Okay. I admit it. I copied.

I find myself reading Liam's 'Hosting Sales and Promos Roundup' pretty frequently to keep abreast of the latest special offers from web hosts. There are also now a number of great blogs which are written by hosting experts at the web hosting companies themselves. So I thought it might be helpful to have an overview of what the various web hosting blogs are commenting on these days. I'll try to include a wide range of companies and blogs when I give the roundup. So here goes.

Rackspace - Our first blog is the Official Rackspace Blog brought to you by the creators of Fanatical Support. The latest entries are: a self promotional piece pointing to a customer testimonial about how Rackspace support was available on Christmas eve. Also entered is 'A Quantitative Comparison of Rackspace and Amazon Cloud Storage Solutions'. This was a pointer to the original piece written up in the Mosso blog. Still a great piece of research and data for those interested in Cloud computing.

Apollo Hosting - The Apollo Hosting Owner's Blog is written by the owner of Apollo Hosting, Tamara Field. Now I'll be the first to admit that as an entrepreneur myself, I'm somewhat biased - but Ms. Field's 'Five Ways To Start A Small Business In A Bad Economy' is exactly what I am looking for in a hosting blog post. Real information that solves a real problem and helps me grow my business. Wow. Did I mention that the piece is written with real authority? Well done and must read.

The Planet - Onward to The Planet Blog brought to us by the dedicated server experts at The Planet. Now I have to tell you that I haven't really followed this blog that much lately, but I didn't really get the latest post. It's entitled, 'Your IT Report Card' and the author takes us back to college to see an actual scan of his report card. Of course the guy got straight A's. Oh, wait. He got one A-. So somehow that winds around to a survey that The Planet is conducting with various professional and educational groups. I guess it is more interesting that just saying, ''Hey - guess what? We're conducting a survey!''. I was favorably impressed with the previous post on The Information Technology Effectiveness Index (ITEI). This is a survey that evaluates the effectiveness of an SMB IT infrastructure.

34SP.com - Here's an entry from 'across the pond'. The latest post from UK hosting company 34SP.com was a story that made it all around the UK. The piece was picked up by the BBC and TechCrunch UK as well. '34SP.com Client Mashes Up Snowfall' tells about a 34SP.com customer who created a mashup using Twitter and Google Maps to track the levels of snow during recent blizzard conditions in the UK. It asked Twitter users to Tweet in with how much snow had fallen and then tracked that data onto a map of the UK. Another excellent blog post - cool information, an innovative idea, and it involves a web hosting aspect as well.

Parallels - Coming off the success of their recent Summit, hosting automation company Parallels has posted a followup reporting that they are going to attend WebhostingDay 2009. Now this is a fairly straightforward blog post with one very notable exception. They have free passes to the event. Pardon me for just a moment while I sign up for free. Okay. That was easy. Thank you Parallels! So in summary - you can catch up with me or the representatives from Parallels at WebhostingDay 2009.

SingleHop - Our final blog entry is from the SingleHop Official Blog. The acronym-laden post entitled, 'cPanel WHM and SSL — 10 Easy Steps!' is a step by step tutorial complete with graphics for setting up secure sites via WHM. Very useful information in the event that you need to set up secure transactions. There are also previous entries on site maintenance and system upgrades.

I hope that you have enjoyed this first roundup of web hosting blogs. Look for another roundup soon!

The fifth annual gathering of web hosting professionals known as HostingCon will be held this year in Washington, D.C. from August 10th-12th. While those dates may seem far off now, the deadlines for participation, particularly speaking and exhibiting come up quickly.

For those of you who may not be aware, HostingCon was sold just after last year's show. The conference and trade show dubbed, ''the largest gathering of hosted services professionals in the world'' passed from George Roberts at Interjuncture (the show's founder) to iNET Interactive (a great aggregator of premier hosting properties including Webhostingtalk.com).

As a speaker at every previous HostingCon event and more recently a member of the Advisory Board, I can say from experience that this is the must-attend event for web hosting professionals. The injection of enthusiasm and excitement brought by the new owners will undoubtedly manifest itself in this year's show.

Regarding the new management, I had the distinct privilege of speaking recently with one of this year's key show organizers, Ms. Kelly Kleiner, Vice President of Sales with iNET Interactive about the communication plan for the show and some of the current deadlines for participation. Ms. Kleiner pointed out that the deadline for speaker proposals is just about upon us. If you are interested in speaking at HostingCon this year - you must submit your proposal in the next few days. Beginning in February, the HostingCon Program Selection Team will review the proposals and select the speakers to present.

If your company is interested in exhibiting at HostingCon 2009, there is slightly more breathing room. According to Ms. Kleiner, the new Washington D.C. exhibit hall layout will accommodate 150 booths. However, even at this very early date the booth space is over 50% reserved. Therefore, the earlier you select and reserve a booth, the more likely that you'll have some choice in where you exhibit. If you are interested in exhibiting, you can find details here.

In terms of attending, early bird discounts will apply until June 29, 2009. The savings are considerable, so if you are planning on attending you should absolutely sign up prior to June 29th to save some money.

On the Advisory Board front iNET Marketing Director, Kevin Gold, is doing a fantastic job of getting out early and working hard to make this year's show the best it can be. Board members are currently reviewing feedback via surveys from last year's show, providing suggestions for show improvements, and also commenting on topics and keynote speaker suggestions. Mr. Gold has made a commitment to meet individually with each Advisory Board member as well. Look for great things from Kevin and the Board as we get closer to August.

Of course, The WHIR will be reprising its role as a key media sponsor at HostingCon 2009, and I expect that the whole team: Liam, Allison, and Candice will be mingling with the hosting community as they have each year at HostingCon. I hope to see you there in August in Washington.

From time to time I am asked the question, ''How long does it take visitors from another country to load my website?''. This is a very important question if you are hosting your website on servers in one geographic location but are receiving visitors from another geographic location. Since the Internet is global in scope, it is very likely that some of your website visitors are experiencing delays (latency) in reaching your web content. The good news is that there is a great free tool online to quantify the load times of your website around the world.

The online tool that I recommend to view latency is at www.alertra.com. The service works as follows (from the Alertra website), ''Multi-POP (point of presence) monitoring stations, located around the world in carrier-class data centers, conduct rigorous RFC-compliant protocol tests on your Web servers, network services and hardware devices like routers, etc. In addition to sending alerts and recording uptime statistics, we're also capturing important performance data including connect time, time to first byte and overall load time. All availability and performance data is viewable online in report and chart format and is also downloadable in popular formats including Excel and XML.''

So how exactly is this tool used, and what is it good for? Let's pose a hypothetical example. Let's say that you want to host content that will be viewed mostly by visitors in the United States and Europe. Which hosting company will provide a fast connection to both? How can we empirically compare the various hosting companies on load times?

Let's use for our example 4 hosting company candidates - two in the United States and two in Europe. Our candidates from the United States are Super Bowl advertiser, GoDaddy.com, U.S. industry behemoth Hostway.com, UK hosting company 34SP.com, and German webhost 123-web-host.de.

If you go to Alertra.com there is a box in the upper right hand corner labeled 'Spot Check' with the instructions 'Enter URL' next to it. Simply type in the full URL of the website you would like to check and hit the 'check' button. The results will be displayed in a few seconds with a variety of cities listed and also the length of time in seconds that the site takes to load. Below is a list with the results from our 4 companies using Atlanta, U.S.A. and London, England as the reference points.

Website Hosting Latency:

GoDaddy.com

Atlanta, U.S.A Load Time - 0.44

London, England Load Time - 1.39

Hostway.com

Atlanta, U.S.A Load Time - 0.22

London, England Load Time - 1.41

34SP.com

Atlanta, U.S.A Load Time - 1.24

London, England Load Time - 0.35

123-web-host.de

Atlanta, U.S.A Load Time - 0.84

London, England Load Time - 0.64

As you would expect, the U.S. based companies are fastest to Atlanta and the European hosts are fastest to the U.K. While there are subtle differences here, all the sites loaded in less than 1.5 seconds - even in a worst case scenario. That means that any of them would probably be fast enough for a business website in either location. As with any web hosting company decision, this is just one factor that goes into selecting a great web host.

One other note - you can read various articles on the Alertra website including 'Web Host Strategies for Server Monitoring'. Alertra is a great free resource which also has a paid monitoring component. I hope this information is helpful to you in determining website latency.

This content was written by Derek Vaughan exclusively for The WHIR.

Many business people are glad to put 2008 in the rear view mirror and begin afresh in 2009. January is also traditionally a strong buying season for those customers who are selecting a new web hosting account. This also translates into a great selling environment for web hosting providers. The buying season spurs companies to compete aggressively for your web hosting dollars, and that leads companies to create special offers and promotions. I searched around The WHIR website and looked over a few promotional emails that I have recently received to create this list of web hosting deals for the New Year. I hope you can find something here that fits your web hosting needs.

Hostway offers free setup and extra RAM on dedicated servers - From a well known hosting provider that has been around for many years. You can double the RAM on a dedicated server that starts at $99 and pay no setup fee. See the offer here: http://www.hostway.com/dedicated-servers/promo/tf/index1.html#.

Superb Hosting offers 20 percent off on all dedicated servers - Another industry stalwart that has a long history with The WHIR. This offer was recently updated to include all servers and also remove all setup fees. View the offer page here: http://www.superbhosting.net/dedicated-servers/holiday-server-promo-2008.php.

SoftLayer doubles bandwidth or doubles RAM on servers - SoftLayer has a number of special offers to select between. Starting at $159, SoftLayer servers will give you your choice of doubling bandwidth or RAM. You can view the special offers here: http://www.softlayer.com/specials.html.

SingleHop has extended its holiday specials - SingleHop offers 20 to 35 percent off on its most popular dedicated server models. Both self-managed and managed servers are being discounted. See the complete details here: http://www.singlehop.com/servers/2008-holiday.php.

UK VPS provider 34SP.com is offering the first month of VPS for 1 penny - For those looking at UK based hosting, 34SP.com based in Manchester has VPS servers for 1 penny and no setup fee for the first month. Details on the VPS hosting offer are here: http://www.34sp.com/vps-hosting.

Apollo Hosting is offering free trials of their hosting accounts - You can try out a VPS or dedicated server for 7 days for no charge. Details are here: http://www.apollohosting.com.

Verio offers a free 60 day trial on Microsoft Exchange 2007 hosting - Free setup, free Outlook, free antivirus and spam protection with seats starting at $11.95. View the details here: http://www.verio.com/?utm_campaign=banner_thewhir_sponslink_exchange.

Of course you can always check out the web hosting directory here at The WHIR to find other great deals on professional web hosting products and services. Good luck on finding a great offer on the hosting that's right for you this year!

This content was written by Derek Vaughan exclusively for The WHIR.

For those of you that follow such things, there was a hugely prescient blog post written here at TheWHIR in April. Here you can view the original post entitled, Why Yahoo Should Sell. Among the many other wise words included in this post were the following:

''The truth - though it hurts for Yahoo to hear it is this - they should immediately make a deal with Microsoft. If Yahoo is so certain that they are going to make a TON more money in the next three years, then they should make a deal that includes lots of Microsoft stock. That way, when the Yahoo piece of Microsoft outperforms, Microsoft stock will go up.''

So what was the deal that I was advocating at the time? Microsoft had offered to purchase Yahoo in a deal that was worth $38 billion (that's billion with a B). Yahoo turned the deal down. Then CEO, Jerry Yang, had said of the deal at the time, ''With the distraction of Microsoft's unsolicited proposal now behind us, we will be able to focus all of our energies on executing the most important transition in our history so that we can maximize our potential to the benefit of our shareholders, employees, partners and users.''

Okay Jerry. So what has transpired in the meantime? Yahoo's stock price has fallen to settle at a current company value of...drumroll please...$12.67 billion. So not listening to me has cost the company - wait, let me do the math: $38 billion - $13 billion = $25 billion. Wow - that was really stupid.

So now the financial cost has caught up with CEO, Jerry Yang - the man that most credit for the failed deal. Mr. Yang announced this week that he would step down as CEO of Yahoo. And so the man that popular investment television host Jim Cramer labeled a ''value wrecking ball'' will go. I contend that it's too late. Yahoo is essentially done. The value is gone. Microsoft has walked away - really.

This saga should act as a lesson for those of us fortunate enough to be working deals - of any size. Don't let the big buyer get away. You may never get another chance.

This content was written by Derek Vaughan exclusively for the Web Host Industry Review.