they were able to send and receive email from any computer in the world, connected to the Internet. The service tapped into the people’s minds and we become more addicted to email, the internet.
If you ask anybody who is using social networking stuff like Facebook or Twitter, they will confirm that it is very addictive. Like drugs. Like addictive behaviour. Will it get to the point when it becomes a social problem and become illegal because of its effect on society? Something to think about.
The current generation who spends hours and hours in front of a computer or keying SMS into their mobiles – will they have skill to relate to people when they get old? Will they have “friends” “following them” when they turn 70 or 80? The current generation does not know how to wait – they want everything instantly. What is going to happen when they get old? We’ll have a lot of very grumpy people. We need to prepare to deal with this now. We’re worrying about Global Warming. I think we need to start worrying about Global addiction to the Internet.
This is a follow up on the previous post. I did a how-to article on how to hookup Confluence and JIRA installation on Amazon EC2 to Zoneedit.com dynamic DNS, in order to keep the same domain name after each time the server is rebooted.
how to hook up this Amazon EC2 server instance to dynDNS (Dynamic DNS) to allow me to keep the same URL without having to pay for that elastic IP address thing.
how to create batch files to start and stop amazon service just by double-clicking an icon on your desktop pc.
Next, a trip to shop for an iPhone and test JIRA and Confluence on iPhone.
After an exciting voting in front of thousands of people in a fully packed Moscow Olimpisky Indoor Arena and millions of TV viewers all over Europe, it was finally Alexander Rybak, a Belorussian boy from Norway who received the highest number of points from televoters and juries from the 42 countries. More – here.
I use GMail for stuff. GMail threads reply messages. It looks like the max number of replies (or messages in a thread) is 100 (see pic above). When the 101st reply arrived, GMail create a new thread, with the same Subject to continue the thread. Is it a feature or a bug. Or no one ever gets more than 100 replies so that it’s so unimportant?
