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About Kenny

Kenny is owner of webhostpark and has been working in hosting industry since 2006. We provide unbiased hosting reviews and release the latest promo news. Follow me on Google plus

Top 10 Website Stress Testing Tools

top website stress testing tools

What kind of web hosting plan we need exactly? It's hard to tell without understanding the actual usage on the site. In order to get the genral stats, we can create numorous requests to the website and monitor how much resource it's using. How to test? Here we're going to introduce the top 10 website stress testing tools which will simplify the process.

Grinder – Grinder is a JavaTM load testing framework that makes it easy to run a distributed test using many load injector machines. The Grinder has special support for HTTP that automatically handles cookie and connection management for test contexts. Users can write their own plug-ins to a documented interface.

Pylot –  Pylot is a free open source tool for testing performance and scalability of web services. It runs HTTP load tests, which are useful for capacity planning, benchmarking, analysis, and system tuning.

Pylot generates concurrent load (HTTP Requests), verifies server responses, and produces reports with metrics. Tests suites are executed and monitored from a GUI or shell/console.

Web Capacity Analysis Tool (WCAT) – Web Capacity Analysis Tool (WCAT) is a lightweight HTTP load generation tool primarily designed to measure the performance of a web server within a controlled environment.  WCAT can simulate thousands of concurrent users making requests to a single web site or multiple web sites.  The WCAT engine uses a simple script to define the set of HTTP requests to be played back to the web server. Extensibility is provided through plug-in DLLs and a standard, simple API.

fwptt – fwptt it's a Web application tester program for load testing web applications. It can record normal and ajax requests. I tested it on asp.net applications, but it should work with jsp, php or other.

JCrawler – JCrawler is an open-source (under the CPL) Stress-Testing Tool for web-applications. It comes with the crawling/exploratory feature. You can give JCrawler a set of starting URLs and it will begin crawling from that point onwards, going through any URLs it can find on its way and generating load on the web application. The load parameters (hits/sec) are configurable.

Apache JMeter – The Apache JMeter™ desktop application is open source software, a 100% pure Java application designed to load test functional behavior and measure performance. It was originally designed for testing Web Applications but has since expanded to other test functions.

Siege – Siege is an http load testing and benchmarking utility. It was designed to let web developers measure their code under duress, to see how it will stand up to load on the internet. Siege supports basic authentication, cookies, HTTP and HTTPS protocols. It lets its user hit a web server with a configurable number of simulated web browsers. Those browsers place the server "under siege."

http_load – http_load runs multiple http fetches in parallel, to test the throughput of a web server. However unlike most such test clients, it runs in a single process, so it doesn't bog down the client machine. It can be configured to do https fetches as well.

Web Polygraph – Web Polygraph is a freely available performance testing tool for caching proxies, origin server accelerators, L4/7 switches, content filters, and other Web intermediaries. It's a standard web stress testing tool for many companies including Microsoft.

OpenSTA – OpenSTA is a distributed software testing architecture designed around CORBA, it was originally developed to be commercial software by CYRANO. The current toolset has the capability of performing scripted HTTP and HTTPS heavy load tests with performance measurements from Win32 platforms.

If you have other good tools, feel free to post the names and share with us. Regards

Create Great Website Without SEO

create great website without seo

When we create a website, we always spend a lot of time to do keywords research and built seo content for better ranking, most enterprise groups will also seek support from seo companies which is very costly. Since from seo appeared in the world, it's been a long time competetion among webmasters. The competetion is available in both whitehat seo and blackhat seo, that's how we can see so many duplicate and low quality stuff on internet. However, today I would like to share a web succesful story that's completely non-seo based.

Here's the original article

Search Engine Optimization, also known as SEO is a subject which gets talked about to death all over the web.

There’s a fairly large group of people who believe that SEO is the be-all and end-all to anything on the web.

They believe that without it, you are nothing and with it, you are everything.

Today we’re going to look at why that isn’t true and why you can create a truly great website which performs well in search engines, without any seedy SEO tactics.

We’ve also included a case study of WooThemes and QA with Adii Pienaar and his views on SEO.

SEO companies use techniques which fall into two categories: “White Hat” and “Black Hat”. Black Hat SEO is the term used to describe questionable SEO practices such where people try to cheat the system with multiple websites and code which exploits loop holes in search engine algorithms. Black Hat SEO is frowned upon but, to be honest, White Hat SEO isn’t much better.

People who do White Hat SEO play by the rules. They don’t break any Google Terms of Service (mostly) and they stick to the techniques which are deemed to be legitimate. The problem is that they go over the top and they entirely miss the point.

SEO companies have one goal and one goal only. To get websites into top positions for highly-search key phrases on major search engines. They generally pay very little attention to the content of the site, so long as it has plenty of keywords. They pay very little attention to the usability of the site, so long as search engines are able to index the pages easily. They pay very little attention to the bounce rate, or how long people actually bother to stay on the site.

Ranking highly in search engines means absolutely nothing if people are just going to press the back button as soon as they’ve spent five seconds on your awful website.

There are SEO companies out there with major investors taking money from clients and then paying untrained staff to create spam blogs with bogus content and links. These companies class themselves as fully White Hat, by-the-book operations, but they’re still using incredibly questionable and ultimately dangerous tactics. I should know, I used to work for one of them and disliked every second of it.

We should probably pause for a moment to add a small disclaimer. Not all SEO companies are the same, and not all of them are trying to screw you. There are a few who believe they genuinely are helping you with some misguided idea of what the web is all about (hint: it’s not spam).

There are fewer still who actually have a huge knowledge on SEO and use it as a very small part of a bigger picture. The difference is that the last group of people rarely refer to themselves with any sort of title containing the letters S, E, and O.

What you should be doing?

Search engines are designed to rank the best and most relevant sites highly. Again: The best, and most relevant sites. Not the “most optimized sites”.

A remarkable amount “Pro SEO Strategies for better rankings” actually coincide with what a good web developer would tell you to do in order to have a good website. Using proper heading tags, creating simple and well structured links to navigate through your site, ensuring that relevant content is well presented and has related content easily available, creating content on your site which other people will want to link to and talk about.

If you want to have a site which performs well in search engines then you need to stop worrying about search engines and start worrying about creating a really great website. Code your site properly, make it accessible, make it usable, make sure it has fantastic content, make sure you have great marketing that has other people talking about it. All of these things contribute to the factors which search engines use to rank your site.

In a nutshell, you can try and win a race with a 1992 Honda Civic that you’ve tuned up and fuel injected and loaded full of Nitrous Oxide… or you can spend the same amount of money on buying a Mercedes.

If you spend time doing the right things when building a site and focusing on your users as you grow that site, then search engine rankings will follow. I guarantee it – something which no SEO company can ever do.

A Case Study: WooThemes

Adii Pienaar built WooThemes with his two co-founders from the ground up just three years ago. They’ve never had a big focus on SEO, instead they’ve focused on their products, their customers and their marketing.

In two years, WooThemes built up an annual revenue of over $2million – so they’ve clearly done something very, very right.

Here’s what Adii had to say on the subject when I asked him to share his experiences:

Adii, you’ve always focused on making WooThemes about great products and marketing without a big focus on SEO. What was it that originally lead you to this method of thinking?

“To be honest, we had two restrictions and we needed to find a way to work around those. The two restrictions were: 1) a complete lack of knowledge or experience related to SEO tacticts; and 2) no advertising to “game” the system by buying links or have an extensive AdWords campaign. Plus, I’ve always been of the opinion that “content is king” and SEO went against that principle.”

“So instead we focused on this that we could control: great products and awesome content. Both of these have been great at generating traffic & linkbacks to the site, which in turn improves our search engine ranking.”

And how has not focusing on SEO impacted your company as a whole, particularly in terms of traffic and on-site statistics?

“I wouldn’t think that this has influenced us negatively at all and instead we’re experiencing that our visitors are viewing 6+ pages on each visit and spending almost 6 minutes browsing the site.”

You still rank extremely highly for most key phrases related to premium WordPress themes, is this something you monitor closely? and do you have strategies or plans for improving on those ranks in the future?

“We do monitor it, but not very closely… 🙂 AdWords is an obvious option in terms of displaying better for particular phrases, but we’ve found the cost per conversion in this regard is exorbitant and thus not worthwhile (hence why we won’t really be pursuing this going forward). So our strategy will stay organic and stay the same: focus on great content and products, which will definitely get our users talking about us, which in turns ranks us higher.”

You recently started offering third party plugin integration for a lot of your Themes, some of the more notable ones were big SEO plugins for WordPress. What made you choose to start supporting these products and has it changed your view in any way?

“We decided to add proper SEO support in our themes, because this was a major request from our users and we didn’t want our own opinion to cloud our judgement in this regard. We probably have a 80% content and 20% SEO-related strategy, but that composition is based on opinion, so we recognize that our users may want to invest their budget & time differently.”

Finally, if you were going to start all over again, would you do anything different with regards to SEO?

“I wish we could reboot the web and make sure that SEO never even existed. 🙂 Seriously though – nope, we wouldn’t change a thing with regards to our SEO policy.”

In Closing

You don’t have to pay through the nose for an SEO company, you definitely don’t need to pay other people to buy links and you shouldn’t even really be focusing all your time on how to get to the top of the rankings. Good rankings aren’t the be-all and end-all of running a website or an online business.

People often use the metaphor of positioning yourself on a high-street in the center of a city when comparing SEO to a retail premises location. The most important thing to remember is that it really doesn’t matter if your store is on a gorgeous marble shopping street nestled in between Gucci and Prada… If it’s a shack with rusty metal racks and a rude shop assistant, nobody is going to go in, and if they do go in then they’ll leave again immediately.

Create a great website, first and foremost. Great websites will always rank highly because that’s what search engines are designed to do. Start focusing on what really matters.

Original article source: Create Great Websites, Without Any SEO

Hybrid Cloud Hosting

hybrid cloud hosting

In cloud hosting, some of the most creative methods are using a hybrid of cloud servers and conventional servers to provide the best of both worlds. Thus there's a new type service called Hybrid cloud hosting which is based on hybrid computing techniques. Today our topic is to discuss this service including how it's setup and the advantages comparing to all other types hosting.

Hybrid Computing Introduction

A hybrid computing platform lets customers connect the packaged small business software applications that they run on their own internal desktops or servers to applications that run in the cloud. A hybrid approach allows an enterprise to maintain a centralized approach to IT governance, while experimenting with cloud computing.

The Hybrid Cloud advantages

The hybrid cloud hosting advantages are mainly from the comparison over traditioal cloud hosting. In general, tradional cloud hosting are mainly configured in two logic

Public Cloud – when a service provider offer services such as application usage, development or storage of data, to anyone on the Internet, it's called public cloud. This is the most popular service type that we can sign up with various providers at relatively affordable price. When shoud we use public cloud? Here're several rules quoted from the web

  • Infrastructure requirements are high for your application. If your organization is in SME range, this would be ideal.
  • Agility in terms of scaling to meet your application user base/load growth
  • Reuse the peak load optimizations and techniques, and you don’t have to re-engineer them every time.
  • No maintenance and other administrative tasks involved.

Private Cloud – It's configured within a private infrastructure network. It's extremely useful when you want to set limited access to the network for security purpose. It's more like cluster but more scalable. When should we use private cloud?

  • Data security is prime concern
  • Corporate governance and proprietary data. For e.g financial institutions, health care services.
  • Already have an infrastructure that can be utilized for majority of applications and the investment in resources is high.
  • Applications are too complex that require more control and migrating them to the cloud would lead to disruption in service.
  • Increased need for ownership and accountability within organization on the processes.

The weakness with public cloud is about security protection. To date there's not a perfect method for public cloud protection over the files. Private cloud solved the security issue but only setup within a limited network behind firewall, however it's very costive and not affordable to every people.

Hybrid cloud actually connects both Public and Private cloud. Besides the improved security configuration, it also ensures the guaranteed resources and preventing applications from conflicting. It's extremely useful when your business need to use some applications in house and some provided by an external provider. This is where the hybrid computing finds itself in a niche position with the applications that require dynamic scaling and faster responses to client demands and adaptability; it can be served via public clouds while the integration can still be done with the sensitive and proprietary data hidden behind the corporate firewalls.

Best hybrid cloud hosting provider

As the understanding from above, hybrid cloud is the way forward and introduced many new techniques. We might find many "hybrid server" providers on the web, but the actual hybrid cloud hosting only available with the industry leading server providers such as softlayer and rackspace. They're not only offering up to date services but also developing their own softwares/platforms for best integration. It's a surprise that the world's biggest cloud hosting Amazon does not have this service yet. If you like to know more about hybrid hosting, you can refer to following article/video.

http://blog.softlayer.com/2011/3-bars-3-questions-hybrid-hosting-video-interview/
http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/hybrid/

Arvixe vs WebhostingHub

arvixe vs webhostinghub

I'm sure you might have read lots of positive reviews(yes, almost all good reviews) regarding to Arvixe and Webhostinghub. What if we have to choose from the two? Which would be better choice in case we have high standards for hosting server? Ok, in this article we will compare the two service brands in personal experience and reveal how to select the proper service plan with them.

About Arvixe

Very long time ago I wrote a very generatical arvixe reviews when I decided to try out them for my website hosting. I did not write too much real experience there since i just got started with them. However, I have to say I'm 100% satisfied with their service after almost 2 years' experience. During this period our site WHP haven't got unacceptable issues except my personal fault in dealing with the website, but everything is perfectly solved at last. That's why arvixe is by far our primary recommendation for reliable hosting. In case you need service today, I still recommend their name.

About Webhostinghub

The first time we heard of their name is because of Inmotion Hosting(http://inmotionhosting.com). When I sign up inmotion for evaluation purpose, their support asked me to check out webhostinghub as well. I'm surprised by the fast server from inmotion and revealed it on this inmotion fast web hosting posting. Maybe I was too happy at that time so added both inmotion and webhostinghub to my recommendation list and wrote a general comparison between them.

However, today I just revisited their website and read more carefully about their service. I start to doubt if I have been doing something wrong. The first doubt is about their comparison page. they showed their advantages side by side over bluehost, justhost, fatcow and ipage. However, we know all the 4 webhosts are actually managed by the same company. So if they agree 100% dell servers to ipage but not other three then it's wrong, if they agree the green datacenter to fatcow but not the other ones then it's wrong. There're several similar comparison which is not right. screenshot below

webhostinghub

Arvixe vs Webhostinghub – Hosting features

Arvixe provides two classes of shared hosting plans and offered as Personal and Personal Pro. With the two shared plans you have choice of windows or linux platform. Webhostinghub provides a single all-in-one hosting solution where you get everything unlimited. It's very similar to the arvixe personal class plan, the only difference is the Personal Class only supporting 6 domains per account and the Personal Pro Class allows everything unlimited.

Arvixe vs Webhostinghub – Server speed/uptime

The arvixe hosting servers are powered by softlayer datacenters in Dallas and Houston that are equipted with Tier 4 datacenter specs and multiple network backbons for 100% availability. Webhostinghub is supported by two datacenters on both east and west coasts where max speed zone enabled. From the actual user experience, webhostinghub server is 120% faster than most competitors. Both arvixe and webhostinghub server uptime are unbeatable 99.9%!

Arvixe vs Webhostinghub – Customer satisfication

We collected the most recent 100 user feedbacks from both arvixe and webhostinghub. Over 93% users are 100% satisfied with the stability of arvixe hosting servers and 95% people are satisfied with the webhostinghub server speed. Arvixe is most well known for it's reliability and stability and webhostinghub is best for the fast server connection!

Should I choose arvixe or webhostinghub?

When I contact webhostinghub support for pre-sales question, they recommend the inmotion for better service and said the hub hosting is for small personal website purpose only. Means if you grow up there's no choice but to switch service provider, the upgrade service is inmotion hosting. So if you decide to go with webhostinghub, make sure you just want to start a small to medium size website.

Arvixe is honest hosting provider. Their support team including CEO join discussion forums to track their problems directly and improve immediately. We can get quality hosting with only $4/mo. Plus, arvixe offers both windows and linux hosting in different grades, means if we're doing web developing and need different support, arvixe will meet our requirements side by side. No matter if we're running a small personal website or medium to large site, arvixe can always provide a good solution.

Basically, if you ask me if I recommend webhostinghub, I would suggest inmotion directly if you really liked their service. If you ask me if webhostinghub is better than arvixe, then answer is no.

arvixe advantages

Best Cloud Hosting Control Panel

cloud hosting control panel

Cloud hosting is going to be the main type service in near future because of the tons of outstanding features. A powerful and user friendly cloud hosting control panel is in need to manage the service professionally. Many companies start to develop their own panel to meet their own requirements. Previously we introduced the popular cloud hosting management softwares, in this article we're going to introduce the most popular project – OpenStack.

What's OpenStack?

OpenStack is an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud computing project by Rackspace Cloud and NASA. Currently more than 150 companies have joined the project among which are AMD, Intel, Canonical, SUSE Linux, Red Hat, Cisco, Dell, HP, IBM and Yahoo etc. It is free open source software released under the terms of the Apache License.

How's OpenStack doing currently?

OpenStack is mainly managed by Rackspace and they're actually the main user. Rackspace is running the second-largest public cloud in the world – The Rackspace Cloud, serving more than 180,000 customers and running on more than 79,000 Rackspace servers – onto the OpenStack open source cloud platform.

Several spotlights with OpenStack

From the rackspace announcement, users can choose to deploy private, public or hybrid cloud services on the new OpenStack powered services.

Openstack controls large pools of compute, storage, and networking resources throughout a datacenter, all managed through a dashboard that gives administrators control while empowering their users to provision resources through a web interface.

On going development and improvement. OpenStack is being developed and improved by many leading groups in computing. Recently rackspace added cool features in the cloud control panel. The new cloud control panel also supports the Rackspace cloud's new multi-region function, capabilities, which let users spin up cloud servers in a choice of regions. It also lets users load balance SSL traffic across multiple cloud servers.

Openstack project official site: www.openstack.org
Features with Video show of cloud hosting control panel: http://www.rackspace.com/blog/cool-features-in-the-new-rackspace-cloud-control-panel/

How do we think?

Being the cloud hosting leader, rackspace does lots of effort to develop the leading hosting control panel as an open source project. The advantage is it will bring into many brilliants and donate their smart ideas to the project, especially when those brilliants are mainly from the world's leading groups. We're not sure if this control panel will be the best in future but it will absolutely be considered by most people and it's platform will be learnt by similar software development.

Stablehost Review

stablehost review

When selecting a web hosting service, reliability is the most essential consideration nowadays, because many people scared by cheap hosting plans and finally have to pay extra for additional support. Under such conditions, price is not so important factor for hosting choice regardless the continuing price downgrade for most providers. However, low price does not always mean less quality service. Today let's check out one of the mostly recommended name in WHT called Stablehost. If you need a quality stablehost review and personal feedback, you got the right place.

Stablehost introduction

In 2002, stablehost was setup in Phoenix, Arizona to provide affordable shared and reseller cpanel hosting, VPS is also launched recently for enterprise level business purpose. From the very beginning, stablehost has been following the cpanel standards and keep up with latest tech updates. All stablehost servers are configured using cloudlinux and litespeed for best performance.

Stablehost Hosting Plans

Stablehost provides multiple level hosting plans including shared, Enterprise, reseller and VPS Hosting. Each hosting solutions are splited into 3 hosting packages with different features/limits. The limits is all about allocated disk space/data transfer. Unlike all their competitors who offer everything unlimited, stablehost limits on disk space and bandwidth to ensure the server health and every client will benifit from this.

Stablehost Pros and Cons

With no doubt, the stablehost infrastructure is configured with the best technologies and user friendly enough. The OS is pre-optimized cloudlinux which is by far the best OS for linux server environment. After the implementation of litespeed, the most reliable platform is ready for quality online service plans.

  • Very affordable service – Only $3.95/mo for guaranteed 1GB disk space and 50GB bandwidth is absolutely perfect choice for most website requirements. With this price we also get free website migration and free sitebuilder. If we're not satisfied with the service we also have 45 days money back guarantee ensurrance.
  • Official 40% discount – If the price is still high with your budget, the stablehost will give you another 40% discount. It's absolutely the best price with this promotional offer. How to claim it? Just enter the coupon code on the home page!
  • Friendly support – The friendly means either you're asking for support or sending service complaint, they will respond in good manner and make it as clear as possible.

What's bad with stablehost? Well, the bad is you can't find too much bad reviews to their service, most reviews and feedbacks are about satisfiction. But it doesn't mean everything is perfect with stablehost, they lack of programming support means if you programed the site by yourself and encountered problems with hosting, you have to fix coding issue by yourself. Their 24×7 support only available for basic hosting service questions.

Stablehost vs mddhosting vs hawkhost

What if we compare stablehost to mddhosting or hawkhost? They're all famous litespeed hosting providers with positive user reviews. All of them provide some kinds discount on official site. From the price rate, the stablehost is similar to hawkhost, From the appearance, it's the same to mddhosting.

The difference is all about the targeted clients. While mddhosting offeres their hosting with uplevel price, their targeted users are enterprise website purpose companies. If you need budget hosting purpose only, hawkhost or stablehost would be the right direction. The difference between stablehost and hawkhost is on hosting plans setup. When your website is grow up and need affordable upgrade plan support, it's not available with stablehost but hawkhost has! So if your website is going to get predictable popularity and need further hosting solutions, hawkhost would be the best choice.