Best Web Hosting 2007

It was rumored today that Microsoft may acquire online advertising tracking and sales company DoubleClick for an undisclosed amount, although it is known that Doubleclick has approached Morgan Stanley in search of a buyer for an appreciated $2B.

WebFaction announced the launch of it’s new help system which is intended to better respond to their clients needs and avoid backlog. HostDept launched their affiliate program today offering affiliates 25% of the first time revenue from new customers.

ResellerClub announced that they have surpassed 1,500,000 domain names under their management, making them the 10th largest domain name registrar and reseller hosting service.

Some news from this day.

The Planet came out with a private rack program for those companies large enough to be able to need an entire rack for their servers. The enhancements also include for their customers the availability of Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance 5500 Series firewalls and Foundry ServerIronXL load balancer.

Our friends at DemoWolf came out with the release of nearly 50 (it was 49) new video tutorials today. Many of DemoWolf products support the web hosting industry and are geared toward walking novices through some of the cpanel and other control panel features.

Most web hosting companies don’t own their own data centers, in fact most web hosting companies (there are over 25,000 companies which have been started as a web hosting service provider, don’t even own their own servers… they are resellers. More about that later but most web hosting companies co-locate their servers in a building like One Wilshire in downtown Los Angeles. One Wilshire is a data center, it used to be full of Lawyers but they kicked them out & put in servers instead and the building is equiped as a large scale data facility with the capabilities of dividing the resources for various companies who need space, power, bandwidth and securities  for their servers.

Man y tims you will see several competitor companies sharing the same building or even the same floor within a co-location facility. What you want to look for in terms of a data center and what they offer to their web hosting clients, to make sure that if you have a dedicated server or a shared web hosting account is that the building has adequate power, that they have partnered with their tier 1 bandwidth providers, that they have security and backup power procedures on site.

Today in the news the Planet, one of the web hosting industry’s largest Dedicated Server Companies announced that they had appointed James P Treuting as the Vice President of Global Sales and Managed services. This position has only just been created.

More news, typical of Godaddy news is that Godaddy has chosen a new GoDaddyGirl Marissa Peck, a former Hawaiian Tropic Model.

Free Rider Web Hosting announced  a minor special deal, for a mere wee, that anyone transferring their web site to them would receive $2/mo off of their subscription. Why this made the press releases is beyond our staff here, oh & let’s also have that go for the press release about a new GoDaddy girl as well.

UK web hosting company NetBenefit was selected to host the social sports network iSporty.

One of things we like to do as webmasters who rate web hots is we pick up information from other developers about some great resources to work with. Most web sites utilize images that they themselves did not develop and they gather these images from photo gallery directories.

Here are some of the resources from our files that you might want to check out for images that can go onto your web site:
BigStockPhoto - this site allows you to buy credits for  downloading stock photos and if you purchase enough credits the costs per image download the costs go down to $1/photo. The photos here are a little limited in terms f volume and variety but the price is reasonable and affordable.

Shutterstock.com is another web site where you can purchase and download images. Shutter Stock is more expensive than BigStockPhoto.com with a cost at $150/mo but the volume and variety of photos is extensive and for the flat monthly rate you can download up to 25 images a day. This is really a much better image site for webmasters.

We’ll have to dig up some other stock image image sites and compare those to Bigstockphoto.com & shutterstock.com

This was a Sunday and so no news was reported for this day.

This was a Saturday and there was no new news to report for this day as no new news was posted or reported.

On this day in 2007 Brent Oxley from HostGator announced that he would be launching a new web hosting service called SEO Hosting whch was supposed to be able to enhance webmasters’ capabilities to host web sites in an environment which would allow them to take greater advantages of indexing their web sites for SEO. SEO Hosting came with a number of features and addons, like different class c IP addresses, which at the time were important to webmasters for their SEO. Undoubtedly Brett came up with the idea after he had built the reseller hosting brand HostGator and had no doubt heard from those customers about the difficulties in securing those stand alone different class IP’s.

Also important on this date it was announced that Google was following suite to some of the upstart pay per action search engines and Google announced that they were beta testing their own pay per action search feature.

FastServers dedicated server company announced that they would be releasing video testimonials from their customer base in an effort to boost confidence and sales for their dedicated server line.

This was a fairly lite day in terms of the web hosting news, mostly press releases.

There was an interesting news piece about GoDaddy and how they were supporting open source software and that they were contributing $20,000 to assist developers in further improving open source software. $20,000 was probably a good start for the developers. Some of the beneficiaries included joomla & simple machines.

Other news of the day included EasyCGI making an upgrade to .NET 3.0 for their systems and UnitedHosting added the MailFoundry spam and virus filtering solution.

WebStream had a press release about moving into ne3w facilities in Deerfield Beach, Florida, (their head quarters are in Fort Lauderdale). Fibernet also made facility news today indicating that they were making a $25 million deal with CapitalSource for Co-location facilities.

And the last piece of interesting news comes from Internap who had a press release about appointing a new CTO, Tim Sullivan, good luck with your new gig Tim.

That’s all from march 22nd 2007 in the web hosting industry

In this section we will analyze the days news in web site hosting and how it may have related to web hosting customers. Since most of the web hosting news that we will read are press releases, we’ll have to see if we can’t muddle through the BS to find some real news.

We’ll do our best to be critical and yet fair to those parties who had the news of the day.