Blog - WebHostPark

Welcome Google Penguin Update

Based on the past google update schedule, it's likely to happen again in short time. During the last update in April, many webmasters' sites got affected. This update is well known as google penguin update which is the next generation technology to deal with web spam and low quality sites. We did not pay too much attention to this google tech since there's not any effect to our site, since the next update is coming soon, I would like to discuss it with real experience and share some ideas on how to co-work with it.

Google penguin introduction

Google penguin was firstly announced on April 24, 2012 when the last google update happened. It's all about a google algorithm update which is aimed at decreasing search engine rankings of websites that violate Google’s Webmaster Guidelines by using black-hat SEO techniques.

How does google penguin help with SEO?

From google reports, the penguin affected approximately 3.1% of search queries in English. What does that mean? Basically the google cleaned at least 3% search results and made the search more accurate for people's requests. From the google's algorithm history, every update will force webmasters to follow their optimization guidance and improve their website quality. From the google panda to google penguin, it's actually improvement of google and the entire industry.

At the meanwhile, it's good news for people who are doing right SEO. Maybe your website ranked low because your competitors were using black hat SEO tricks on their websites. However, the penguin update simply dropped most of their rankings from search result and you will surprisely see that your keywords ranking got improved!

Don't be confused that penguin update is to abandon SEO. On the other hand, SEO is recommended by google and there's guidance on how to. It's designed to deal with those websites that are over optimized or doing bad ways.

How to recover if your site is affected by google penguin?

When your site got penalized by google penguin, the first though in mind would be how to recover the lost rankings. But before you make any change, make sure to understand where the problem is and how google think about, or else we're just doing work for nothing. Here're some important rules on how google penguin recognizes a quality website

Authority, Content, Natural Backlinks are actually the core ideas for white hat SEO. From the last update, the points are almost golden rules for google. It tells every webmaster to pay more attention on website content building and attrack more natual backlinks for better ranking. If our site are targeted to provide honest and useful info to visitors, the site authority will be improved automatically and potential high ranking is expected. In case our sites get penalized by google penguin, following actions would be useful to recover the lost.

Remove pages ready for search engines only — At the meanwhile, make sure your sitemap and robots file is correct and up to date, make sure to remove duplicate content and add more authority content.

Remove unrelated links to your website topic — Such links will simply decrease your site authority. Such case always happen on link selling sites. If you're selling links, you might stop now.

Content is still king — If you want to get recovered from penguin effect, content building would be the most important task. Fresh and user friendly content will help with the site ranking quickly.

Do not use low quality link directories — If your site is always submited to such directories for SEO purpose, stop it now.

EIG Acquired Hostgator

There're several articles on web state that EIG(endurance International Group) has acquired hostgator. Indeed, it's absolutely big news to everybody in the business. The effect is wide and related to millions clients on the globe. If it's the first time you hear of the news, let's learn more about the event and see how will the deal goes.

The news firstly posted on webhostingtalk forum by someone and provided a link to Brent Oxley's letter writing. From the letter, Brent seems pretty satisfied with the deal which is $225 million. He says the EIG CEO Hari pretty understand how to continue with the hostgator success and promote the business to the next grade. Here're the original reasons Brent list why he would like to sell hostgator:

* I want to travel the world before my wife and I have kids.
* I've been doing HostGator since I was 18, and I'm looking for a newchallenge.
* I'm extremely worried about the financial path our country is headed down.
* Taxes will be going up significantly in 2013, making it more difficult for business owners.
* I've failed more times than I can count to launch software that would allow us to compete as a registrar.
* We have tried and failed to develop a billing system that has automated and can integrate with our key systems such as chat, phone, affiliates, and tickets. I think we are finally on the right track, but unfortunately I no longer have the patience to wait for it to all come together. Thankfully EIG has tackled a lot of these challenges already.
* I have practically 100% of my chips in HostGator and if something should ever happen to the company, I'd more than likely be bankrupt in a matter of a few months.

Hostgator business statistics

Over 12,000 servers under management
Over 400,000 global customers
Hosting over 8 million domains
The largest reseller hosting provider

As we see, the hostgator is running a very huge business on the planet. If EIG finally acquired hostgator, their overall business will even bigger than Godaddy and become the largest web hosting company.

Worries about the take over

The main worries would be from the existing hostgator staff and clients. For such business acquisition, current workers will worry about the potential redundancies and replacement of company cultures etc. However, from the previous experience such problems never happened. "Bluehost was at 280 employees when the sale closed and they have 450 today. Their management team has stayed the same and the culture has stayed the same." Brent explained. He also assures hostgator’s management team won’t be going anywhere if the deal is completed.

As about the worries from clients, it would be the service quality from the EIG support. Based on many people's experience their support is not so responsive (the very limited EIG supports are mainly Inida based). However, EIG is well known of it's powerful technologies and stable system. They introduced advanced server managing skills and make all hardwares/softwares up to date. In this way, no much service outage happened. The main support requests are not from server problems but websites themselves. Most likely the EIG will keep the current cpanel and plesk system for users so people no need to change anything and be familiar to a new software etc. On this point on view, the acquisition doesn't actually affect anything to end users.

How do we think about the event?

It's not a surprise to see any hosting acquired by EIG. No matter how popular the hosting is, if there's opportunity to be more profitable, their owner will consider it. Hostgator has been the industry leading name and recommended by almost every webmaster. I can't say how much better EIG will bring to this brand but surely it will keep the popularity and gain more success. What actually changed is the owner but not the service itself. Don't be surprised when you see more promotions with hostgator in future.

Visit http://www.Hostgator.com and see current promotions

CISPA and Why

07 June 2012
by: Kenny
in: Blog
note: no comments

Looks like someone is always trying to hack into personal information and encourage some bills to get passed in law. Previously there're SOPA and PIPA and finally blacked out by the efforts of many people. Now the threat is passed, but have you ever heard another bill called CISPA? Should we support or against it?

What's CISPA? Here's a good writing and explanation from arvixe blog posting:

CISPA is the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act and it actually passed through the House of Representatives on April 26th.

While SOPA focused more on copyright issues, CISPA aims to “track cyber threats.” The bill allows for government agencies and private companies to all be allowed to share private information about cyber threats. No one can deny that cyber threats have certainly been on the rise. We live in a world where most of our daily activities and private information is online, so criminals and vandals have turned towards the Internet to achieve their goals. While CISPA actually does have the potential of being a good thing, the question simply becomes: “what is considered a ‘cyber threat’?”

With CISPA, a cyber threat is anything that makes “efforts to degrade, disrupt or destroy” vital networks. Also, a cyber threat could be anything that can be taken as a “threat or misappropriation” towards information that is privately owned or owned by the government.

CISPA does not force any private company to share any information. CISPA only allows for companies to share their users’ information. So why would any company choose to disclose the information of its users to any other company or the government? Well, with SOPA, business interests were put at risk. However, CISPA doesn’t threaten the business interests of any company. On the contrary, CISPA actually rewards companies for sharing this information with the government! It also includes clauses that would allow the company to be free from any legal charges if they do choose to share their users’ information. For these reasons, several companies such as Facebook, AT&T, Verizon and Microsoft are supporting CISPA.

So although CISPA seems to have some good intentions and may seem to fight off the threat of cyber attacks, just like SOPA and PIPA, the language in the bill is extremely vague. The vagueness included makes this bill a threat to every single Internet user. The government or any private company basically has free access to all of your information. Worst of all, if they choose to share your information, it will all be “proprietary.” That means that you will never know what information has been shared. Your information can include (but is not limited to) your names, addresses, phone numbers, and all of your Internet activity.

“CISPA has a very broad, almost unlimited definition of the information that can be shared with government agencies and it supersedes all other privacy laws” said the Center for Democracy and Technology. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation pointed out, companies would be able to “use cybersecurity systems to identify and obtain cyber threat information to protect the rights and property of such protected entity.” They could use these excuses to “protect” themselves from “cyber threats.” Then these companies that have just shared all of your private information would have immunity from lawsuits if they have exercised these rights “under good faith.”

Although this bill passed (almost silently) through the House of Representatives, it must still go through the Senate and Obama’s desk. The Senate might vote out the bill and Obama might veto it, especially if we tell them to! If you want your representatives to know that you are against CISPA, there are several places on the Internet where you can help to stop CISPA. One of these places is PrivacyIsAwesome.com. The Senate may vote on CISPA as early as June. Do your part in fighting this bill.

Web Hosting Hacking Events

Hackers are very active at the moment. Many popular services have or being attacked which caused huge loss to both service providers and clients. In any case, the online security protection should be treated seriously for every operators.

Hacking issue in web hosting

All recent hacking events are related to the UGNazi group. The team cracked the popular web hosting billing software WHMCS and hacked into the system database. they gave WHMCS' web hosting provider admin credentials, and was able to gain access to its hosting account, change the email and then request a mailing of the access details. Some sensitive materials like credit card information are in high risk. It's said there might be up to 500,000 client records have been leaked.

Another hacking from UGNazi is to the popular CDN service cloudflare. Facebook seems also included in the hacking list. The FBI has got into the urgent research and arrested one of their members, but the hacking never stopped! The events simply showed us how insecure the internet is. In order to protect our privacy, it's always recommended to set good surfing policy to ourselves.

How to protect account privacy?

No matter if it's for web hosting account or other login account, since it includes our sensitive information, we should always secure it as possible as we can. Generally speaking we can deploy the following to protect it.

Set a strong password and change it often.
Keep the password at a safe place where you have access to only.
Restrict the login to your account, we can apply IP restriction and number of login attempts to avoid potential hacking.
Do not login from a public computer and always scan your computer virus.

if we can follow above strictly, our accounts would be pretty safe. Of course there're many more methods to secure our online accounts, just do everything you can to protect it.

How to secure your website?

Website hacking would be the most well known issue on the web. How to protect the sensitive info on our website? We can apply all above rules for account protection, plus we can add the following for website purpose.

Contact web developer and optimize the coding and fix potential security leak.
Secure the site using SSL if you're operating an Ecommerce site.
Password the directory where contains your private data

For nowadays web development, we always use some popular CMS software like joomla, wordpress and drupal etc. For this concern, it's always recommended to sign up their official website newsletter so we can get the security update in time. For wordpress, we have prepared following especially.

Replace the default secret keys in wp-config.php file. We can get a set of random unique keys by visiting this URL directly.
Change the default admin user to something else other than "admin". The methods and related tips can be found on this wordpress sql queries article.
Configure wordpress firewall. There's a plugin called "wordpress firewall 2" developed by Matthew Pavkov. When someone trying to hack into your wordpress site, it will send your email notification so we can take actions!
Add the limit login attempts plugin. The purpose of this plugin is to lock out the person from login trying if they have typed wrong id/password for several times.
Keep the wordpress core and plugins up to date.

Is that enough? Absolutely no. Because no matter how we secure the site, it's acually being served on hosting server. That means the hosting server security is the most important. We should always keep in touch with the hosting support for any security leak. At the meanwhile, get a quality and secure web hosting is pretty essential to block any potential attacking or hacking.

Top Cloud Drive Comparison

08 May 2012
by: Kenny
in: Blog
note: no comments

Many internet giants have offered cloud storage service. From the most popular dropbox to skydrive and the new google drive, they all offered the similar service. In case you're looking for such service and need to compare a bit, let's check out the top 3 cloud storage providers and choose a suitable one.

Free storage size comparison

Free size – Only 2GB free as default, but we can increase it by inviting friends, the total size can be up to 18GB (500 MB per referral)
Google Drive – 5GB free as default.
SkyDrive – The free size already upgraded to 7GB till present, the previous offer is 25GB.

Paid storage size comparison

If you think the free storage is not enough, they all provide upgrade plan with a fee. Let's take the 100GB size for instance. $60/yr is required for Google Drive, SkyDrive needs $50/yr and $199/yr from Dropbox!! So you see the Dropbox is the most expensive platform.

Note: If you're gmail user and applied the Google Drive paid service, your gmail account size will be upgraded to 25GB.

File Synchronization

We can synchronize our computer folders to their cloud drives. With Dropbox and Google Drive we have the option about what files we would like to synchronize. Although Microsoft announced they like to make things as simple as possible, we don't have the option to choose what folders we like to synchronize on Skydrive.

Platform support

Here's the interesting thing. While Microsoft and Google design their mobile device Apps, their apps are not compatible with each other. But they both are compatible with IOS. Dropbox is the only platform with both Linux and Blackberry compatible.

Internal file reader comparison

The Skydrive took advantages of many MS products like MS Office. Users can even edit documents inside a browser using Office 365 and even edit documents in groups or share links to files publicly or privately. Similar features are available with Dropbox. How about Google drive? the GDrive is probably the most brilliant one. It can open 30 different file types inside the web browser and can even open Photoshop files even if you don’t have Photoshop files on your machine. It even has an Evernote like OCR scanning feature, which scans text from an image.

Speed comparison

Probably because of the new of Google Drive, with 100MB shared bandwidth, the uploading of 300MB files completed in 10 minutes with GDrive while SkyDrive is around 50% completed and 30% for Dropbox.

However, being the most popular and biggest cloud drive provider, the dropbox has great tech advantages. In the testing, google drive will duplicate the uploading while dropbox not. The GDrive has more advantage in overall bandwidth. From overall comparison, Google Drive is a powerful competitor to Dropbox.

For quick view, here's a table about the main features among Google Drive, Skydrive and Dropbox

Brands	Google Drive	SkyDrive	Dropbox
Free Size	5GB	7GB	2GB(can increase by referal)
Paid Plan	25GB: $2.49/mo 100GB: $4.99/mo 1TB: $49.99/mo	20GB: $10/yr 50GB: $25/yr 100GB: $50/yr	50GB: $9.99 /mo $99/yr 100GB: $19.99 /mo $199/yr
Max file size	Unknown	2GB	300MB through web, unlimited through desktop app
Desktop App	Windows and Mac	Windows and Mac	Windows, Mac and Linux
Mobile Device	Android, iOS	iOS and Windows Phone	Android, iOS and BlackBerry
Features	open SDK, Google search, Google+ & Google Docs integration, OCR Tech	Ms Office integration for online documents generating.	Able to increase free storage by referal

The Company Behind WordPress

03 May 2012
by: Kenny
in: Blog
note: no comments

No matter the wordpress core software or free blog platform, it's always the primary considration for many people who like to put up a website in quick time. From some reports, the wordpress powers over 70 millions of websites on the globe. Have you ever thought who supports wordpress and the entire backend team? Recently I found the following and think it's necessary to share with you all in case you're not aware of it yet.

Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, is a quiet Web powerhouse.

WordPress now powers 70 million sites, up from 35 million sites a year ago. Almost half of the biggest blogs in the world are hosted by WordPress.com or run on their own versions of the open-source WordPress platform.

The company is profitable, and expects to bring in $45 million in revenue this year, according to CEO Toni Schneider and founder Matt Mullenweg.

The majority of Automattic revenue comes from premium subscription services, and that’s supplemented by a “VIP” enterprise publisher business — in total, there are half a million paying customers — as well as a recently launched advertising revenue-sharing network.

Now Automattic, which has long been a distributed, flat company run by the two-man team of Schneider and Mullenweg, is bringing some outside executives into the ranks.

New CFO Stuart West, who was most recently an executive-in-residence at Andreessen Horowitz, had also been at Wikimedia, Kno, Tivo and InfoSpace.

West will be in charge of all things financial and operational. “When you see this much usage, you know there’s an extraordinary revenue opportunity,” he told me.

Meanwhile, Paul Sieminski, previously of Gunderson Dettmer, will become Automattic’s first general counsel.

Automattic is not your normal Silicon Valley Web start-up, between its commitment to and grounding in open source, its workforce distributed around the world (the company currently has no office, though it’s planning to open a new San Francisco headquarters soon), and its relative lack of interest in tech trends.

For instance, way after the rise of Tumblr and the rest of the social Web, WordPress.com last year added its first social features, to tie its blogs, bloggers and readers together into a network.

The company was slow to get social because it was more focused on expanding its blogging tools into a more general publishing platform, and also because of its general commitment to openness over walled gardens, Mullenweg said.

Meanwhile, Schneider said mobile usage has grown dramatically in the past year (is there any site or app for which that’s not true?), with a 500 percent increase in the number of mobile views and amount of content created from mobile devices.

What’s next for Automattic is tighter integration into social networks and a more seamless set of tools across different devices, the two said.

“We march a little to our own beat, and sometimes it’s out of sync with Silicon Valley — and that’s been to our advantage and disadvantage,” Schneider said. “We don’t get sucked into the latest thing, while some of our competitors are distracted by the latest shiny object. The disadvantage is sometimes we’re against the grain of what everyone else is excited about, and people ask ‘Why don’t you have x yet?’ — but we go at our own pace.”

One other way Automattic is unusual is its incredibly low rate of staff attrition. Mullenweg said that the company currently has 106 employees — and it has only ever hired 118 people.

Read the original article at Allthingsd

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