This email came from one of my team members, and he said he had a review of GlowHost, but he did not know where or how to post it.

When I heard this, I immediately assumed that a customer had taken the time to review GlowHost, and I suggested to this team member that he contact this customer to thank them for taking the time to review us, and to also ask the customer if they wouldn’t mind posting their review on an appropriate site where members of the general public could read it. You see, our customers often send in some sort of testimonial at our helpdesk or via email, but that means only our team can see them. Sure, that makes us warm and fuzzy inside, but….

Reviews out on the Internet where the general public can see them helps to bring us new customers, so this seemed like the normal approach for dealing with the situation. The question I was asking myself was, “He already knows what to do with customer reviews, so why he was asking me?”

I asked him the same question and he said, “Matt, this is a review of GlowHost, by me,” and “it’s kind of a review, but kind of not.” Needless to say, it took me by surprise because I have never had a review of the company from a staff member’s perspective, and I have to say, just the thought of reading it made me a little nervous…

Mr. Gladio wears many hats. Here is one of them.

The team member I am referring to is one of our long-time crew chiefs at GlowHost, Andrew Gladio.  His official title is “Customer Care Team Leader,” but the truth about Andrew, like all of our awesome crew, is he wears many hats. Other than just making sure our customers are getting the best service possible, we often find him in the billing department, doing some systems administrator duties, and generally just helping out where things need it.

Since he and I now had the same question about “Where do we put this thing?” we agreed that the GlowHost Blog was a good place, and I’d like to share with you what he wrote.

“I would like to share with you the experience I have had with GlowHost. This writing is not just another review, because I am not a customer, but part of GlowHost team. You might think that my boss just told me to write something nice, but no, that was my idea.

One problem with hosting is that many companies publish their reviews, advertise their services on the Internet and thus become quite popular, even if their service stinks. At the same time, even if you know everything about the services offered by a company and were lucky enough to have communicated with the senior staff members, you still won’t know what is really going on backstage.

My intention to write this article came to mind because for me, behind the scenes at GlowHost is awesome. Also, I have worked at other hosting companies, and many friends of mine work in other hosting companies, and I can ensure you, that GlowHost’s attitude towards business is worth your attention, and this attitude is something which I have never seen any place else.

The first thing that impressed me after I came to work at GlowHost from another hosting company, was the high level of automation that GlowHost has. It helps us to get rid of many boring routine tasks which can kill one’s interest in work and can transform you into a mindless robot sitting in front of your PC and doing the same things all the time.

The other thing I noticed was GlowHost’s Knowledge Base. It has a lot of instructions for customers and we have a huge section for the staff as well (you can’t see this area). Adding new articles for internal and external use is of high priority for us. We are constantly updating the Knowledge Base when new issues arise. If it is something we can fix on our side, and not an adjustment that needs to be made on your side, we will apply it across all servers quickly (in some cases, the guys write programs that will automate process if needed) that way, the particular issue would not require a Knowledge Base article at all.

What I mean by that is, we don’t sit here and wait for helpdesk tickets to come in for the same issue over and over like other places I have worked at. We find the resolution and patch as efficiently as possible, hopefully before too many customers notice any problems. Patching is very common in hosting because servers are constantly receiving system and security updates, which sometimes break things that used to work before. We spend a good part of each day fine-tuning our systems, but the automation we have in place makes it possible to push updates to all of our systems at the same time, instead of one at a time, which could take days or weeks with the number of servers that we control.

Also, if you have ever submitted a trouble ticket to GlowHost, you already know that our response time is usually less than 15-20 minutes. This is very challenging and not so easy for many staff to keep up with.  If we reply in 15 minutes, that means that we need to read the case, try to fix it, write a detailed (important!) reply and probably leave notes for our colleagues so they know what the status of a particular incident is. If tickets come simultaneously (which they usually do), now we have to divide the time period we have into 2, 3, 4.  Being able to make these rapid response times would be impossible without a well-organized internal communication system for our staff and mutual help from our vendors.

Another main point I’d like to mention is that we never stop. I have been working here for almost 4 years and I can ensure you that things have changed a lot. Our CEO likes innovations, more so even, he knows how to organize and implement new systems to streamline our daily processes. An important fact is that he accepts our ideas and is always interested in our opinion.

When one isn’t enough

Everyone here take part in the life of GlowHost. It is not like in other companies, where several marketing people tell you what to do, and don’t want to hear what you think. I saw these types of things happen at my former employers and “double facepalm” is my only reaction for that…

Now, back to innovations, you should know that we have customized everything in cPanel, added free useful services, like CloudFlare, Incapsula, and SoftAculous auto-installer. We also offer a service called Sucuri which helps customers who are experiencing problems with their web site’s security. At the same time we scan all servers from the root level and include user account scanning for free to protect users from being infected. Most hosting companies will tell you that “What is in your account, is your responsibility,” and, “we only take care of the server itself.” We take the extra steps because we care about our customer’s accounts and want them to be operating as well as possible at all times. Besides, the few guys we have at GlowHost who have Information Security master’s degrees make sure the entire GlowHost crew are keeping a careful eye on things.

Another thing I find interesting is that we have recently introduced cloud solutions that are being optimized and improved all the time. Our cloud stuff is really cool and I could write a whole article on this itself. We are also searching for and working with new partners in different hosting-related fields, and I can ensure you that we will add more new awesome and unique features that you will not find anywhere else, very soon…

Another important thing is the organization of the working process at GlowHost. I am not going to tell you secrets, just some facts. For example, we never face a lack of disk space on our shared servers. Trust me, this is a typical problem at other companies, but not at GlowHost. We have strict limits of number of accounts being hosted on each server, and these limits work to keep common shared hosting problems at bay. The same thing can be said about overloads. Sure, sometimes our servers occasionally suffer from high load, but those issues are usually fixed quickly, because we find the accounts responsible and get them buttoned up. We help the affected account to find broken or hacked scripts and can help point them in the right direction in regards to optimizing or upgrading their software. Finally, another important note is that there is no server at GlowHost that should just suffer from load because it has too many customers on it. It is not possible here because we don’t try to save money by putting as many customers as possible onto a shared server, which leads to compromising service levels.  Even on the lowest-end hosting packages that we offer, we still maintain account limits. The guys here at GlowHost really do care and are not afraid to do some extra work if needed, or stay after hours to help out with some critical issues that need extra special attention.

Reading this you could think that giving out secrets of success is a little bit foolish, but this knowledge is not enough. You will need the main ingredient – a strong team. I can assure you that getting the one we have is no easy task, taking much time and effort to compile. Our primary training takes no less than 6 months to complete, and the training really never ends because our systems and policies are always evolving along with the Internet. Even if you find smart, responsible people, the job is still not complete. Creating conditions for highly productive work is also a big problem that has been successfully solved by GlowHost’s leadership. Everyone here is 100% devoted to his work, and it is why I am proud to be a part of this great company.”

Wow, thanks Andrew! I think I speak for the rest of the crew and our customers that we are all very happy to have you as part of the team, and for me personally, I could not do this without you. Your contributions to our customers, as well as what you do on the back-end for GlowHost surely do not go unnoticed. It’s great to have you on the team.

Please post any comments or questions you have below!

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The two major concerns you have as a website owner are keeping the website safe and running, and providing the best possible user experience for your visitors.
But you also know that dealing with security and performance issues can take a lot of your time and efforts, and as web-attacks become more and more sophisticated, you might not always win the battle.

A new solution offered for free by GlowHost solves these exact issues for our hosted websites. We’re glad to announce that we have partnered with Incapsula, a cloud-based website protection and acceleration service. Incapsula provides Enterprise-grade website security for the biggest websites in the world, including banks, government institutions, trading companies and some of the biggest eCommerce websites.

A new integration into GlowHost control panel, allows you to activate Incapsula on your sites with a simple click, without configuring anything or making any changes to your website. Simply click the Incapsula icon on your control panel, sign up and activate Incapsula’s Free plan for your sites.

How does Incapsula work?
Once you activate Incapsula, your website’s traffic is routed through Incapsula’s global network of servers. Incoming traffic is intelligently profiled in real-time, blocking all known and emerging threats. Meanwhile, outgoing traffic is accelerated and optimized with Incapsula’s global CDN, for faster load times, keeping welcome visitors speeding through.

This means that Incapsula does the job for you: monitors your website 24/7 and filters all traffic so only the legitimate traffic passes through. Or as Incapsula says: “You’ve got enough things to do. So go ahead, we’ll take care of the rest”

So what do you get by using Incapsula through GlowHost?

Once you activate Incapsula through your GlowHost control panel, you get Incapsula’s Free plan which includes:

1. Website Acceleration: Incapsula’s CDN improves website performance by caching and optimizing its content and delivering it to your website visitor from the nearest location.

2. Bad Bots Protection: Incapsula developed a unique bot classification and detention technology which is based on several layers of protection and on their existing and growing bot signature database. This means they filter human visitors from bots, and good bots (As Google) from bad bots (As spammers). As a result, using Incapsula will block spammers, scrapers, vulnerabilities scanners and other malicious bots from reaching your site.

Upgrading to one of Incapsula’s paid plans, will provide additional protection:

Web Apllication Firewall

Incapsula’s Enterprise-grade PCI compliant WAF, protects from all malicious attacks: SQL Injection, Cross Site Scripting, Illegal resource access, and other OWASP top 10 threats. This should be especially important to eCommerce websites, high profile websites and sites that have already suffered from these kinds of attacks.

DDoS Protection
Incapsula also provides protection against network (layer 3 & 4) and application (layer 7) DDoS attacks that can be activated immediately and without installing and hardware/software or making and changes in the website.

Please note that on the Incapsula screen you have a green button linking to your website’s dashboard, where you can see all your website traffic, security and performance stats and change your site’s settings. We recommend using it.

Please note: Incapsula cannot be activated together with CloudFlare which is also offered as a free version in your GlowHost control panel.

Learn more about GlowHost’s Incapsula offer and take advantage of their free tools to block bad bots and accelerate your web site today.

Do you have questions or comments about this offer? Please ask us using the comments section below!

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Why is this important? Performance.

At GlowHost we are unique in the fact that we offer both traditional (disk space and bandwidth limited) shared hosting packages alongside our unlimited hosting packages. This is often a source of great confusion for many new web hosting customers, so lets look at how the type of server that you choose can directly impact the performance of your web site.

First, lets put you in the shoes of a web hosting company CEO. At the very simplest level, you know that for every server you have, you need to make a certain profit. So you think to yourself, “How can I offer plans to compete with other hosts that are offering unlimited space, unlimited bandwidth, and are charging a measly $4.00 per month? How can that be profitable? What should I do?”

OK, now snap back to reality, lucky for you, you do not need to think about such a difficult question, you probably are not a web hosting CEO or decision-maker for a hosting company. But, if you were, here would be your options:

A) Pack as many sites as possible onto a server to reach your profit targets.
B) Put the same number of sites on a server, and enjoy less profit per server.
C) Don’t offer unlimited hosting, and watch as the industry pounds you into oblivion as your long-time customers migrate to other hosting companies seeking a “better” deal.

At GlowHost, we chose option B. We would have loved to take option A, but with unlimited accounts, as it turns out, sometimes a server must have even less accounts on it than a traditional server to simply keep it stable. This means an even lower profit margin for the hosting company. But why should you care about your host’s profit? How does it affect you as a site owner?

Don’t loose too much sleep over your web host’s profit margins. Well, let me take that back, you should care a little bit. You want your host to be making money so that they of course remain in business…you don’t wake up one morning to find they have vanished without a trace. Believe it or not, this happens all the time, especially when dealing with hosts that offer crazy things like unlimited hosting for $1.50/mo. You also want your host to be making money so that they can invest in their systems and support services, after all, smart people to answer technical questions 24/7/365 and systems to manage thousands and thousands of customer accounts, web sites, and things like that, all cost boatloads of cash. Aside from sub-par support and slow servers that you will find at most budget web hosting companies, you also inherit the risk of spending your money on a fly-by-night hosting operation.

How cheap hosting affects your web site’s performance.

Lets consider the typical demographic of the unlimited hosting consumer. There are many facets to this market segment, and I will probably offend a few people by stereotyping, but I don’t really care about your feelings. Instead, I would prefer that you were an informed consumer. Here are the four most common types of customer who choose unlimited hosting, I will refer to them as “The 4 Neighbors.”

- The 4 Neighbors -

1) Hobbyists – People who just want a site to play around with.
2) Hoarders – People who want to store huge amounts of data wherever they can get it.
3) Newbies – People who want to save a buck, and have not done their homework.
4) Fraudsters – People who want to do bad things like send Spam, and not pay a lot of money to do so.

Most of these people are not evil, the obvious exception being #4. At some point in time, we all were newbies, most of us have hobbies, and many of us collect things. But bring all of these types to a “hosting party,” and performance can suffer.

Hobbyists:
They sign up for a service, get bored of it, and forget about it. That’s bad for you because when someone installs an app on their web site like WordPress, that app (or script)  essentially becomes an Operating System for the web site. Now, on your PC at home or the office, I am sure that you are used to getting the latest updates from your Operating System vendor. If you don’t get the updates, what happens? Eventually your PC gets a virus, spyware, Trojan horse, adware, malware and all sorts of other fun things. Remember “Pop-up Hell” from the early days of the Internet? The apps on your web site are no different in their needs to be constantly updated. If a user doesn’t keep the scripts on their web site updated, it most likely will end up hacked at some point in time. When an app gets hacked on a shared server, it can affect performance for everyone who shares the server. Typically what we see is an app that gets hacked and then it is used to send spam, or it is used to attack other sites on the Internet, or it is used to spread viruses on the PCs of visitors to that web site. I could write an article itself on how hacked apps on a shared server can affect your perfectly legitimate web site, but that might be for a future post. For now, you can take my word for it.

Hoarders:
Horders like to do things like upload their entire movie or MP3 collection to the server (even though that is against the rules, and we eventually catch them). Imagine this user starts sharing the links to his music collection. All of a sudden there is a download frenzy which can slow down your site because all the bandwidth is being consumed trying to deliver the MP3s to lots of people at the same time, it can also eat up the available connections to a server. Aside from that, this type of activity can cause general slowness with certain functions that a server typically performs.

The most obvious example of that, would be the backup system. If your server supports backups, then clearly its going to take forever for them to complete if the server is full of a bunch of hoarders. If the server had a group of web sites that contain typical web site data, which is normally a very small amount of data, backups would be complete very quickly. Backups are generally set to start at an hour “off-peak,” so lets say, 2 AM. On a server which has only legitimate web sites and small amounts of data, the backup process could be completed in as little as an hour or less. On a server that is full of hoarders, backups might run on until the next day. So why do you care if backups are running in the middle of the day? Because it slows down the server the same way a backup system on your home PC would. Things slow down, freeze up, disconnect, crash and do all sorts of fun things like that if too many things are competing for the same CPU cycles. Backups take a lot of CPU and you do not want them running in the day time because you want that CPU to be available to your website visitors. Unlimited servers typically only backup one time per week because of this, (or not at all with some hosting companies) and usually on a Sunday night since this is usually the slowest night for most servers. But, if those backups are still running in the middle of the afternoon on Monday (which is the busiest day) that is clearly not a good thing.

Newbies:
Newbies like to do things like play with new apps, test out email features, test out features they do not know how they work, and generally experiment. That is totally fine and expected. The problem with some newbies is that they also suffer from chronic hoarder or hobbyist syndrome. They might upload their entire music collection, (which affects your backup completion times) and then at the same time, they get bored of their site, which leaves you open to performance issues if their site gets hacked. Now you have the double-whammy from just one user who happens to share the server with you. Newbies can also do things like go purchase a list of 100k email addresses for $29.95 then decide that at any moment, it would be a great time to go ahead and try to send emails to these addresses to announce their shiny brand new web site. In other words, newbies might be tempted to Spam. That can affect performance, and worse, it can get your mail server’s IP on a blacklist, even though you were not the one sending email. What that means is certain ISPs might refuse to deliver YOUR email even though it was someone else on the same server who was sending the Spam. Seems unfair doesn’t it?

Fraudsters:
Fraudsters like to spend little money or no money (most prefer to use stolen credit cards) to gain access to a server. If you want to know an interesting fact, over 90% of the orders we receive are from fraudsters using stolen credit cards. Bad thief! Bad! The good news is that those people very rarely gain access to our servers because we call every new customer to check if the order is legitimate. The ones that can escape detection are the ones that actually spend their own money to buy an account. They don’t want to pay a lot, but they want to send a lot of Spam, or host a site that sells illegal software, or any other number of bad things. Again, since they could potentially share your server (until we catch them and give them the boot) your performance can suffer.

Still With Me?
If you are still with me and have made it all the way down here, it should be noted that at GlowHost we have numerous protections in place to combat these and many other types of scenarios. But, the preventative measures themselves can cause additional load (stress on a server’s CPU), and like anti-virus or any other software for that matter, the system is not 100% effective in catching everything or being 100% fool-proof. That is why we have systems administrators on staff 24/7/365 to babysit the servers for you, in case our automated systems do not catch something, or something new is invented which has not been seen before starts to affect server performance.

At the end of the day, if your web site’s performance and uptime are more critical to you than the few dollars per month you can save on low-end or unlimited hosting, consider spending a little bit extra and pay for a better hosting solution.

Lets start at the top of the list of what is going to be the best hosting, and work our way down:

Dedicated Servers
For you established business owners out there, keep in mind that your web site hosting fees are going to be  the absolute cheapest form of advertising and marketing that you can find. A simple advertisement in the Yellow Pages can cost upwards of $1200 or more per month, and that is just for a local listing, not national, and certainly not international. If you can budget $200-$300 for a managed hosting solution, our dedicated servers are a sure bet for maximum uptime, speed and performance.  For a fraction of the cost of a Yellow Pages ad, you get worldwide exposure and a server that’s going to be fast, stable and reliable for many years to come. With a dedicated server, you do not share the server with anyone; this entirely eliminates your exposure to The 4 Neighbors and performance issues that I have outlined in this post.

By the way, I am not pitching dedicated servers because they are the most expensive item we offer, the reality is that our profit margins on shared hosting are at least 10 times higher than what we earn on a dedicated server. I am pitching you a dedicated server because they work great, and they are good for your business. If a dedicated server is beyond your budget, which for many start-ups, it will be, then there are many alternatives to unlimited hosting or dedicated servers at GlowHost.

Cloud Hosting
Cloud hosting is a theory where if you have a lot of physical servers and pool all of their resources like CPU, hard disk, and RAM, that you can do cool things like make “Virtual Machines” which function and act exactly like a dedicated server would. Cloud servers range anywhere from $75 to “the sky’s the limit.” They are generally very fast and perform well. The technology is still new, so sometimes there can be short periods of unexpected downtime if for example, the operating system vendor rolls out a bad system update. However, over the last year I have been watching this breed of hosting at GlowHost, most if not all of the kinks have been worked out and they are becoming as stable or in some cases, more stable than a dedicated server. You also have no neighbors to worry about with a cloud server. Cloud servers also require no downtime, or in some cases a quick reboot in order to upgrade hardware specifications. Whereas, with a dedicated server, you must physically remove the machine from the rack, (which means unplugging it from the power supply AKA “downtime”) insert the new parts, then put it back on the rack and power it up.

Shared Hosting
Semi-Dedicated servers from GlowHost limit your exposure to The 4 Neighbor types because there is a maximum of 30 accounts which can exist on each Semi-Dedicated server from GlowHost. Most of these servers operate with around 20-25 accounts on them. It is much easier to get 20-30 neighbors playing nicely with each other than it is a Home Owners Association with several hundred houses under management (a typical shared or unlimited server). By limiting the number of neighbors you share your server with, it equates to more CPU for your own account. Also, very rarely do The 4 Neighbors order this type of server. Typically because of the higher cost, these servers are used by sites that understand the value gained by a more expensive hosting package.

Below Semi-Dedicated, we have Personal and Professional shared hosting packages, which are a step up from unlimited. They typically have a mix of all kinds of web sites from start-ups, long time business web sites, personal sites and play sites. Sometimes, The 4 neighbors make unexpected visits on these servers, but not nearly as often as unlimited shared servers. When they do, we deal with each case individually to see what can be done to make their web sites play nicely with the others who share the server.

If you ever find your site performance to be sub par at GlowHost (even on unlimited hosting packages) please, drop by our help desk and open a ticket. We can do all sorts of things to help you out which may not cost you a dime. For example, we might be able to move you to a better performing or newer server free of charge. However, please keep in mind that their are alternatives to unlimited hosting and shared hosting in general. At some point it may make business sense to spend a little more for the increased level of performance.

Finally, I ask a question: Do you think GlowHost.com runs on a shared server?

Please post a comment and tell us what you think. We love to hear your comments, questions and feedback.

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Let me start off by saying, Unlimited Hosting plans are NOT the best…at least if we are talking about performance. If we are talking about price, then it could be argued that unlimited has a fair shot at the title of “best hosting.”

“Well, how could it be?” one might ask. People often think to themselves, “I see a low-price package with unlimited disk space and unlimited domains, what could possibly be better? After all, those other shared web hosting packages cost more, and have limitations on disk space and bandwidth.”

Lets pretend that you wanted to buy a value meal at your favorite burger joint. You were looking at the menu and saw that they sold value meals for what appeared to be very similar burgers, fries, and a cola, yet they offered these meal deals at 2 different prices.  The sign says: “Special! $2.99 for a burger, fries and cola.”  You look at the menu again and see another special which costs $4.99, but you notice that the more expensive meal looks a little smaller, in fact, it is only a quarter-pound of “all beef goodness” when the $2.99 burger is the clear winner with the half-pound gut-buster.

After repeatedly shopping at the same burger joint for some period of time, you decide to splurge a little bit and try the more expensive burger. “Wow! This is yummy!” you think to yourself, “I wonder what is different?” So you ask the cashier for their nutritional information card (because that’s what we all do when we eat fast food). After inspecting the ingredients, you realize that the $2.99 gut buster is made with “Meat Product” which by law is only required to be 45% REAL meat.

Then you look at the information for the $4.99 burger and see that it is 100% Kobe beef. Now the price difference becomes clear to you. Is one more healthy than the other? I have no clue, ask the FDA (as if they know anything), but at least in my own somewhat twisted mind, I’m going with the Kobe beef just on the fact that the thought of “Meat Product” is fairly disturbing on its own.

As consumers, we are trained at an early age that more for less, equals better, and virtually none of us read the fine print.

More for less is almost never the case with web hosting, and people never reading the fine print is virtually every hosting consumer, except those who have been burned in the past and who are now trained to look for this very important document. With web hosting, in general, you get what you pay for.

Lets look at a typical start-up web site scenario. Most people do not want to spend a lot of money on their hosting bills. This is completely understandable since there are lots of unknown factors.

“How long is the site going to take to build, how much is it going to cost to build, why should I pay $20/mo when I can pay $3/mo, will I like this hosting company, and will I even be in business this time next year?”

If you have asked yourself some or all of these questions, then you are not alone. Considering most people have the same questions you do, and the same mentality that I described above (about more for less being better), then most people do the seemingly logical thing and spend the least amount of money on a hosting package that gives them everything including the kitchen sink.

At GlowHost, we fought for many years as advocates against “Unlimited” hosting in any form. However, due to the way the industry has shifted over the last several years, we were forced to make a business decision, which involved us offering unlimited plans to remain competitive and to retain our existing customer base.  The difference at GlowHost is we try to present the facts about unlimited hosting front and center. For example, we have a full page unlimited hosting FAQ on the main web site about what unlimited really means, our Terms of Service also cite specific details about what is allowed, or not allowed, and from time to time, you might even see blog posts like this, where we try to educate our consumers about what they can expect with a shared unlimited package.

Unlimited hosting, by nature will have more reliability issues than traditional shared web hosting, due to the nature of the unlimited beast. As a web host, we never know for example, when someone who shares the server is going to bog down or crash a shared server when they test out their badly coded scripts. We never know when someone will decide that during peak traffic hours on Monday morning, that it seems to be a good idea to try and send out a few thousand emails to a list of email addresses they just purchased for $29.95.  We’ll never know know if little Johnny got bored of his web site and hasn’t patched his WordPress software in 12 months, which ended up getting hacked. We don’t know about any of this until after the fact, which is when we can react and try to save the servers from a disastrous downward spiral that slows down performance or can even take the server offline temporarily.

Now, guess which web site demographic has the most incidents involved with causing these types of issues? If you guessed sites that utilize Unlimited Hosting packages, you win the prize!

I will explain what I mean in more detail in this article that will outline your typical unlimited hosting customer, their behaviors, motives and how these can affect the reliability of your web site.

Now tell us what you think about this post. Please leave a comment below.

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The ultimate online goal for any small to medium-sized business must be to build a community of potential customers that takes an active interest in the products and services you offer. Your visitors demand more than just a catalogue of products; it is your responsibility to use your web hosting service to its full capabilities, implementing a range of interactive content that keeps customers coming back.

Web hosting plans from GlowHost include a number of different features to help you create “sticky” content, affordably and quickly. We’ve designed every one of our hosting solutions with flexibility in mind, and whether you are an expert developer or a complete novice, GlowHost web hosting services can launch your online community and keep your visitors satisfied over the coming years.

Launch sticky content with built-in web hosting plan features

Sticky content describes a wide range of web content that businesses and individuals launch on their websites to encourage return visits. Maximizing your online revenue and return on investment (ROI) requires a hosting provider that supports this kind of content.

The most commonly used example of sticky content is interactive communication, a category which includes discussion forums and chat rooms where visitors can discuss your products and services. Every type of web hosting plan offered by GlowHost, from shared hosting to cloud VDS hosting, includes automated script installers that can get these kinds of features up and running on your website in minutes. However, any experienced webmaster will know that building a community takes far more than offering the relevant tools to your visitors.

In practice, communities grow and flourish based on subject matter. If you want your customers to start talking to each other, give them something to talk about! You can achieve this in several ways. First, take on an active role within your own website community, sharing your expertise with potential customers. For example, at GlowHost, we are widely recognized as experts in the field of web hosting. Through our Facebook and Twitter accounts, as well as our blog and discussion forums, we share our insights on web hosting with our existing customers and website visitors alike.

In addition, look for new ways to provoke discussion by posting regularly updated content. Ultimately, the stickiest content is new content and the best conversations often come as the result of blogging or releasing articles on topics relevant to your customers.

Give your customers a reason to check your site often and watch as your visitors grow into an active and exciting community.

Is your web hosting plan ready to support a community?

So the goal is simple: attract lots of visitors, and build them into an interested and engaged community of followers. Eventually, with a number of repeat visitors, you just might be able to transform some of them into paying customers.

GlowHost web hosting solutions guarantee that your web presence is ready to grow. We offer high-availability, highly reliable, and consistently responsive shared hosting, VDS hosting, and dedicated server hosting plans that can cope with growth in traffic. The ability of our plans to scale with traffic will keep your visitors happy, provide a positive visitor experience, and give visitors yet another reason to come back to your site.

What have you learned from the GlowHost community? Have you joined the discussion over at forums.glowhost.com? What advice would you give another hosting plan user who wants to start building an interactive and sticky web presence?

Feel free to post your comments below, send us a message at www.facebook.com/GlowHost, or give us a Tweet at www.twitter.com/GlowHost.

For more information on Glowhost’s web hosting packages, visit glowhost.com or call us at 1-888-293-4678 today.

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One of the most common places to begin is the world of search engine optimization, or SEO. The theory is simple: optimize the pages of your website to achieve a high ranking position on major search engines such as Google, and your visitor numbers will skyrocket. But in practice, great SEO is only part of the picture, and just one aspect of achieving the traffic you are looking for.

GlowHost has tailored every one of our web hosting services to make it easier for you to attract visitors with SEO and – more importantly –keep them coming back for more high-quality content. To help you make the most of your shared hosting, cloud virtual dedicated server hosting (VDS), or dedicated server hosting plan, we offer a range of web hosting features for SEO and attracting more traffic.

How GlowHost web hosting plans make attractive and optimized content easy

Website hosting users who struggle with SEO are not having difficulties due to a lack of available information on SEO. However, although search engine optimization is one of the most popular topics on the Web, it is difficult to find helpful information that gets right to the point. Worse, since major search engines like Google are highly secretive about the algorithm and processes they use to rank pages, finding accurate information is increasingly difficult.

In essence, there are three significant elements of search engine optimization that will always apply to the content you deploy on your web hosting service, regardless of how search engine crawlers change their behavior. First, you must integrate into your content the kinds of search terms, or keywords, that users are searching for. Next, you should ensure that your content is formatted clearly and that every page is coded to the highest standards.

At GlowHost, we provide web hosting plan features to help you achieve these search engine optimization basics quickly and easily. Every shared hosting service user can use the Soholaunch Website Builder to deploy a cleanly coded website, adding customized – and optimized– content without having to hand-code from scratch. Alternatively, high-quality websites can be made in minutes using our automated Softaculous script installer to launch WordPress, Joomla, or another content management system for your hosting service.

What is more important: SEO or creating quality content?

The good news is that using just these built-in hosting features, getting started with an optimized site is effortless. The bad news is, once you have your optimized website online, the hard work begins!

With increasing volumes of competing web content, and only a basic level of optimization coming as standard with most web hosting plans, it is now necessary to do more in order to attract customers and achieve a high search engine rank. Where SEO was once an advanced set of techniques to trick the search engines, it is now a basic level of compliancy. Search engines cannot be tricked; your website will only hit its targets if you manage an entire campaign of great content that earns the attention of the Internet.

At GlowHost, we understand that our shared hosting, VDS hosting, cloud hosting, and dedicated server hosting customers have their work cut out for them when it comes to promoting their websites. That’s why every one of our web hosting plans comes with an uptime guarantee, automatic script installers, and a convenient control panel to make administration easy. GlowHost web hosting solutions cannot generate your content for you – but they are designed to get out of the way to let you focus on creating quality content that sells.

How do you go about promoting your web presence to attract visitors? Do you think that search engine optimization is still a significant factor in online marketing? What are your favorite GlowHost features for writing and implementing content?

Post your comments below or send us your thoughts now at www.facebook.com/GlowHost or catch us on Twitter at www.twitter.com/GlowHost.

And to learn more about GlowHost’s web hosting packages, visit glowhost.com or call 1-888-293-4678 today.

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We’ve put together a list of three useful reseller hosting tips, each of which will help guarantee more interest in your hosting services, more sales and – most importantly – higher profits.

Distinguish your reseller web hosting plans

Do you remember when you first started searching the web for reseller hosting services? There are lots of web hosting providers, all offering similar services. However, GlowHost reseller plans are unique, offering a lower price point, more generous allocations, and a number of free, value-added features. By offering something different and more comprehensive, GlowHost continues to grow year-after-year – that’s what being original can do for you, too.

Despite the benefits of offering plans with distinctive features, it’s surprising how few web hosting resellers look for ways to make their hosting services unique. Standing out from the crowd is of great importance if you hope to attract customers, and there are many ways you can distinguish yourself. Why not offer a hosting service for the complete novice, like a “Getting Started” hosting plan? How about a hosting plan designed for bloggers? Or, maybe a plan geared toward businesses in your local area? There are many ways to avoid being yet another cookie-cutter hosting site. Pick one and run with it.

Target your market with the right web hosting advertising

Although there are many ways to make your web hosting service unique, your most important distinction as a reseller hosting user is your preferred customer, or target market. By figuring out how to create a tailor-made service that suits the needs of a certain group, you won’t need to become the best host in the business – you can just work to become the best host in your niche.

But even if you offer a specialty hosting service, customers will not start placing orders unless you promote your hosting services to them specifically. For example, if your niche is local businesses, an advertisement in your local newspaper might be a better choice of strategy than using Google AdWords. Whatever the specific content and medium of your advertising, always think about how your message will reach your target customers – after all, these are the people most likely to give you their money.

Always add value to your reseller web hosting services

Finally, consider the things you can do to make your website hosting plans more than just web space. At GlowHost, every reseller hosting service plan includes a professional website template, more than 1,000 brandable support videos, and a variety of convenient administration tools as standard. In addition, GlowHost draws on years of experience to guarantee uptime and reliability across all services.

If you have experience or expertise in web hosting, web design, advertising, or any other niche, make sure your potential customers learn this when they arrive at your homepage. However much you distinguish your plans and target your audience, the biggest selling point of any hosting service is your expertise and how you use it to help your customers grow.

Share your tips for great reseller hosting success

Now that we’ve outlined the basic reseller tips, we would love to hear about your own reseller hosting success strategies. How have you advertised your web hosting business online? What great tips do you have for those just getting started with reseller hosting?

Join the discussion below or visit us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/glowhost.

To learn more about GlowHost’s web hosting packages, visit glowhost.com or call 1-888-293-4678 today.

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With such popularity, it is strange to think that a little over ten years ago, social media wasn’t even conceptualized. The leading websites that make up 22% of the USA’s time spent online – Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter – are not even ten years old. This relative infancy means that social media should still be rigorously examined, user trends should be carefully monitored, and nobody should start promoting their business through social media without knowing all the facts.

GlowHost has collected some of the most fascinating facts surrounding social media, giving our shared web hosting, cloud virtual dedicated server hosting (VDS), and dedicated server hosting customers the head-start they need to see their social media presences flourish.

1. If Facebook were a country, it would be the world’s 3^rd largest

No big surprise here, but something that’s always worth remembering – Facebook is not just popular, it’s a phenomenon. For sheer volume of users and the ability to connect with potentially more than 800 million people, having a Facebook page is no longer an option – it’s a fundamental element in building your online presence.

2. The average Facebook user creates 90 content items per month

The major concern with Facebook is that its large scale and enormous user base leaves the site flooded with content that vies for attention and those all-important ‘Likes.’ However, not all of this content is useful and not all of it is worthwhile. All the same, many customers find it difficult to find a way to cut through and gain visibility on this particularly busy platform.

3. YouTube is the world’s second largest search engine

For many of us trying to achieve better traffic, a focus on Google is only natural. However, partly through integration with Google, YouTube is an incredibly popular search engine and can be a fantastic way to reach out to new customers and start increasing your visibility.

4. More than 24 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute

In real terms, the quantity of video that finds its way onto YouTube makes it difficult to capture attention without a large existing following or some inspired viral material. As with Facebook, over-saturation means that achieving your social media goals usually requires a great deal of time and effort.

5. Five new Twitter accounts are created every single second

Twitter is particularly refreshing since it is social media with a strong USP – everything is confined to short 140-character bursts of information. This individuality, alongside the celebrity adoption of Twitter, brings in new users by the bucketload, all of whom are potential customers for your business.

6. Almost a quarter of new Twitter accounts are never used

But despite its popularity, Twitter is an experience that some people love and some people do not fully embrace. Around 21% of all new signups to Twitter never post a message, never follow any other users, and never revisit the site. As a result, if you are looking to build your business by attracting new customers, Twitter may not be the golden opportunity that it seems.

What do GlowHost web hosting service users do with social media?

What these statistics reveal is that social media is rife with opportunity, but attracting new customers through social media is a time-consuming, potentially expensive process. High visitor numbers can be achieved through a little ingenuity and constant communication, but perhaps the biggest saving grace of social media is not in the new customers, but in the ones you already have.

At GlowHost, we use our Facebook and Twitter accounts to share information on our shared hosting, VDS hosting, dedicated server hosting, and cloud hosting plans with new customers, but we also relish the opportunity to communicate with our existing users. For help, information, or just a friendly conversation, social media puts GlowHost in direct contact with the people that are most important to the web hosting services we offer. If potential customers join the conversation too, that’s great!

What are you doing with social media to help your business be better? Is your focus on appealing to potential customers or talking to your existing ones? How have you managed to make social media an integral part of what you do with your GlowHost hosting service?

Join the conversation now at www.facebook.com/GlowHost or send us a Tweet at www.twitter.com/GlowHost.

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There are, however, a number of other factors that should play a key part in your decision making process. In addition to the hardware hosting solution itself, it’s important that you understand the other features of your chosen web host. Often, the best value for your money and return on investment (ROI) comes as a result of service-related features, including customer support, service level agreements, and additional services included in your overall package.

GlowHost goes beyond offering the hosting plan that you want. Our goal is to give you the complete service package that you need, delivered with care and quality at all times. Whether you decide to order a shared web hosting, virtual private server hosting (VPS), dedicated server hosting or cloud hosting solution, GlowHost offers a number of value-added services to make setting up and running your server easier and more cost effective than ever.

1. Instant web hosting setup to get you online immediately

A common concern when ordering a web hosting plan is that you could potentially be waiting days for your hosting to become available. This is particularly true with those popular web hosts who handle many orders every day. Look for a provider who has invested in leading account administration systems, enabling them to set up your hosting solution immediately.

2. Industry experience with ongoing industry partnerships

They say that you can judge a person by their friends, and this is equally true in the web hosting industry. The most reputable hosting services have been growing steadily for years, developing the kind of long-term industry partnerships that enable them to make your day-to-day server administration easier with powerful software such as market-leader cPanel.

3. Dependable servers with a minimum 99.9% uptime guarantee

Whichever type of web hosting service you choose, your time and money is wasted if your web presence is not consistently online and ready to serve your customers. You need a hosting provider with a secure high connectivity data center. In the majority of cases, the most reliable web hosting services will include a service level agreement (SLA), giving you assurances as to the amount of uptime that the network will offer. As a minimum, you should be looking for a 99.9% uptime guarantee.

4. Easy to manage web hosting with 24/7/365 customer support

Once your server is online, you can maximize your return on investment by minimizing the amount of time you spend administering the various features of your hosting such as SSL certificates, mailboxes, or FTP accounts. Looking at the longer-term implications of your purchase, you should always search for a host who offers a user-friendly control panel for your day-to-day administration, and 24/7/365 expert customer support for those inevitable occasions when you need assistance.

Order an affordable and reliable GlowHost web hosting solution today

Finally, if you are to make a success of your investment into your online presence, find a host who can offer the fully featured service you need at a price you can afford.

GlowHost currently offers a competitively priced range of shared web hosting, cloud virtual dedicated server hosting (VDS), dedicated server hosting, and cloud hosting services, all of which can be instantly deployed to get your business online today. Every GlowHost web server is hosted in the firm’s Atlanta, GA and Dallas, TX data centers, with a 99.9% uptime guarantee and 24/7/365 customer support as standard. In addition, GlowHost provides every user with powerful cPanel control panel software, making website administration quick and easy.

To find out more about GlowHost’s selection of cPanel hosting services with a minimum 99.9% guaranteed uptime, call 1-888-293-4678 or visit www.glowhost.com today.

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In theory, each of these things can be achieved using any type of web hosting service, provided that the available system resources are sufficient for the technical demands of your software. Whether you choose shared hosting, virtual private server (VPS) hosting, a dedicated server hosting solution or even cloud hosting, you will be able to get these kinds of exciting services up and running with the right expertise.

At GlowHost, we have taken things further. In addition to our generous resource allowances across all services that make streaming content a possibility, we have developed a number of hosting services including FFMpeg hosting, podcast hosting, vBulletin hosting, and SHOUTcast hosting plans. These solutions, customized to suit the unique needs of different customers, make achieving your goals easier than ever.

FFMpeg hosting services for streaming video and audio

If you have ever visited YouTube, you have seen FFMpeg web hosting in motion. By running a quality FFMpeg script on your server, you can upload standard video, in almost every possible format, have it converted server-side into .flv format, and make the footage available to visitors that have Flash Player installed in their browsers (almost everyone on the Internet) in an instant.

Every hosting service available (excluding our Unlimited packages) from GlowHost includes FFMpeg functionality as standard, making streaming video on any scale available immediately. What’s more, we can install a popular video streaming script like PHPMotion, vShare or VidiScript free of charge with any purchase over $25.

SHOUTcast web hosting for live online radio broadcasts

SHOUTcast is an incredibly popular software solution designed for setting up and running your very own online radio station. In addition to live broadcasts that can be deployed from your PC to your SHOUTcast hosting server and then streamed immediately to your audience, this technology also allows you to store pre-recorded MP3s on your server for those times when your live broadcast is offline using our Auto-DJ service.

Each of these features is managed through the SHOUTcast Admin Pro Control Panel, which GlowHost offers across a number of tiered SHOUTcast hosting services, each of which has been designed to guarantee the best listening experience for your customers. Additionally, each of these plans allows for unlimited users and features, and full support for high quality 128Kbps audio streaming.

Free vBulletin hosting and installation

One of the world’s most versatile and scalable pieces of bulletin board and forum software, vBulletin uses PHP and MySQL to make a robust place where your customers can talk about your products and services. This can be an essential tool in effective communication, or simply to add value to your online presence and encourage repeat visits.

Every web hosting plan from GlowHost fully supports vBulletin, but customers can also make use of free vBulletin installation on a number of hosting services. GlowHost offers a special vBulletin hosting package which is an all-encompassing vBulletin solution that includes a free vBulletin license, free installation, and a free domain name among other goodies.

Flexible GlowHost hosting that can meet and exceed your requirements

In addition to the specific, individualized web hosting solutions designed to meet individual needs, every GlowHost server is highly adaptable to whatever it is that you or your business aim to do. This includes Softaculous and Fantastico, two script installers that make deploying shopping carts, blogs, and other dynamic content a quick and easy process.

GlowHost’s FFMpeg hosting services, vBulletin hosting plans, and SHOUTcast hosting solutions all include instant-activation, a minimum 99.9% uptime guarantee, a 60-day money back promise, and unrivalled 24/7/365 customer support from a highly trained and experienced staff.

To find out more about the choice of specialist hosting services available from GlowHost, call 1-888-293-4678 or visit www.glowhost.com today.

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