WebHostPark Blog updates for either hosting or any other technical information

Best Time in The Day for Social Network Marketing

More and more people stay longger on social network websites like facebook, twitter. Because of this, the online sellers are trying various methods to promote their products/services on those networks. A perfect idea is important to archive success, but if we can pick up a perfect time to send out the ideas it will return twice value with less work.

Email Marketing

Email is the traditional and basic marketing tricks. Regardless any kind spam email, do you know when people open email box in a day? Here's a graphic analysis

perfect time for email marketing

perfect time for email marketing

The above graphic stats is the research of English people, it shows the golden times for email marketing is 10:00AM – 17:00PM from Tuesday to Thursday.

Blog Marketing

What's the time for people to read blog? Let's see this graphic

perfect time for blog marketing

The answer is most people read blog news at breakfest time around 8:00AM

Facebook Marketing

Facebook is the largest social network site, it's pretty essential to learn about people's activity on it. Here's the facebook acivity graphic

perfect time for facebook marketing

It shows the perfect marketing time on FB is 7:00AM – 12:00AM and 19:00PM – 21:00PM. The research also shows people are more active from Friday to Sunday. So make sure to handle your marketing campaign correctly and spend each penny on right place.

Now turns to Twitter. What's the best time for twitter marketing? The answer is 12:00PM – 20:00PM, From Wednesday to Friday

perfect time for twitter marketing

perfect time for twitter marketing

The mobile device marketing is new but fast growing business, the time for mobile marketing is very similar to twitter. Most people connect to mobile during 12:00PM – 20:00PM.

perfect time for mobile device marketing


Top Cloud Computing Providers

cloud computing rank

Cloud computing is popularily deployed by many IT groups and everyone would like to catch up with the up to date technologies. In cloud computing industry, amazon is definitely doing leadership because of their powerful system and popular business. But who is ranked NO.2 and 3 and the rest? After a bit research we found the following ranking. Hope you get a general idea about the current status.

Amazon Web Services is, by all accounts, the largest cloud service provider by far, although good luck finding third-party numbers to verify that. Amazon, like most of the big cloud providers, doesn’t disclose much about current or planned data centers.

New research from Accenture analyst Huan Liu estimates that Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) runs on a whopping 450,000 servers. Amazon does not break out AWS revenue, but some say it could already be a billion dollar business.

So, stipulating AWS as No. 1, here are seven cloud rivals that could give it a run for its money over the next few years.

1: Rackspace While Rackspace encompasses managed services and pure hosting businesses, it’s also a major cloud provider with actual, paying customers.  Measuring by revenue and VMs, Rackspace currently has a lock on the No. 2 slot by a wide margin, said Gartner analyst Lydia Leong. As one data point, Rackspace public cloud revenue rose to $189 million in fiscal year 2011, up from $100M the previous year. Going forward, that business should only grow as Rackspace brings more OpenStack implementations online.

2: Google If you’re talking number of physical servers, Google could already be the biggest cloud player. As for paying customers? That’s harder to discern. Google is one of the few companies that can (and does) invest in the pure computing firepower to contend with AWS. If you count all that Google Apps and Gmail storage, then Google’s obviously a huge player. The Google App Engine platform-as-a-service is still around but isn’t a factor for business developers.

3: Microsoft Two-year-old Windows Azure has big capacity, but actual traction is unclear — but it is clear Microsoft is going for the gusto. Microsoft just launched an Azure-focused startup accelerator in Israel to help boost demand. Next week, it is expected to announce timing for the first of its ERP products — actually the first of any of its major products — to run on Azure. And, going forward, Microsoft Azure’s embrace of Hadoop could attract more of the next-generation big-data workloads that the cloud vendors compete for.

4: IBM IBM SmartCloud is coming up fast on AWS and Rackspace even now, according to one cloud storage expert. That news surprised me but probably shouldn’t have, given IBM’s size and resources. And face it: IBM knows data centers. Like Microsoft, it is bringing Hadoop into its cloud with its InfoSphere BigInsights service.

5: Hewlett-Packard:  HP’s been all over the map on cloud plans, promising an Azure-based implementation a few years ago that has gone nowhere and more recently standing up an OpenStack-based public cloud. Zorawar “Biri” Singh, SVP for HP cloud services, told the New York Times last week that HP’s cloud will add features and capabilities beyond what AWS provides.  HP has also said it wants to challenge AWS for the hearts and minds of cloud developers. HP has had its share of woes lately, but it’s still a tech power, and provided the cloud is a priority with new management, it would be hard to rule out.

6: VMware: VMware’s vCloud already runs a ton of clouds for third-party providers, and the company’s Cloud Foundry platform-as-a-service is gaining traction. All of that plus the Mozy cloud storage service, which VMware manages for parent EMC, means that the company — which dominates server virtualization inside the firewall — is gaining a pretty impressive toehold in the cloud beyond as well.

7: Facebook: Don’t laugh. It’s a wildcard, but Facebook is putting serious sweat into data centers. And it’s applying lessons learned to the Open Compute Project, which aims to apply open source development to hardware design. With more than 800 million users, Facebook knows a thing or two about cloud infrastructure. True, Facebook doesn’t offer cloud services now, but then again, Amazon used to just sell books. Facebook could evolve into many things. GigaOM’s Derrick Harris has already suggested that Facebook could be your next software vendor.

Scrappy competitors could make a play, but…

“To compete with AWS you would need three things: Billions to invest, the wherewithal to manage technology on a massive scale and freedom from legacy constraints. Google and Microsoft surely have the money as well as the technology chops, but both are constrained by commitments to their valuable core businesses. Who might come in to compete out of the blue? Maybe Facebook, if they were looking for another line of business,” said Robert Shear, president of Greystone Solutions, a Boston consultancy that uses AWS for most of its development and deployment work. “My guess is that AWS will keep on growing until they bump up against anti-trust limitations in the US and the EU.”

So there you have it: seven contenders who could duke it out for the No. 2 spot in cloud services over time — and maybe even battle AWS for the top spot. Who am I missing here?

Original article posted on this Gigaom page

Search Engine Credits For Google, Yahoo & Bing

search engine credits

Search engine is playing an important role for online marketing. No matter what kind of optimization we apply, SE advertisement(popular for PPC) is always the best method to get traffic and orders in website early times. In order to save our budget, we always need the web hosting provider who can offer as many SE credits as they can. But are you aware such credits are already offered on search engine websites?

How to claim the most promotional search engine credits?

In case we have hosted our website but no such credits offered by hosting provider, we have collected the following

Search Engine Google Google Yahoo Bing
Credit Amount $75 $100 $75 $25
Promo Link View View View View

The steps to claim facebook $50 credits is a little complex because it's not offered anywhere directly. We need to be advertiser of PepperJam Network or Commission Junction. Once we're registered with their websites and get approved we'll be able redeem the facebook $50 credits in coupon code way. From the facebook Ads manager we can apply this coupon and the credits will be activated immediately.

How is it being offered by web hosting providers?

As for web hosting provider, they have many choice about which one to pick up. Many of them only give out one offer from above list such as yahoo $25 credits or google $75 credits because they don't earn from it. They mainly focus on their own offers. Very few of them pay extra effort to offer clients such bonus or even develop a management center to control over it.

Who is offering the best value search engine credits?

iPage is absolutely NO.1 in the list. There're over $450 free bonus offer in hosting plan. Generally speaking the ipage hosting has offered credits almost all popular search engines and social network websites like facebook. Beside this industry leading offer, the outstanding part is they integrated these services to hosting control panel directly. That means we don't have to log into the actual service website and configure the advertisement separately. Instead, we can manage everything under a central panel. In this way it brings us great convenience and efficiency. No other hosting could offer so friendly service.

In case you think the ipage hosting is costly, make sure to check out this ipage coupon page and claim $1.00/mo offer!


Why Web Hosting Chat Support is Important

web hosting chat

Congratulations for people who need live guidance in choosing a proper hosting service! In order to give our visitors' direct assistance and improve the reply quality, I just added live chat service on WHP. In case you have any question in choosing web hosting service or request some kind hosting coupon codes, you can now click the chat icon on top right for instant assistance.

How will this live chat help?

Since from the start of our web hosting reviews, I received lots of enquiries in my personal email account and I may have to reply many times for a single question. It's absolutely inefficient communication. Ideally, I would like to reduce email communication and put it on this chat window directly for fast and efficient support.

What kind of support available with this service?

Please note, since I'm not running a web hosting business but just a personal website. What I can offer is general questions in choosing/using a web hosting service. For some technical support you will have to check with your actual hosting provider since they're managing your service and know better about their environment. But I can still provide some basic technical support based on my working experience in hosting company. But if it's beyond my knowledge or access, please bare with it since I'm just a volunteer in offering such service and it's not profitable.

What's the support time?

This web hosting review website is my part time work so the popular 24 x 7 support does not exist on WHP. Generally speaking I will leave the chat window open during regular business time. In case I'm not available there, you can simply leave your contact details and question there. I will update with you quickly when I'm back. So don't worry if you can't get instant response, we'll always keep in touch.


IIS vs Apache, Which is your right web server?

iis vs apache

IIS and Apache web server are two of the most popular web developing platforms, but which one has more advantages and works better with our website? I did a lot of research on the web and setup local environment directly to find out the difference.

Because a user friendly GUI is always expected for programmers, windows is always the primary consideration. So we have the chance to test out the software's overall performance and stability etc.

Here're the platform and softwares specification used for testing — Xeon and Core2 E6 CPU. 2GB RAM with both windows server 2003 and Centos 5.4 Installations. The web server environment are — Windows + IIS 6.0 + PHP and Windows + Apache + PHP and Linux + Apache + PHP

Scripts used for testing: one 40K static HTML page and a basic phpinfo page. Tools for server testing: Web Capacity Analysis Tool (WCAT). Testing time: One minute.

WCAT download link: http://www.iis.net/community/default.aspx?tabid=34&g=6&i=1466

What's the testing result?

Under both server environment (IIS), I opened about 100 threads to the HTML file and found out the E6 CPU be able to handle 5 requests/s while the Xeon can reach up to 30 requests/s! After stopping IIS and switch to Apache, the testing resutls are similar.

Now turns to test the basic php page(windows server). When I increase the threads for both IIS/apache sites, the apache RAM usage is pretty high comparing to IIS server. At the meanwhile, IIS can keep an average usage and keep running, however, the apache is finally dead. But such issue doesn't happen under the Centos environment.

So I get the basic conclusion — IIS/Apache have similar abilities to handle static files under the same hardware specs/OS, hardware would be the bottleneck for performance downgrading. But for dynamic pages, apache is definitely not a good choice under windows OS.

How to improve the website performance?

Based above testing results, we found there're several factors to affect the website actual performance — Hardware specs, Server OS, Types of scripting language

So here're the solutions

If we're doing PHP scripting on our website, do not apache running on your production windows server. IIS is absolutely the best one for windows OS. Secondly, always try to avoid using dynamic pages on the website. With the current website technologies, it's easy to convert any dynamic page to static one. The popular module for apache mod_rewrite is highly suggested to activate.

How about web hosting environment?

Obviously, above rules are still valid for hosting purpose. But there're more. The hosting industry is already a mature market and many new companies are joining in every day. We can't find which is good and which is not without any actual experience with them.

Generally speaking, all quality web hosting companies have up to date hardware & OS installations on hosting server and they have a professional tech team to optimize it based on live experience. But it's another story to less quality service providers. There might be a more attractive price with lots of promotional offers, but you can't find too much info about their service on internet, such company is either too new or simply rubbish to disturb our decision.

When we evaluate a web hosting provider, always remember to contact their pre-sales support to confirm the server and network specifications. Also ask around for other users' experience in web forums or blogs. No matter how much time it cost to learn about, it's valuable to avoid future problems with the service.


Happy Valentine’s Day 2012

valentine's day 2012

Happy Valentine's Day 2012! Are you ready to send/receive gifts from your honey? I hope so and hope all of you will have a romantic and memorable festival. While we're enjoying the happy times, let's see how other people celebrating it in the world.

France: The capital of romance. On Feb 14th, love is everywhere in this country. It's common to see lovers are kissing each other on the street. For gentlemen, rose and perfum are popular gifts to the other part in life. Champagne and red wine are the best engine to express their feelings with each other. You know Fance has the best brand wines in the world, many famous wine pubs will give out discount this day and provide some special colors/tastes.

United States: From a recent research news report, over 4 million americans wish to be married or plan to speak out their love on Feb 14th. However, commercial related stuff is mentioned more in the report. Many sellers are trying to make more sales on that day, some popular products like watches, diamond rings, necklace etc are all giving out some kind of discount to attract visitor's eye-balls.

Japan: Unlike all other places in the world, it will be the first valentine's day for Japan after the earthquake and nuclear leak. The local chocolate store produced a new type chocolate candy which is made by wine and honey. The most special part is they have printed "thank you" in five languages to express their thanksgiving because of the nature disaster.

Thailand: There was a kiss competetion over 7 couples lovers on Feb 12th. One of them announced to conquer the Guinness record.

South Korea: The Soul department store produced a huge chocolate spike (length: 3m, wide: 2m) to welcome the festival. This spike is made by 60 kg chocolate.

In England, a 23-year-old fashion designer designed a skirt with 1725 roses. In order to make the skirt perfect, it took the designer 170 hours.

There're many new ideas with different people over the world, just take a search on the web then find what they're doing and what's going on.

How about web hosting industry? Is there any activity going on? Well, we have not received any newsletter about it, however I'm sure every hosting providers will not give up this opportunity to make more sales with some promotional offers. Some popular names like Godaddy, Hostgator, Ipage are always offerring time limited specials which will save us lots of money for domain name or web hosting registration. If you need to host a website, they're worthy of checking out.

At last, once again I hope all you guys pass a romantic and memorable valentine's day! 2012, what a special number!