jonlee.ca

Virtual Private Servers (VPS for short) are a relatively new type of offering from some web hosts.  Traditionally, web hosts offer a choice between shared hosting and dedicated hosting.  Shared hosting is cheap but performance leaves much to be desired, especially for sites that expect to have any decent amount of traffic or to perform database intensive queries.  Dedicated hosting on the other hand, although expensive, allows you to run your website off of your own machine on a rack, giving you dedicated resources for your website, hence the name.

VPS lies somewhere in between the two options.  Disk space and RAM are dedicated to you, but CPU cycles are shared.  Often times, web hosts will tell you that you have a certain amount of disk space available but in reality, a single disk might be shared amongst several users and the web host assumes that not everyone will be using all of their allocated space.  This is known as overselling. The same applies for memory/RAM.

Advantages of VPS

• Burst memory: although your site has dedicated RAM, when a huge traffic spike hits (for example, if you get front paged on digg or reddit), RAM usage may go beyond what is allocated to you.  In this case, reserve memory is automatically borrowed from the cloud until the traffic subsides.  Occassional burst memory on VPS is supported by some web hosts such as inmotion hosting.
• Scalability: VPS packages come in many forms, from basic plans with little disk space and reserved RAM to full out e-commerce plans with a lot of disk space, unlimited databases and lots of RAM.  Start-ups can easily start with the most basic plan and scale up to the more expensive plans as user base grows.  The great thing about VPS is that everything is virtual, so upgrading from one plan to another is instant and just takes a click of a button — no physical hardware upgrades required!
• Server customization: The VPS runs on a virtual machine with it’s own installation of an operating system and webserver. This means you can customize the server however you would want, just as if you had your own dedicated server.

Given these advantages, I don’t see any reason to stick with shared hosting if you are a web developer. The price difference between shared hosting and the lowest VPS package is small and the customizability is unparalleled.

Eventually you may outgrow what Virtual Private Servers or even a single dedicated server can offer but I think we can all agree that this is a problem we’d all like to have!

Popularity: 1% [?]

A little piece of exciting news for web developers.  The .co extension is being released by Network Solutions in just over two months.  This easy-to-remember and brandable domain extension (and also .com typo) certainly has a lot of potential for growth.

Network Solutions is currently running a contest on Pitch.co where they will give away prizes and domain names to those that pitch the best idea for a .co site!

I am pleading to the fellow readers to help me get Stats.co by giving me a vote! I want to make a webapp to help analyze various types of data.  Analysis of web traffic data would be a great tool for web developers! If you also enter the contest, let me know and I’ll vote for you too!

Popularity: 1% [?]

Smashing Magazine has an excellent article about applying mathematics to improve web design. Mathematics is a beautiful subject with a lot of subtleties that are deeply entrenched in nature.  Most people know of the golden ratio and its aesthetically pleasing qualities but that’s not the only way mathematics applies to art and design.

• Golden ratio and golden rectangle
• Fibonacci design
• Kundli design
• Sine wave design.

Ahh don’t you love it when art meets science?

Popularity: 1% [?]

A couple days ago, I was pleasantly surprised to receive a Valentine’s Day card from Google sent out by good old snail mail to select Adsense publishers.

Included in the card was a code for $100 in free Adword credits, good to drive a decent amount of traffic to your site!

On the back of the card was a QR Code, the popular 2D matrix bar code that is popular in Japan.  It’s a code that can be read by some mobile phones and directs to the same URL shown on the card.

If the pictures are too small, the card reads:

Front: Others will fill your heart this Valentine’s Day
Inside left: We want to overload your servers.
Inside right:

Because nothing says “I love you” like free traffic to your website.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

XOXO The AdWords team.

Happy Valentine’s Day to all my readers!

Popularity: 2% [?]

As all web developers know, the best source of traffic is from search engines such as Google.  But just getting listed on Google isn’t good enough, you also need to be listed as one of the top results (ideally the very first result).  This is because the vast majority of users will not click past the first page of search results.  In fact, most of them won’t look past the first couple links.

In order to increase your search engine rankings, the best way is by building what is known as “organic” or natural backlinks. An example of an organic backlink is when a blog links back to your site because of your interesting content or relevance to their content.  Typically, these are done without asking or any sort of trade, hence the term organic or natural.

Trading links used to be a common tactic amongst website owners and I still often get e-mails along the lines of “If you’ll put a link to my website from yours then I will do the same.”  While this has the advantage of potentially increasing exposure to new users, this type of trade is typically very one sided with one site being more popular than the other.  Also, trading links does not increase search engine rankings as the links can be seen as “cancelling” each other out.

Ideally what you want are one-way organic backlinks and LinkWheeler.com is a service that looks to address this issue through the creation of link wheels.

What is a link wheel?
A link wheel, simply explained, is when sites link to one another in a cyclical pattern.  For example, site A links to site B, site B links to site C, and site C links back to site A.  This example is a small link wheel and generally does not work as their short cycle is easily detected by search engines. LinkWheeler.com offers link wheel packages that are much bigger and more sophisticated with links coming from different types of sites.

Their link wheels are also not cyclical, meaning the last node does not link back to the first node. This “open wheel” is more effective and more attractive to search engines compared to traditional closed wheels.

Web 2.0 and Social Media
Perhaps the biggest advantage of LinkWheeler is their usage of social media websites and other web 2.0 outlets in addition to traditional article submission strategies.

I’ve seen other backlinking services, all of which make big promises, but their methodology is pretty primitive compared to what LinkWheeler is doing.  Simple directory submissions and article farms just don’t cut it anymore in this day and age.

Pricing and Features
There are three possible packages to choose from ranging from $149 for 27 backlinks to $359 for 89 backlinks. Not everyone will consider this cheap, but you do get what you pay for and results can speak for themselves.  The lowest package includes linking to two URLs with two different keywords whereas the top package links to eight URLs with eight different keywords.

In terms of value, the top premium package is definitely the way to go in my opinion.  With eight keywords and 89 backlinks, you can be sure you’ll get to the first page of search results at least for low-medium competition keywords.  For those highly competitive keywords, it may not boost you to the top but it will certainly go a long way to help getting you there.

Conclusion
The field of search engine optimization (SEO) is a highly competitive one so it’s nice to have a service like LinkWheeler who are experienced and clearly know what they are doing.  The money invested in building links will show returns within a couple weeks once search engine traffic starts funnelling its way onto your site.  In my opinion, link wheels are a great way to increase exposure of your site or blog, and LinkWheeler is an effective and easy way of creating these link wheels.

Popularity: 2% [?]