VPN

A VPN or virtual private network allows you to use a VPS server like you would a desktop computer via an OS and GUI (such as Linux Ubuntu), essentially giving it unlimited functionality. One popular reason for implementing a VPN is the anonymity it provides when using the internet- in fact in many countries where the internet is heavily censored and monitored VPNs provide citizens with a way of accessing otherwise forbidden parts of the net safely. With the growing trend of politicians and corporations both in America and around the world wanting to force ISPs to monitor your web use and punish those who deter from their approved sites, getting a VPS server to browse anonymously seems like a very smart idea.

Game Servers

When gamers come together online to perpetually murder each other, they need to connect to a server that hosts the game and handles all the information being transmitted. This can easily be done using a VPS server- in fact chances are if you’ve played Counter Strike before you’ve probably played on someone else’s VPS server. Owning and operating your own server for your favorite online game can be a rewarding hobby for you and your friends to enjoy or a lucrative community building venture, it all depends on what you want out of it.

Backup and Disk Space

Since a VPS server can be used in much the same way as a home computer can, it makes sense that we are able to store files on the disk space that’s available to us. The cool thing about storing your files on your own server is that you can access them wherever you can connect to the internet, which makes it very convenient for sharing files amongst your friends or collaborating on a project with a group. This might also come in handy when you have big files that need to be transferred but don’t have a USB stick big enough to handle the job.

VoiP

While there are a myriad of VoiP (voice over IP) services out there, hosting your own can have plenty of benefits. Sure, you can pay to rent space on someone else’s server to use Ventrilo or TeamSpeak, but there’s much more security and reliability in owning your own setup – not to mention that there isn’t any arbitrary limits on how many clients/users can be chatting together, the only limit is the resources.

Other Stuff

VPS servers have loads of different functionality and can be used almost any way imaginable, chances are if you need to use a server for something then a VPS hosting plan should accommodate you. Keep in mind that things like proxies, IRC, and P2P/torrents/filesharing are technically possible but against the terms of service of many providers, so always double check before doing anything that might get you banned. Other than those few exceptions, VPS servers really are the Swiss army knife of the web and are capable of much more than just hosting web sites.

WHOIS Records

All domains have an entry in the WHOIS database which anyone can access that contains the identifying information that you provided to your domain registrar. This is obviously not exactly a boon for us as webmasters and it’s preferable that we keep this information private. Luckily there is an easy way to do this- most registrars offer an option to hide your real WHOIS information for a small fee. Royalty Networks actually offers domain security for free when you register a domain. You can couple this with a CDN to further obfuscate your WHOIS entries.

Themes and Designs

Using the same or very similar themes across multiple sites is a no-no, it’s a very big clue that can tie together several different web properties and make it easier to track down their owner. This should not be an issue as there is an abundance of themes available from a variety of different designers for next to nothing. If you really want to be efficient and have fine-control over your designs but don’t want to learn the subtleties of a coding language then you can try using a WYSIWYG program like Artisteer- it lets you design site-wide themes with a user-friendly editor that lets you drag and drop everything into place, which makes it very easy to make a myriad of different-looking themes with just a few clicks.

IP Addresses

We made an entire post about the importance of diversifying IP addresses between your sites, and it’s really as easy as scaling up as you need more of them- you can buy additional IPs no matter what hosting plan you use. Anyone can see the IP address of the server where you sites are hosted, so if you have multiple sites on the same IP it is relatively easy for someone to notice this and take advantage of it. Spread your sites across as many IPs as possible and don’t be afraid to scale up as you build more websites.

Technical Security

There’s always the constant threat of a hacker taking advantage of a vulnerability in your site’s code and wreaking havoc, so you should take some precautions to make this harder for them. The golden rule of defending your sites is to keep everything up to date all the time, check your back-ends often and install updates whenever they are available. Only install plugins and themes from trusted sources, and if you can accomplish something sufficiently without using a plugin then don’t be lazy and add yet another plugin to your installation when you have the option not to. If you’re on WordPress install something like Secure WordPress to automatically manage common vulnerabilities.

 As you can see the benefits of having this enabled are obvious- anything that makes your site stand out from the rest is going to increase CTR (click through rate) and help you rise in the rankings, so there’s no reason not to set up authorship, especially since it’s not an overly technical process.

First we need to understand how Google goes about verifying authorship, how does the algorithm know which pages belong to who? This process relies heavily on your Google+ profile, so if you haven’t already created one and fleshed it out, now would be a good time. Keep in mind that the avatar you use will be the one that shows up in the SERPs, so use a presentable one (yes, it should be a shot of your face).

Let’s go over how the ‘rel’ function works before diving into implementation. We can use rel=x when making links to specify what type of link it is and how it behaves, in our case rel=author ties our identity to the content and tells Google that a specific account is responsible for all pages linked to it, which gives us those more prominent search results. In order to use a rel tag, you can add ?rel=author to the end of a link- or if you have access to HTML you can use rel=”author” tag before the href part. By using a combination of rel=author and rel=me tags, we are telling Google to enable Authorship for certain sites and articles.

There is essentially 3 links involved in this process that Google uses to complete the handshake between your site/article and Google+ to verify that you are the owner of both. First, each article that you write must link to an author profile page on the same site using rel=author, which can be a page of your choosing but is most often either your profile page or the About page. This establishes a connection between your articles and your author profile page, but now that profile page needs to be connected to your Google+ page. To do this you should have a link to your Google+ profile from your author page using rel=me, and your Google+ profile should link back using the Contributor section.

So to summarize:

• A link from your blog posts or articles to your author page using rel=author
• A link from your author page to your Google+ profile using rel=me
• A link from your Google+ profile to your author page in the Contributor section

This may seem a tad confusing if you aren’t technically inclined, but thankfully there are several options for those of you that want to make this a tad easier. Google has an alternate method using email addresses and a form that you can submit, but there are some reports of this taking longer to aggregate. There is also a WordPress Plugin called Authorsure that pretty much does all the work for you besides linking back from your Google+ account, it really streamlines everything and makes it very easy to implement properly.

Basics of onpage SEO

Before we get into the specifics on optimizing pages in WordPress, we should do a quick rundown of the most important on-page factors that you should be paying attention to.

Your keyword should be present in the title, a few times in the content, and ideally in a subtitle or header as well. A lot of people overdo it and end up stuffing their keyword unnaturally, but this isn’t necessary and search engines are getting a lot smarter about this. Keyword density doesn’t have to be above %1 or so, anything above %2 is overkill. The best way to optimize for your keywords in the content is to make sure the writer is knowledgeable about the topic and uses industry terms- Google reads through your pages for certain words related to specific topics and niches and uses them to determine what your page is about. If your writer is using a lot of ‘fluff’ in their articles that isn’t on-topic or just doesn’t produce helpful content in general, you should consider getting a new one. When it comes to your money site, quality is much more important than quantity.

Choosing an SEO plugin

There is a monolithic selection of SEO WordPress plugins to choose from, but for a beginner it’s a good idea to choose one of the most trusted and reliable all in one packages that streamline the process. Here are few plugins that can serve as a complete on-page SEO solution for your web pages:

Yoast SEO – Yoast is one of the best choices for beginners because it makes the entire process very easy to understand. The presentation is very clear and it even gives you some very helpful metrics in real time as you compose your article (or paste it in) so you can constantly keep track of keyword density and whether you are following best practices (keyword in first paragraph, etc.)

All-in-One SEO – This is another full SEO solution for WordPress that many webmasters rely on- the layout is very simple and it’s easy to customize the parameters of each post individually. It also supports e-commerce sites and automatically generates META tags, it’s extremely customizable for advanced users but is still great right out of the box for beginners.

Keywords, Titles, Meta Description, and Density

Each article that you add to your website should be targeting a profitable keyword that you find during keyword research (using a service like Google Keyword Tool), preferably a long-tail that you can easily rank for. This keyword should appear in the title of your article, the URL, the Meta description, and throughout the article itself. This can be very easy or fairly tricky depending on the keyword, get creative but don’t make it obvious and force the keyword where it doesn’t seem natural. The Yoast plugin makes some great SEO suggestions under the ‘Page Analysis’ tab while it actively scans your article, which is very helpful if you aren’t perfectly clear on what search engines like to see.

If your keyword appears in all of these places and your article is authoritative and helpful, the on-page portion of your SEO is complete. Now your focus should be on link-building and outdoing your competition, try to offer your visitors something that the other pages are missing- Google pays attention to the pages that users most often click on and don’t bounce from.

One of the most oft-recommended tips of web development is to eliminate the trail of clues that connects your network of different websites together. Failure to do so makes it obvious that these sites are all owned by the same webmaster or are at least hosted on the same server- which is information that can be used by your competitors or search engines to your detriment in a variety of ways. This principle is true throughout every facet of web development, it’s imperative to leave as little footprints as possible between your sites that might link them together whether it’s the theme and design of your sites or your WHOIS entries or even your analytics provider (hint: putting all your sites on the same Google Analytics account will likely tie them together in the eyes of Google), you need to be proactive at diversifying your sites as much as possible if you have a large amount of them.

Luckily it isn’t very difficult or expensive to ensure that each of your sites has a correctly configured IP, but you need to be willing to go through this process every time you make a new site- if you slack off then your whole network of sites might be ‘outed’ (a term web developers and SEOs use that means private information has been revealed).  Fear not, anyone with a big portfolio of sites can rest assured that their IP’s are done right if they follow just a few basic guidelines.

Types of Hosting and IPs

Your IP address is an identifier for the server that your site is hosted on, so the type of web hosting you have will determine how you need to manage IPs. The main goal of this is to spread your websites over as many IP addresses as you possibly can, some types of hosting are better at this than others and there are many things you can do to further diversify IPs other than their initial configurations (CDNs are one thing to look at), but for now let’s just get everything set up properly.

Remember that for each of the below plans you can purchase more IP addresses as an add-on for a monthly fee, so you can always scale up as needed when you make more sites. Keep within your budget but also remember that you need to be spreading your websites out as much as possible.

On a shared hosting plan, you are sharing a server and IP address with a number of other users, hence ‘shared’ hosting. While this isn’t very friendly when it comes to diversification, it does offer a limited amount of identity protection because there are bound to be many sites on the IP that don’t belong to you at all, which can throw a spider/bot or competitor off of your trail depending on what they’re looking for. Shared hosting is fine if you don’t have many sites, but once you start building a large network of them you’ll need to upgrade so you can spread your site over more IPs.

Reseller hosting plans are great for diversifying and assigning IP addresses because you can treat each site like it’s under the control of a client account instead of your main account if you want to. All you need to do is create a separate account for every site you create as they are made- this gives each site its own H-sphere panel as well. Try to create the accounts at least 24 hours apart from each other, or at least not all at once.

VPS hosting plans are very flexible and expandable, adding more IPs and scaling up your plan’s power and resources is a snap and you don’t need any advanced technical skills to do it, keep track of what each of your sites is using and scale along to fit it.

While it isn’t as simple as just picking something that sounds catchy and relates to your topic, it really isn’t much more complicated than that. Your only other responsibilities will be some basic keyword research and flex your marketing muscles to end up with a domain name that’s memorable and accurate for human visitors and streamlined in a way that search engines can easily identify you.

Choosing Exact Match Domains – EMDs

You’ve probably heard this phrase thrown around a lot when people start talking domains- and with good reason because it’s a very important principle that sets up an important part of your overall SEO strategy. An Exact Match Domain is a domain that contains the main keyword you are targeting in its exact form, meaning if your main keyword is “blue widget accessories” an EMD would be bluewidgetaccessories.com or something like blue-widget-accessories.net.

So what advantage does this practice give you in terms of SEO? Domain names are a big factor that search engines take into account when putting your site through their algorithm, so any keyword contained within the domain is associated with every page on your site (especially the homepage), which reinforces your sites association with the topic.

It sounds a tad confusing but it really isn’t as hard as it seems. To come up with an effective EMD for your site you need to start with a foundation of solid keyword research, use a reliable keyword analysis tool like Google Keyword Tool and make a list of viable and profitable keywords that you intend on targeting (this means keywords that have enough traffic to be profitable while having as little competition as possible). Try to put a more general term in the EMD, long tails are certainly where the low-hanging fruit is but we need our domain to fit every piece of content so it needs to be an appropriate title for your niche.

An example would clear things up. So let’s say we want to make a site about kayaking equipment and we are looking for a good EMD. After some keyword research, let’s say (for the sake of the example) that the term ‘high-end kayak gear’ is getting a good amount of traffic and that we can easily beat the competition on page one of Google. For an EMD, a good choice might be highendkayakgearreviews.com, or high-end-kayak-gear.net, or highendkayakgearblog.com. As you can see, adding a word or phrase to the beginning or end of the keyword is a great way to fit the term in the domain name if the most obvious ones are already taken. From this point on you can write a series of articles related to high-end kayaking equipment to go after some less competitive long tails while reaping the benefit of the EMD, optimizing the home page for ‘high end kayak gear’ would also be a good idea.

Reseller hosting for resellers

Selling slots on your reseller plan to clients can be quite lucrative, but you need to know what people are looking for in a host and your presentation need to make your business seem very professional and trustworthy- no one wants hosting from a fly-by-night operation.

Reseller hosting allows you to completely customize the hosting plans that you want to sell- you can edit everything from prices to features. Your clients will have an experience very similar to that of any regular hosting provider, you can have them billed automatically and they will be able to access their H-sphere control panel- You will even be able to privately brand everything so that your clients don’t suspect you are reselling server space instead of offering your own.

This can be a great business plan for those willing to make a commitment to becoming a hosting reseller, but it’s not something that can be taken lightly or put on autopilot- Being a reseller requires lots of attention and some technical skills, not to mention the time you’ll be spending interacting with clients. The good news is that if you give it a shot and it isn’t for you, you can still use your reseller account to host your own websites.

Reseller hosting is a great idea for freelance web designers and programmers because it allows you to offer your client your own hosting service instead of referring them to another provider, which means you make residual income as you do work for more clients and before you know it you’re getting a respectable amount of monthly rebills.

Reseller hosting for webmasters

So why would a webmaster who doesn’t intend on reselling hosting slots choose a reseller plan instead of a VPS, shared, or dedicated server plan? The answer is that it’s one of the most cost-effective hosting plans considering the amount of resources and features you get, and it’s just as easy to host your own websites with a reseller account as it is with shared hosting as opposed to jumping through the technical hoops of running a dedicated server.

Reseller plans are also scalable and can be upgraded easily to accommodate more sites and traffic so you don’t have to worry about the headaches of transferring hosts if you need more resources. The features can also be quite helpful- the ability to create accounts and roles means that each of your sites can get its own H-Sphere control panel so you have more control of their settings.

Reseller hosting is a good idea whether you plan on becoming a reseller or not for a variety of reasons, it has the functionality and resources to handle almost anyone’s hosting needs for a very affordable price.

How does CDN Technology work?

Content delivery networks are more efficient at serving content than traditional servers alone because they operate on a large infrastructure with many nodes, servers, and access points in a variety of different locations. When a user requests data from your website, the CDN chooses the most opportune server and node to serve the information as efficiently as possible depending on a variety of factors (geographical location, server load, content type) as opposed to serving everyone from the same central server. Think of it as sort of a ‘cloud’ implementation to your hosting server- your content is being distributed by a more nebulous and widespread network of servers that improve your site’s reliability as well as its speed and efficiency.

CDNs make use of the cache feature that many web developers are familiar with- while caching can be done on your own host server to speed up load times it can also be implemented with a CDN so that your most popular pages have copies stored on the whole network. This means that the requested data hops through fewer nodes than it normally would and is served directly from the CDN to the user instead of referencing your host server first.

CDNs operate in different ways depending on the provider and the client’s needs, one site may only need a CDN for their heavy bandwidth usage content like multimedia and games while another might want a more general setup that covers all their content- other users might want a CDN to handle downloads from a virtual goods store (Apple uses one for the iTunes marketplace). You’ll need to assess your needs and decide what setup is best for you- chances are if you just want to make your site snappier you can go with one the popular CDNs on their basic service.

CDN’s reduce the load on your own host server, meaning you’ll be using less of your own bandwidth and data. On the flip side, most CDNs will have you pay depending on the amount of bandwidth you use, which works out for most webmasters because more traffic means more income- so paying the CDN and hosting bills should be no problem.

CDN Providers

Assuming you don’t have any specialized needs and you just want to make your website faster (which you do- Google likes efficient sites) your best bet is probably to go with one of the more popular and established CDNs. Here are a few that you can’t go wrong with:

Cloudflare – Cloudflare is extremely popular and a very well performing CDN, they offer a free plan that’s super easy to set up and has impressive results so there’s really no excuse to not at least run Cloudflare if you don’t want to spend any extra each month apart from your hosting bill.

Amazon Cloudfront – This CDN provided by Amazon is known for its reliability and flexibility. It’s very easy to set up and understand and you are only billed for the data that you use. The performance is what you’d expect from a network as big as Amazons and it’s suitable for almost any type of content.

NetDNA – Some very big and recognizable brands are powered by NetDNA CDN such as Facebook, Garmin, Mashable, and Sitepoint. This is a great service especially for users who need to handle lots of traffic and big data loads, which is great if you are running web applications for your audience.

Which Hosting does it work with?

The great thing about CDNs is that they work with almost anything, you can set it up to work with shared, reseller, or VPS hosting and enable it for almost any web assets you plan on serving to visitors.

phpMyadmin is one of the most commonly used SQL management programs around and it’s a part of almost every web host’s backend. It is, as per the title, written in PHP like many web scripts are and it serves as one of the main interfaces needed to manage a SQL database. It is open source software which means that the community has access to the inner workings of the program and it is published under an open license, so you won’t need to pay anything to use it.

Creating a SQL database

Most web hosts use H-Sphere as a backend GUI because of its user friendliness and flexibility, so we will go through the process of creating a database using the basic tools in H-Sphere. If you use something else, chances are the process is very similar.

There should be a section among all of the menus in H-Sphere called Databases. Here you’ll find a few of the main functions for managing mySQL databases. To create one, click on MySQL Database Wizard. After that you’ll have the option to create a new database.

Put in a name for the database and hit the button and an empty SQL database is created. Next you need to assign a user to it so you can sign in an as that user and gain access to its entries. Use an existing username or create a new one and assign it to the database with administrative privileges, remember the password and other information because any programs that rely on this new database will need it. Once the user is assigned you’re all set, the database is ready to be populated.

For a detailed step-by-step, refer to our flash tutorials section.

Using phpMyAdmin

Now that you’ve created a SQL database, you can click on phpMyAdmin from the H-Sphere main menu and find your database by its name on the left. You can select it and perform a variety of actions from the GUI- here are some of the most common ones:

Importing and Exporting .sql files

If you already have some tables and information saved as a .sql database file you can upload it with phpMyAdmin easily and have it on your database in a matter of seconds. Just click on Import on the top menu and you can browse for a .sql file to upload. Conversely, you can save your current database as a .sql file as a backup for later use, or if you are migrating to a new server.

Modifying Databases

If you want to change a value or make a quick edit to your database, it’s as easy as going to the Structure tab and navigating the table until you find what you need, it’s a bit like an excel table with the ability to have nested entries. If you want to add a table or rename the database just go to Operations and fill out the respective forms.

Queries

One of the most basic functions one would need when managing a MySQL database is the ability to run queries. Queries are pieces of code that you can input into phpMyAdmin to do things like update, create, and delete entries and easy make changes to your database quickly without fiddling with a GUI. Just click on the Query tab and put your code into the text box and hit Go to run it. If you don’t know the proper syntax or aren’t sure what you’re doing, it’s best to stay away from queries until you do.

Choosing and installing forum software

Web scripts make it extremely easy to set up a functioning website, without them web development would be a nightmare. So, considering how easy it is to set up a blog using a foundation like WordPress, it should be just as simple to set up a forum using the right script.

However, not all forum templates are created equal. You should learn about their varying functionality and extendibility to see which one best suits your purposes before installing anything. The main contenders in the world of forums are Phpbb3, MyBB, bbPress, Simple Machines, and a few others. Most of these should be available from your QuickInstall or Fantastico menu depending on your hosting, but you can also download them from their official websites and install them yourself.

Here’s a quick overview of the two forum scripts usually recommended for beginners so you have a general idea of what they’re best for, make sure to do your own research and check out the features of each one.

phpBB3

PhpBB is an open source platform (like many forum packages) that’s been in development since 2000, it boasts one of the most complete feature sets of any forum software and it’s very flexible with a lot of room for customization. This emphasis on micro management can be a hurdle for beginners, but the streamlined GUI makes it easy to digest. The community is large and very active, they are more than happy to help people out with technical issues and they have created a cornucopia of different extensions and modifications. This is one of the most commonly used and reliable platforms and it’s suitable for almost every situation due to its extendibility.

MyBB

MyBB was once considered an outsider when it comes to forum software, but it’s proven itself to be one of the most intuitive and easy to use solutions around. It’s open source which is always a plus, there is a huge community behind it and the development team gives it a lot of love with frequent updates. One of the most attractive parts about it is the streamlined administration panel, everything is laid out in a way that makes sense and even a beginner can figure out how to manage their forum just by clicking around on their own. Don’t let its ease of use fool you, MyBB is very powerful and extendible and some of the largest boards on the net run it. The library of plugins and themes is mammoth and with version 2.0 on the horizon it shows no signs of slowing down.

Choosing a hosting plan

Forums are a different beast than the average website or blog, the content is created entirely by the users which means that interactivity is a big factor- it’s much more difficult for a server to load a page worth of dynamic forum posts than a regular static article, the information is coming from a variety of sources. The database will be much more complex because it needs to store everything about the users and what they’re doing, which means the more they interact with the site and each other the more power you need from your host.

A shared plan from one of the bargain hosts isn’t going to cut it, sure they claim to give you ‘unlimited’ resources in a lot of areas but that simply isn’t true- it’s called shared hosting for a reason and those resources are being allocated to other sites as well. It may be fine to start out with a shared plan for testing purposes, but once (if) you start getting traffic you will need to invest in either VPS hosting or reseller hosting at some point to handle the load if you haven’t already.