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Colocation is rapidly becoming a popular solution for many small to mid-sized companies. Colocation facilities can provide quality cooling, power and connectivity networks, as well as security protocols. In addition, a colocation center can offer server management services. As such, a trained staff of IT professionals is present onsite 24/7 to handle a variety of issues. For this reason many companies are evaluation colocation pricing.

Management Concerns at Colocation Facilities

A colocation facility differs greatly from an in-house data center although both serve the same general purpose. A private data center is setup by an enterprise that is solely responsible for building and maintaining the facility. This can be quite costly and is often cost prohibitive
On the other hand, a colocation facility is setup in the same way as a data center. The only difference is that such a facility is used by a number of different clients. Companies purchase their own equipment, and then place it within the center. Once the equipment has been installed, the facility staff is responsible for making sure the servers remain online and in operation.

Types of Management Services

There are a number of things that require technical services. For instance, if a server crashes due to network overload, a reboot might be required. Any server downtime can be extremely costly for companies. Therefore, maintaining the functionality of servers is very important.

In addition, servers are connected to a high-profile Internet connection. Other equipment is also connected to the servers in order to create a fully functioning IT environment. If anything affects the server, other equipment is affected, as well. Therefore, issues such as replacing a cable or even a circuit board need to be handled instantaneously.

There are some situations in which companies also require hardware upgrades. This type of service usually comes under the agreement that has been drafted between the colocation provider and a company. In fact, it is very important for a company to read each and every detail of the service agreement plan. A service agreement plan is signed between both parties before the equipment is installed. The agreement contains all of the services that the colocation vendor is responsible for providing. Those services that fall outside of the contract can be added on at extra cost. A company must be confident the colocation facility it contract with. This is because once an agreement is signed, it is not easy to get out of. 

Also, operating systems as well as other applications are installed within a server. Software upgrades direct from the manufacturer is released frequently. These upgrades contain performance upgrades, as well as security patches. For a fully functioning server, it is important to install these upgrades as soon as possible.
Moreover, file system as well as database maintenance should be performed routinely. Both hardware and software aspects of IT equipment need to be kept in consideration. A server is an expensive piece of hardware that needs to be closely monitored for optimal performance.

Lastly, a colocation vendor is also responsible for backing up data in case of a disaster. The number of backups that exist as well as their frequency is mentioned within the service agreement.

For all of these issues, someone must be on hand at all times – evenings, weekends and holidays – to address these issues as soon as possible. Colocation technicians are onsite around the clock to fill that need.

Without management services, companies would have to take care of all of the above factors. Consequently, colocation management services are extremely important.

One of the most discussed topics we see when attending WordCamps and other events is what’s better for SEO: categories vs tags? What’s the difference between categories and tags? What’s the optimal number of WordPress categories? How many is too many? Is it okay to assign one post in multiple categories? Is there a limit of tags we can assign to each post? Do tags work like meta keywords? Are there any SEO advantage of using categories over tags or vice versa? We’ve seen quite a few commentaries on this subject through out the web, but we found that they were inconsistent and incomplete. If you ever had these questions, then hopefully they will be answered once you are done reading this post, so you can make adjustments to your blog if necessary.

Before we discuss any of the questions listed above, we need to understand what is categories and tags. In the WordPress nomenclature, both categories and tags are known as taxonomies. Their sole purpose is to sort your content to improve the usability of your site. Meaning when a user comes to your site, they can easily browse through your content by topic rather than browsing chronologically which is how blogs were initially setup.

What’s the difference between Categories and Tags?

Categories are meant for broad grouping of your posts. Think of these as general topics or the table of contents for your site. Categories are there to help identify what your blog is really about. It is to assist readers finding the right type of content on your site. Categories are hierarchical, so you can sub-categories.

Tags are meant to describe specific details of your posts. Think of these as your site’s index words. They are the micro-data that you can use to micro-categorize your content. Tags are not hierarchical.

For example if you have a personal blog where you write about your life. Your categories can be something like: Music, Food, Travel, Rambling, and Books. Now when you write a post about something that you ate, you will add it in the Food category. You can add tags like pizza, pasta, steak etc.

One of the biggest difference between tags and categories is that you MUST categorize your post. You are not required to add any tags. If you do not categorize your post, then it will be categorized under the “uncategorized” category. People often rename the uncategorized category to something like Other, ramblings etc.

Another difference is the way your category and tags permalinks (urls) look. If you are using a custom permalink (URL) structure, then your base prefix will look different. Example:

http://yoursite.com/category/food/

vs.

http://yoursite.com/tag/food/

What’s the optimal number of WordPress categories?

Up until WordPress 2.5, there was no built-in support for tags. This led to very long category lists because people were using it to define micro-details. Tags were added to improve the usability of your site. Having that said, we believe there is no specific optimal number of categories. The optimal number varies based on the complexity of your site. However, for the sake of structure and usability, it is best that you utilize sub-categories and tags.

Categories are meant to encompass a group of posts. It is always best to start with generic categories and work your way down with subcategories as your site grow. After having run multiple blogs, we have learnt that blogs evolve. There is no way that you can come up with all the right categories. Chances are when starting out, you are only writing one post a day. Or maybe 3-5 posts a day. Having 30 top categories is pointless specially when some of them will only have one or two posts. You are better off with 5 generic categories that have fresh content rather than 30 top categories where majority are not updated.

Let’s take a look at an example. Say that we are starting a social media blog in 2012. We want to share how-to tutorials, news, tools, case studies etc. We can create top categories like Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn etc. As sub categories of each, we can have tools, how-to’s, case studies, news etc. However that is a very short-term mindset, and we will run into issues in the future. What if one of the social media network dies and a new one enters the game? You will be required to add yet another top level category and more sub-categories.

A much better way of structuring this social media blog would be to have top categories that are future-proof. You can have your categories like How-To’s, News, Case Studies, Tools, etc. But how would people know that it is about twitter? Well your categories are not suppose to do the entire job. This is where tags come in. Let’s say you wrote a how-to post about twitter, simply add the tag twitter. In your design just add a section called Popular Topics and control that manually with links to popular tags like Twitter, Facebook, Google+ etc.

When do you add Subcategories?

Let’s say that you do a case-study posts where sometimes you interviewed an expert for a specific case-study. Because there is no category called “expert interviews”, you will add that as a tag on that case-study post. If you find yourself doing a lot of interviews for case-studies and your expert interviews tag has 10+ posts in it and is consistently growing, then you should consider adding expert interviews as a sub-category of your main category “Case Studies”.

Yes, you will have to go back and edit your older posts. If your URL structure is /category/postname/, then you have make sure you are using the Redirection plugin. It automatically redirects your modified posts to their new URL, so you can keep all the search engine rankings.

Do I have to use sub-categories?

No ofcourse not. You can always leave popular tags as tags. In our example above, almost all posts will have a tag for a specific social media network like twitter, facebook, etc. But we are not creating those as categories. The only reason why you add sub-categories is to make it easy for your users to find the content. You are more than welcome to simply add the Expert Interviews tag in your site somewhere.

Remember the whole purpose of categories and tags are to make it easy for your users to browse your site.

Is it okay to assign one post to multiple categories?

You might read on other sites that assigning posts to multiple categories can hurt your SEO. Some say that you can get penalized with duplicate content because of that. We believe that statement is not entirely true. First of all, don’t get lost with SEO. Remember the purpose of sorting your content efficiently is to help users find it. By the nature of how top categories should be setup, you shouldn’t be able to classify one post into multiple top-level categories. For example, if your blog has three categories “Advertising, Marketing, and SEO”. Your posts often tend to fall into multiple categories. Perhaps you need an umbrella category for all three? Maybe they should all fall under Business? Or you can have one category called Advertising & Marketing. Then have SEO as a sub-category for those.

There is no SEO benefits to adding multiple categories. If you think it helps your users, then you are more than welcome to add one post into multiple categories. However, if you see this becoming a regular issue, then you should consider restructuring your categories. Maybe some of your categories need to be tags. Or maybe they should be subcategories of one major category. It is mainly about making the user experience better.

If you are super concerned about duplicate content penalty, then simply (noindex, follow) your category taxonomy using the WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin.

If you only want to (noindex, follow) specific categories, then you can do so by editing the category themselves. Yoast plugin has the setting to override the global settings.

Basically when you (noindex, follow) certain thing, it tells Google and other search engine bots to follow all post links in these categories, so all posts can be indexed. However do not index the main category archives to prevent duplicate content.

Short answer: WordPress allows you to add one post into as many categories as you like. Yes it is okay to assign one post into multiple categories as long as you think it helps your users. However, if you think of categories as Table of Contents for your blog where posts are chapters, then can you have one chapter in two separate sections? The answer to that question is NO.

Is there a limit of tags we can assign to each post?

Short answer to this question is NO. WordPress has NO limits on the number of tags you can assign to a specific post. You can add 1000+ tags if you like. However, the purpose of tags is to relate your posts together. Again think of tags as the index or your book. These are popular keywords that you can use to loosely relate your posts. This makes it easy for users to find your posts specially when they are using the WordPress search. It also helps if you are utilizing the tag archive for users. We say add no more than 10 tags to your posts unless you can justify it. For example: if you are running a movie review blog, you may add multiple tags: actor/actress names (this alone can be over 10). But chances are that you may review multiple movies that have Adam Sandler in it. But for other simpler scenarios, you should really limit the amount of tags you use. Otherwise, you may find yourself with over 10000+ tags with only 300 posts on the site.

Do tags work like meta keywords?

Often people mistake tags to be like meta keywords for your blogs. This is the main reason why they try to add as many tags as possible. Tags are NOT meta keywords for your blog. At least not by default. Popular plugins like WordPress SEO by Yoast allows you to use your tag values to be in the meta keywords template. But if you don’t have these plugins configured to do that, then your tags DO NOT work like meta keywords.

Categories vs Tags: What’s better for SEO?

The most asked question that we see being asked on this topic is: Are there any SEO advantage of using categories over tags or vice versa? The simple answer to this is NO. You should NOT look at this as categories or taxonomies. They are meant to work together. If you have read this post, then you should be able to understand the individual purpose of categories and tags as well as their combined purpose for your site’s usability.

Conclusion

Your site is about your users not search engine bots. The goal of every search engine is to think the way users think when valuing your content. If you make your decisions based on usability, you will almost always find yourself reaping the SEO benefits. Categories and Tags are just the two default taxonomies that comes with WordPress. Most advanced sites use custom taxonomies for sorting their content alongside with categories and tags. Think of your blog as an ever evolving book. Choose the Table of Content (categories) wisely. Make sure that they are broad topics, but be cautious to not make it too vague. Use tags to loosely relate multiple posts. If you see a certain tag is becoming popular, then consider adding it as a sub-category. However, if you have to add the tag as subcategory of multiple top-level categories, then leave it as a tag. The goal is always to make the site as user friendly as possible.

We hope that this article helps clear any and all confusion when it comes to the topic of categories vs tags. We would love to hear your thoughts on this matter. How do you sort your content? what best practices do you follow?

Originall article posted on this wpbeginner page

Blog is the most popular website style on internet. No matter it's for personal hobby or business marketing purpose, blog is the best solution. Some day we found we have so many blogs on hand and no idea how to manage them efficiently, then we should look into some blog management softwares and find the right solution. In case you're looking for such solutions, we're going to introduce some of the best ones on internet.

Best Blog management softwares comparison

When we're talking about blog, 99% are wordpress related. So our article will mainly focus on wordpress platform, the available Blog management softwares are mostly WP based too. Such softwares are most ideally to be developed in desktop application. In this field, the windows live writer has been the most popular name for professionals. Not only because of it's free, but also for it's various support over the main blog systems such as wordpress, blogspot and we can manually configure to connect to other third party blog platforms. We can add as many blogs as we can.

The problem with live writer is it can't download blog themes from the configuration untill we switch back to default theme and disable all plugins. Especially when we have some customized functions enabled with our blog site, live writer can not help at all. However, it's already good enough for basic bloging purpose, we can wirte blog posts offline and publish any time.

If you think live writer is too basic for your blog requirements, then let's go ahead to check another solution — InfiniteWP.

InfiniteWP is developed by infinitewp.com, with this software we can manage wordpress updates, backup and restore in one click away. If we like to keep a backup and make everything up to date, infinitewp is probably the best free solution at the moment.

If you need further requirements such as code snippnets, bulk posting and scheduling backups etc, there're paid options.

Except for above freewares, there're more excellent paid softwares and they will provide much much more features. Let's check out the following brands in quick view.

ManageWP – A commercial wordpress plugin that let's managing multiple wordpress blogs under one dashboard. It's also designed to auto backup/monitor your wordpress sites in security tunnel. The best of the best is it's 100% mobile compatible! Means we don't have to use a PC and login to blog site, a mobile phone is enough.

ManageWP is available in free/paid solution. We can add up to 5 websites for free version with limited features. With enterprise edition we need to pay as much as $3.24/mo for professional services.

If you are running a pupolar wordpress site or going to have one and offer your clients personal blog options under a sub domain, you should check out "Pro Sites" solution.

The Pro Sites is developed by wpmudev team, it's simply designed the same way as wordpress.com where people can sign up blogs. If you have used wordpress.com you should have understood how powerful it is. Once Pro Sites is configured on our blog site, we can set to offer free or paid blog service. If we're going to make money with this business, Pro Site is absolutely the best solution so far.

Web hosting is a matured business, there're thousands of service providers to make the competition hard. For new players, they always have to use lots of methods to get customer orders, either ethical or unethical. Their primary chanllenge is to survival in the business. BUT, that makes users especially novice hard to determine a quality service provider. A decent service might be ignored because they did less marketing while a less quality service doing big efforts on it. This is what we're going to discuss in this topic.

How did you find your hosting provider?

The internet got great improvement these years and makes our lives more and more easy. No matter what we need, we can always find a perfect solution via few clicks away. Search engine plays the most important role in finding something we needed. When we not sure where to navigate, search engine(google) is always the primary place to check out. No matter if we trust the search results or not, the first page always get the most clicks. Means if the website is perfectly optimized and ranked very high on google, it will receive numorous visits from search engine redirecting.

Another way would be forums where almost every service providers advertised there. Some industry leading forums bring big business to hosting providers like Webhostingtalk. If we have some basic knowledge about hosting, we will look into such forums and ask for suggestions from experienced user or simply go with the recommended section directly since we trust the reputable forum brands.

So are they all right? Can we go safely with our choice? Well, just continue to read below.

How can we trust online hosting advertising?

Before we trust any info we should understand we're going to pay something. Because we're going to pay money, there'll be lots of providers trying to sell their products with every effort. So generally what we see on the web is not always what we needed at the very begining.

Search engine, every business knows it's importance and did everything they can to get higher ranking from search results. Forums, always spammed by tons of messages. Many service providers employ people to write fake reviews there and build a positive reputation on the site. Because of this, we can be misguided easily.

It's easy to write out 24×7 support and 99.999% uptime as well as 10 times more than what we actually need on their websites, however it always takes 100 times efforts to archive it. Not every company would like to invest that much. For many new setup brands, they just setup their business on several VPS instance or a single dedicated server. The support, billing and sales might be all handled by one or two people. What they really concerned is to sell their service to more people instead of fixing problems efficiently.

Nowadays, in order to gain business, people have tried almost all they can. Just yesterday, I received an email saying if I cancel my service with current company, they can offer me 6 months free VPS hosting with only 1 month payment! But when I check their website, it's only registered one month before! Can I leave a reputable company and put my business with such service? Absolutely no.

Conclusion

For people who need hosting service but not sure where to go, the most safe choice is to list out the old brands and search reviews of them. Generally speaking, if the positive rating is over 80% with that company, then it will do good with us, at least we know we're hosted with the direct equipment providers instead reseller or renter. No offense to new providers but it's really hard to evalue them, but I believe they will be reputable brands if they can put customer on top position.

From early days, there's less competition for online marketing so people can focus on actual service quality and gain business by offering leading techs and service. However, as more and more players join into the industry, money becomes the primary consideration. A quality service is hard to get customer if they don't implement some "unethical" methods like their competitors. As a result of that, people can't figure out which is good or bad, that's the source of so many complaints from users.

INTEL XEON E5 AND E7 SERVER PROCESSORS

If you're setting up a server, or choosing a cloud provider, you might want to know about the processors that go in to the machines. Which is better, and which should be used for which purpose? Have all the facts when you shop for a provider by reading on.

It’s worth mentioning before we start that the Xeon E7 and E5 processors have strong pedigrees – IBM, Dell and Amazon, who are among the largest cloud management companies, use Intel Xeon processors in their rented server space. So either one is going to be a strong option.

The E5. You might consider the E5 to be the ‘baby'of the line, especially where compared with the E7. It’s a newer processor design, which means higher optimization, and was released only in the second quarter of 2012. The processors are designed for affordable scalability, and as such are less expensive or complex to deploy than their bigger brother. It’s optimized for 2-socket performance, though it can happily take up to 4. This means that virtualization is a viable project for E5-based servers. Memory constraints are not gargantuan, but do come in at the Olympic level of 768GB (on 2 sockets) or 1.5TB on 4 sockets. They are reliable and efficient, with sizeable 20MB on-die caches. If your cloud operation is smaller scale or relies on flexible scalability, cloud providers with E5-based machines may offer all the operating headroom you require – even if you anticipate surges or shortfalls in customers say, throughout certain periods of the day.

The E7. This is the granddaddy of Intel Xeon processors. It is ‘top-of-the line’, according to Intel, and undoubtedly offers some of the best virtualization experiences possible today. Intel claims that it has ‘near native'Virtual Machine capabilities, which means that it is worth considering for intensive or interactivity-rich cloud applications.

Offered are 10-core processors – capable of processing up to 20 threads simultaneously – on between 2 and 256 sockets. That limits your maximum RAM to 4TB, and it’s hard to think of a use for any higher figures. For Mission-Critical or high data demand uses, the E7 is likely the processor that you will want to be using.

So which should you select? This depends on your use. Intel recommends the E5 for ‘standard infrastructure'projects. That covers, to be honest, the vast majority of cloud programs on the market today. The E7 is almost exclusively reserved for high-capacity computing and mission critical tasks (because of its increased power and reliability). Of course, if you really have the cash to splash, you can branch out to Intel’s super-premium Itanium 9000 sequence-based servers. It’s hard to think of many uses in which it would be more cost-effective to deploy these behemoths – they support up to an astonishing 1024TB (a petabyte) of RAM and reside almost exclusively on the UNIX platform (with support for Windows and Linux).

Hopefully this article has given a bit of insight in to your cloud provider’s hardware. If you have any comments or questions, please pop them in the thread below.
 

WordPress is probably the most popular website platform, especially for people who like to create a blog site or enterprise site, the friendly interface simply makes everything easy. Since it's not so hard to get our website online with WP, can we do something to be profitable on it? Because it costs us money for hosting the website, if we can earn with the website, we can keep it's running with no worry about further investment. So we can make money in what ways? Here're good ideas from Harish Chouhan on tutsplus site.

Theme Design

Unless you have a big client, the profit from a single custom made website project is not much. Most projects also end up as a disappointment, as clients sometimes reject good design ideas. Getting into theme development, gives designers the opportunity to work on their own time, use good design principles and create something they are proud of. Marketplaces such as ThemeForest.net offer between 50 to 70% of the sale amount to all theme developers. Considering a basic WordPress theme is priced around $40 on ThemeForest, even if 100 people download it, it would mean the designer earns $2,000. This is actually more than what most freelance designers and small companies in regions like India earn from a custom design project.

Some top theme developers like Orman Clark have around 18 themes with over 23,000 sales. If you do the math, it’s a pretty impressive number. Of course we would not reach that number in one day, but it’s better to start now, and if you have multiple themes for sale this could be a nice way to do what you love and earn money.

Plugin or App Theme Development

One of the plugins that I absolutely love and use for each single WordPress project is Gravity Forms. There are many free plugins similar to this and they are great, but I and many other users find this plugin to be the best. The developers have made one thing, and this one thing named “Gravity Forms” makes creating complex forms as easy as creating a WordPress post.

Gravity Forms charges just $39 for a basic license. Having a useful product such as this along with a low price has made Gravity Forms a market leader in the WordPress forms category. Low price seems less profit, but considering the number of WordPress websites, this can get very profitable. As of today this plugin is installed on more than 300,000 WordPress websites. As WordPress developers, some of us might have already created custom functionalities for our clients. Creating a premium plugin out of it can add a new source of income.

WordPress Specific Web Hosting

Over the last few years, WordPress specific hosting has become more than just a marketing gimmick. While most web hosting companies are using WordPress in their website promotion only for SEO reasons some companies such as WPEngine.com & Page.ly have become specialized WordPress hosting platforms with almost no competition.

Many web hosting companies offer one click installation of WordPress, but WordPress users do require many other features such as automated security updates, daily backups, one click restore, etc. which are not addressed by most hosts. Despite WordPress being easy to update, many users still ignore it or are unaware of it.

For such a market, selling WordPress specific hosting which allows users to focus on their site and content while security updates & backups are taken care of becomes more useful than a general web hosting account. If you currently charge $10/month for general hosting, then you could easily charge double for WordPress specific services with your hosting. Since there are very few companies like WPEngine or Page.ly, if you start now you definitely would be among the first few companies with less competition.

Premium Support, Backup & Maintenance Services

Like WordPress specific hosting you could package your after sales maintenance services as WordPress management to offer optimization, regular security audits, backups for a fixed monthly or yearly fee. Most companies have already started doing this but are not marketing it well. If you are able to promote this service and get good reviews, even doing general updates could add an additional source of income.

Services like ManageWP.com & WPRemote.com allows us to update WordPress core, plugins, themes & take backups remotely in just a few clicks. By using this as the tool to manage your WordPress customers, instead of logging into each customer’s website, you could remotely manage all WordPress websites through one single control panel. Considering these services cost as low as $0.02 per website and your few minutes each day there is no additional requirement to start offering WordPress management services and make decent profits from day one.

While being a WordPress designer or developer and working on custom projects gives a good income, the above business ideas would give regular income by doing exactly what you want to do and on your own terms. It makes sense to get started early and who knows you could be the next person to be featured on ThemeForest for reaching a million dollars in sales.