It is finally here! After a lot of work the new design of WebHostingSearch is finally launched! As you probably have noticed the site is looking quite different and we hope that you like its new look and feel. If you browse around a bit we hope that you also notice that the design is not the only thing that has changed – we have also added a lot of new content that is intended to help you when working with anything that is related to the web, and of course web hosting in particular. Things that I’d like to recommend you guys checking out are for example our new step by step guide on how to start up your own website, where you will learn everything from the different types of hosting to what domain name to choose and how to upload your files using FTP. Another great tool is the comparison chart that helps you find hosting matching the needs of your website. Please navigate your way around the site and comment on what you think about the new updated version of WebHostingSearch.com!

When it comes to setting up your site, there are countless things that need to be taken care: finding your host, designing the site, developing content and so on. Once the site is up, although the difficult work is done, there are still many things that need to be dealt with. The largest of these things being the monitoring of the site, after all, a site that is not up is of no use to you or your users. You may recall awhile back that we looked at a few different monitoring solutions and reviewed one specifically. Since that period a few people have recommended that I look into the solution offered by Power Admin. They offer a number of monitoring solutions but their flagship piece is their server monitoring software.

The good news about this software is that it has a 30 day free trial, and unlike many other pieces out there, it is an actual full trial without any of the “This Feature is Only for Registered Products” or whatever. Installation is pretty straight forward and then the configuration process starts up. Of the monitoring services I have tried out, this one had one of the easier to follow configuration processes and it only takes a few minutes. Once this is finished, the program will populate with details from the server. At this point, those few minutes of work pay off with loads of info (some of which is vital , others may not be of any interest to you).

The server monitor has tons of features to it and can monitor a lot of different things. Here is a list of some of the things it can be used to monitor:
• Event Logs
• CPU, Memory, Network Usage
• Disk Space
• Running Services
• Log Files
• Server and room temperature
• SNMP Object Values
• Running Processes
• Ping Response Time
• Directory Quotas
• Changed files and directories
• FTP Servers
• POP,IMAP and SMTP mail servers
• Web Page content and load times
• TCP port response
• Citrix Monitoring
• And additional resources through user scripts
As many of you likely noticed, we have recently implemented a redesign on our site (at the same time we shifted CMS). So a few of these areas were particularly interesting to check out as I had not done so since things went live.
The page for content and load times is quite nice. In here you enter a specific page you want monitored and it will track the load times over a period of time and allow for the data to be made into a graphical representation. Load times are always of the utmost importance to us, as it is to all site owners, so it is nice to be able to take a look at this data and see how it compares to earlier designs on that page to see what the average response time is. Similarly, the ping response tool was also one of interest to me. It was a pretty straightforward tool with only a few options in it, but it does allow you to schedule a ping test and to graph out the data. The interface feels very familiar and is easy to navigate. Overall the specific tools were very easy to use and their site offers information on how to configure each one if you cannot figure it out on your own.

If you decide to use to register the solution for permanent use, the costs are reasonable. It can be registered for one server at $49, but for larger scale operations can be bought in packages to allow for up to 20 servers to be monitored from a single location. Enterprise licenses are also available if that is of interest to your needs. Before doing any of that though, check out their site and give the software a trial for 30 days.

Not that long ago the European Interactive Advertising Association (EIAA) released a report about the evolution of e-commerce and the online shopping habits of Europeans in 2008. Around 80% of all Internet users bought a product or service online in 2008. This figure was 40% in 2004. There has hence been a 100% increase in just four years all over Europe. Each user has in average shopped for 747€, during the first six months, which means a total sum of 1.3 billion Euros.

The products that people buy are 1. Travel tickets (54%) 2. vacation trips (42%) 3. books (40%) 4. concert tickets (38%) 5. clothes (33%). Out of these online shoppers do 59% consider the brands own websites to be a good resource for information on products, and a majority of people think that search engines is a greater source for information rather than personal recommendations.

This means that we in average trust the Internet more than we trust word-of-mouth. And keep in mind that word-of-mouth is the marketing technique that as good as all experts have proclaimed as the best marketing method these latest years. Maybe the new direction is not that strange either. On the Internet you are able to read hundreds of reviews on a single product. Your friend might be wrong about something but can a hundred people be mistaking?