I came across another cool analytics tool and best of all, it will be free come June 2008. Take a moment to check out TrackPoint. This is a great tool to work in conjunction with Google Analytics, especially for e-commerce sites. Google Analytics can tell you specific order numbers that take place on your site. It can also tell you how people get to your site. However, it doesn’t tell you how those specific order numbers got to your site. Trackpoint has this capability. This is invaluable information to have when you are an e-commerce site.

I came across a blog post yesterday that was sending some love out regarding A2 Hosting’s stimulus plan. I thought I would send the love right back. Simon Payn says “Taking something that’s in the news and putting your own twist on it to make an offer to your customers is a great way to stand out from the crowd.” Glad you like the idea Simon!

That reminds me A2 Hosting customers; you have only a little over half this month to upgrade your account to take advantage of the A2 Hosting Stimulus Plan. Below is a recap of your money saving options:

Option 1: Extend — Paying for your hosting on a monthly basis? Extend to a 6-month or longer billing cycle on your next invoice and we will give you a $5 free service credit! Besides saving cash on your hosting bill, you also get the added convenience of not worrying about those invoices every month. To extend your billing cycle:

1.) Submit a billing ticket
2.) If you have more than one package, include which specific package you would like to extend
3.) Include what length of billing cycle you would like to extend to
4.) Mention code Stimulus1 to receive your service credit

Option 2: Extend & Upgrade — If Option 1 isn’t for you, Option 2 might do the trick. A2 Hosting will give you a free $10 service credit if you upgrade your hosting package and extend your billing cycle to 6 months or longer. For example, if you are a Shared Discount customer who pays monthly, upgrade your account to a Shared Small Biz account on a 6-month billing cycle and you will not only receive a $10 service credit, but you will also save on your monthly hosting costs. Customers who are already on a 6-month or longer billing cycle can also upgrade their account and earn this $10 service credit. There is no additional fee to upgrade. To upgrade your package and billing cycle:

1.) Submit a billing ticket
2.) If you have more than one package, include which specific package you would like to upgrade
3.) Include what length of billing cycle you would like to extend to
4.) Mention what hosting package that you would like to upgrade to
5.) Include coupon code Stimulus2 to receive your service credit

I recently have been searching for different types of website analytic tools and came across one that I thought was especially cool. ClickTale is an analytics tool that takes videos of the actions taken by visitors on your website. You can watch the mouse movements and scrolling to see what actual visitors are looking at as well as their general behavior on the website. Here is a sample ClickTale video to check so you are able to watch what this program actual does. This is a great opportunity to see if you have something inconsequential on your site that visitors are drawn to that you might consider removing. It also let’s you see if there is something that you find important on your site that you want make more prominent because visitors are skipping right over it. Even better, ClickTale offers a free account that you can record 100 videos per week. This is a perfect sample size to evaluate.

A2 Hosting keeps on rolling out the best, most powerful Linux hosting technologies and this time around, A2 Hosting has announced the launch of Magento hosting.

Magento is a brand new (launched March 31^st, 2008) open-source eCommerce solution that offers users exceptional flexibility and power over their web store. Magento was designed around the concept that every business has different needs, so there must be flexibility in the eCommerce solution. Some of Magento’s flexible features include:

 * Shoppers can easily filter out products to locate precisely what they are shopping for.
* The ability to create wish-lists to send to family and friends.
* Experience increased conversion rates thanks to the Single Page Checkout that keeps the order information visible at all times and allows customers to edit their order without ever leaving the checkout process.
* Shipments to multiple addresses without completing multiple orders.
* Product Reviews interaction enable your customers to rate and evaluate your products for future customers to see.

All A2 Hosting shared and reseller hosting packages come with everything that is needed to run the awesome power of Magento including Apache 2.2, MySQL 5.0.x, and PHP 5.2.5 compiled with PDO/MySQL, mcrypt, hash, simplexml, GD, DOM, and iconv support. Harness the power of Magento hosting for your web based store today.

I’ve noticed that Alexa hasn’t updated their rankings in quite awhile. As a marketer, this is one of the statistics that I love having updated rankings for. I decided to get to the bottom of things.

Apparently Alexa has been working behind the scenes for quite some time to improve their methodology. According to Alexa, “We now aggregate data from multiple sources to give you a better indication of website popularity among the entire population of Internet users.” This sounds good to me. To my knowledge, Alexa used to only count hits based on browsers who had their toolbar installed and the Alexa search on their site to create their rankings. This was fairly easy to manipulate. Hopefully the new Alexa methodology will provide more powerful statistics for analysis.

I recently spoke to a salesperson trying to sell some ad space. It quickly became obvious that it was a cold call, which I have no problem with. My friendly sales advice though is to do your research before contacting a company about a sale. The salesperson mentioned that they had highly converting ad space, which is obviously always very nice. After asking the salesperson what sort of relevant sites they had space available on, he responded by asking me what we sell. I asked him if he had visited our site and he flat out said “Nope”. This is generally a poor sales technique that I would urge anyone to avoid.

If you’re trying to sell ad space, or any product to a company for that matter , it is always a good idea to take at least time 2 minutes and become semi-familiar with the product offering. I always appreciate the effort, but the moral of the story is you have to know your customer when trying to make a sale.

Let A2 Hosting help. We just posted a brand new Managed PCI Scan page for more information. Unlike many web services that merely offer the PCI scan and expect you to fix the security vulnerabilities yourself, A2 Hosting’s staff will work with you to ensure that you pass your PCI scan. We know that PCI compliance is pretty confusing for those who are exposed to it for the first time. We want to make sure we’re here to help. Also make sure to check out our new knowledgebase article for the Steps to Becoming PCI Compliant.

I just wanted to post you a quick note regarding an update to A2 Hosting’s Affiliate Agreement. Because of A2 Hosting’s 30-day money back guarantee, we have decided to approve pending affiliate transactions 30 days after the date of when the affiliate sale occurred. This is just to make sure that affiliate sales are not refunded by the customer within the 30 day money back period. This policy was added on April 19^th, 2008, meaning that all affiliate transactions from then on will be subject to the new 30 day approval period.

A2 Hosting has announced the release of Zend Framework Hosting on their Linux servers. Zend Framework is an open-source, lightweight, flexible, adaptable and thoroughly tested PHP component library created to aid in the development of modern Web 2.0 applications and a variety of other web services. Zend Framework was developed with the objective to make web development straightforward while also encouraging the best practices within the PHP developer community.

Zend Framework has been thoroughly tested for stability and dependability. All code contributed to Zend Framework has been rigorously unit-tested and is easy to extend and re-test. Zend Framework is included with all A2 Hosting shared and reseller hosting packages. Get started with your Zend Framework Hosting account today!

I had been hearing a lot about the site Twitter, but I never had much of a chance to dive in and check it out. Since I am sure I cannot possibly be the only one that is unfamiliar with Twitter, I thought I would give a quick explanation of what the site is. I view Twitter as an online journal. The only difference is that you can only type 140 character long journal posts. This is great for someone who has a lot of friends that they want to keep in touch with, but doesn’t have the time to read long posts from all of the friends. Plus it isn’t very difficult to log in everyday and write a 140 character post about what you did that day. For example:

“Today I found an amazing web host called A2 Hosting and decided to start a blog.” Posts are quick and concise.

A2 Hosting has set up a Twitter page of our own. You can visit our page at http://twitter.com/a2hosting. This page is set up to give snippets of the most current updates from Adventures In Hosting, the A2 Host Post and the A2 Hosting forum. The sources of information are most likely to increase in the future as well. You can visit our Twitter page and get a quick update of what is going on and if you would like to read more, just click the provided link to read all of the information, not just the snippet.

 What is somewhat crazy is that there is going to be a “Twitter” about A2 Hosting being on Twitter.