Green Web Hosting: Going the extra mile

There are plenty of hosts out there claiming to be green only by buying renewable energy credits and not by taking the correct measures of decreases their power usage. Sure, renewable energy credits sound like a smart idea of “fixing” what you have caused, however, the consequences of what has been created have already been done.

We think of green web hosting in a different matter. We believe that we can provide a great service and also truly and literally reduce our environmental impact, not just by getting credits. Inside our offices and our datacenter, we are constantly looking for ways of reducing power usage (the biggest issues when working with a lot of computers and servers!)

To start everything, electricity is provided to both our datacenters and offices from Hydro-Quebec. Hydro-Québec is a government-owned corporation that generates, transmits and distributes electricity in the entire province of Québec. With sixty hydroelectric stations, Hydro-Québec is the largest electricity generator in Canada and one of the world’s largest hydroelectric generating companies.
What this means is that all the power that we utilize is renewable hydroelectric energy that causes almost no pollution when being generated. However, we don’t just stop there, just because we get power from a renewable source doesn’t mean we can do whatever we’d like with it.

Inside our offices, we don’t use desktops anymore. On every desk, there is a Apple MacBook Pro installed with a 24” LED Cinema Screen. The amount of power that a laptop uses compared to a regular desktop is much less as well as it gives the ability for our representatives to grab their workstation anywhere they can go.

Instead of running Ethernet inside the entire office, we’ve opted for a 802.11N wireless network, they can reach speeds of up to 108Mbps and that’s more than needed for an office (no, we don’t use wireless networks on our servers ;]) therefore, less wiring, less mess and less environmental impact. Our telephone system is entirely VoIP and connected to each workstation, so there is no need for phones, we have softphones installed on every Macbook Pro.

However, most of our power savings come from our datacenters. Our datacenters are extremely well cooled therefore after experimenting with servers, we found that there is no increase in server temperature when setting the fan setting to “Acoustic”. The acoustic setting lowers fan speeds (and there are a lot of fans in a server!). Also, we have opted to use Intel’s SpeedStep technology that underclocks the CPU’s frequency when it’s idle, when there is load, it will clock it back to default speed to process with no performance difference. We have also made some experiments and we have seen a big decrease in power when using Intel’s LV (low voltage) series of CPUs, they have the same exact power however run at a lower voltage.

One of the biggest power saving methods we have is virutalization, we are a certified and authorized Citrix XenServer partner and using their virutalization services has permitted us to consolidate multiple physical servers to one or two virtualized physical servers for all of our internal services.

All this is done to lower energy costs to provide you a much affordable service and decrease our environmental impact. We hope you enjoyed reading this article and if you have any suggestions on how we can decrease power in our daily operations, feel free to do so!

Will web page speed become a more important ranking factor?

Google’s Matt Cutts recently suggested that the speed of a web page may soon get more attention in Google’s ranking algorithm. It seems that Google focuses on fast websites to make the searching experience better.

What can you do to make your web pages faster?

Of course, you should start by choosing a reliable web host that has a good connection to the Internet. Your web server should be easy to reach and it shouldn’t have any down time.

In addition to choosing a fast web host, you can do the following to make your web pages faster:

* Combine external JavaScript code files into one file. The fewer files the server has to request, the faster your web pages will load.
* Compress your JavaScript code to make the JavaScript file smaller.
* Combine external CSS files into one file and compress your CSS files.
* If your web server supports it, enable gZip compression (your web host can do that for you).
* Use as few images as possible on your website and compress your images. Most graphic tools enable you to choose the compression rate when saving an image for the web.
* Put tracking codes and other JavaScript snippets at the end of your web pages.

Host your website with VEXXHOST web hosting to insure fast web page with optimum performance.

While fast loading pages are good for web searchers, using the page loading time in the ranking algorithm can cause problems for smaller businesses:

* Businesses will be forced to choose a fast (and probably expensive) web host if they want to be found in the search results.
* People with a low income or businesses from a country with slow Internet connections won’t be able to compete with companies that have more money.
* Big corporations that have a very good connection to the Internet will have an advantage.
* The big websites will get bigger and the small websites will get smaller.

Sign up with VEXXHOST for a fast reliable loading site yet with very affordable web hosting prices.

The role of the page loading time in Google’s ranking algorithm isn’t clear yet so the above points are speculation at this time.

Optimizing the loading time of your web pages is a good idea, no matter how large the effect of loading time on your website rankings will be. The faster your web pages load, the more visitors of your website will be able to see the contents of your pages.

Web surfers are impatient people. The average web surfer wants immediate results. For that reason, your website should be fast loading and it should also contain clearly arranged content that makes it easy to read your pages.

SEO Tips: For how many keywords should you optimize your web page?

Alright, you have just put the last minutes touches on the look of your new website, it’s been uploaded on to your favorite web host (vexxhost, obviously!). Now, you want some people to look at your web pages but don’t want to spend much. Introducing the world’s most efficient free, guaranteed, traffic: Search engines (such as Google, Bing – previously named Live – previously named MSN, Yahoo!).

If you get your website listed on any of those search engines, that’s an accomplishment, however, that’s just half the task because you won’t get any traffic on the 685th page. In order to get plenty real visitors that are looking specifically for your web page, you have got to get in the first pages on the search engine.

First of all, you have to do a research on what keywords you need to focus on optimizing your site on; this is very important, make sure the keyword you’re working with is not something that’s very vague. For example, if you try to be the #1 on Google on “blog”, well, good luck. The end result will be that you won’t get to #1 on keyword “blog” and you’ll have no traffic, if you focus on the keyword “car blog” instead, you have a much bigger chance into making it to the first page, while at the same time having very good traffic on your website.

Page 685 of “blog” with almost no traffic or Page 1-2 of “car blog” with decent traffic, your call.

Once you’ve picked your specific keywords that you want to focus on, what to do with them is very simple. The best way to gain placement and traffic on search engines is that to optimize each page of your website on a specific keyword.

Take for example that you are a web hosting company (coincidentally called vexxhost, too), then you would try to optimize one of your pages for the keyword affordable web hosting and another page for quality web hosting and so on. You’d also make sure that all the pages that have your plans/services are also optimized for the product itself, for example, Shared Web Hosting, Reseller Web Hosting, VPS Hosting, Dedicated Hosting, etc.

This will make it much easier to get a higher placement on search engines on those specific keywords, instead of those vague keywords that are very difficult to make it on the first page of, like web hosting.

Web hosting datacenter proximity, does it matter?

A lot of users who are looking for web hosting usually take the location into matter to add to the complicated equation when looking for a web hosting company however it is not always the most important factor. It’s not completely unimportant but it is important to some point, you would at least want to have the datacenter at least in the same continent.

Of course, you won’t get the best speeds off your web hosting company if you are located in North America, it wouldn’t be the smartest idea to get your web hosting somewhere in southern Asia as it will be very slow & will be crawling for you and most of your clients if they are located in North America.

However, if you do take web hosting in a place such as Montreal, QC which is 5 hours north of New York, NY – The speed will not be that much different if it was actually located in Montreal, QC or New York, NY because the difference between the two is close to nothing at the speeds that the internet runs at.

To conclude, the best idea is to get your web hosting services at a company close to you but not necessarily very close but not necessarily very far that your web site would be very slow.

Web Hosting for Dummies: What is Web Hosting?!

Web hosting is a pretty vague term because there are plenty of web hosting types out there, ranging from Shared Web Hosting up to Clustered Web Hosting, I will be explaining all of these in this article.

Shared Web Hosting

This probably is the most popular type of web hosting on the internet. Shared web hosting means you and other people share the same server and are hsoted on the same server. Usually, there is a control panel such as cPanel that helps you manage your email and other features such as MySQL. This is the most common type of web hosting purchased by people who run their own small blog or a small business.

Reseller Web Hosting

This type of web hosting is less popular compared to Shared Web Hosting. Reseller web hosting is a special type of account that comes with a special control panel which generally is WHM and the difference is that Reseller Web Hosting gives you the ability to give away shared web hosting. Typically, start up web hosting companies get Reseller web hosting so that they can offer Shared Web Hosting.

Virtual Private Servers

Virtual Private Servers are pretty common for people who have out grown the resources of Shared web hosting but do not want to pay yet the high prices of dedicated servers. Virtual Private Servers are virtual machines located on dedicated servers; it’s like dividing the server into small servers. However; the Virtual Private Servers are not shared, you have your own operating system, your own kernel. It’s a complete dedicated server environment.

Dedicated Servers

Dedicated servers are a bit less popular due to their high prices however they are usually used by very high traffic websites or web hosting companies who would like to have their own servers instead of working on Reseller Web Hosting. Usually the servers are leased with a specific bandwidth allotment and when purchasing, you usually choose the server’s specifications (RAM, HDD, CPU)

Colocation

Colocation is pretty close to Dedicated Servers; however, the colocation provider only does provide you with bandwidth, space & power for your server. You have to purchase your own server and send it to the colocation provider. The colocation provider has nothing to do with your server and generally colocation is not recommended unless it’s a local datacenter because of the high costs of repairs.

Clustered Hosting

This most probably is the least used web hosting solution as it comes at a high price and is for high usage sites. They usually have multiple servers and each server would get a specific role, one server could serve all the HTTP traffic and one would manage all the MySQL traffic. Usually; this is a custom solution and it is not sold as packages on the internet.

This article pretty much sums up all the types of web hosting out there, stick around for more articles about web hosting, make sure to subscribe to this blog!