Let’s say that you have a larger website that will get a lot of traffic. Sharing a server with other websites may not be the best approach for you—you may need your own dedicated server. In our last post, we mentioned how shared hosting is typically the best choice for a small venture. However, if you are operating a more demanding website that handles heavy traffic, video streaming, or excessive data transfer you may need your own server.

Costs and Benefits of Dedicated Hosting
Getting a server exclusively to yourself is, understandably, more expensive. Costs normally shared among several different businesses are now covered exclusively by you. However, the benefits of a dedicated server may be well worth the extra cost. Because dedicated servers are specific to your site, they have much greater capacity for bandwidth and storage space. Also, you can customize them for your specific needs, choosing the exact hardware and software configurations you want for your site. If you’re not sure what you want, the web host can recommend a good server configuration for your needs. Also, you can install more web-related tools on a dedicated server. Because shared servers are sharing resources you may find limitations on what you are able to customize. On a dedicated server, you have more flexibility to customize your site and use tools to make your site visually appealing.

In addition, dedicated servers can provide logistical advantages in terms of security. Keeping in mind that shared servers are secure, you should know that dedicated servers can be easier to defend from attacks because there is only one client using the server. Also, greater server resources can be dedicated to defending your site from viruses, Trojans, worms, and other malware. You—and only you—have the rights to determine who has access to your server.

Besides higher service fees, there are no inherent disadvantages to dedicated hosting over shared hosting. If you get a fully managed dedicated server (described below), your server will be similar to a shared hosting service. (It should be noted that not all web hosting companies provide fully managed dedicated servers—WestHost does.) The only differences will be the higher costs associated with having your own server and paying for all of its bandwidth.

Managing Dedicated Servers
Web hosts can provide different levels of server support with dedicated servers (unlike shared hosting). You can ask them to fully manage your server in the same way they manage shared servers. However, you can also save some money by taking on some aspects of maintaining the server. With managed dedicated hosting, the host will monitor your server, update it, and provide a limited amount of maintenance support. You will be responsible for the rest (updating and making changes to your website). With unmanaged dedicated hosting, you provide all maintenance and monitoring.

Having different levels of support enables you to lower your cost to the web host when you get a dedicated server. This will not necessarily reduce your costs, however, since you will need to hire someone with the expertise to perform maintenance functions on the server. Keep this in mind when choosing between managed and unmanaged hosting.

Getting Started with Dedicated Hosting
The initial steps to getting started are the same with any hosting service—choose your host, figure out what hardware and operating system your site needs, etc. Your host does not design your site, but your host needs to know how your site is designed in order to get you the right server for your needs. You don’t want to be paying $245 per month for a server when you only need a $95 per month server instead. At this point, there is an added step with dedicated hosting—deciding what server you need and what level of management you expect. You can either hire your web host to maintain the server for you, or you can hire a web administrator who is also skilled in server maintenance. At WestHost, we try to make managed service affordable—it is only $100 more per month than unmanaged service.

Performing maintenance on a managed server is easy—you just let your host do it. Keeping your unmanaged server running requires in-house expertise. Your technical personnel will handle server upgrades, routine maintenance checks, and the occasional customer-caused outage. We will keep the server cool and physically secure, and we will monitor the server regularly to ensure network up-time. It is up to you to keep your software up to date and secure on your unmanaged server.

Dedicated hosting provides you access to the entire servers resources. This means you can expect a more efficient website, better up-time, and fewer problems due to server load. WestHost provides excellent affordable service, and we appreciate your interest.

Once you have registered your domain name and before you begin blogging, you are going to need a place to post. Enter web hosting.

What is Web Hosting?
The majority of people who create a website or blog underestimate the importance of domain name hosting, but they shouldn’t. Web hosting is a service that gives the space necessary to make your blog accessible on the Internet.

Web hosting is a lot like a storage unit. With a storage unit, you rent the space from a company that keeps your possessions secure. Similarly, a web host is an online storage unit—a safe and secure place to keep your website files.

Why Web Hosting is Important
Whatever your big blog idea, a reliable web hosting solution is vital. If your blog crashes or you have technical problems due to poor web hosting, building an audience and traffic for your blog will be difficult. In fact, you can expect any service interruptions that make your blog inaccessible will take a toll on traffic to your blog. The right web hosting solution makes your blog easy to download, update and browse. A web host is necessary because it offers guaranteed uptime and reliability. WestHost guarantees 99.9% uptime so your blog remains up and running constantly.

Things to Look for in a Web Host
When it comes to selecting the winning web hosting service for your blog, there are aspects of domain name hosting you should consider. Some important features and options to look out for include:

1. Bandwidth and Disk Space: A beginning blogger needs to guesstimate how much space and data his website will generate. Disk space is the amount of storage you get and bandwidth is the amount of traffic. For example, if you anticipate using a lot of graphics and images you will need bigger storage and bandwidth. If you’re just starting your blog you likely use less than 1GB of disk space and 5GB of bandwidth which is well below our limits on the personal hosting plan.
2. Blog Utility: Blogging software is designed to make the creation and maintenance of blogs easier. WestHost supports the most popular blog applications so you can utilize these special functions (i.e. managing blog comments, updating the look, inserting media). Better yet, WestHost uses a special utility called ‘Softaculous’ for the power of one-click installations. This auto installer is fast and installs all the applications you want in just one step. This feature also allows you to keep your blog up-to-date.
3. Price: Like mentioned before, WestHost offers personal hosting that is excellent for starters. The basic personal hosting package is only $4/month and is a good launching point for your first blog. The exact web hosting price will vary depending on the hosting package you need.
4. Flexibility: WestHost allows you to upgrade your account whenever you see fit. The right host for your blog will have this option to upgrade your plan to continually meet your needs when necessary.
5. Technical Support: Support can be super important down the road for starting your blog, installing applications or updating your blog. WestHost offers live chat along with a toll-free number for around-the-clock support. This type of 24/7 support is critical for handling your questions and concerns.

What Type of Web Hosting Does Your Blog Need?
Once you have purchased a domain name and determined your hosting needs, you are ready to host your website. There are at least four different types of web hosting, but for beginning bloggers, shared web hosting is exactly what you need.

Shared Hosting is the most popular type of web hosting and is a place for sites to reside on a server together so hosting is more affordable. Consider the concept of shared hosting like an apartment complex; people share the building but live in separate spaces at a cheaper price than owning the entire structure. Shared hosting provides the right amount of storage and bandwidth while you’re getting started. Luckily, creating a blog has become so popular that WestHost has created numerous hosting packages that cater to the needs of a growing blogger.

Get Going!
Don’t allow yourself to get overwhelmed with the technicalities of web hosting. Web hosting services, like those at WestHost, offer a simple solution. Find a package that is tailored to your anticipated needs, and you’re ready to let the blogging begin. Next week, we will elaborate on the advantages of shared hosting to give you a better grasp on how it benefits bloggers.

If you have a brilliant blog theme and are ready for readers, your first priority is to secure your own personal website by choosing a domain name and registering it.

Why do I need to register a domain name?

If you want to take blogging seriously, there are two main paths to take when it comes to registering a domain name:

1. Free Services allow you to host your site off another site using a subdomain (e.g. blogspot.com). Using these types of services can be convenient but they tend to limit features and enforce certain restrictions.
2. Professional Domain Registration is more beneficial in the long run. A registrar helps you manage your domain name and information as well as offers a variety of helpful services. WestHost provides additional advantages like directing where your domain points, securing several domain name registrations like misspellings, creating an email account for the domain and helping you maintain control of it.

Choosing the right domain name

Before you register your domain name, put considerable thought into selecting the right one. There are definitely dos and don’ts when it comes to the perfect domain name registration and we intend to help you strike gold with these suggestions:

1. Go for the obvious. Keep your domain name simple, straightforward, and relevant to purpose of your blog; this helps your audience recognize and remember you.
2. Keep it focused. Generic domain names (e.g. Pianos.com) are nearly all unavailable. Your best bet is to select a domain name that targets your idea more specifically (e.g. UsedPianos.com).
3. Hide from hyphens. Using a hyphen in your domain name is not recommended. More often than not, people forget to include a hyphen in a domain name, leading your audience to the wrong blog.
4. Beware of the length. Shorter domain names are more memorable, but not as readily available. On the other hand, longer domain names are not as easy to remember but can contain more keywords that boost your domain name’s ability to be seen in a search engine like Google or Yahoo.

We love talking about selecting domains so if you still can’t decide check out a few more suggestions here.

Selecting a domain registrar

If you have found the perfect domain name for your blog, the next step is actually registering the name with a domain registrar. Just like any purchase you always want to find a company with credibility. Over the last decade WestHost has created a global reputation for itself as a trusted domain name registrar.

In addition to credibility, price is also one of the most important things to consider with domain name registration. A lot of companies tend to be pricier for little or no reason. With WestHost you can register your domain name for as little as $9/year.

What do I need to have to register a domain?

When you have your domain name and registrar selected, the actual domain name registration process is easy. You should be prepared to provide contact information during the registration process. The required personal contact information will include your name, physical address, phone number and email address.

This information is required by the governing body of domains called the ICANN. Your information is filed into a public online directory, called WHOIS, so others can check the availability of domain names; unfortunately, this includes spammers. In the event you would like your information to remain private, registrars provide domain privacy.

Domain privacy protects your personal information and replaces it with the registrar’s information so you can rest easy. Better yet, domain privacy is cost friendly. WestHost provides this luxury for an additional $5/year. Right at the beginning of our registration process, WestHost asks you upfront if you would like domain privacy.

How long should I register the domain?

Once you have selected a registrar you need to determine how long you would like to own the domain name.

The time period of possession is a personal preference. The domain duration can be for one year or up to ten years. If you decide to play it on the safe side and purchase the domain for only a year, you will always have the opportunity to renew the domain for an extended period of time.

What’s next?

All in all, registering a domain name is a speedy process that only takes a few minutes to complete. After registering, you can expect about 24-48 hours until the domain becomes active. Once you are registered, you aren’t quite set-up to begin blogging. At this point, you should then turn your focus toward web hosting. At first this may sound daunting, but it will not be difficult. Next week, we will outline the ins and outs of web hosting so you can be ready to roll.

Tell us about something exciting you’ve been working on lately.
I’ve been working on a WordPress SEO plugin, which is a scary amount of work. Basically I’ve been merging some of the stuff that plugins like All in One SEO and HeadSpace do. It will allow you to set titles, meta descriptions for posts and pages and what my own, more advanced, SEO plugins did like Robots Meta and Canonical plugin. Plus it adds in XML site maps to try and make an SEO plugin that really covers all the stuff that you should be doing on your blog. It turns out though it’s actually a shit load of work.

That’s pretty cool, I’m pretty proud of what’s there already, but it’s far from done so it’s in public Beta now.

It has forced me to go pretty deep into the core of WordPress again so I had to play with all the new custom taxonomy stuff and had to come up with several things to fix the fact that WordPress doesn’t actually have an API yet to store meta-data by categories, tags and other terms.

Lot of coding, lot of fun, but that was there already; it’s turning out to be pretty good stuff. It basically should be my contender to be the most downloaded WordPress plugin of all; because I like to set big goals… actually most used. Most downloaded is, of course, not a very good metric because if you do a lot of updates you get a lot of downloads.

PHP seems to be one of your favorite programming languages. Do you use any frameworks such as Zend, Symfony, or Cake?
I’ve done a bit with Zend but to be honest I spend 95% of the time coding in WordPress. If I do something outside of it I usually download BackPress, which is part of the core of WordPress, and that’s about it. I’m pretty weird framework wise.

I’ve urched myself a couple times for the last few years to look at stuff like Cake and Symfony because it looks very interesting. I just don’t spend any time on it because I spend so much time on WordPress; we don’t use it there so there’s not real reason for me to do that.

How did you get into development? Is this something that’s been a self-proclaimed passion or have you had some influencers that helped you get into it?
It has been pretty much self-proclaimed. When I went to high school I started coding with some friends who coded a bit. I built my first website and got my fist internet connection at home.

I started coding in a bit of HTML and other stuff but soon rolled into Turbo Pascal and started coding in that. I basically went from there into periods where I did less coding and focused on other stuff; at some point I starting more coding again.

I dove into PHP because I did WordPress already and used it on a couple blogs. I needed to learn PHP better to fix the stuff I wanted to fix. Before that a lot of my time was spent on HTML and CSS. I used to own css3.info; started that back in 2006 when CSS3 was really hot and new. It’s all hot again because it’s finally being implemented, but back then I did CSS3 previews which loads of people like. It was my first experience with having a really popular site. That was a lot of fun.

Basically went from there to doing other stuff. I sold css3.info at a certain point. When I did css3.info I was also doing an awful lot of work in the Web kit community; the Safari Web kit, the rendering core of what is now Safari and Chrome. I am still a committer on the project but not very active anymore. That forced me to learn some objective C and an awful lot about how browsers work with HTML, CSS and stuff like that.

The funny thing is because I was doing that and css3.info I rolled into PHP because I was doing WordPress and found that the WordPress community was actually one of the nicest communities out there to be developing for. So went from there and never looked back to be honest.

What would you tell someone who’s just learning to develop? Do you have common resources you turn to?
Obviously for PHP, php.net is heaven.

I just learned by looking for a code. I was a crap developer at first because I was looking at a lot of WordPress code and the WordPress code back in those days wasn’t the best code ever. I just looked at a lot of code and figured out some stuff could be done more efficiently, etc. I am probably a pretty bad example of how to learn this stuff because I just learned by doing and making a shit-load of mistakes. I learned by doing it an awful, awful lot. That’s basically how I learned most of this stuff.

It’s learning by experience.

What was the deciding factor for choosing PHP as a programming language?
It was the other way around, I chose WordPress first. The thing is, I chose the community and not even the product because the product itself when I chose it was pretty bad. The community was good and had a good vibe to it. I liked the openness and the fact that free was the default; which is also painful now that I make all my money dong this stuff.

I’ve developed about 25 plugins and so far they have all been free. I’ve gotten like 3 million downloads in total over all of them. Didn’t make a lot of money out of that but did have a lot of fun because the community is very thankful, usually. It is a very fast growing community and the core developers are always there to help, even with your plugin, there usually willing to help you to fix it because a lot of people use it.

I chose that and didn’t really choose the programming language or anything else. If I had chose the programming language to be honest I probably would have chose something like Ruby on Rails because it seems so much nicer.

What’s your all around favorite API (Google Analytics Export API, YQL, Facebook, Delicious, Google Maps, Yahoo Boss, etc)? What makes it so cool?
Well you mentioned a couple there and I’m in doubt. The Google Analytics API is awesome, mostly because the data you can pull out. In terms of power I take Google Analytics but in terms of ease of use all Yahoo APIs are so incredibly cool and so well documented. I’ve played with Delicious, [Yahoo] Boss, Yahoo Term Extraction, there’s shit-loads of APIs that Yahoo offers. Because I do a lot of SEO work those APIs are gold mines. I would have to say those two.

Google Analytics, especially the latest version of the Google Analytics API, is very good. They really listened to the community and that’s a good thing to see. There are more and more possibilities to do real cool stuff which I’m working on for my own Google Analytics plugin for WordPress. It tracks all sort of custom stuff like 404s. I can now pull back those 404s out of the API and in a cool way to show to people what pages are 404ing, how people are getting there and from what links. That’s incredibly cool to be able to do that. The new version of the analytics plugin dashboard will show you that data in your dashboard.

What advice do you have for someone just starting programming in PHP (what would you like to tell yourself 10 years ago)?
I’d like to tell myself 10 years ago to stop messing around and learn PHP. But then again I probably wouldn’t have been the coder that I am now if I hadn’t learned the basics of a lot of languages.

That’s probably the first advice; learn a little about a lot of languages. Make sure that you know why these languages differ and what’s important about them. That has helped me quite a bit in finding ways to develop stuff. I started programming in Turbo Pascal which is very functional and only later starting learning objective programming. The fact that you can do both is probably a good thing in your programming skills.

The first thing is just start doing it, the second is learning a little about a lot of languages.

Have a look at those Python and Ruby intros and then pick a language because you think it’s the most elegant and that fits most with what’s your doing. That also means if a certain community or product fits best with what you’re doing then you should be using that.

What is your favorite plugin you’ve created, even if it is not necessarily the most popular? What makes it so cool?
Right now that would be my WordPress SEO plugin, that changes every moth or so… which is a good thing because I only work on my favorite stuff.

I am in the luxurious position right now that I can stick with doing stuff I like. That is because of affiliate payment from companies like WestHost and VPS.NET and some other advertising stuff like that. It earns a decent living.

Was there a plugin that has been more challenging to create than any others?
The new SEO plugin has more lines of code than any of the others combined, so that one is a bit more complex.

The funny thing is that the hardest thing in developing plugins, which ever one, is always developing the UI and not doing the stuff that people think is hard. The UI is the biggest challenge because doing a bad UI always results in shit-loads of questions.

Doing a bad functional implementation of some code, no one will ever care. I could seriously screw up thousands of blogs without them even noticing, I am very sure about that. But if the UI was bad I’d get thousands of emails.

I always end up spending more time on developing UI. I’ve recently gone into actually hiring UI experts to help me improve the UI on those plugins. Even though they are free and people can use them for free there’s a revenue model attached; I get my clients based on all the stuff that comes out of that. Having them be very usable is a big advantage so I try to work on that a lot. But it really is the hardest part on developing a plugin. I think I spent like 30% actually coding functionality and 70% of the time coding UI.

Do you find that it’s more difficult coding the UI for WordPress than for other applications?
We’re slowly starting to develop standards for how these things should be and should look in WordPress. That helps because if everyone made all this stuff look like its WordPress internal stuff it would be a lot better.

So that’s what I try to do I try to stick with what WordPress does internally and use all their functionality to code my UI. UI is about a lot of things not just the fact that you have to have a button. It’s also the copy that you have around that stuff that needs to be good.

At times I do a fix on a plugin where the only stuff I fix is three lines of copy in the admin section… Then to see the number of emails going down tremendously because I changed a number of lines in the copy is just ridiculous but it happens to me all the time.

That has a bit to do fact that I’m not a native English speaker entirely. Sometimes I write these tiny little weird things in sentences that people don’t get. It’s just stuff that makes you learn the language even better. It also helps me because I look at my copy a couple times more.

It’s very hard, being a coder, copy is usually not the thing you’re good at.

What is your favorite plugin (WordPress/Magento) that you did not create?

That’s actually quite easy, I work a lot with Frederick [Townes] and Frederick created a plugin called W3 Total Cache, which is ridiculously large. The total size of the folder for W3 Total Cache is 2.1MB. That is a lot of code for a plugin.

What Frederick has done is, I think, much under appreciated in the WordPress community. I’ve seen servers getting hot where we had a couple hundred WordPress installs on it. We load them all up with W3 Total Cache and we were easily able to load another couple hundred sites on the same server without any problems. We even had people suddenly saying, “My server’s so fast.” I am like, ok, good stuff.

It is a power horse. I think it’s the best plugin to have been released this year.

WordPress seems to be gaining an awful lot of momentum at the moment which is good for all of us. If you have a Drupal, Joomla and WordPress site, which would take the least amount of support and resources? The obvious answer is WordPress but it’s not obvious to a lot of people yet. That’s why it’s growing so rapidly, it’s all about UI which is why I focus on UI so much in my plugins.

It’s not that WordPress has better code, I think Drupal has the best code of the three, but the UI of Drupal is so bad. That alone makes WordPress the product to use.

How many plugins have you created that did not take off in the way you had expected? Why do you think they did not take off?
There is one plugin that I like an awful lot but I haven’t marketed it enough to help people understand what it actually does. It’s my comment redirect plugin.

It’s a very, very simple thing. It redirects someone who comments for the first time on your site, to a thank you page of your choice. You can thank them for commenting and throw some other stuff at them like that. I built that because there was another plugin out there that did something like it but sent them an email instead of redirecting to a thank you page.

The issue with the email plugin is that you don’t have people opting in for stuff like that; it’s actually against spam laws, probably in the US, but in a few European countries. I decided not to do that and do the redirect instead. I still think it’s under-used, more people should be thanking people because they comment on their blog and because they give their thoughts.

For me getting comments is probably more important than getting a lot of page views. It is how I measure the quality of traffic coming from other sites. If less than 1% of people coming from other sites leave a comment, 1% being the average number of commenters, if it’s less it’s usually poor traffic.

How do you decide what ideas (for plugins/sites/tools) get turned into actual projects?
The funny is I basically code all of them. On yoast.com I run about 55 plugins, 40 of which are my own, 20 of which are not released. Most of them are very simple stupid things. I usually only release something when I find that someone else has a need for it.

If I see someone ask a question and I think, yeah I’ve already solved that somewhere, somehow, I’ll usually just package it up and release it. But releasing a plugin takes a shit-load of time and every plugin I release means more questions, more support emails so I try to reduce that, which is also why I’m bundling my WordPress SEO plugin.

With bundling the SEO plugin I’m basically stopping development on five other plugins which will all merge into one, hoping that will also reduce the support requests I get in total. I doubt whether that’s actually true, I think it will actually increase but we’ll see.

A little geek talk: in your entire PHP programming career, what is the single coolest piece of code you have written? Tell us about what it did and how you used it.
I can tell you that now, I couldn’t have told you that a couple years ago. The coolest thing I probably ever coded… back in the day, when Technorati was still important for people, one of the things that all of the big bloggers tried to gain was Technorati authority.

What I did was code a plugin that would automatically scan all your incoming track backs, pings and links on Google blog search to see whether all those links were actually pinged in Technorati; if they were not it would automatically ping Technorati with those URLs.

I installed that on a site of a friend of mine, Copyblogger, and he basically boosted himself from number ten on the Technorati authority list to number two within two weeks of using it. That was like ridiculously fun spamming.

Of course nobody cares about Technorati anymore, there close to debt. I think that was probably one of the coolest things I was coding then. I was like oh this is so bad and also so funny because I am well within all their own terms of use because I’m telling them about new content and I’m helping them discovering more shit.

I have some plugins like that which you do not release because the minute you release them they become worthless. If every WordPress site were doing that you’d never be able to get as up high in the Technorati ranking as you wanted to. That was quite a lot of fun. Used that for quite a while even when Technorati got out of fashion there were a couple other blog rankings that were using Technorati rank amongst other things. That was fun.

Happy Halloween from our favorite employees…

Starring
Kirk as Luis “El Gaucho” Gonzalez
Cameron as Chuck Bartowski
Clint as… himself
Cari as Amelia Earhart

A little more from our team a the data center…

As this March approaches and we come to the 21st anniversary of the first WWW page to go online, I have been taking a proverbial “trip down memory lane.” I can still hear that cordial voice informing me of the fact that “You’ve got mail.” I have an image burned into my mind of the AltaVista and HotBot search engine home pages. And I vividly recall the sound of my modem dialing in.

An awful lot has changed in the past twenty-one years. We no longer have to wait to connect when checking our email; we do not even have to use a computer! Your “status” can be updated at any time, from any place. Our news doesn’t come from a single paper or a few TV channels; we use readers and RSS aggregators to pick and choose what we want to hear about from literally thousands of sources. And “Google” isn’t just a search engine, it’s a verb…. how often do you Google your own name?

In the Beginning

Towards the end of 1989, Sir Tim Berners Lee envisioned a system of inter-connected computers which could be used to learn anything you wished to know. Along with Robert Cailliau, a Belgian computer scientist, Sir Tim put the earliest web server online using the NeXT Computer System, a high-end workstation computer which ran a Unix-based operating system. They also wrote the first web server application called CERN HTTPd, and the initial browser, WorldWideWeb. The first live URL ever was http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html; in fact it is still a valid address, making it also the oldest URL in history.

What began as a tool to aid physicists in sharing information amongst each other has evolved into a global network that links all of us together. Sir Lee made the brilliant move of making his ideas publicly available and free for the taking, thus allowing millions of people to come together to expound on and expand upon his work. The idea of open source or free software was picked up by developers of other browsers such as Mosaic, Netscape (Mozilla) and even Microsoft.

Today’s most popular web server software, Apache, is open source as well. All of this has combined to allow everyone to experience and use the web with relatively low cost. Like the internet’s technological predecessors of radio and television, people have the ability to take part in the fun without the need to mortgage their home, which has helped to create this enormous World Wide Web tidal wave.

A “Coming of Age” Story

Netcraft LTd, a company that has taken on the task of surveying the entire internet, estimates that there are currently 206,741,990 web sites. Using search engine statistics, WorldWideWebSize.com calculates a total of 23.2 billion unique pages exist. From humble origins on a single computer, to a global behemoth of billions of connected devices and people, World Wide Web certainly has come a long way in twenty-one short years! And, might I add, hasn’t really aged at all; like a fine wine, it simply becomes more valuable with each passing year.

Join me in my sentimental journey and think back to your first experiences going online. Think of the first search engine you used; maybe you were as impressed as I was when you got 30,000 results. Or perhaps you also had a Geocities web site, most of which was written entirely in Notepad. Do you remember the first time you LOL’d?

What experiences come to your mind when thinking of your first visit with World Wide Web?

As many of you know, beginning January 12th, a chain of earthquakes devastated Haiti leaving its people in a famine of essential supplies and support personnel to assist.

Although normally fiercely competitive, WestHost has joined VPS.NET, midPhase, HostGator, SingleHop, Laughing Squid, HostDime, iWeb, Site5, SoftLayer, Blue Box Group, Webair, and more in a community effort to exercise power as a group and achieve much more than we can alone.

Hosting for Haiti has partnered with the American Red Cross to provide support, which may include mobilizing relief workers, sending relief supplies, and providing financial resources for recovery.

We hope to make a difference. And you can too. Ten dollars helps. One hundred dollars helps ten times more.

PLEASE VISIT: HostingforHaiti.com and join us!



3 Ways to Help

Donate to the International Response Fund.100% of the funds will go to the American Red Cross Haiti Relief and Development fund.

Copy this URL (http://www.hostingforhaiti.com) and place it on your blog or anywhere else you think it will be viewed.

Tweet about this!Use the hash-tag #hostingforhaiti and spread the word!

What was the first Thanksgiving like?



Thanksgiving has been a tradition in my family for the last 388 years… really! I am a great grandson to William Bradford, one of the original American Pilgrims and Governor of the Plimoth Colony. Sounds pretty cool, right? You’re probably picturing my family party… dressed in ruffles, gold buckles on our hats trousers and shoes, out hunting the perfect turkey, digging up enormous sweet potatoes, and making the perfect pumpkin pie!

Sorry to break your heart but our family tradition has been quite modernized. In fact Grandpa Bradford probably didn’t eat a turkey, didn’t wear buckles, and hadn’t ever heard of pumpkin pie.

So what was the first Thanksgiving like?

Let’s start with the menu. Turkey is always the first thing that comes to mind. However, the first Thanksgiving might not have had turkey on the menu. Instead, protein in the form of geese, duck, crane, partridge, eagles, and swan were present!

If you’re serious about going traditional, don’t forget your cooked eel, lobster, cod or clams. Need more protein? Don’t look past the deer and seal. If that does not sound very appetizing not to worry! You can use liverwort, leeks, dried currants, olive oil and parsnips for a little seasoning.

Vegetables were likely on the menu including pumpkin (although no recipe for pie was around), peas, beans, onions, lettuce, radishes and black carrots; yep that’s right black carrots. Today’s orange carrots are an 18th-century hybrid. Representing the fruit group were plums and grapes.

As most of us know the first Thanksgiving was a celebration of the harvest and included both Pilgrims and the Wampanoag Indians. What we don’t typically know is that the meeting between the two was not an organized event. The best picture of the original feast is given by Edward Winslow from A Journal of the Pilgrims at Plymouth, in 1621:

“Our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might after a special manner rejoice together after we had gathered the fruit of our labors. They four in one day killed as much fowl as, with a little help beside, served the company almost a week. At which time, among other recreations, we exercised our arms, many of the Indians coming amongst us, and among the rest their greatest king Massasoit, with some ninety men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted, and they went out and killed five deer, which they brought to the plantation and bestowed upon our governor, and upon the captain, and others.”

Hands, spoons used like a shovel, and knives were the only utensils available. Richard Pickering, deputy director of Massachusetts’ Plimoth Plantation, owns a 17th-century book of manners stating, “Save teeth picking for later and moderate your spitting. No smacking your lips like hogs. While sitting, do not move back and forth, lest your fellow diners think you are breaking wind.”

These are all fun facts about the great Thanksgiving tradition but if you decide to celebrate traditionally this year remember the underlying significance and the history of the event itself. The Pilgrims still found reason to celebrate even after more than half their colony dying, and a higher rate among the Native Americans.

Author A.J. Jacobs put it perfectly, “The 1621 revelers had undergone a mind-boggling amount of suffering. And yet there they were at the first Thanksgiving, sharing their harvest, running races, and overflowing with gratitude. If they could appreciate life amid such chaos, pain, and uncertainty, I could give thanks for all the good things in my relatively cushy life.”

Well said.

What are your favorite Thanksgiving traditions? Share some of your favorites.

]]>