The life blood of a business is its income, and within a website that income comes its visitors. A constantly and steadily increasing stream of new visitors is what generates income for many web based businesses. One of the main ingredients for this to work is making the website attractive.

So how does a web designer go about doing this? One strategy is to work on the visual style of the page. The imagery used, all of the things that the visitor will see. Things like the typography, the types of images, the colours and icons used. These are all factors which add up into making a good-looking web page.

If one is unsure about what exactly to use then try things. Choose things because you like them initially and work from there. Combine your own ideas with ideas from other popular websites and you will eventually formulate a unique style for your page. A page that is visually informed, design wise.

Hosting review websites are all over the internet, but you can never be sure of how authentic they are. A lot of the websites where people can freely contribute a review of the service they’ve received from one company or another are used by the companies themselves as a reputation management tool.

More trustworthy websites are generally forums where they have a visible community of contributors. On these websites you can get a general idea of the service you may encounter with certain companies, with the benefits of an engaged community who can fact check thanks to their experience in the industry, and have the expertise to perform a proper judgement of the services should somebody claim they had a poor experience which was entirely the hosting company’s fault.

In review, you should leave websites which provide reviews of hosting companies alone, unless you can be sure that the information you’re getting is from real people.

Cloud hosting is useful for a number of reasons specific to its hosting model. Cloud hosting relies upon a number of different servers for its hardware requirements, which sets itself apart from shared or dedicated hosting which have specific hardware allotments which you rent or buy. This gives customers a number of advantages, namely in that they aren’t as strictly limited by hardware usages, as the pool of processing power is typically considerably larger than even a massive server.

While these advantages are valuable to most businesses, it does rely on different things as well. Cloud computing relies upon your internet connection for its needs, so when your internet is down so are the applications that rely upon your cloud hosting. This is on top of possible server downtime, which is still a possibility. In addition to this drawback, attainable adequate security has been a constant concern within the industry, and has yet to be achieved to the same standard as in traditional server hosting.

In simple terms, Bandwidth is the transfer of information from A to B, and the more complex your website is (the more pages and information), the more there is to be downloaded, and so you’ll need to make sure you have enough bandwidth for your website and the visitors accessing your website’s information.

If you opt for an entry level package, then you may find need to go for premium if your website expands and attracts a larger audience, so it’s not always best to go for the cheapest option. This is why you should really research into various service providers, looking for the best deal for you and your business.

Visitors need a pleasurable experience on your website if they are to return, so make sure you choose a package that cna handle the number of visitors and the information on the website.

When choosing your hosting package you have to consider if you want to opt for dedicated hosting or shared hosting there are pros and cons for both. With all types of hosting you will pay the hosting company for a certain amount of space on one of their servers. The main difference is that on a shared server there will be other people’s websites hosted on there along with yours where as dedicated servers allow you to host just your site or sites. Below are a few points to consider about each option before making your decision.

Shared hosting is ultimately cheaper but can mean that actions other people take could potentially affect your site. If for example they send out a lot of spam emails or carry out bad SEO practices, it could mean your server IP gets blocked causing your website to go offline or emails be blocked. Most hosting companies are pretty hot on this and will remove any domains from their servers that are seen to be doing this.

Dedicated allows you much more control over the server settings and security. You will have access to the whole of the server and it is your choice as to how many sites you host on there. This is more expensive but is seen as more reliable and secure.

Web hosting is basically the space needed for your website to reside on. There are many types of hosting available from shared (Renting a space on a server shared by others), Dedicated (Renting a server purely for your own website/websites) to Cloud hosting (Renting a space on a virtual server). With all of these types of hosting, security should always be a top priority. If your website or customer’s websites are hacked, then this could cause a number of issues. Not only may the site go down or be filled with spammy advertising, but you may also find that secure information such as customer’s records or card details are compromised. This can not only have an immediate devastating effect but can affect a business long term, as you may find you lose the trust of many of your visitors. Talk to the hosting company about what security features they have in place and what the process is if there has indeed been a compromise.

When choosing which hosting company to use to host your website, cheapest is not necessarily the best option. You do not want to go to the expensive of having a website created and possibly even and online shop to find that the site goes offline every few days and also takes your email down with it. There are many hosting companies out there offering a wide range of packages.

Often the company that creates your website for you will host the site as well, but it is worth finding out who they use and what kind of up time and support they offer. Some companies will let you host your site elsewhere but this should really be discussed with them upfront. Websites and online trading can be a huge part of many businesses and the losses incurred if the site is offline for a few days can not only affect those days sales but also future business as many visitors will not return to a site if they have experienced problems with it the first time they used it.

(The Hosting News) – In 2011, Microsoft surprised many analysts in the tech arena with an $8.5 billion buy of Skype; now Google could but upping the ante.

According to a report from Digital Trends on Friday, the company is in the mix to purchase popular mobile messaging service WhatsApp.

The report cited an “inside source,” noting the acquisition price is currently being considered at close to $1 billion.

In January, Forbes.com contributor Tero Kuittinen noted WhatsApp had reached a new milestone, receiving 7 billion messages via its platform on a per day basis.

Via its website, WhatsApp Inc. describes its popular messaging app as such: “WhatsApp Messenger is a cross-platform mobile messaging app which allows you to exchange messages without having to pay for SMS. WhatsApp Messenger is available for iPhone, BlackBerry, Android, Windows Phone and Nokia and yes, those phones can all message each other! Because WhatsApp Messenger uses the same internet data plan that you use for email and web browsing, there is no cost to message and stay in touch with your friends.”

The deal would make sense for Google. Despite being the top online provider of free services, the company has fallen short on messaging platforms excluding ones already present in Gmail.

Source: Google in the Mix to Buy WhatsApp

Server Sitters, leaders in North American outsourced web hosting support, will be making their 3rd consecutive appearance at HostingCon 2013, the largest conference and trade show for the hosted services industry. On June 17th-19th of 2013, the best and brightest from the industry will be in attendance to learn about the latest news, ideas and technology affecting their businesses.

Source: Server Sitters Management Prepares For 3rd Consecutive Appearance At HostingCon Being Held At The Austin Convention Center In June Of 2013

OpenStack has made its 7th release, called Grizzly, which includes updates that touch on user experience, compute, storage and networking

OpenStack announced on Thursday that it has made its 7th release, called Grizzly, which includes updates that touch on user experience, compute, storage and networking.

According to a blog post by Mark Collier, this release, more than any before it, was driven by users who have been running OpenStack in production for the past year or more. The number of contributors has increased by 56 percent from the last release, Folsom.

The compute side adds new capabilities for those operating at massive scale, including “Cells” to manage distributed clusters and “NoDB” to reduce reliance on central databases. Grizzly also adds full support for ESX, KVM, XEN and Hyper-V hypervisors. Prior to Grizzly, OpenStack was largely focused on KVM and XEN, according to a report by GigaOM.

Grizzly includes cross-origin resource sharing to enable browsers to “talk” directly to backend storage environments, and on the block storage side, 10 new drivers were added including Ceph/RBD, Coraid, EMC, Hewlett-Packard, Huawei, IBM, NetApp, Red Hat/Gluster, SolidFire and Zadara,

OpenStack Grizzly has an intelligent scheduler for allocating the right class of storage for each workload, such as for performance, cost or efficiency.

According to a recent study on Ceph, OpenStack is the dominant cloud stack used by the majority of Ceph deployments.

On the networking side, there was a focus on achieving greater scale and higher availability by distributing L3/L4 and DHCP services across multiple servers. Grizzly features a new load-balancing-as-a-service framework and API. There are new plugins from Big Switch, Hyper-V, PlumGrid, Brocade and Midonet in addition to support for Open vSwitch, Cisco UCS/Nexus, Linux Bridge, Nicira, Ryu OpenFlow and NEC OpenFlow.

A report by InformationWeek says the features around software defined networking are the key area of development in this release. 

“By implementing software defined networking in OpenStack, the project’s leaders are on the one hand charging forward into territory on which established network vendors, such as Cisco and Juniper, have approached carefully. If OpenStack succeeds in making virtualized networks both flexible and manageable, it will have made a major argument for itself as a future architecture inside the enterprise data center as well as among service providers, such as Rackspace and HP.”

Talk back: What do you think of the features introduced in OpenStack Grizzly Is there anything you hope to see in future releases of OpenStack Let us know in a comment.