This isn’t normally a problem, however some customers were concerned about identity theft issues. So now we are registering certain domains with privacy turned on by default, and customers can remove this if they wish. It is an ICANN requirement that your WHOIS lookup details are kept up to date. Our service provides you effectively with a private contact and email address and you are still the valid registrant for the domain unlike certain “secure” registration services.

We are currently offer this free, whereas the major registrars charge at least £4.99 + for the service, per year. WHOIS Privacy is only available on .com, .net, .org, .info, .biz and .tv domains.

I made a few blog posts, which were mainly theme related Youtube video’s with some comments, and added an affiliate widget from Amazon. Then I made a blog post from this blog (which is a “nofollow” link by the way).

By 6th December we were number one for our chosen keyphrase (or keywords). Here is the proof (click the image to enlarge):

Number One on Google

Will my blog stay in that position? Its unlikely unless other sites or bloggers link back to it fairly quickly, or we post some new content. Maybe I could add some killer content, book reviews and create some buzz on the social networking sites?

What is this blog adding to the overall visitor experience that couldn’t be obtained, by the visitor going directly to Amazon? I’m expecting the blog to slip to page two over the coming weeks if its not maintained. Google has picked up on the blogs newness, and will later on evaluate its overall “quality” but there is no doubt Google still appears to like Wordpress Blogs.

Actually I think I could have got the domain indexed and ranked sooner. My normal approach would have been to bookmark the blog at del.icio.us, then use their RSS feed to automatically update this remote blog. However del.icio.us’s blog posting feature doesn’t appear to have worked. No matter. All I did was write a manual blog post instead. At the time of writing, the blog has just one page indexed and has yet to be deep crawled by Googlebot.

The more experienced “pro - bloggers” will realise, the number of competing websites for this niche is very small , perhaps less than 300 worldwide and less than 4 in the UK. However it shows what is possible, with a new domain bearing in mind, some people still struggle for months to even get their site indexed by Google, let alone ranked on the first page.

Of course whether there is any traffic for this niche term, sufficient for this blog to pay its registration fee’s and web hosting costs is another matter. Then again part of the fun and expertise required for what is loosely labelled as domaining” “niche” “seo” and “affiliate marketing” is being able to pick low competition “long tail” niches that have sufficient long term traffic earning revenue.

Over the coming weeks and months, we will be revealing to our Weycrest hosting customers, how to configure their blogs for maximum results, and giving our recommendations for best plugins and themes.

Paul Lee

It includes the libavcodec, the leading audio/video codec library. FFmpeg is developed under Linux, but it can compiled to run under Windows operating systems . If you need video hosting with ffmpeg support you would be better off going to a company that specializes in video and media hosting such as apthost, and because apthost are US based the bandwidth costs are much lower:

Apthost also install the following modules on their servers:

FFmpeg & FFmpeg-php
Libogg & Libvorbis
Flv2tool
LAME MP3 Encoder
Mplayer
Mencoder
GD Library

Apthost PHP Configuration as follows:

safe_mode = off
upload_max_filesize = 200M
post_max_size = 200M
max_execution_time = 6000
session.gc_maxlifetime = 14000
safe_mode = off
Apache mod_rewrite Enabled

The good news is that phpmotion is 100% free to download and use. The not so good news is that there are not so many shared hosts around that also fulfull all the technical requirements to run phpmotion, as the following software is also required: LAME MP3 Encoder, Libogg + Libvorbis, Mencoder, Mplayer, FFMpeg-PHP, plus the ability the run background processes. Below is a host that can provide this on their shared cpanel hosting packages:

Its also a requirement to select a host like Apthost, that have generous disc and data transfer allowances. Apthosts shared plans go up to 1000GB of data transfer per month and up 20GB of storage.

UK2 is one of the UK’s biggest hosting companies. They provide good value services such as Domain Names, Web Hosting, E-Commerce, Dedicated Servers and Reseller Hosting. They used to suffer some criticism for their support, but they are now committed to providing competitive prices and first class levels of support to help theircustomers grow, improve and profit in their businesses.

UK2 Web Hosting
Web Hosting Customers have a choice of Home or Business Web Hosting. Both come with at least 1 free domain name, generous Webspace and monthly bandwidth, free POP/IMAP email accounts, free Google AdWords voucher and much more.

UK2 Dedicated Servers
Now come with 10,000MB of monthly Bandwidth.

UK2 E-commerce
This product has been completely re-invented to give their customers everything they need to get their shop online.

UK2 Reseller Hosting
UK2 Reseller Packages are now “unlimited” with 250GB of fast web space and 200GB of monthly data transfer. Cpanel/WHM is provided as the control panel. Whilst its true there is no such thing as truly “unlimited” hosting UK2 say “it really means you can have as much as you want! We don’t believe in offering things we can’t deliver or hiding limits in fair or acceptable usage policies”

UK2 will shortly announce an e-commerce reseller package.

A few years ago it was neccessary to have your own server in the office to run Microsoft Exchange, but not any more. A number of leading hosting providers now offer Hosted Exchange on fast servers running from established data centres with back up power and reliable networks.

Once thing to find out from your host is where the servers are actually based. For instance a lot of UK based hosts actually have their servers located abroad for cheapness, and the further away they are, the more latency you can expect when collect when collecting your email and other data.

We know of two reliable UK based hosts offering Hosted Exchange. One is Coreix with its own data centre in East London. If also important that your host has an N+1 reliable network and Coreix recently celebrated over three years of continuous uptime. The other is one the UK’s oldest and largest web hosts - Fasthosts.

Fasthosts starter hosting package is the “Home” package which is available in both Linux and Windows forms for an identical price. If you have a straight forward, static html site then there is no reason why you can’t use the Linux implementation. It all depends on the scripting technology you intend to use when choosing the operating system for hosting plan (this has no bearing on the OS you run at home). For instance if your site is designed in .ASP (a proprietary Microsoft scripting language) then Windows web hosting would be the sensible choice. On the other hand if you choose Windows Web Hosting, you don’t miss out if you decide later to use the “open source” perl and php technologies.

The Home package comes with 1.5GB of storage space and “unlimited bandwidth” so its highly unlikely you will incur added charges should your site become extremely popular. Both Linux and Windows versions support Perl and PHP CGI scripting, with the Windows variant of course adding the ASP support.

CubeCart however is not “open source” software. You cannot be redistributed without the company’s permission. CubeCart can however be used free of charge provided the copyright notices are left intact. To remove the notices you can $89.95 per domain and be issued with a Copyright Removal Key. Cube Cart currently comes with three months technical support, free of charge, once a key has been purchased.

Cube Cart Templating System
A great deal of powerful features are enabled in Cube Cart to allow your business to trade online successfully. You can change the look and feel of your store to match your company’s branding due to CubeCart’s HTML template system. Cube Cart solutions are robust, flexible, and affordable supported by not only a profitable and stable company but a thriving community of enthusiasts who are keen to recommend and share their ideas and expertise

Search Engine Friendly
Cube Cart is extremely search engine friendly; robust and very secure. Search engine friendly means the ability to rewrite the dynamic URL’s created by shopping cart into a search engine friendly way. This does require .htaccess and mod_rewrite to be supported on your hosting plan, which usually implies a Linux host.

Linux Compatible
To use CubeCart on your webspace you will require a compatible web hosting account. This will usually be a shared hosting account on a Linux server, with Apache, MySQL, and PHP. This is OK when starting off and testing but once you are earning money we would recommend moving your shopping cart site to a Virtual Private Server (VPS) or Dedicated Server where you have more security and control.

Cube Cart Payment Gateways
Credit/debit card payments are handled by a wide range of modules to plug your online store into a payment provider. You will need to apply to these payment providers for a merchant account.