Rice Blogger

I think there is a lot of question regarding webhosting in forums because people are not sure if they should commit one year with one webhosting, and some people would end up purchasing a cheap webhosting which does not fit into their needs. Most webhosting company provide money back guarantee and some have monthly plan, try them out before your decide to go with the particuliar company.

Local or Overseas Server Location
This is one of the priority I search for a webshosting company although some company have servers in both local datacenters and US datacenters. My rule of thumb is that if you are serving a local visitor, go ahead with Local services because you will get phone support and it is usually faster to load local website. When you are serving a visitor from the whole world, I would suggest that the server located in United States or Europe because you could target more International reader who reads in English.

Webhosting Company Review
Although some of the reviews on the Internet are sometimes bias and maybe submited by the webhosting company themselves or their competitors, there are some real ones. I tend to search for keyword like “Dreamhost Review” on google or “Hosted by Dreamhost” (you could subsitute Dreamhost with other hosting company). I use the keyword Hosted by Company because I would like to know the speed of the website is loading as I do not want to take hours to upload my website to the webhosting company.

Another best place to look for review is from forums, as some of them will provide pretty honest reply and if you are lucky, you could get some promotional offer for the particuliar webhosting you need.

Price
Price does reflects on the services you get, therefore it is best to go for what you can afford. Share hosting level it could vary from USD10.00/year to USD15.99/month or more. Personally, I experience arguing with someone about price but I would recommend paying a little more because Webhosting is like a shop/office rental for your business, and how much do you generally pay for a shop rental? 100 times more?

Type of Webhosting
You could choose from shared hosting, VPS hosting and Dedicated Server.

• Shared Hosting – The cheapest, and it is suitable for bloggers, personal website, and small to medium business website. You could generally start your e-commerce or forum using shared hosting, and when demand for your server resources increase, you can do an upgrade. Generally you share them with 100 to 500 different users depending on the hosting policy.
• VPS Hosting – Virtual Private Server is basically splitting a server with a fix amount of users, therefore you would at least get a fix amount of resources. This is the solution to upgrading from Shared Hosting to a Dedicated hosting because of price. Usually forums and high traffic website would require at least a VPS hosting.
• Dedicated Hosting – Dedicated comes managed and unmanage. Managed hosting is where the hosting company assign technical staff to run routine maintainance and provide support. Unmanage Dedicated Hosting does not mean that your server is setup and left there as it is, but support is minimal and if you require technical assiatant, you may end up paying extra.
• Reseller Hosting – This is actually an account which enables you to sell other share hosting plan. You will be given some resources which you could split them up and sell them to your client. This is very suitable for web design company as they could provide hosting service and get recurring income.

Webhosting Operating System
Basically you could choose between linux and windows. This is quite easy to choose because it will depend on what you plan to install on your hosting server. If you plan to have a wordpress blog, you know that you definately be choosing a linux hosting plan. Plain HTML website will work well in both server, but you may want to think of future expansion like a forum for your client or a blogging platform.

I was looking at websites under the keyword search engine marketing Union

and came across your site http://www.riceblogger.com . I see that you’re

ranked 14 on page 2 in google. I’m not sure if you’re aware of why you’re ranked this low but more importantly how easy it is to start getting higher listings in search engine results. All you need to do is some simple “link publicity” for your website and you could quickly hit the front page and work your way up to #1-#3. … over the last 5 years we took the website www dot weddix dot de from only 50-100 clicks per day from Search Engines up to 49,000! clicks per day! (generating $23M in sales last year!) How? Well, by having quality articles written about this website which were then published by many blogs, web 2.0 websites, and many other well respected websites on the internet… amongst slowly adding hundreds and now tens of thousands of highly optimized content pages to his site. We also took a site last year which was quickly losing its SEO rankings and using the same techniques got their site from: BEFORE After (3 months later) July 2007 Nov 2007 Google: 165,578 Google: 300,803 Yahoo: 11,076 Yahoo: 39,113 Google UK: 14,823 Google.co.UK: 12,242 Total: 191,477 Total: 352,158 … we doubled his traffic by basically do press releases with content about their company into many many web 2.0 networks, blogs, industry news sites, high PR news sites, article directories… you name it – we made his website “famous” online and google rewarded him greatly. Now let me be completely honest with you – the keywords these clients paid to optimize were extremely competitive and thus relatively expensive to optimize…. and generate insane amounts of traffic. We were paid over six figures for optimizing those two sites alone and the clients are making a huge ROI from their investment! Your keyword: search engine marketing Union Is NOT competitive and I now have a large team to allow me to serve smaller businesses such as yours for pennies on the dollar – for a fraction of what those clients paid – you too can enjoy the fruit’s of Top 10 rankings in google for your target keywords. I’d be happy to show you results in the first 30 days with NO money down – just to prove to you how good we really are at this. If you’d be interested in seeing what we can do to ramp up your traffic — I’d love to speak with you over the phone to go over the details of how our system works. Just reply back with a good time to call and I will reply back with my call availability so that we can schedule a time that works for both of us! Warmly, Jason Cox www dot creativedigitalmedia dot com P.S. Checkout this article published by SEOMOZ where 24 of the worlds top Search Engine Optimization experts discuss the most important factors in SEO: http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors … this is a good outline of the type of things we can help maximize on your website to push your rankings up, up, up!

I was at Perhentian, Malaysia on the 25th April until 27th April. Pulau Perhentian (Perhentian Island) is one of the unspoiled island in Malaysia. I really enjoyed my stay there at Pulau Perhentian, as this is the few days of the year which I am located far far away from my computer, ipod, cars and a lot of my other gadgets. Although I did had my handphone for communication sake, but it is mostly left inside the room to avoid getting it wet. Another gadget that I brought is my Olympus 725 SW, this is the best time for my Olympus to perform as it is waterproof up to 5meters (about 16 feet), which means that I could capture picture during my snorkeling trip. There is a new version, Olympus 770SW that is able to go up to 33feet.

I flew there to Kota Bharu and arrive hire a cab to Kuala Besut Jetty for a half an hour boat ride to Pulau Perhentian.

The beauty of the nature and look at the clarity of the water

Some underwater shots of me.

The underwater world @ Pulau Perhentian

Now it is back to civilization and back to work.

Since Alexa changes its algorithm, I thought that it would be good to look at Alexa Top 100 Malaysia Sites 100. As expected, Yahoo, Google and Friendster grab the top 3 spot.

What is amazing in the Top 100 site is RedTube and YouPorn is actually not far behind. But they rank higher in the global ranking, so it means that there is more visitor from other countries.

File sharing also is a huge trend in Malaysia with website such as 4Shared, eSnips, SendSpace and RapidShare.

Was actually looking forward for KennySia or LiewCf on the list, but does not see any blogger other than Malaysia Today and another X blog.

I find that Alexa ranking being inaccurately because I have another site which have more traffic than this blog but have a 4 times higher alexa ranking recently. I think Alexa may have taken page rank into account for its ranking.

If you own a website / blogs about travelling, tourist location and hotels review, this would be a niche advertisements network for you. Travel Ad Network is currently having third largest online audience, I believe it is because they are accepting publisher.

Although there is no mention of the terms and condition for joining them as a publisher, if you own a traveling related website, it is definitely worth a try. You may be able to make some good money out of this niche industry.