14July2008
Available now: Dedicated containers
Posted by admin under: announcements.
Dedicated containers are available now, please check VPS Hosting page for more details about this new package.
4July2008
coming soon: the Dedicated Containers
Posted by admin under: announcements.
Today, we have setup the first beta server(s) for this new type of web hosting, the Dedicated Containers are our virtual private web servers plans.
For who is not familiar with such things, Virtual Private Servers or VPS is large physical server divided into smaller servers, each server is having a full operating system and resources including CPU, RAM and disk I/O.
Every VPS owner have full access to configure server software even reboot his own VPS without affecting other VPS owners.
Pros of VPS:
- flexible, you can do whatever you want whenever you want with your server.
- have Guaranteed resources, your website’ need of RAM and disk are dedicated.
Cons of VPS:
- its a full server, so you need good experience to deal with it, secure it and keep your operation system up to date.
- For hosts to keep price down, the resources allowed for each VPS usually is small, imagine giving 256MB of RAM to run HTTP, MySQL, Email, cpanel, ..etc. such non optimized VPS may end with less performance than our shared hosting accounts.
So we decided to make it Fully Managed Containers + guaranteed RAM from 512MB + a lot of hardware and software optimization, our initial tests show that single container can beat low cost dedicated server .. more good news on the way.
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26June2008
Crazy egg
Posted by admin under: Uncategorized.
conversation rate: the percentage of unique visitors who take a desired action upon visiting a website.
If your desired action is to make your visitor buy something from you and you could made 5 visitors buy out of 100 visitors, then your conversation rate is 5%.
want to increase your sales online? there are 2 options, get more visitors, or enhance your website to make more people buy from your website (increase the conversation rate).
Increasing conversation rate, website optimization to increase conversation is subject of too many books today, personally, I’m reading “web design for ROI“, a small and nice book like other books it try to learn you one word ’sympathy’ if you can think in same way like your visitor, it will be easy to you to design your website and convince him to make a purchase, simple rule .. but not easy.
‘Human nature is tricky: once we learn something, it’s hard to imagine not knowing it, this is why user testing can be so valuable; it reminds us that most people don’t know what we know.‘
Web design for ROI - page 27.
OK, to optimize your website for better conversation, you need to think like how your visitors think, but you will not able to do that because its hard to ignore what you already know.
the solution, to get user-testing software (a software that monitor users, their mouse moves and clicks,..etc .. cost around $1500), get people to test your website or application, get results, enhance your website, test again, ..etc … who have budget for that!
the other solution is tiny and promising online application called Crazy Egg, ok, it doesn’t give the super deep results like Morae, but it does give very important information in what your visitor look for in your website without hiring people to test your website.
getting a free account in crazyegg will take 10 seconds, you will be given a small javascript code to put in your page, that’s all .. check this nice demo
the report called “heatmap” gives you exactly where the user click, the most clicked links and the referrer of users who clicked this links .. ok .. you must see yourself.
for website like 2mhost.com, this tool is better than nothing, frankly speaking .. We have no time to hire people to test our website or order process so getting some picture of real visitor’s behavior is amazing.
I hope to make detailed review of this nice tool soon, for now, its free for limited number of pages and visitors (its enough for mid-size website though) and there are paid upgrades… but I really do not know what I’ll gain if I used the paid service .. I’m checking that now, Paid accounts lets you have realtime results, free accounts have 3-6 hours delay, for me, no big deal.
10June2008
beware of Domain Registry of America
Posted by admin under: Uncategorized.
Few months ago, after sending a renewal reminders, I got a reply from a customer that he already renewed his domain with “Domain Registry of America”, he said that a sales agent called him and asked him to renew his domain as soon as possible and the customer paid to them by credit card, in this time I explained to the customer that 2mhost is not “Domain Registry of America” and the domain is still registered by us and he had to pay us to renew the domain! I did not follow this case because it looked like a scam attempt by someone.
Today same story happen again, same scenario, but this time the victim paid with check so there is no doubt that “Domain Registry of America” themselves is scam company and contacted our customer to renew his domain while they do not have any access to this domain and they can’t renew the domain for him.
I hope I can get more details from our customer to publish it here, until then, be ware, we are not or affiliated with ”Domain Registry of America”, they can’t renew your domain name.
Update
our customer sent us the letter she received from DROA, its a hardcopy sent by regular mail
Although everything written in that letter is correct, but its hide important parts too need to be explained before they ask for money.
- They advice the user that her domain needs renewal every year and this is correct.
- They told her that she do not have to renew with the current registrar in sneaky way
- They DIDN’t tell her that she need what so called EPP code from current registrar to complete the transfer, and the other steps required to complete the domain transfer process.
anyways, legally I see nothing on the letter, but its not ethical way to gain customers.
5June2008
Google penalty is over!
Posted by admin under: Uncategorized.
Finally,google penalty has been removed and after 90 days of pain we are up again in google search results!
Google penalty?
I have searched and didn’t find any official source in google that admits what so called ‘google penalty’, but it does exist ,there is a cold war between Google and “some” webmasters, google puts rules to rank the websites in better way , the webmasters are trying to find out those rules to cheat google to increase their websites ranking , when google enhances his rules the webmasters enhance their methods too and so on, when Google find what they are doing he puts new rules to punish who are trying to manipulate the search results and depending on what they did google may remove those websites from his index or give them a penalty, in our case we got just a penalty .
How the penalty looks like?
In our case, if you were searching for “2mhost” instead of getting 2mhost.com as the first result you will find us in the sixth page!!, google simply added around 50 websites above our actual rank, 2mhost.com was ranked as the third website in “cheap web hosting” and during the penalty we became in the 6th page, ..etc ,as a result, we lost all the traffic from google and ofcourse lost a lot of business.
Check the graphs below from alexa.com
I’d say that we have dropped more in this 90 days, putting some ads here and there helped us to get some traffic, so the above graphs could have been worse without those ads.
Did 2mhost deserve a penalty?
Its really hard to tell, I believe we played it nice with our SEO methods, Also I think google allows some margins around his guidelines, the only thing that I feel sorry about is buying a bulk of links from a reseller with us, his offer was good , he has 100s of article websites,so the offer was writting some articles about web hosting and link it to us, spread it over 100s of websites then google will index this articles and rank us higher .. links are permanent, “pay once and get links forever” .. looks like a bargain to anyone interested in building links .. but it was easy for google to find that, we got 100s of links at once, all from similar, useless, long articles in websites that no one reads .. so google punished us, a 90 days of 50-lower-rank-penalty.
What we did to remove the penalty?
Well, we did 2 main things:
1. removed all paid links to us.
2. submitted google reconsideration form, which is the only way to ask google for forgiveness, you can find many articles that will tell you the etiquette to talk to google! OK, I followed every advice ..
personally, I think that adding google penalty and removing it is 100% automated process, I think no one at google reviewed 2mhost.com before giving the penalty or read my request(s) to remove it.
anyways, .. its over now and we are happy for that, I have learned a lot of things about SEO and I hope to write about them soon.