Blog Hosting

A few weeks ago I wrote about cloud computing and its effect on data centres, but investigating a new cloud host has caused me to wonder what effect hosting your files in multiple locations could have on search engines.

It’s a reasonably well-known fact that the geographical location of the files that make up your Website can have a big impact on how they are ranked within Google and other search engines. For example, a British site hosting in the UK is more likely to be found in a UK search than a British site hosting in Germany.

This is one of the arguments against budget hosting, which is invariably located overseas where the pound is stronger. If you’re just hosting a WordPress blog or two it may not make that much of a difference, but if you’re running a company that sells, promotes or simply relies on good search engine rankings, you must be hosting within your audience’s country of residence.

I’m currently looking at Mosso, RackSpace’s cloud computing venture. They provide application hosting in both Windows and Linux (the first I’ve seen) aswell as file hosting which you pay for by the gigabyte. But what concerns me is, if I were to move some of my sites onto the Cloud, with their servers being located potentially worldwide, search engines may become confused as to where my site is actually from.

If that doesn’t make sense, let me break it down. When you request a Web page, your computer follows a chain of computers to get to the one hosting that page. One computer tells yours where to find the next one in the chain until you get to your destination.

With standard hosting you have one (or maybe more) computers with the same files on them, but crucially in cases where you have multiple computers hosting the same content, they’re located quite close to each other (this is called load balancing, and it just stops one computer getting overloaded with requests).

Cloud computing adds another link near the end of the chain. That computer in the chain is in charge of telling your computer where to find the Web page you’re after, but because you’re hosting on lots of computers simultaneously (the Cloud, as it’s known), each time you request a page, you will probably get a different computer, which would be on the other side of the world compared to the last one.

So if you think in terms of search engine spiders (the applications that crawl the Web looking for content), a spider could hit your blog’s homepage and find a computer in New York, then go to the About Us page and find a computer in Aberdeen. So how does Google determine your site’s cultural locale?

The domain name and language of your site already play a key part in Google’s decision to rank it based on geography, however Google Webmaster Tools allows you to specify one or more locations for your site, so as hosting moves closer to the Cloud we could find these services become more and more valuable.

In conclusion then, if you’re considering a move to cloud hosting, remember to let Google know in what countries your site is most relevant, so you don’t end up with a drop in rankings.

With the Microsoft Juggernaut now loaded up with a new operating system called Azure, will this mean a mass take-up of the cloud computing ethos?

Since late 2005 Microsoft, with their Windows Live service set have attempted to temper Google’s ever-increasing grip over the Internet, but with an average-quality mail service, a second-rate MySpace and a third-class search engine they’ve struggled to compete.

Now it seems the corporation is flipping its business model whilst still sticking to what it does best: providing a platform, by joining Amazon in the race to be the king of the Cloud.

Cloud computing is a way of storing mass amounts of data (be it documents, media or applications) without being concerned as to where its exact physical location may be. Unlike shoving a server in a rack at a data centre where you have physical access to it, you instead entrust your information to the Cloud: a collection of secure, mirrored servers that you interact with remotely.

It’ll take a while yet before cloud computing overtakes collocation, but the average Web developer unable to invest in rack space, bandwidth and the like in order to power a new venture could find his or her answer in the cloud’s pay-as-you-go plan.

The market’s still burgeoning and so fragmented (Amazon will take care of your Linux hosting whereas Microsoft are offering .NET and SQL services) but as it begins to mature and competition drives down prices, it will very simply make working with the Web a whole lot easier.

One might argue that this fragmentation is a good thing though: at least, if two different companies are sticking to their own platform du-jour, the chances of ending up with a shadowy monopoly running everything we do online are no more.

And on that day, Satan will be skating to work.

As my Twitter followers are aware, I spent an hour hanging around Birmingham International Railway Station for a train back to New Street today, which was late due to “severe delays”.

We all know and accept that things go wrong, but I think many of us are now immune to the standard-issue apologies we receive when this happens. What’s infinitely more valuable than a blank apology is a helpful suggestion: “board this train and change at New Street and continue your journey from there”.

While I was waiting, and not knowing how long I would be sitting at the station café, I started thinking about how most Websites deal with unforeseen problems.

In his book The Big Red Fez, permission marketing guru Seth Godin looks at ways we as Website owners and developers can make our users’ lives easier in the unlikely event of a loss of cabin pressure.

Rather than a 404 (page not found) error or a search that yields no results, why not say sorry and then suggest some of the most popular pages on your site? If a page stops working, why not get a quick form together than emails your Webmaster, provide a direct email link or list a telephone number?

Railway stations are good because they try not to leave you feeling helpless, but Websites do that to users all the time. You could be on the verge of converting a visit into a sale when the link between your site and the payment system fails, and their order details, along with their confidence in you, is lost.

The microblogging site Twitter is as famous now for its all-too-frequent error messages as it is for its revolutionary offering, but interestingly enough someone has done the contingency work for them. Twiddict lets you cache your tweet on their server until Twitter is ready to receive it. Brilliant!

So with Twitter having bought Summize, surely the next best move would be to acquire Twiddict, re-brand it, keep it on another server and send all over-capacity or “something is technically wrong” messages its way.

That’s a quick example for a fairly frivolous site, but the same pattern can be adopted anywhere. Your error page doesn’t have to follow the same design pattern as your main site: after all, your visitors are probably only going to click the back button again, so if you have a few sites, why not upload some contingency forms to a cheap Linux host and redirect your errors to the relevant form?

Just extending a helping hand to your visitors when things aren’t going their way - no-one cares if things aren’t going your way, sorry! - can really make a difference and once in a while it’ll bring you a conversion you otherwise might have lost.

For the last 18 months or so I’ve been skipping from one host to another trying to find a company that didn’t cost the earth but also provided decent support. This is harder than you’d imagine.

My journey really started back in 2005 when I discovered GNX Online, a small firm who I think were based in India. As I was an ASP.NET programmer I plumped for their .NET hosting which was - and still is - extremely cheap. It used a Plesk control panel which is great, and they had both instant chat and a support ticket system.

In all fairness the web side of things was OK on the whole: now and again the permissions I’d setup in Plesk would be reset and I’d have to go in and reinstate them, but the real problem was with their email services. There really is nothing worse than knowing you should have received an email but having no evidence to suggest this: hosts love that because there’s no mail to dispute (you can argue about a late email, but a missing one? forget it).

To cut a long story short, one of my clients complained so I found another host: Dataflame. God they were great to begin with: cheap .NET hosting, free MySQL databases, instant chat, Plesk and a telephone number. I lapped it up, and ended up hosting about 8 sites with them.

I’ve recommended Dataflame in the past, and for small “set it and forget it” sites (minisites, static sites, email asset hosting) they’re great because you shouldn’t ever have to rely on their support...which is poor, to say the last. As I often do with hosts I started off very polite with lots of pleases, thank yous and complements, but I think the last online chat I had with one of their support guys (obviously stationed in an Indian call centre but given fake English names) ended with me calling him a bloody fool. Hardly offensive but not very professional either.

Not so long ago I decided to move this blog from wordpress.com to my own host, and thoroughly disillusioned with Dataflame and not willing to stump up the cash for a company like Fasthosts (who are great, but not cheap), and on a Twitter recommendation I signed up with Lunarpages, another budget host. And boy did they look budget! But the thing that attracted me was the distinct lack of an instant chat button and the welcome presence of a UK phone number. Could I be on to something here?

I’ve had two occasions to contact their support team and on both I’ve been really impressed. The first was down to my own ignorance but the second was a genuine problem that couldn’t be countered with their cPanel installation (the poor man’s Plesk). I got in touch and within an hour or so (on bank holiday Monday no less) the problem was resolved. Plus they were really polite and above all helpful.

I should stress though that this is not a .NET host but a PHP one (obviously the other hosts I’ve mentioned provide PHP but I was going for their .NET packages at the time), so I’m still stumped for a budget .NET host which leads me to wonder whether such a company exists. As I’ve mentioned I’m a big fan of Fasthosts, as I am of Titan Internet, but you’ve really got to reach into your pockets with those and they’re not great for getting a website out of the door quickly.