In yesterday’s blog entry titled A2 Hosting’s Ruby Hosting, I explained about what the programming language ruby is (not surprisingly). In addition to A2 Hosting’s ruby hosting capabilities, they also have what is known as ruby on rails hosting.

The following are the characteristics of ruby on rails:

1.) Ruby on rails is a free web application framework. A web application framework supports the development of interactive websites. Its objective is to reduce the cost of basic activities involved in website creation.

2.) The goal of ruby on rails is to increase how fast database-driven websites are created. A database-driven website is a type of interactive site that pulls information from a database and inserts it into the web page every time it is loaded. For example, many credit card companies let you log in to view and pay your balance. These sites pull information from a database connected with the credit card website.

3.) Ruby on rails offers scaffolding from the very beginning. In regards to computer programming, scaffolding is a way to create database driven websites. The programmer writes how the database may be used and in turn a compiler (a program that writes a computer language into another computer language) uses this information to read, write and edit the database entries.

One of the great attributes of A2 Hosting is that they have the latest and greatest ruby hosting capabilities. I am a beginner to hosting language and terms and the purpose of this blog is to explain what these terms and capabilities are. Today’s entry will be regarding ruby hosting and what exactly that means.

Ruby is a programming language that has 3 of the following characteristics:

1.) It is reflective. This type of programming allows for a program to observe and even modify its own behavior as it is being run.

2.) It is dynamic. Dynamic programming is a type of language that executes many common behaviors during runtime (from the start to the end of the command) as opposed to during compilation (translates a higher level computer language into a lower level computer language).

3.) It is object-oriented. Object-oriented programming encourages encapsulation, inheritance, interfaces, and polymorphism.

a.) Encapsulation is the ability of an object to hide its information from everyone else.

b.) Inheritance is a way to form new classes (a way to group related fields and methods) by using classes that have already been identified.

c.) Interface identifies the communication border between two separate entities.

d.) Polymorphism is the ability of objects to respond to uniquely to the same message being sent to each object.

One of the types of hosting that A2 Hosting offers are Semi-Dedicated plans. The best way to explain the features of the semi-dedicated hosting plans are to liken it to beefed up reseller hosting. Semi-dedicated plans come with all of the features of reseller hosting, but with the added benefit of sharing a server with only 10 to 20 accounts which is quite a bit less than the amount of people that you would find on the typical shared/reseller hosting server.

Semi-dedicated hosting plans are a midpoint between reseller packages, due to the additional hosting capability, and dedicated hosting packages as they are less pricey. Semi-dedicated hosting accounts are obviously more expensive than the typical reseller account, but semi-dedicated hosting accounts have huge amounts of disk space and monthly transfer rates which offers greater flexibility and hosting power. Take the bronze package as an example below, which comes with 10,000 MB Disk Space, 80 GB of monthly transfer for just $79.95 per month with a year long package.

A2 Hosting’s Semi-Dedicated Hosting Plans

Bronze Package - 10,000 MB Disk Space/80 GB Monthly Transfer/$79.95 per month

Silver Package - 20,000 MB Disk Space/100 GB Monthly Transfer/$119.95 per month

Gold Package – 40,000 MB Disk Space/120 GB Monthly Transfer/$159.95 per month

As I have mentioned time and time again, I am a big fan of Google Analytics as it provides a ton of invaluable and free information about a website. Thanks to Google Analytics, it is easy to discover that one of the keywords that A2 Hosting ranks very highly on is “PHP5 Hosting”. A2 Hosting is currently ranked number 2 in Google under this search term. Just as I hadn’t previously known what WebDAV hosting was, I can honestly say the same about PHP5. I decided it was  research time again. I did begin a small explanation of PHP on this Adventures In Hosting post about how A2 Hosting upgraded to PHP 5.2.4 in October 2007, but I thought that some more in depth research was in order. There were a lot of unfamiliar terms involved in the research, so there are a number of definitions below.

PHP stands for PHP Hyptertext Preprecessor. PHP is a reflective programming language. When a computer language is reflective, it means that the computer program can adjust its own behavior as it is being run. PHP is a server side programming language meaning that the web programmer runs scripts (files that have sequences of commands) directly on the web server to make web pages that are animated, interactive and can change at any time.

By combining the above paragraph to write a definition of PHP in everyday language, you would get the following. PHP is a programming language, able adjust its own behavior when executed and is run when a programmer gives it a sequence of commands to make interactive and changeable web pages.

The three main occurrences where PHP is used are server side scripting (discussed above), command line scripting and for writing desktop applications (self explanatory). Command lines are read by a computer program that reads the commands entered by the user and interprets them as a programming language.

It seems as though PHP is a quite involved and cannot be described simply or just by one definition. A prime example is another definition of PHP is a programming language that allows web developers to create web pages that interact with databases. PHP allows developers to create allow web users to input any sort data and then receive information immediately that relates to the data that they put on the web page.

So this made me ponder, what is the difference between html, the language designed for the creation of web pages, and PHP? The difference is that PHP files include both HTML code and PHP code. The PHP code is executed by the web server when a page with PHP code is accessed and written as HTML and the person who accessed the page only is relayed the HTML through their web browser viewable as a web page.

This is a lot to take in and hopefully I can brainstorm a lighter subject for tomorrow’s entry.

Follwing the same theme as last week, this week’s forum posting centers around A2 Hosting’s new VPS hosting packages. This week we focused on all the features that are included in the Value VPS package and the affordability of it.

Last week, A2 Hosting announced the unveiling of their brand new VPS hosting packages. These packages included many features including HyperVM Control, they are powered by the OpenVZ platform, choice of custom OS templates and a number of other state of the art hosting features that can be found here http://www.a2hosting.com/services/vps-hosting/.

This week we would like to announce that you can become a VPS hosted customer for as low as $13.95 per month with our Value VPS Package. We will even sweeten the pot more by offering an additional 15% until the end of the year with the coupon code a2forumhost07 on our Value VPS package, as well as all other hosting packages.

Specific specifications for the Value VPS Package include:

128 MB Dedicated RAM (256 MB Burstable)

5 GB Disk Space

100 GB Monthly Transfer

1 IP Address*

CPU Share: 1x

And just like all A2 Hosting packages - FREE Setup!

The topic I was going to discuss yesterday before I stumbled across the site that archives all websites was how to check your back links. Even after double checking Adventures In Hosting, I still can’t believe I have yet to discuss how to look up your back links because it is a vital part of website promotion. Today is as good of a day as any to post about this topic.

I think of back links sort of like a rumor. Imagine if someone tells a rumor to a friend who tells that rumor to 5 of their friends who in turn each tell 5 more people that secret and so on. All of a sudden that secret has received a lot of exposure after being started by just one person. If the original person had not passed on the rumor, nobody would have heard about it and the rumor would have died.

Think of yourself as the rumor starter and instead of telling people a rumor, you are telling people about your site. Hopefully people will like your site and decide to tell other about your site in the form of links to your site. Any site pointed to your site is called a back link. Hopefully from my metaphor from above, it is apparent that back links can be crucial to a website’s success because of exposure purposes.

There a few methods to check your back links. A main way to see who is referring actual traffic to your site is by checking to see how traffic is coming to your site through Google Analytics. To learn more about Google Analytics and to see how to implement it on your site, you can learn more here.

Besides Google Analytics, I would also suggest using the site MarketLeap because not all sites that link to you will initially send traffic to you. It is still important to know these sites though because these sites will help your PageRank. MarketLeap is a site that will check a number of search engines to show you what and how many sites are pointing to yours.

Though MarketLeap will give you information on who is linking to you for a number of search engines, you may just want to check certain search engines individually for this information. To check your back links in Yahoo, all you need to do is use Yahoo Site Explorer and search for your site. Once the results come up, click “inlinks” and this will show you who is linking to you in the eyes of Yahoo. To check who Google sees linking to you, merely type “link: “ followed by the URL of your website through a normal Google search. For example, if I wanted to look up A2 Hosting’s backlinks (which I do frequently), I would use the search “link: www.a2hosting.com” and get the following results.

Towards the end of the week, I begin to struggle a bit with what to post. I’ll generally have a few ideas about what to write about during the weekend and will try to budget those ideas so that I can post every day of the work week with a fresh idea. I luckily stumbled upon a very cool site so I am saved from posting some sort of stale content.

Have you ever wondered what your website domain looked like before the domain was yours?  I know I was curious what Adventures In Hosting looked like before I got my hands on it. Thanks to a site called http://web.archive.org, it is possible to search what any site used to look like, thanks to this site’s archiving capability. Unfortunately Adventures In Hosting was just an error page, so I thought that it was a major upgrade over what it once was. Let’s have a some fun and jump into our DeLorean time machines and take a little trip down memory lane.

Before A2 Hosting became A2 Hosting, it was named Iniquinet. Here is what this precursor to A2 Hosting looked like on August 2, 2002.

Before the domain A2 Hosting was purchased by our company, it was some sort of search engine. Here is A2 Hosting as of December 2, 2002. Luckily, A2Hosting.com evolved into the current web hosting company that it is today. But before it did, here is the first archived version of the page, as of December 17, 2003.

There were two sites in particular that I wanted to see early versions of. The first one was Google, shown here as of December 2, 1998. It didn’t create as big of a laugh as I was hoping for, but it is still pretty cool to see this early version of Google compared to what it has evolved into today. The other site that I wanted to see was Myspace. Luckily this one was a bit more of a laugh. Here is Myspace, a former business brochure, newsletter and flyer creation business as of November 7, 1997.

Due to the fact that Microsoft FrontPage is now longer updating extensions for UNIX thus exposing potential security flaws, A2 Hosting will no longer support FrontPage Extensions. The good news is that if you are currently using FrontPage to support your page or want to, you do not need these extensions to edit your page. Instead, you just need to use FrontPage in FTP mode. Here is a link how to use FrontPage without such extensions http://www.microsoftfrontpage.com/content/articles/nofp_ext.html.

Hi everyone;

If you’re looking for a new sales piece to offer to your web visitors regarding A2 Hosting, look no further then the shiny, brand new VPS hosting packages that have just been unleashed on the world of hosting. See these accounts for yourself here http://www.a2hosting.com/services/vps-hosting/.

A2 Hosting VPS accounts are now powered by OpenVZ, which is a platform that ensures that the space allocated to VPS users is always available. Instead of the cPanel control panel, VPS accounts come with HyperVM. The number of available Linux operating system templates has also multiplied to include:

* Debian

* CentOS

* Fedora

* Gentoo

* Slackware

* openSUSE

* Ubuntu

* And the ever popular Ruby on Rails

There are still 4 distinctly different VPS packages for you to promote. Please take note of the VPS Value Package that is offered for as low as $13.95/month and offers 128 MB Dedicated RAM, 5 GB Disk Space, 100 GB Monthly transfer and of course no setup fee. Below is a summary of the other VPS packages.

Enhanced Package - 256 MB Dedicated Ram/10 GB Disk space/200 GB Monthly Transfer – For as low as $23.95/month.

Power Package – 512 MB Dedicated RAM/20 GB Disk Space/350 GB Monthly Transfer – For as low as $42.95/month.

Extreme Package – 1024 MB Dedicated RAM/50 GB Disk Space/500GB Monthly Transfer – For as low as $76.95/month.

Happy promoting!

A2 Hosting Unveils Brand New VPS Hosting

You might believe there is some sort of Christmas miracle behind A2 Hosting’s brand new VPS hosting packages. There isn’t, but just further proof that A2 Hosting is dedicated to meeting and exceeding our client’s needs. This time we do it by still offering the bells and whistles of managed dedicated hosting at a fraction of a price, but with the latest VPS hosting technology. Every VPS account now comes with the control panel HyperVM as well as the OpenVZ operating system that ensures that all allocated VPS space will always available.

You can become a VPS hosting client for as low as $13.95 a month with the A2 Hosting VPS Value package that contains 128 MB Dedicated RAM, 5 GB disk space and 100 GB Monthly Transfer. As a member of this forum, we invite you to save an additional 15% until the end of the year with the coupon code a2forumhost07 on this package and all others.

A2 Hosting’s VPS Hosting is designed to be developer friendly, compatible with the most popular Linux distributions including:

*Debian

*CentOS

*Fedora

*Gentoo

*Slackware

*openSUSE

*Ubuntu

*Ruby on Rails

VPS Feature Overview:

HyperVM Control Panel
Choice of Linux operating system from a number of OS templates
Ability to reload and re-image your VPS at any time
Full root access
Boot, shutdown and reboot controls
Access to install or compile your own custom software
Full control over network services running on your VPS
Port monitoring and IP blocking

A2 Hosting Custom OS Templates:

CentOS 4: Host In A Box
CentOS 5: FastCGI + Ruby on Rails
CentOS 5: Mongrel Pound + Ruby on Rails
CentOS 5: LAMP
CentOS 5: LAPP