A friend and business acquaintance of mine, Mr. Brett Tabke, will be holding his webmaster conference next week in Las Vegas. The official title is, WebmasterWorld’s Search and Internet Marketing Conference, however, it is know by most attendees as PubCon. (This refers back to the earlier days of the conference when it actually took place in a pub.) The dates of this great event are November 11-14 at the Las Vegas Convention Center in Las Vegas, Nevada.

PubCon is a conference that centers on what it takes to succeed as a webmaster. That drives the focus towards search engine optimization (pretty much every search engine and all the major search experts show up), search marketing, social media marketing, affiliate marketing, and how to gain traffic at a website and then monetize it.

The list of speakers is truly impressive. Brett has invited experts from web hosting to take part in the past several shows, and the audiences have been very accepting of our message. This year a web hosting panel will be part of PubCon and feature, Ben Fisher, Vice President with TechPad Agency, Amy Armitage, Director of Business Development with Lunarpages Web Hosting, and Curtis R. Curtis, Senior Vice President with Superb Internet.

Lunarpages and TechPad Agency will both have booths at the show. There are other hosting and hosting related companies that will participate as well, including: SmarterTools, an information technology (IT) management software company that builds applications to simplify and automate the day-to-day operations of hosting businesses. iNetU, a managed dedicated server company will have a display booth at PubCon, as will domain registrar and hosting provider, Register.com. Additionally, Affinity.com will participate in the show, featuring its customized monetization solutions for different types of publishers including search portals, toolbars, online directories, domain parking, blogs, URL errors, desktop applications and content websites. The Affinity.com brand is owned by hosting giant, Hostway.com.

The founder of PubCon, Brett Tabke, commented on this year’s keynote and charity events as well, ”I am really looking forward to this year’s kickoff keynote by Shawn Rorick. He is doing things with Cirque du Solieil marketing, that most of us haven’t even heard about yet. Remember when all the stories about the in video game advertising that presidential candidates were doing hit awhile ago? They talked about how progressive and leading edge it was? Rorick was doing that stuff two years ago already at Cirque. So the question we have to ask, ”is what is he doing THIS year” that we won’t know about until two years from now? We also have a charity casino this year in the middle of the networking lounge in the expo hall. After that, there is a party or cocktail reception every night of the conference. My advice would be to start working and get in shape now!”

Daniel Foster, a founder with website hosting company 34sp.com, commented on the importance of attending industry conferences such as PubCon, ”In the hosting industry - being that it is truly competitive, one needs to keep apprised of all the information and expertise available to succeed. PubCon offers a great opportunity to learn from search experts and the search engines themselves. The networking events at these types of conference also offer the opportunity to have a deeper discussion in an informal atmosphere.”

To learn more about PubCon or to sign up visit: www.PubCon.com. Be sure to look for PubCon London in July of 2009 as well. If you are involved in web hosting, websites or webmastery in Europe - it will be a must-attend event in 2009.

This content was written by Derek Vaughan exclusively for Host Discussion Blog.

I remember the heady days when Rackspace first went public. Think back to early August 2008 - before the market crash and all the bank failures. Rackspace had successfully launched its stock on the New York Stock Exchange. For those that may not know, here is how Rackspace described its business in its S-1 filing with the SEC:

”Rackspace Hosting is the world’s leader in hosting. We deliver websites, web-based IT systems, and computing as a service. Our rapid growth is the result of our commitment to serving our customers, known as Fanatical Support, and our exclusive focus on hosting. Our financial success is the result of responsible financial management and our disciplined, just-in-time approach to capital investment. During 2007, we had net revenue of $362.0 million. As of December 31, 2007, we served over 29,000 business customers of all sizes with more than 36,000 servers, over 700,000 business email accounts, and more than 32,000 cloud hosting domains. To deliver on our Fanatical Support Promise to our customers, we have created a culture that encourages passionate, engaged employees who we call “Rackers.” In 2008, Fortune magazine ranked Rackspace Hosting #32 on its list of ‘100 Best Companies to Work For’.”

Shortly after the IPO, on August 20 to be exact, I wrote an op ed piece asking the question, ”Is Rackspace Really Worth $1.2 Billion?”. The point of the piece was that even though Rackspace had lost 20 percent of its value, the price to earnings ratio was higher than Google, Microsoft or Yahoo. Remember that it is a bit hard to compare non hosting businesses to hosting businesses. Also Rackspace competes in the managed hosting space (IT hosting, they call it) - not the VPS or budget hosting space.

I went on to speculate that:
”It is possible that Rackspace justifies the current valuation and that the company will shock and surprise investors with incredible upside when they next report earnings. That’s just what Google did when it went public. However, if the first earnings reports are anything less than spectacular – it’s likely that Rackspace won’t be worth $1.2 billion anymore.”

Oh how times have changed. I took a look at the valuation of Rackspace since August 12, 2008 and compared it to the performance of the Dow Jones Industrial Average during the same period. Neither investment looks particularly good, as you might imagine. The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 24.9 percent of its value. Ouch. Rackspace, however, lost twice as much declining an eye popping 50.8 percent. So if you had put your life savings into Rackspace on August 12, 2008 (just about 10 weeks ago) you would have lost half of your money.

So does that mean that now is a great time to buy Rackspace? The price to earnings ratio is way better now, having declined from around 60 times earnings to a more reasonable 30.8 times earnings as of the close of business on October 17, 2008. The key to this answer lies in your confidence that Rackspace will do exactly what they said that they would do when the stock was launched. Here is what the company stated it would accomplish:

”Our vision is to be recognized as one of the world’s great service companies. Our goal is to expand our leadership position in hosting around the world, and our strategy for accomplishing this goal includes the following key elements:

Add New Customers. We intend to continue our focus on aggressively acquiring profitable new customers.

Keep Existing Customers for Life and Sell Existing Customers More Services. When we serve customers well, they generally stay with us and buy more services. This means each customer has the potential to generate significant lifetime economic value.

Add New Services. Our goal is to add new services to meet our customers’ growing needs.

Expand Globally. We intend to expand further into continental Europe and to Asia.

Continue to Invest in Our Culture and Hire the Best People. We intend to continue our highly selective hiring process and maintain a work environment that encourages passionate, engaged Rackers.”

At this stage in the stock market cycle, I tend to become bullish on Rackspace. I believe that the company can execute well on the above-listed objectives. I think the company has done a great job of positioning itself as the leader in high end hosting and will add new customers at a steady rate. The global expansion seems to be going well. While I am not advocating putting your life savings into any one stock (have a well balanced portfolio to reduce risk) I think that Rackspace is a much more attractive investment at 50 percent off.

This content was written by Derek Vaughan exclusively for hostdiscussion.com.

As I surf through several cheap dedicated server host web sites, I see budget server after budget server. Competition is stiff and furious for the low-end Dedicated Server customer. I can only imagine the insane churn rates, low profit margins, and overall headaches caused by the low-end customer. What’s scary for the cheap dedicated server providers is; there’s already a better product on the playing field at more affordable prices.

Furthermore, this new player is easier to manage, easier to provision, uses less power, and will be commonplace by the end of 2009.

Even more damaging to your future is that this provider offers more computing power in one tiny sliver than your ancient low-cost dedicated server.

What will you do once the customers start to leave you for the new player? Lower your prices even more on ancient hardware? Probably.

Will it work? No chance

MEET YOUR NEW COMPETITOR: VIRTUALIZED DEDICATED.

Once a customer gets used to the automation, 20 second reboots, easy migrations, back-up / restoration tools a Virtual Server offers, they will not go back.

What’s even more cool is, a VE (Virtual Environment) on a high-powered Dedicated Server vastly out-performs these ancient pieces of hardware you are pawning off on people for $40/mo for the same price. This is not the VPS of two years ago. Processing power has gone up considerably and has now enabled cost efficient ’slicing’ of a single computer in to many usable computers. More efficient manufacturing methods have also led to competitive pricing on server hardware

The processing power increases now make sense for the end customer to consider VPS as a viable solution. It’s affordable and reliable now for mass market use.

In addition, the power consumption on your old beast servers are considerably higher than a newer more powerful machine capable of being virtualized. This saves you the Hosting company money.

As a dedicated server provider, you already have a data center, network, and the infrastructure in place to keep selling dedicateds. You just need to tweak your sales model to cater to virtualization hardware and software for end Resellers.

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If you missed it, the U.S. stock market (along with the rest of the world markets) has been dropping like a rock. To put a bit of perspective on the state of affairs consider this:

The venerable and respected investment bank known as Lehman Brothers which had been in existence for 158 years has gone bankrupt. The former CEO has been facing a Congressional hearing into whether or not the company misappropriated funds in the days leading up to the collapse.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell below 10,000 yesterday. How low is that? The first time the index crossed 10,000 was back in 1999. So if you had invested $1,000 in the Dow Jones Industrial Average stocks in 1999 and waited almost 10 years until today - you would have earned nothing.

If you need further detail on the abysmal state of the financial markets you can visit any major news outlet or financial website. The particular sector that interests me at this time are those companies involved in web hosting. In the publicly traded markets there are two firms that are pretty much web hosting ‘pure plays’. That is, their entire business is built around only web hosting-related business activities: Web.com (ticker symbol WWWW) and Rackspace (ticker symbol RAX).

So how have the web hosting companies been fairing over the past month? Terrible.

For comparison’s sake, let’s sat that you had a bunch of money to invest 1 month ago. Here is how much you would have lost in each of the following investments:

Microsoft - you would have lost 2.9 percent in the past month.

Dow Jones Industrial Average - lost you 11.3 percent.

Google - sorry, you lost 16.4 percent in the past month.

The Nasdaq - loser to the tune of 17.4 percent.

Which now brings us to the web hosting companies. If you had the inclination to invest in Web.com or Rackspace over the past month, here is how you faired:

Web.com - you would have lost a staggering 30 percent of your money.

Rackspace - are you sitting down? Good, because your investment has shrunk by one third. You lost 33 percent of your money in one month. Ouch.

Not to belabor the point, but consider the overall valuations of Web.com and Rackspace.

On September 5, 2008 Rackspace was worth around $1.2 billion. On October 6, 2008 it was worth $851 million. That’s a loss of over $400 million.

On September 5, 2008 Web.com was worth $167 million. On October 6, 2008 it was worth $117 million. That’s a loss of $50 million.

That makes me think of what I could do with $450 million. Let’s hope that the downturn on Wall Street and the blood bath in the web hosting sector let up soon. If they don’t, I’m not sure you’d want to invest in web hosting for the next month.

This content was written by Derek Vaughan and is provided courtesy of the VPS and dedicated hosting experts at HostMySite.com.

Now that we’ve discovered where we stand in relation to indexed pages, keyword rankings, and search engine coverage. We have a good idea of where Host Discussion now ranks and what it doesn’t rank on. Now that we know where we are - it’s time to find where we want to go.

Webmasters sometimes get lost in knowing what keywords to attempt to rank on. You may start with a random keyword list. You probably also don’t know if those keywords are well searched. You search what competitors of yours are ranked on for these random keywords. All time consuming and usually fruitless.

It would be nice to have a tool that makes keyword suggestions. It would be even nicer if that tool gave us a rough idea of how heavily that keyword was searched for. What if this tool also told us what keywords visitors were using to hit our competitors Websites?

That’s the beauty of RankSense and the true power of it. These kind of tools are readily available to you. If you know what keywords are heavily searched for, you erase the guessing game. Now you can focus on keywords you KNOW will bring traffic to your site. Using this tool you can discover obscure keywords that others may not even know visitors heavily search. It’s efficient and it’s easy.

Figuring out how humans search is part of the equation within RankSense and I love it. Now let’s see how these tools are used within RankSense.

Step 1 - Search Engine Selection

As most Webmasters know, a Website can rank differently between Google and Yahoo and other search engines. The Search Engine Selection tool helps you choose the search engine you wish to increase rankings for. For our review, I’ve picked Google, Yahoo!, and Live.com. Pretty basic here, obviously Google and Yahoo! are clearly the top two to pick here to reach the mass market for Host Discussion.

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The internet has become more than a tool used for research and simple entertainment. The world is using the net to connect with people from all over. It has turned into a daily routine, like drinking coffee and reading the morning paper for us. We can’t live without getting online and checking our email or scoping the world news. The list goes on and before we get to social networking. Social networking is the craze nowadays as contrasting social communities are uniting and expressing their individual interests.

Everyone has heard of MySpace, Facebook and Hi5, but have you heard of LinkedIn, MyChurch, or Passportstamp? If you haven’t, it goes to show how social networking, as does life, is evolving. The first three sites are dedicated to general social networking between anyone and everyone. LinkedIn is dedicated to bringing together business owners and entrepreneurs. As MySpace has “Friends” for you to add and chat with, LinkedIn’s users are called “Connections.” The way the site works is as follows: A contact network is built up consisting of their direct connections, the connections of each of their connections (termed second degree connections) moreover the connections of second degree connections (termed third degree connections). This can be used to gain an introduction to someone you wish to know through a mutual, trusted contact. Next, you can use the network to find jobs, people and business opportunities recommended by someone in anybody’s contact network. Employers can list jobs and even search for prospective employees. The job seeker can review the profiles of hiring managers and discover which of their existing contacts can introduce them. The next site, MyChurch, is a Christian social network site serving Christian churches that follow the Nicene Creed. In addition to the standard offerings of MySpace, MyChurch allows churches to post sermon podcasts, show event calendars and even collect tithes from members. Although, MyChurch is geared towards Christians, they encourage non-Christians to join. Lastly, Passportstamp is a social networking website for travelers to record their worldly travels and visits. It was even named one of the Top 50 Travel Websites of 2007 by the Times Newspaper. That just goes to show some of the strides social networking online has taken. Other social networking interests include: college life, knitting and crochet, books, music, social story writing, online artistic community, Gay and Lesbian communities, genealogy and biography, recreational sports, collaborative scientists, investing, jet-setting and social elitists, online gaming, African-Americans, fantasy and sci-fi and a site dedicated to adults looking for friends and sexual partners. The list is very, very long and ever growing. There are even sites dedicated to users to create their own social websites and networks.
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The direction I’ve seen Google take with business and consumers tools in recent years have been to make our lives easier.  So when I heard that Google released a web browser I had to check it out.

The download and setup of the new browser was quick and effortless and soon as I loaded up the browser I noticed a resemblance to Firefox but with some cool tricks and features.

Firstly, as an avid Google search user I often find myself installing the Google Toolbar or Search Box.  With Chrome they have combined the typical (IE/Firefox) URL form into a search box as well.  So now one form field can handle both my Google search’s plus direct typing of a website URL.  For example, a common search I do to see our website ranking is ‘web hosting reviews’ and our website I visit daily is www.findmyhost.com.  With the combined box, I can do both without having to switch between the search box and URL submit form, very handy.
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There are tons of different niches in the web hosting business. There are hosts that specialize in specific areas such as:

shared hosting
dedicated servers
Windows VPS hosting
virtual private servers
ColdFusion hosting
hosting in different languages
hosting for realtors

and so on. There are probably hundreds of different ways that a hosting enterprise can separate itself from the competition. So it shouldn’t have surprised me when I came across a web host that I had never seen before with the intriguing name of:

AlcoHol-Host.com

Now whether the ‘h’ in alcohol was intentionally capitalized or whether that was a mistake born of ‘one too many’ is unknown – unfortunately the site is written in a language that I can’t understand.

One facet of this innovative webhost is readable – they apparently rate their hosting plans based on alcohol content. In fact, their main product set seems to be named the ‘’AlcoHol Plan’’ with a starter plan containing ‘’Alcohol 5%’’ up to the maximum legal limit plan of ‘’Alcohol 30%’’.

The website drives home the point that to create a strong market niche is to succeed in the competitive landscape that is the modern website hosting industry – and that is great for consumers. Let’s take two hypothetical web hosting buyers: Mr. Tech and Mr. Novice. Both are looking for reliable web hosting, at an affordable price. Mr. Tech, however, needs much less hand holding that Mr. Novice – so he is content with email-only support backed up with a detailed knowledge base. Mr. Novice needs 24×7 phone support with a service department that has the patience to deal with his novice questions, and he will probably never read knowledge base articles. Two clear niches exist to serve these two buyers: a slightly more discounted brand with email-only support and great online self-help articles; and a full service, high touch web hosting brand with 24×7 phone support at a slightly higher price point.

The above example helps illustrate that web hosting allegiance is not decided based on price – or even technical specifications alone. Consumers are shrewd enough to understand that ‘you get what you pay for’ and actually expect a brand with higher service and more features to cost more money.

So whether you are a buyer or a seller of web hosting services, remember that there are many niches out there – and select the one that best fits your business model and needs.

There has been an enormous amount of business press devoted to energy and energy-related businesses in the past few months. As oil prices and gas have risen, businesses that depend on these commodities have suffered as well. For example, the automobile manufacturing industry has been hurt dramatically as consumers either shift into gas sipping cars - or simply opt out of buying a new car altogether. Likewise, the airline industry has seen its profits evaporate as fuel costs eat away at the already slim operating margins of the major carriers. One notable exception is Southwest - which has held operating costs low and cleverly hedged against volatile energy swings.

So what - if any - impact will higher energy costs have on the web hosting industry? At first glance this question may seem mute. Web hosting doesn’t appear to be an oil or gas intensive industry. However, a closer look at the operating costs of any large web hosting operation will reveal that there is a significant operating expense in all large data centers that is energy dependent - electricity usage both for running the computers in the data center, and also for the cooling and air flow within the data center.

Using research statistics provided by the United States Energy Information Administration, I checked on what electricity cost in 2000 versus 2006. Of course we all know that energy prices have risen even more dramatically recently. It turns out that in the year 2000, electricity cost commercial operators an average of 7.43 cents per kilowatt hour. In 2006 that price had risen to 9.46 cents per kilowatt hour. That cost represents an increase of 27%. When you also consider that the price of fuel for backup generators and any driving trips between data centers has easily increased by over 30% over the past year, and also that employees probably want and need pay increases to keep up with fuel costs of commutes to work - then it is clear that prices to end users must increase at some point.

There have been price increases here and there in the web hosting industry, but rising prices for overhead have been tempered by increased competition. Therefore, consumers have not seen an increase in the overall cost of web hosting. The other considerations at work are the differences in energy usage between dedicated server offerings, VPS hosting, and shared operators. If energy costs continue their upward march, it is just a matter of time until most or all of the major web hosts bring prices up to accommodate the increased operating costs.

What do you get when you combine one of the world’s most powerful technology companies with its biggest and most expensive advertising campaign ever? The answer is…Jerry Seinfeld.

Various news outlets including Reuters and the Wall Street Journal are reporting that Microsoft is gearing up to spend $300 million in advertising to bolster the flagship ‘Windows’ brand. The theme of the campaign is reported to be ‘’Windows, Not Walls’’ and is expected to focus on how people connect ideas together when barriers are removed.

The Windows brand and Vista in particular have been the subject of a series of impactful and (in my opinion) really funny bashes by Apple – as depicted in recent Mac advertisements which feature a hipster (‘’I’m a Mac’’) and a Bill Gates look-alike (‘’And I’m a PC’’). You can view the campaign ads here: http://www.apple.com/getamac/ads/ (fair warning: you can spend a lot of time viewing these as they go back several years – and they’re really entertaining!).

So to bolster its tattered Vista / Windows reputation Microsoft is turning to another powerful icon: Mr. Jerry Seinfeld. The company will pay Mr. Seinfeld a reported $10 million to participate (and one would assume make sure the ads are really funny). Guess who else is starring in the ads according to the reports? Mr. Bill Gates! Wow, so he’s not really retired at all – he’s just career shifted into television advertising work.

This has the makings of an epic advertising battle – and I for one can’t wait. As a marketer for the VPS and dedicated servers hosting experts at HostMySite.com, I have dreamed of going up against a huge iconic company like Microsoft armed with only a paltry few tens of millions in ad money and my sense of what the marketplace will respond to.

I expect Microsoft to hold its own quite well in this advertising battle. After all, it is much harder to get users to switch than to just sit pat. The real shot across Microsoft’s bow has already been dealt in the form of the iPhone – a device which Microsoft has no current answer for. The advertising campaigns s