As far as I can remember, Philaahzophy.com is not new to me. I think I’ve seen and mentioned this site on this blog way before when I had a grand review about THC’s lifetime Rudolf hosting plan last February (which is now unavailable — unfortunately). He was still positive to THC that time — far different from his views now.

On Philaahzophy’s latest post as I checked it entitled "Top Hosting Center Can’t Keep Own Website Online!," I believe Aahz missed to read something from his H-Sphere control panel. I am not sure if he is on Rudolf hosting plan or Speedy (I didn’t have interest to research) but I know he is one of THC’s customers and claimed that he used to be a "big fan" of the web host. His post was a bomb to THC and considering that THC announced the event prior to their downtime, this blogger once again shooted blanks.

While it is true that the official homepage of Top Hosting Center was down as of this writing, I wasn’t surprised. I’ve read yesterday from the company’s H-Sphere control panel news section that they are going to change their IP address as they’ve always done in the past months (this is something Aahz missed to read). I’m not sure how many hours had it been in downtime status but I have asked some friends abroad and they told me that they can fully access the website (which makes me believe that DNS information propagation is complete on some places). I don’t know if other THC users noticed the advisory but for sure it is conspicuous enough to get noticed. Since I’m in the Philippines and THC servers are in North America, I guess I will have to wait for the site to go up. It is a good thing that this blog or any customer sites (and hosting functionality) was not affected by their downtime otherwise it would be real shitty.  

As far as I know based on my working Cisco networking knowledge, changing an IP address does not take effect immediately and unfortunately domains undergoing IP changes will experience downtime. Changes that undergoes downtime include IP updates, IP transition from shared to dedicated IPs and vice versa, and name server changes.

To THC: Aahz May Be Right, But Not Completely Right

I do not say that Aahz is completely wrong. He was just shooting blanks on some ways; he may be right, but well, not completely right on his claims since I highly believe he missed the advisory. Plus, he could be on a shared hosting — and you can’t expect a dedicated server quality on a shared hosting plan!

Now this is for you THC: like what he said on his first post,  I agree that there have been quite a few times that THC had problems with their hosting services. Although they are fast in responding to support and delivering solutions to problems, complaints like from Aahz’s is a sign that THC needs to be consistent and make their impatient customers feel what a good host is. It doesn’t feel good to defend something that doesn’t deserve to be defended. Fortunately, THC isn’t as worse as Aahz described it based on my experience. He was a bit too extreme. Perhaps he needs to get a dedicated server. Believe me, you will never find a host that doesn’t experience downtimes especially on shared hosting.

Bottomline

If Top Hosting Center wasn’t good enough, as it never became a perfect web host, I would have flown to other web hosting companies. I’ve got lots of sponsorship offers for this blog from other web hosts yet I’ve denied them all because I like the way THC handles its hosting services. Plus, I don’t need to worry about a thing because they have backups accessible. An anonymous hacker tried to devastate this blog earlier this month and THC was very, very quick to restore my database. I’m sure other customers can have similar experience as THC’s support is just a matter of clicks away. In my case, I write to them via email but I can also use their live chat for basic issues and trouble ticket on my H-Sphere control panel as well.

BlogRush is a cooperative syndication network launched by John Reese. Their web service binds the blogs of their members through their widget which displays five clickable blog post headlines. Each member earns one syndication credit every time the widget is loaded on their respective blogs. It also costs them same value to have their recent blog post title displayed on another member’s blog.

Basically, I signed up for BlogRush with good expectations that their web service would help drive traffic to my blog. Blogrush’s dashboard looks great for sure: the statistics and traffic charts look neat and attractive. Unfortunately I’m not charmed with the interface whatsoever, like other bloggers do, I want results for my efforts: quality traffic for my blog as promised.

In the first few months, I ignored that it didn’t bring traffic due to the fact that my blog was one-month old when I registered it to their service. In the following months, I read and followed lots of tips and articles from other bloggers who praised BlogRush – but none of them worked. Even though BlogRush’s idea of driving traffic from targeted audience is good, people seem not to care clicking their widget and prefer links and referrals written on the blog post itself.

My Personal Standpoint

No matter how much I think that my articles might not be “hot” in the eyes of BlogRush members, I personally proven that some of them were proven good – good enough to actuate a click. In fact, some of my articles got stumbled in StumbleUpon and that drove me enormous amount of traffic. I know that the BlogRush and StumbleUpon are two different web services that drive traffic. However, if the two web services are to compete each other in terms of traffic generation performance, no doubt I would abandon BlogRush quickly and hop right away to StumbleUpon (or any other social bookmarking or web service that would bring measurable benefits for me and my blog).

It’s good to note, however, that Blogrush is a free web service. I’ll leave them now my comments and hope they take all of them positively. The intent of their service is great, but it needs spark.

SEO is significant to site owners (regardless of the nature of the site) because it promotes greater chance of getting a higher position in SERP. Higher rank usually means greater probabilities of being searched by people, bringing traffic to their website and creating opportunities. If you just created a blog website powered by WordPress or you have an existing site that is not optimized, here are the most common effective methods you can do to improve your SERP rank.

Provide quality content at higher frequency

This is easier said than done. Providing fresh, quality content at higher frequency remains the most effective method of SEO. Quality content refers to the significance of information or services presented on your website. For instance, if you’ve published an article (or any content) that interests your users, chances are great that they might visit it again, promote it or create link to your website.

Search engines nowadays are getting smarter and more sophisticated that it can nearly bring visitors exactly to the page they really want. Search engines will look less on the syntactic composition of a web page, and focus more on the real, actual content. Since this is the trend, it’s wise to strive to provide quality content. The content, for me, remains the “king” when it comes to website marketing.

Make your pages searchable

Validate your pages and make sure they adhere to W3C coding standards. Having a good code in your pages basically will help spiders crawl and search relevant information on the page. Spiders are automated programs or scripts that search engine use to browse and discover the pages of Web. While validating your code does NOT improve your SERP ranking, it does contribute to an effective SEO by its nature. Use absolute links, and try to avoid making a Flash-dominated page because, as of this writing, it performs poorly in improving SEO. Dead links and HTML/JavaScript/CSS syntax errors should also be eradicated so that the page will properly be indexed.

Join the social community bandwagon

If you ever heard of social community and bookmarking sites (e.g. Facebook, StumbleUpon, Technorati, Digg, Del.icio.us, among others), they are hot these days because they promote socialization beyond borders. Fortunately, webmasters can take advantage of them because they can be great tools to improve the exposure of a website. Most sites work by submitting to them your content through Web feed formats (like RSS), online bookmarking and personal submission, which they publicize. Squidoo, for instance, lets you create blurbs to promote or sell just anything. If interested online readers found them, they can potentially bring huge traffic to your blog or website. To participate, visit social community websites and create an account to them.

Install SEO-friendly WordPress themes and plugins

Personally, the Themes and Plugin feature are among the myriad things I love in WordPress blog platform. They are easy to install and you don’t need to be a geek to be able to add widgets and extended functionality (well, it helps when you know HTML, CSS and PHP – but don’t be scared if you don’t). If you own a WordPress-powered blog, visit their official website and browse for SEO-friendly plugins and themes. You may personalize them if you want.
This website, powered by WordPress, uses the following plugins:

• Adsense Deluxe
  Place Google AdSense ads in your WordPress Posts. Requires WordPress 1.5 or higher. For complete usage and configuration click on AdsenseDeluxe under the “Options” menu.
• All in One SEO Pack
  Out-of-the-box SEO for your WordPress blog.
• Digg This
  Adds Digg story link on detection on digg referrer.
• DoFollow
  Selectively disable the “nofollow” tagging for comments.
• FeedBurner FeedSmith
  Originally authored by Steve Smith, this plugin detects all ways to access your original WordPress feeds and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber.
• Google Search Widget
  Adds a sidebar widget to let users search your site with Google.
• Google XML Sitemaps
  This plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and Yahoo.
• Social Bookmarks
  Adds a list of xHTML compliant graphic links at the end of your posts that allow your visitors to easily submit them to a number of social bookmarking sites.
• Text Link Ads
  Really Simple Web/RSS Advertising For Personal or Commercial Use
• WordPress Database Backup
  On-demand backup of your WordPress database.
• WP-Cache
  Very fast cache module. It’s composed of several modules, this plugin can configure and manage the whole system.
• WP-Print
  Displays a printable version of your WordPress blog’s post/page.
• WP 2.3 Related Posts
  Generate a related posts list via tags of WordPress 2.3
• WP YouTube
  WP YouTube makes it easier for you to post embed YouTube videos in WordPress. It also features YouTube options , for you to control all the YouTube videos at the same time.

I’d like to give credit to the creators of the above-mentioned plugins. It is up to you to discover how they work and what benefits they bring. Also, please note that there are other plugins that you may want to install for your WordPress site. My personal advice, however, is not to install too many plugins because they may consume too much CPU resource if you are on a basic hosting.

Spread your links to the world

In SEO, it is generally better if you strive to have more inbound links. Inbound links are links pointing to your website from other sites. If you are blog is new, it is wise to submit your website’s Uniform Resource Locator (URL) to free web directories. This can initially build inbound links that can be beneficial. Your next option is to exchange links with other bloggers or sites. Making friends online, blog commenting and link baiting usually help. If more of your inbound links come from sites with high PageRank and belongs to your blog’s niche, you might increase your blog’s PR as bonus. There are still quite a number of methods to spread your links to the Web, I leave it to you to discover. Enjoy!