A very interesting discussion titled “Can a Europe company have the Email hosted outside Europe?” is taking place in Web Hositgn Talk forums.

“I have heard that companies located in Europe has to have the email also hosted in a European Datacenter because of privacy and storage laws. So does anyone have any idea about this? Is it true, or can a European company has the email hosted for example in USA?”, asked the WHT member with a nickname pedrojose.

Check it our http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=905408

Honestly, I thought that WordPress is not going to get more popular than it was an year ago… and was wrong. The WP is getting trendy platform among people from 40+ generation who want to get online with blogs, websites and various publications. Why?

It is simple and anyone who has ever used text editor programs can get used to WordPress within a day or two. Al most people need to do online is to be able to organize content, to publish and edit text and pictures, and of course to add multimedia from time to time.

All basic (most of them free) and premium WordPress themes anyone might find on the web can be installed with one single click. All of you who use WP platform know that very well.

According to statistics I found on WordPress official website over 15 million are currently using WP platform. There are 6 million blogs hosted on WordPress.com (one of them is Hostinn Topics) and there are another 9 million active installations of the WordPress software. Those numbers do not include the self-hosted WordPress.org blogs. Exciting news for WP development team and Matt Mullenwegq the founder of WP.

WordPress Resources

Let me target your attention to some great places to find WordPress services. Brian Gardner, Justin Tadlock, and WP Zoom are my favorite places where to buy WordPress design. Host Color is one of the providers that pay special attention to WordPress with their $2.95/month WordPress Hosting plan. Other web hosts can be found at WordPress.org/Hosting page.

When it comes to WP plugins go to official website WordPress.org/extend/plugins/. iPhone users can check iPhone.WordPress.org for latest tools and software for their mobile phones.

A partner of mine, who maintains a high traffic website, created to promote and support a CMS said that he has been contacted by a hosting provider starting with Bluehost and the hosting provider offered hi $120 affiliate commission per sale. This commission looks so big that my friend accepted it. But let’s see if a commissions like this a real?

The above mentioned company sells overselling web hosting for $6.95 per month ($83.40/year). If the $120 commission is real they have to keep the customer for 2 years to avoid bankruptcy. I’ve spoken to Bluehost live chat representative and asked him a few questions.

My Question: Hi, I would like to join your affiliate program. Can you please tell me how much do you pay per sale?

Answer: $65 per sign up

My Question: That’s good. Thanks. Someone in WHT forums posted you are paying $100 and above… Is it a special rate?

Answer: We are not paying $100 they are confused

Me: OK. Thank you for your time!

So, according to Bluehost official the company pays $65 per sign up. If you however go to this page -http://www.affiliatewatcher.com/21-top-paying-web-hosting-affiliate-programs/ you’ll see that the web host pays $120 per sale.

In CJ.com, probably the world’s biggest affiliate network Bluehost pays $90 per sale. Action Referral Period of the company in CJ is 120 days.

So, where is the truth… The web host is probably offering different commissions to its affiliates. Those who sign up with CJ get better deals. Is that proper? At the same time I remember that 2 years ago one of the owners of the company complained that “the costs of acquiring new customer” is very high and blamed affiliate networks for asking high commission per sale. But I believe that oversellers are those who offer unrealistically high payouts and then impose various terms that allows them leagally to avoid paying commissions.

VPS Hosting is a class web hosting service which becomes rapidly popular among site owners. The reason for this is simple. It brings all the advantages of the dedicated hosting to site owners with small budgets. However the VPS users do not need to back up their virtual servers, something they must do in dedicated class hosting.

However the price and the backups outsourced to the VPS hosting provider are 2 of the advantages of VPS server owners. Another key advantage is that when anyone uses a virtual private server they do not have to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on hardware, every time when they need an upgrade. The VPS Hosting users can easy add more resources to their plans – RAM, disc space and data transfer – every time they need to use more resources.

There are different approaches to virtualization and different virtualization techniques such as VMware\’ ESX, Xen, KVM, Virtual Iron, OpenVZ and etc. Any of them utilizes different virtualization technique. If you want to learn more about virtualization techniques read Full Virtualization, Hardware-assisted virtualization, Paravirtualization, OS Virtualization.

Parallels Virtuozzo Powered VPS Hosting

On of the most appreciated virtualization platforms – both from site owners and web hosts – is Virtuozzo Containers. It is proprietary software of Parallels based on OpneVZ. Both are the world\’s leading OS virtualization solutions. Virtuozzo Containers creates isolated containers on a physical server and OS instance. Compared to other virtualization technologies, it offers the highest levels of density, performance and manageability.

According to Host Color, a VPS hosting provider, one of the long line of hosting providers that use Parallels software products, Virtuozzo has a number of key advantages that makes it preferable virtualization platform. It allows you:

• To manage a high performance virtualization solution without need of learning how to manage an Operating System
• To get scalable VPS solution and dynamic resource management.
• To fast upgrade your VPs hosting plan every time you need.
• To get a real-time change of key system resources such as CPU, memory, network, disk and etc.
• To benefit for a full native performance architecture.
• To use fully-featured client interface that enables you to convert, provision, monitor, backup, recover, analyze, troubleshoot, repair, migrate, self-manage and to execute many other operations on your Virtual Private Server.

Promotional Listing: Host Color says that its Virtuozzo powered VPS Hosting plan – VPS Start that features 256 MB RAM, 10 GB disc space and 100 GB data transfer per month – is probably of the most affordable one in the industry.

Microsoft have announced $250,000 reward to anyone who can give them information that will allow the law enforcement bodies to arrest and convict the person who is responsible for creating the Conficker Internet worm. The virus infected millions of PCs.

Microsoft told IT media that the worm constitutes a “criminal attack”. Residents of any country are eligible for the reward and should contact their international law enforcement authorities, the company said in a statement.

The Windows producer partners with security companies, domain name providers, and others companies to coordinated its response to the worm, also known as Downadup.

Among organizations involved into the pursuit are Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), VeriSign, NeuStar, CNNIC, Afilias, Public Internet Registry, Global Domains International, M1D Global, AOL, Symantec, F-Secure, ISC, Georgia Tech, the Shadowserver Foundation, Arbor Networks, and Support Intelligence.

The worm is active since 2008. It spreads through a hole in Windows OS and exploits a vulnerability that Microsoft patched in October 2008.

It also spreads via devices like USB drives, and network shares by guessing passwords and usernames.

“The worm seeks to update itself by using a long list of pseudo-randomly generated domain names to contact over HTTP and then grab new code”, said Jose Nazario, manager of security research for Arbor Networks. According to him the algorithm for this domain name generation scheme has been cracked (by F-Secure and others) and has been used to pre-compute the names for pre-registration to prevent hostile parties from using this update feature. This has been facilitated – greatly facilitated – by ICANN, TLD operators, and various registrars working together with Microsoft and others to identify the names and grab the ones they need to. These records can then be pointed at sinkholes to discover Conficker-infected hosts checking in.

Symantec has announced that within the last 25 days it observed an average of 453,436 IP addresses infected per day with W32.Downadup.A and 1.7 million IP addresses infected per day with W32.Downadup.B, the company said in a blog posting.

Infected machines from the worm are estimated to be around as 12 million. The could be used for a launch of distributed denial-of-service attacks on web servers or for a seeding a new worm.

Shame of myself! A whole year lasted since my last post here… and a few new versions of WordPress have been released. No excuses. This is the bad new for me. The good one however is that web hosting has gone anywhere during the last 12 months. There is not much things that we can define as new. Well a lot of developments are going on on the virtualization market, but this is still far from consumers’ interest. When it comes to virtualization, let me tell you that I joined to two other guys to from a small web publishing group. We have recently opened VPS Host Dir, a new small but quality media that covers virtualization technologies and VPS hosting market.

But when it comes to web hosting in general, which means “Shared Hosting”, I can tell you that there’s nothing new on the market. See what was the first title I’ve seen in Google this year – “Starting a Web Hosting Company“. And it says: “The first thing that needs to be done is to get the website going. This includes getting a template, creating pages that describe the company, its plans, and its services. When that is done, a program such as WHM Autopilot needs to be configured. This is so that when someone orders the web hosting, the order will automatically be received. Not only do these things need to be done but they need to be aesthetically pleasing as well.”

So I’d probably didn’t missed much!

MODx is one of the most promising Content management systems. It is relatively new but there are growing number of developers who already use it. It is good for blogging and any other type of authoring and media projects. The purpose of the articles here is to offer advice on how to integrate MODx with vBulletin.

There is an integration script called BanzaiTokyo. It’s modXVBin 1.0 version helps you to synchronize the users databases of modX and vBulletin.

To integrate the content management platform with vBulletin forums you need to get PHP files of both MODx CMS and vBulletin located on the same server. Databases can be anywhere since the script looks up the information for the connections in the configuration files.

Already works fine:

Synchronized log in and log out.

Synchronized registration through vBulletin. MODx takes database from the forum.

Synchronized “Profile edit”. When users add/edit profiles in their VBuleting Control panel, the script updates the parameters in MODx.

Synchronized change of user’s data. Again form vBulletin Admin panel.

Synchronized “Password reset”.

The script works fine when users work on vBulletin interface. What is not finished yet is to edit details on MODx and to get them changed in vBulletin.

Script Installation in vBulletin

1. Plugins & Products -> Manage Products -> Add/Import Product -> Choose product-modixvbin.xml from the installation archive.

2. Turn off GZIP HTML output in vBulletin Options -> Cookies and HTTP Header Options -> GZIP HTML Output. Once installation is complete, test user login and registration. If everything works ok, you can turn GZIP HTML output back on.

3. Languages & Phrases -> Phrase Manager -> Phrase Type: GLOBAL find phrase “modxpath” and set it to modX.

Script Installation in MODx

1. Manager -> Resources -> Manage resources -> Plugins -> New Plugin

Plugin name – any name. Take “vBulletin” for instance.

Plugin code – insert the contents of modx_vblogin.php

Menu tab System Events: check OnWebLogin, OnWebLogout. Save.

2. In index.php anywhere (you can do it right after “<?php” insert the contents of modx_index.php

in $VBDIR put the path to vBulletin script (see below)

Setting the Paths and example can be found here.

If you need something related to MODx CMS visit MODx forums. If you need MODx web hosting take a look at one of the MODx sponsors – Host Color.

A friend of mine send me this web site about web hosting. It is actually fake web hosting provider which makes fun with hip-hop and some stereotypes of the black street culture. It is funny! See it!

Website provides “Free hosting for all herbal dealers”. Take a look at the message:

“Chronic is a bitch to sell. Cops always be bustin a nigga up. How the fuck you supposed to get them spinnas? Well, at niggahosting.com we have FREE hosting for all herbal dealers. If you got herbs, and wanna sell that shit without the cops jumpin on ur ass. Give us a try! If your shit is dank, please donate to the niggahosting.com crew”.

Another hosting offers says:

“Tired of working at McDonalds? Is minimum wage just not pushing it? Then get that useless babymama bitch and show her freaky deaky side to every pervert out there. At niggahostin.com we will give FREE hosting for that kinda ill shit”.

Paid Hosting Service

• 10 Mega Bytes of ill hard-drive space
• 1 GIGABYTE of transfer, which aint shit. Cheapass nigga
• P H P, CGI-BIN AND HTML
• 1 MYSQL Databases – which aint enough to do shit
• 2 POP3 email addresses, so you and your punkass little crew of you and your little brother can have email addresses
• 50 uptime, and if we could, we’d make it lower. We promise to make every attempt to drop kick the hell outta your site
• All for the low price of $23.95 per month, you cheapass.

“Google Advertising Loves Link Farms”, this title grabbed me today when I visited SitePoint forums. Take a look at the story:

“A couple of months ago I started in earnest tracking the advertising hits that Google generates for me. And what I found is not a happy picture. About 30-40% of the traffic generated — ie. the traffic that I pay for — comes from link farms” says Rick Strahl on his blog.

Rick explains that he sent an email to Adsense support and asked about Link Parking sites and what their policy was in regards to counting these hits towards paying clicks. The response he received was essentially a shrug of the shoulder.

Someone from AdWords team responded to Rick that they know about the website which work as link parking places, but they are legal, so he has to pay for these links. Rick says that Google’s technical support tried to convince him that link parking site links do better conversions than ‘regular’ links.

“Better for whom?” asks Rick ”for Google”?

Read the discussion Google Advertising Loves Link Farms in SitePoint forums.

I’ve decide to summarize some dedicated and managed web hosting offerings I found areound the web. They come from companies taht I know as a quality ones.

Apollo Hosting – Dedicated Servers

Apollo Hosting is a quality web hosting company. They are well-known with their VPS hosting but I can get a good deal on Dedicated servers as well. They offer CeleronD 2.8 GHz, 512 MB RAM, 80 GB SATA, 1000 GB/mo, Plesk 8 control panel, and etc, for $99.95/month. There is a $99.95 set up fee.

HC Servers

I know this company for years and host some of my websites on managed server with them. HC Servers offers Managed Intel Core 2 Duo, 160GB SATA Hard Drive, 1000 GB Monthly transfer, 5 Free IP Addresses, and 2 GB RAM for $169/per month. It now comes with 1 free month. Good bargain! Check also their discounted dedicated servers. 

HiVelocity

This company advertises in WebHostingTalk.com their Dual Quad-Core Xeon dedicated servers. The price is $259/month. The server comes with 250 GB HDD, 4GB RAM, 1 IP address and $99.00 set up fee.