Research recently carried our for Cisco jointly by Oxford University’s Said Business School and Spain’s University of Oviedo’s Department of Applied Economics has placed the UK 25th out of 66 countries in terms of the quality and reach of its networks.

Out of the 4 classifications, ranked in quality order from ready for tomorrow, comfortable for today, meeting needs for today and below needs for today the UK only managed to be ranked as “meeting needs for today”. South Korea and Japan are leading the way with the former promising 1Gigabit per second speeds by 2012. This is in stark contrast to the current situation in the UK, where the average download speed was measured at 4.75Mbps (megabits per second), while average upload speed was 1.3Mbps. Researchers estimated that 11.25Mbps and an upload speed of 5Mbps is required to cope comfortably with future applications.

Joanne Hughes, Cisco’s communication manager did comment on a positive note ”We forecast the UK will improve because of things such as cable networks being upgraded and the Digital Britain report focusing on next generation access”. Hopefully the Government will stay committed to improving broadband quality in the UK, at present we lagging behind due to an aging infrastructure that requires significant investment.

The research was based on 24 million speed tests done in 66 countries via speedtest.net.

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If you have not optimised your images before or are not sure about this, I’ll give a quick example to show the benefits.

These 2 versions of our logo are exactly the same, the first is a print-screen taken from our website and pasted into MS Paint, then saved with default options which saves it as a Bitmap file (.bmp). This is a quick way to save files and a way that I know many people use, but it is one of the largest file formats there is for images. This has resulted in this little image being 56KB, for an average dialup user this would take around 10 seconds just to download this tiny image. The second version is exactly the same image which is in Portable Network Graphics format (.png). This is a lossless compression, so the image is exactly the same as the bitmap, however in png it is just under 2KB. This would be downloaded by your average dialup user in under 0.5 seconds! The total compression achieved is 96.7%, the resulting png is over 30x smaller than the original!

To compress this file, I used a very useful website which offers free image compression, you can find this at www.smush.it and it is very easy to use. If you are still in the process of creating your site, you can click the Uploader option and this lets you select your images and upload them. Once they are uploaded it compresses them, then gives you the option to download them in a single zip file. It also has a URL option, you can tell it the path to an image that is already hosted and it can compress this for you and again let you download it. It gives you a full run down of the savings you are achieving too!

Image compression may not be the most exciting of subjects, however I’m sure you’ll agree that potential cost savings due to disk space and bandwidth, coupled with a better user experience of faster loading sites makes it time well spent, with a service like smush.it optimisation is a trivial process!

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Each one seems to have something going for it, and I’d suggest checking them all out, Wolfram|Alpha can be extremely impressive, I’m going to include the presentation on it that I first saw which made me take notice:

I think it definitely has it’s uses, for example maths homework will never be the same again, kids these days! I think most people would agree that mainstream search at present is really down to the big three, Google, Yahoo! and Bing. Which one you use is down to preference really, they all do a fairly good job, but for a nice comparison you should try out Blind Search. This will give you results from all three search engines side by side for comparison, I found this very interesting and a quick search for NetHosted gave me Yahoo! as my search engine of choice. Overall I think Google still holds the search crown but they best stay on their toes, as the competition are definitely gaining on them!

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The basic explanation to these is that a 301 redirect is known as a permanent redirect, this means that the 301 code is served in the http headers to your browser by the web server, letting it know that the page that was previously at this address has moved permanently to a new address. A URL rewrite basically allows people to access your content through a different URL, handy for changing the structure of a site if you wanted to move to more SEO friendly URLs for users and search bots to access via. These should be used in conjunction to avoid any loss of rankings or incoming links going to 404 pages when content is moved or restructured.

Now, lets look at a practical example of how to go about doing this for a very simple site that wishes to change to a more SEO friendly structure:


travel.com
|- 10241.html
|- new
|- 6316.html


This is a very simple site at travel.com containing 2 html pages that are not descriptively named, one inside a directory named new. Now lets say the file 10241.html is about holidays in Africa, and the new folder contains european holiday destinations, of which 6316.html is about spanish villa holidays. I’ll now show you a .htaccess file which will URL rewrite these to search engine friendly and user friendly URLs, then setup 301 redirects from the old pages so no pagerank or link juice is lost. Anything on a line beginning with a # is a comment

.htaccess
# All htaccess files doing rewrites should begin with these 3 lines
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /# rewrite rules
RewriteRule 10241.html holidays-in-africa.html [R=301,L]
RewriteRule new/6316.html http://www.travel.com/european-holidays/spanish-villa-holidays.html [R=301,L]

You would then change your directory structure to the new layout as follows:


travel.com
|- holidays-in-africa.html
|- european-holidays
|- spanish-villa-holidays.html


Any links to the old pages would get redirected to the new pages so visitors would not receive any 404 errors, as well as all of the pages pagerank moving to the new location. This also avoids duplicate content issues that would occur if you simply copied the files to the new locations.

This is just one way to greatly optimise your site for search engines and to improve user experience. It should also make your life easier as you will be able to see at a glance what file represents what content on your site. A previous post we have made comments on the effectiveness of using keywords in domain names which is worth a read if you would like more convincing!

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Online security is vitally important, in a world of credit card fraud and identity theft people need to be more and more vigilant when divulging their private details. Having the padlock symbol at the bottom of a page gives people a feeling of some security at least, this means the site is using an SSL Certificate so communication between the user and the website should not be able to be viewed by anyone else. This is because it is encoded when it is sent, as opposed to sent in plain text in packets that could be viewed by anyone the data passes through. When this could be in another country, potentially the other side of the world, then each packet you send could pass through ten, twenty or even more nodes on the way.

If you are considering purchasing an SSL Certificate then you most likely should have one. The main criteria for purchasing an SSL Certificate are as follows:

• You are an online store
• You store personal details such as address, date of birth, etc.
• You are a business that needs to comply with privacy regulations
• You are sharing confidential data over the internet, perhaps with another office etc.
• You are in a position where customer trust and confidentiality is important

I would say that these cover the vast majority of reasons to purchase an SSL. Some examples of sites that would not require an SSL generally are: Blogs, News Sites, Entertainment Sites, Personal Websites.

An SSL Certificate requires your site to be running on a dedicated IP. Sites on shared hosting can be secured, but you would have to purchase a dedicated IP for them to run on which you could order at the same time. SSL Certificates are reasonably inexpensive, any business should be able to afford one as the cost over a year works out at just a few pounds a month for a basic one. To order an SSL Certificate some basic information would be required by your host, these are the details that NetHosted require:

Email: This should be a site contact email
Password: This is a new password used to create the SSL certificate
SSL Hostname: This is the site to make the certificate for.
City:
State:
Country (2 letter abbreviation): GB
Company Name:
Company Division:

Once this information is provided, the SSL Certificate can be ordered and set up for you.

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Now personally I’ve always been of the opinion that Matt undersells the importance of SEO to a degree, this would be the typical view of a Google employee; The reason they are where they are today is due to the quality of their search results, and unscrupulous individuals may attempt to influence search results in a way that is detrimental to the users search experience, e.g. spammy irrelevant results entering the users SERP’s (search engine results page).

In my opinion it is valuable to have targetted keywords in your domain name, but it is definitely not going to make or break a website. High quality unique content has always been the key to long term search engine rankings, and as long as search engines keep doing their job this is the way it should stay. Of course certain design features make a site easier for a search engine to understand, using relevant titles and keywords in a blog url gives them an idea of the post content, and a well structured site with navigation links allows a robot to spider your content more effectively!

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The best way to do this is using a 301 redirect, this tells any spiders that your page has moved permanently to a new address, and this should pass all PageRank and other benefits from the links you may have to your current page to your new page.

That’s all well and good, but how do I do this you may ask? Well, here’s how:

You’ll be making some changes to your .htaccess file, this is usually found in your web root which is public_html/ on our web hosting. Once you’ve located this file (or created it if it doesn’t exist) you will add the following lines:


RewriteEngine On

Redirect 301 /oldpage.html /newpage.html


That’s all their is to it!

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For business web hosting, the most important factor is reliability, if your site is down then you will be losing customers and this will cost you money, losing a single customer if your website is down for 30 minutes may cost you more than an entire months web hosting fee, so you can see how important finding a quality web host is. It is important that the host offers rapid support so if there are any issues you know that someone will be on hand to resolve them quickly and efficiently, minimising the negative effects.

If you have a UK based business then having UK business hosting is important as this will help you to rank better regionally in search engines. They favour websites that are hosted in the country that they are targetting when other factors are the same, so this will give you an edge in search engine rankings. If you for example look in Google.co.uk and search for shop then compare these results to Google.com you will notice that in the UK search there are UK shops but in the american Google there are more american shops.

When handling your business data it is important that you are with a webhost that understands the importance of the security of this data, all of our servers at NetHosted are secured by us against many different attacks including brute force and denial of service. Each server has its own firewall that automatically bans connections that appear to be trying to gain unauthorised access.

Data integrity is another concern, it is important that there are backups of your data kept in case of hardware failure which is unavoidable. Ensuring there are robust backup solutions in place can minimise or negate the effects of hardware failure which could be catastrophic for your website without backups. NetHosted offer RAID1 disk mirroring on all of our servers meaning that if one disk fails, the backup disk takes over seamlessly as the same data is maintained on both disks. The faulty disk can then be replaced meaning that there would be no downtime or data loss and the mirroring array will copy itself to the new disk. In addition to this we take weekly remote backups of all sites that are held on a different server, so if a serious mistake was made when you were editing your site a backup could be restored.

The final major concern for business hosting is scalability. Once you find a host that you are happy with the service of, you want to be able to stick with them perhaps for years to come, so they must be able to offer packages that can grow along with your business. This means that a wide range of services are necessary, NetHosted offer shared hosting, reseller hosting, VPS hosting and dedicated server hosting which should cover the whole spectrum of needs from small businesses to international corporations. We offer an upgrade path through our services and can assist you in migrating through these packages as your business grows.

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Content Management Systems are suitable for both novices and experts alike, they are user friendly and far easier and quicker than for example developing your own site with even half the features of a good CMS. They are fully skinnable allowing you to completely change the look of a site, with a lot of customisation it will look very different to the default installs. There are many sites to download themes that other people have made for these also, and a simple search should turn up a lot of results.
Typical features of CMS’s:

• User management with fine grain settings
• Article versioning
• Separating content from styling
• Content repository
• Extensible with addons
• Fully customisable in style and layout

Here is a short breakdown of some of the most common and up and coming CMS compatible with our UK Web Hosting:

• Joomla: Joomla is a Content Management System for building fully featured and attractive websites rapidly. It is the most popular CMS in the world, and we offer Joomla Hosting, which is Fantastico install enabled. It offers a shopping cart module and is suitable for online stores and document management.
• Drupal: Drupal is the second most popular CMS currently available. It offers SSL support which Joomla doesn’t out of the box, and offers much better search engine optimisation features than Joomla. We offer Drupal Hosting which is Fantastico install enabled.
• WordPress: WordPress is not strictly a CMS but a blogging software, however it is so advanced and customisable that it can fall into the same category. WordPress is the most widely used blogging software in the world, offering a great selection of user created addons. We offer WordPress Hosting, which is Fantastico install enabled.
• Jaws: Jaws is a framework and Content Management System for building dynamic web sites. It aims to be user friendly giving ease of use and lots of ways to customize web sites, but at the same time is developer friendly, it offers a simple and powerful framework to hack your own modules. We offer Jaws Hosting.
• MODx: MODx is 100% buzzword compliant, and makes child’s play of building content managed sites with validating, accessible CSS layouts. It empowers its users to build engaging Web 2.0 sites, with its pre-integrated MooTools, Scriptaculous and Prototype libraries. We offer MODx Hosting.

One major advantage of CMS’s is that they come SEO ready, allowing very easy optimisation of your pages, changing title and description tags for each article for example.

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The HOSTS file has a very simple format, this is simply the IP address you wish to map to followed by the hostname you are mapping to it. E.g.

85.13.250.34 www.nethosted.co.uk

This format remains the same across operating systems, however the location of the hosts file does vary. Here is where you can find it on different operating systems:

• Windows 95/98/Me: c:\windows\hosts
• Windows NT/2000/XP Pro: c:\winnt\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
• Windows XP Home: c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
• Mac OS X: /private/etc/hosts
• Linux: /etc/hosts

On Windows Vista they have unfortunately decided to make things more complicated and less accessible, but it’s still possible to make changes to this. You need to edit the file with administrator rights, to do this in Vista:

1. Start Menu -> All Programs -> Accessories
2. Right click “Notepad” and choose “Run as administrator”
3. Click “Continue” on the security prompt
4. Select File -> Open
5. Browse to “C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\etc”
6. Change the file filter selection from “Text Documents (*.txt)” to “All Files (*.*)”
7. Select the “hosts” file and “Open”
8. Make the changes that you require and save the file.

For OS X or Linux you should edit this file with your favourite text editor from the root account.
Using this method can save you a lot of headaches in the site development process, and offers you the flexibility to develop your site from anywhere without having to mess about with changing the DNS servers on your web hosting. It also removes the need to consider DNS caching and propagation. This method works for any kind of hosting you have, be it linux hosting, reseller hosting or even VPS hosting.

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