WebHostingBuzz Hosting, Marketing, Security and Technology

There is an interesting read over on Slashdot today, linking to an article at ITWorld which talks about the different rituals programmers use when they are “getting in the zone.”  Some things mentioned by the programmers include listening to certain types of music or going to movies the night before a rough day of work.

These superstitions are common throughout life, as they all give the mind a routine to go through when it needs to focus.

Read the rest of this entry »

This one is just too good to pass up:

Small Bat Hitches Ride on Shuttle Discovery

I guess if you want a free ride to the ISS, all you have to do is hang on tight!

There’s certainly no shortage of web hosting directory and review sites online today. Our estimates put the figure at over 1000, all pledging to help you find the ‘best’ host for your needs. Unfortunately however there is a setback. Hosting directories and review sites fall into 3 categories.

1. Honest review/directory sites who are owned by companies wishing to help the user
2. Review/directory sites owned by hosting companies, wishing to direct more traffic to themselves
3. Review/directory sites owned by affiliate markters, wishing to direct traffic to their highest paying affiliate links

No marks for guessing which two are the most popular.

Whilst we have no objections to sites being run as businesses with the goals of profitability, some sites take this to the extreme. Some directory/review sites REFUSE to give us an honest listing because we do not want to work with them. They deliberately give us a low ranking or bad reviews, simply because we want honesty. A perfect example is http://www.vistainter.com/reviews/W/webhostingbuzz.com/. Our rating on here isn’t great and after reading through every single review, I could only find a handful I could link back to actual clients of ours. As we do not advertise with them, we get false reviews and a bad rating…. which is hardly fair.

Without wanting to get too much into a legal loop hole, our motto of the story is look for real reviews when searching for a web host. We elected to setup our Facebook page where clients can post real reviews and you can verify their authenticity by checking out the Facebook account. There’s no way to forge these and we’re proud of the reviews we get on Facebook.

So the moral of the story? Take the directory sites with a pinch of salt and do real research before deciding. If the directory consists of advert after advert, avoid it. You’ll see at many directories, the top 10 lists of hosting company are the same — those that payout the highest affiliate payouts. These top lists do not reflect how good the hosting company is.

We recently announced our commitment to offer 24×7 support over the Christmas and New Year period. Many other companies close up shop for a day, some even longer (a couple of years ago, CI Host announced they were closing for an entire week!).

For us, it isn’t a hard decision to make. Work for us isn’t all that taxing and all of our team enjoy what we do. We also care our us as a business, our customers and our servers. So our team is more than happy to come in on Christmas day and do what we do best. No doubt we’ll have a mini Christmas party and the atmosphere will be lively and enjoyable!

Rumor has it there will also be a large New Years party… I will endeavour to post some pictures on our Facebook…

With the economy slowing as a result of inflation, it’s hard to say what the impact is on hosting. Web Hosting Unleashed interviewed four key executives at various hosting companies about what impact the

economy has made on their business, and the results varied.

Here’s what WebHostingBuzz COO and resident DJ Matt Russell had to say about the matter:

“With the global economy in tatters and many of the West facing a “credit crisis”, we’ve noticed a number of things:

1. We have far fewer inactive websites. Most websites are there for a purpose, whereas before we’d have many clients signing up just to test out some features.
2. Our international client base is growing fast. The weak dollar makes our plans very attractive to those outside of the U.S.
3. And of course, consumers are more price-savvy as they have less money to spend.

You can read more opinions on the matter at by reading Chris Lloyd’s article in Web Hosting Unleashed.

Here’s a question for our resellers, have you noticed any up or downtowns as a result of the economy?

I am not sure if most of you have got the taste buds for Indian food but I like spicy stuff therefore I can take not only Indian dishes but also make quite a few. There is one famous one which is made by initially frying up few onions and tomatoes with a bit of oil and then adding small pinches of like five to six different spices like salt, red chili powder, tumeric powder, green coriander (cilantro ) powder. We fry it for like five minutes or so on low heat and then add the eggs. Scramble them inside and then let it cook for about another 5 minutes or until the eggs are all done. Needless to say its very delicious and can be taken as a side or main dish. The whole purpose of the above recipe was not only to prove how good of a cook I am but also to point out to the recent brain storming session yours truly had with Matt about the improvement of our services. There are lots of changes coming over few days and during the course of the next two to three months which will include free domains for life, web space and bandwidth quota increases with additional stuff such as software tools for our resellers and other secret add-ons which I am not going to list at this time. I am uploading a *very* private highly professional document of our future plans. Luckily or unluckily it resembles the Indian hoshposh where one cannot figure out the ingredients or the resultant outcome. Well I wish you best of luck in figuring it out. One thing is for sure, you are bound to hear good news very soon about our new plans to take our services to the next level. Cya.

I was WHB’s sole representation at HostingCon 2006 and attended a hosting conference for the first time. It was, however, great fun and very productive – two key elements of any conference. As a result, both myself and the CEO will be in attendance at HostingCon 2007 to meet industry peers, suppliers, competitors and, hopefully, you.

HC2007 is in Chicago and we’d be very interested in meeting anyone with a greater interest in hosting at HostingCon. We’re friendly and would love the chance to meet some customers in person. We’ll be staying in the W hotel but if we can get a small group of customers together, we’ll take you all out for dinner and discuss both hosting and WHB, as well as anything that crosses our mind

If you’re in Chicago, going to HostingCon or want to meet us, then get in touch

Contents:

1. Introduction
2. January Uptime Figures
3. Dedicated Servers
4. Carbon Neutral Hosting
5. New Helpdesk Team
1. Introduction
Welcome to the February edition of the WebHostingBuzz Wire. You’ll find news
on all of our latest developments in this issue as well as news on some
exciting discounts that we’re offering.

2. Uptime Figures
We’re sure you know the score by now, uptime figures are posted on our blog.
HOWEVER, our blog has moved. It’s new home is at
http://www.webhostingbuzz.com/blog/, please make sure you visit
URL in future.

3. WebHosting Buzz Managed Dedicated Servers
Dedicated servers are here and they are now on our website. Fully managed by
our hard-working team, these servers offer masses of power backed by the
peace of mind that it’s through WebHostingBuzz. Full details can be found at
http://www.webhostingbuzz.com/website-hosting.shtml?host_dedicated-server

4. Carbon Neutral Hosting
Last month we mentioned our carbon neutral project and how we intend to
offset our carbon emissions produced by the generation of electricity to
power our servers. This is just a short update on our our project; we’re
still in negotiations with the ITF on how we can help offset our carbon
emissions and help the planet. We’ll add a section to our website about this
soon. Being green is important to us! For those interested in learning more,
please visit http://www.internationaltreefoundation.org/.

5. New Helpdesk Team
We’ve been expanding our helpdesk team as part of our ongoing effort to
provide the best support around. This has been facilitated through the
opening of a new office and the employment of new staff members. Our
recruitment process is still going so expect to see the team expand even
further over the coming weeks – all part of our commitment to providing you
a service that’s better than the rest at a stupidly low price. We’d be very
interested to hear what you think of the new and expanded support team so if
you have any feedback, please email it to management[at]webhostingbuzz.com.

Best Regards from all at WebHostingBuzz,

The WHB Team

My desk…. where it all happens.