As the latest round of Google’s algorithm changes take the Internet by storm, SEO marketers around the world are wondering what effect these changes will have on search results. Google’s primary metric, PageRank, named after its inventor, Larry Page, is extremely complex. The Wikipedia entry for PageRank demonstrates the lengths to which many great minds have gone to try and reverse-engineer the algorithm to figure it out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank.  But, each new algorithm tweak Google reveals new hints about how it all works.

The latest update is called Caffeine and includes several new layers of complexity for the algorithm. It is rumored that caffeine will be taking into account website age and loading time. This will benefit those sites that are more established and faster, and will hurt newer and slower sites. Evidently, Google aims to reinforce good quality, reliable content, optimized for speed and built over time. This is consistent with Google’s mission of improving the overall search experience.

According to Wikipedia and Mashable, there are two key changes to consider:

1) Caffeine includes a massive speed increase. Search results will now be returned twice as fast as before.

2) Search results will be “blended,” including information culled from a wide variety of sources—press releases, images, video, news—along with traditional results.

While, as a marketer Google’s constant changes might drive me crazy, as a searcher, I appreciate the egalitarian nature of much of what they do. If marketers had the inside scoop, there would, undoubtedly, be millions of dollars invested by those who could afford it to manipulate search results to their own ends. This would be great for those businesses but, in the long run, it would ruin the user experience. When I run a search, I’m not looking for results paid for by wealthy companies, I’m looking results that best match my search terms. As our collective information bank, our massive online reference library, Google has a responsibility to the information above all else. As much as the business people among us might wish for it, as soon as money starts getting in the way of our free access to information, we no longer live in a free society.

In this, the first of our new series, Ask the Experts, our President and CEO, Adam Wills, tackles our first question:

How can I choose a dedicated service web hosting company?

Take it away, Adam…

1) Work with a reputable, real company.

It may sound obvious that you should  be looking for a reputable, real company, but the reality is that  many of the web hosting companies that claim to be, aren’t.  There are thousands upon thousands of web hosting companies in existence today, many of which claim to offer dedicated servers.  However, the shocking truth is that many of them are 1-man operations that lack infrastructure, support and a positive track-record. So, the first step in choosing a dedicated server host, it to research the company that offers it. Visit the Better Business Bureau website. Look for an independently verified reputation. Make sure there is an organization in place to back up promises like service-level guarantees.

2) Purchase directly from the company that owns the hardware (i.e. do business directly with the datacenter and carefully review any businesses that are middlemen or resellers).

Many clients come to us on the heels of devastating experiences with other hosting providers. Often their websites just disappeared along with the supposed company they were doing business with. Here at TurnKey Internet, we support resellers. There are a great many excellent reseller companies with pristine reputations and wonderful customer service who have been in business for years. However, like with any business, there are plenty of not-so-reputable resellers out there too. When a reseller doesn’t pay his hosting bill with his provider, his servers get shut down. If your website happens to be on one of those servers, your website gets shut down too. The best way to avoid this is by researching your reseller or, better yet, by going directly to the source– the web hosting company that owns their own infrastructure and datacenter. You will not only get the piece of mind an established, brick-and-mortar business provides, you will also get a better price by cutting out the middleman.

3) Work with companies that offer a large selection of the latest technology.

A wide variety of the latest server hardware and models is a sign of the health and longevity of a dedicated server provider. For instance, today the hot CPU chips for entry level and mid-range dervers are the Quad Core Intel i5 and i7. The high-end and enterprise-level CPUs are typically the multi-CPU configured, Quad Core Xeon E550x series. Make sure the company you choose has these products available.

4) Make sure the company you choose has a wide range of support and backup options.

Most web hosting companies will claim to have top-notch support. You should always try before you buy. Test phone numbers and live chat and note response times. Also, make sure the company offers a premium managed support and backup service option. If a company is not able to offer options like server hardening or firewall setup, it is a sign that company is not a full-fledged dedicated provider. While you might not need to take advantage of these services at the start, it is always good to know they are available, should you need to upgrade in the future.

Here at TurnKey Internet, we go out of our way to help potential clients feel comfortable. We always offer all the latest technology and we take time to explain who we are and why what we offer is unique.  We display our better business bureau A+ status and independent reviews right in the footer of all our web pages. We provide links to news organizations that have written stories about our company, and in general try to help potential clients understand the all that we offer. Whether you choose TurnKey Internet or another established web host (and we hope you choose us!) doing a little research can save you lots of heartache and ensure that you have a positive  hosting experience.

Adam Wills
President and CEO

As the Marketing Director here at TurnKey, it’s my job to keep up with all the social networking stuff the kids are doing these days. In all seriousness, social networking has had a real impact on how we do business. Since the very beginning of the company, TurnKey has been focused on the customer first. Adam Wills, our president, firmly believes that customer satisfaction is the single most important part of a successful business. I couldn’t agree more! So, when I came on last summer, my job was to facilitate our customer communication and to present TurnKey to the world as a company that cares about nothing more than keeping our customers happy.

Of course, these times being what they are, the logical first step was to set up accounts on all the social networks. I built our profiles and started posting company news and coupons, but quickly realized I wasn’t getting the kind of customer interaction I had hoped for. There are so many commercial enterprises out there vying for eyeballs nowadays and people are wary of befriending companies that might just end up spamming them.

I realized social networking works best for our business as an extension of our ticketing/contact system. By using Twitter and Facebook to respond to questions about our services, I engage our customers, help them out and encourage them to stay connected. When I do post the occasional coupon or special, the customers who have connected with us through the network in the past appreciate the notification because it comes on the heels of actual real human interaction. Nowhere does it say that being part of a company means you can’t make small talk or be friendly but so often in this virtual space, companies are all business. Of course it goes without saying that professionalism is important, but we are selling services to people, not machines. They are called social networks, after all. If you’re going to use them (and doesn’t everyone?) I think you should make an effort to really connect.

Anyhow, I’d like to give a shout to Facebook, Twitter and Myspace for facilitating our communication with our clients. You’ve given us great tools for understanding how we can be a better company!

If you would like to connect with TurnKey on the social networks, you can!

TurnKey on Facebook
TurnKey onTwitter
TurnKey on Myspace

Come tell us what you think, what you need and how we can better serve you! We’re all ears.

For many clients just starting out with a website or a new business, a virtual private server is often enough to get off the ground. But, for many there comes a point when the VPS offerings just aren’t enough.

The most obvious sign that it’s time for an upgrade is when your website has started regularly requiring more bandwidth or power than your current plan provides. Sure, this is kind of a no-brainer, but it’s a good idea to upgrade before you start running into trouble. If your site starts topping out the charts, it could temporarily go offline and that’s not good for business. Often we will see clients explode all of a sudden because they ran a special promotion or got some good press, and we will always work with them to make the transition to a dedicated server as seamless as possible. But, if you start seeing things getting busy, you can avoid a stressful situation with a preventative upgrade.

Another time an upgrade is a good idea is when a web application transitions out of beta. While your working the bugs out of your application, a VPS can work fine. With just a few developers and beta testers in the system, a dedicated server would probably be overkill anyway. Once you release your application to the public, however, you’ll want to make sure you plan for the inevitable boom in traffic. Nobody wants their newly released project going down right out of the gate!

Regardless of the content of your website, if you’re worried about stability, dedicated servers are always the safest bet. Below you will find a summary of all the benefits a dedicated server provides (and how TurnKey maximizes those benefits for our customers)…

• Speed and Performance: Server and network response times in a shared hosting environment depend highly on the activity of others with whom you share space and resources. With a dedicated server you have significantly faster response and page load times because all the systems resources (such as CPU, disk, RAM and network bandwidth) are controlled and utilized solely by the applications on your server.
• Reliability: With a dedicated hosting environment, you have unlimited access to the operating system, server resources and software applications. This gives you a reliable way to manage the needs of your web site and database system: it’s all there when you need it. If a neighbor causes a problem by over using resources, it will not impact your web site or your business. All TurnKey Dedicated Servers are bundled with our Managed Services (http://www.turnkeyinternet.net/webhosting/turnkey_managed_services.php) to ensure you have remote off-site backups, 24 x 7 monitoring and security to maintain the highest level of reliability on your server.
• Security: Dedicated servers provide better security than any other form of hosting since you are the only one with the root “administrative” access to your resources (disk, CPU, RAM, etc.) and can configure customized security policies server-wide such as firewall protection, user-level permissions and even restrict the types of applications that run on the server. With other forms of hosting, such as shared hosting, the neighbors you share space with could jeopardize the security of your web and database systems.
• Customization and Flexibility: Dedicated Servers offer unlimited customization and flexibility to meet your hosting application needs. You have access to fine tune and optimize all aspects of the server such as custom versions of Apache, PHP, MySQL, Perl/CGI or custom database configurations to suit your application needs, providing substantial performance gains over any other form of hosting. You maintain full root ‘administrator’ access to the server and can install, remove, or modify any applications you wish. Need even more power behind your hosted application – and TurnKey can customize your server with additional RAM, disk and bandwidth to suit your needs or provide you with advanced enterprise level solutions such as clustering, virtualization, load balancing and mirroring of your dedicated server.
• Easy-To-Use-Software: TurnKey Internet provides easy-to-use, pre-installed and pre-configured hosting applications for your web, database and mail system needs. If you know how to use a web browser, you are ready to use a TurnKey Dedicated Server with your choice of Administrative Control Panels. You can even select your choice of Linux or Windows operating systems.
• Multiple Domains: Dedicated servers provide a cost-effective and management-friendly solution to multiple domain hosting. Rather than dealing with the burden of numerous accounts on shared hosting servers, you can host a virtually unlimited number of domains on a single dedicated server. With our server management software, it’s easy to create, manage and delete accounts whenever you want, and all from one interface.
• Worry-Free Operation: TurnKey Internet backs every dedicated server with our Managed Service to ensure you don’t have to worry about your server and can keep your focus on running your business. From offsite backups to London and New York, to managed Firewall and Security monitoring, TurnKey takes care of everything for you.

As you can see, dedicated servers are the best solution for those that are serious about their web site and want the assurance that hardware, software and resources are dedicated exclusively to them. If you are considering hosting numerous domains, a high traffic site, an e-commerce site, reselling hosting to others, have sensitive data contained in your site or simply want more speed, power and control, it’s time to upgrade to a dedicated server. We hope you’ll choose TurnKey!

This is a question we often get from new clients. Every time I hear the question, I think, “if you don’t know the difference, you probably want a managed server.” Of course, this isn’t a very helpful thing to say to someone who is curious about what is actually going on behind the scenes. Here brief overview of the differences…

We have many clients with years of experience working with servers, and these are typically the clients who opt for the unmanaged option. With an unmanaged server, we set up the hardware, install the operating system, install the control panel if one is ordered, and maintain the network and hardware. Beyond that, most everything is controlled by the client: troubleshooting, configuring firewalls, installing software, etc. While we are happy to provide unmanaged servers to those clients who request it, we feel so strongly that managed servers are the way to go for most clients that we offer it free with our dedicated and virtual private servers. Over the years, we have found that this is the most effective and efficient plan for keeping our clients up and running. 

A managed server is dedicated server or virtual private server backed with extra technical support services such as round the clock monitoring, off-site backups, security and firewall management, software updates, and software technical support beyond just rebooting the server if you have a problem. Many companies out there today abuse the term Managed, when in reality they only provide minimal support via email only, and offer to reboot or reformat your server in response to any problems you may have. TurnKey Internet was founded on managed services and we take it very seriously – when we say our servers are fully managed we mean it, and put it in writing.

Whether a client is an expert or a novice, having a platform that works without a fuss is usually pretty appealing. Why do all the extra work if you don’t have to?

Click here to learn more about TurnKey’s managed services.

Or follow these links to learn more about our different managed plan options:
Silver, Gold, Platinum, and  Titanium.