Midphase Blog

If you are building a website for a client, you not only have test your beta versions in various browsers including Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer; you also need to check displays in various mobile platforms including Apple, Android and Nokia.

In fact, many would suggest that any new website you build on professional hosting platforms should perhaps be targeted towards mobile FIRST. By 2013, web access via a Smartphone is set to exceed that of a laptop or desktop.

But, this point has still not sunk in for a number of web designers as evidenced by recent Google data that suggests that mobile sites area on average 1.5x slower than desktop versions.

In terms of testing your designs, check out this solid article on Six Revisions, which gives you 10 testing tools for mobile devices.

http://sixrevisions.com/tools/10-excellent-tools-for-testing-your-site-on-mobile-devices/

But, there may come up a point when while testing the site on your actual iPhone none of the changes you have made in code are showing up correctly in the Apple Safari browser. This is frustrating and may simply be due to an un-cleared cache, browsing history or cookie trail.

The solution is not to access settings in your mobile safari browser but to visit the general settings in the iPhone and access the Safari icon found in the menu. You can then set about clearing your browsing history, cookies and cache.

By doing the above, you also speed up your phone and web-browsing experience as unneeded files have been removed from the disk space.

It’s vitally important that web designers and developers start targeting their websites towards the latest versions of Apple and Android browsers.   Also don’t forget about tablets, which look set to become a dominant form of web browsing in the next couple of years.

Many predict that mobile and tablet users will simply hook in larger external screens to offset the smaller screen real estate in the future as they pursue a more mobile lifestyle at home and at work.

Filed under: Tips and Tutorials by Clint Reeves
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Google has been gathering latency data from site speed reports in Google Analytics which suggest the United States ranks 6^th in the world in terms of current web performance. Japan comes in first followed by Sweden, Canada, UK, and Germany.

The data also indicates that mobile performance speeds for most sites are about 1.5x slower than the desktop experience, despite new Smartphone optimization strategies by a number of SMBs.

Google also said that new web timing standards are allowing it more accurately collect data relating to page speed.

“User latency is an important quality benchmark for Web Applications. While JavaScript-based mechanisms, such as the one described in [JSMEASURE], can provide comprehensive instrumentation for user latency measurements within an application, in many cases, they are unable to provide a complete end-to-end latency picture,” said W3.org, the governing body in charge of web standards.

To address previous measurement limitations the body has introduced performance-timing interfaces.

“This interface allows JavaScript mechanisms to provide complete client-side latency measurements within applications. With the proposed interface, the previous example can be modified to measure a user’s perceived page load time.”

Google has for some time been dropping serious hints that a slow loading page may well be affecting your search engine rankings, negatively. Interestingly, it appears the automotive, beauty and health industries are leading the way in performance load times; entertainment, real estate and news round out the bottom three.

Your website speed depends largely on the hosting provider you select to drive your online presence and your ability to craft compact, slim, code libraries which are typically found in content management systems like WordPress and Joomla.

Filed under: News, Tips and Tutorials by Clint Reeves
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Attention all web developers! There appears to be enough recent data collected by analytics firms to suggest that for the first time1366 x 768 has become the most popular screen resolution worldwide, having overtaken 1024 x 768.

StatCounter, a leading web analytics company, reports that since 2009, 1024×768 has been the dominant screen size globally on the web, except for mobile. 1024×768 has fallen from 41.8% in March 2009 to 18.6% in March 2012. Over the same period 1366×768 has grown from 0.68% to 19.28%. The third most popular size is 1280×800 at 13%.

The information was collected from over 15 billion page views per month (4 billion from the US) to the StatCounter network of more than three million websites. So this is a pretty solid forecast and affects all web designers or developers coding sites on cheap, affordable hosting platforms.

W3Schools.com also said most users are employing screen resolutions larger than 1024 x 768. In fact as of January 2012, it reported that at least 85% of users are using a higher resolution.

Source: W3Schools.com

But while screens have been getting bigger, that does not mean they have been getting better, especially in terms of pixel density.

“This may change once Apple brings its Retina displays to its MacBook line, but right now, it’s almost as hard to find a small display with a very high resolution in a mainstream machine as it is to find a screen that isn’t widescreen,” said TechCrunch.

It’s also interesting to note TechCrunch’s observation that Microsoft’s Windows 8 was aimed (almost) exclusively at 1366 x 768 resolution screens.

Only 1.2% of active Windows 7 users currently have screens with resolutions of less than 1024×768 and just fewer than 5% still use 1024×768 screens.

Filed under: Industry Trends, News by Clint Reeves
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So we guess many of you saw Google’s ultra-cool doodle last month that focused on using an HTML5 zipper effect to highlight the 132^nd birthday of Gideon Sundbuck who invented the modern-day zipper.

A zipper appeared vertically over the search bar, allowing the user to pull the zipper down using the mouse.  At this point all the search results appeared for Gideon and the zipper.

This is awesome example of the power of HTML5, which moves your browser closer towards becoming an application or operating system.  Instead of having to download applets, Java or Flash to initiate a cool animation effect, it’s largely built into the browser.

We did a quick search on Google for code relating to the Doodle and came up with this reference at Stackoverflow.  We have not yet tried recreating the JavaScript that apparently uses the <canvas> tag but hopefully it’s enough to get you started.

Source: Stackoverflow – visit site for full code

Filed under: Industry Trends, Tips and Tutorials by Clint Reeves
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Location, location, location. Yup, from real estate to mobile phones the customers’ location seems to be one of the prized assets for online retailers’ onboard affordable hosting platforms offered by Midphase.

But, if you thought the names Foursquare or Google Places were going to be mentioned next you’re wrong. One of the hot new technologies being tried and tested by some very big brand names these days is called Common Short Codes or CSC.

Also fondly referred to as SMS or text messaging, these 160-character Twitter like messages are purposely designed to have short phone numbers with strong call-to-actions associated with them. Common Short Codes (CSCs) are short numeric codes to which text messages can be sent from a mobile phone.

“Common short codes are easy to remember and they are compatible across all participating carriers. CSCs are either five-digit or six-digit numbers. CSCs can be leased by anyone interested in interacting with nearly 200 million wireless consumers,” said the CSCA, the United States governing body for Short Code purchasing and assignment.

In recent years, leading retailers such as the North Face has successfully deployed the Short Code marketing devices, using an interest strategy referred to as Geo-Fences.

When a customer is nearby a North Face store, opt-in customers automatically receive a coupon, discount or promotional text message on their Smartphone.

This virtual fencing technology is driven by the application provider Placecast which offers white-label ShopAlerts to web savvy e-retailers on US hosting platforms.

What’s more the technology is not actually limited to a Smartphone: the technology also pushes alerts to Facebook and mobile-friendly websites

“On the consumer side, ShopAlerts will only send maximum number of 3 messages within a given week from a retailer. And users can opt out of the program by texting “stop” back to a text message,” said TechCrunch.

If you are interested in deploying text-based marketing from PlaceCast, checkout their Brand page for more information.

Remember that by 2013 most consumers will spend more time accessing web pages from their Smartphones than from laptops or desktops.   This means your website should be powered by a rock-solid cheap, powerful hosting platform and start exhibiting mobile-centric features, including CSC technology mentioned above.

Filed under: Industry Trends, Tips and Tutorials by Clint Reeves
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Nothing put more fear into top-ranked websites on Google than a search algorithm update by the world’s dominant search engine. This extends into small business websites that have hired SEO companies to boost their rankings on cheap, affordable web hosting platforms offered by Midphase.

Over the last several months Google has deployed several updates code named ‘Panda’ in an effort to inoculate itself against the growing tide of spammers and website scrapers who attempt to the game their way to the top of the rankings.

A negative consequence has been the recalibration of certain legitimate websites downwards, leading to a spree of complaints, jeers and disbelief by their owners that have come to rely on the gold-laden traffic to stimulate e-commerce conversions and further offline retail sales.

Once company affected by the search updates told the British paper, The Guardian:

“We were crushed by the Panda update, and the site is now gasping for breath,” she said. Traffic is down 75%, revenue is down 90%, and I’m getting seriously worried about the future”. (She has never bought adverts on Google, and isn’t thinking of doing so now). “Everybody says not to rely on Google, but there’s no way around it.”

The irony of these machine-updates is they are not in fact being driven by machines; rather people.

For years Google has steadfastly claimed that their core business philosophy is built upon programmatic rules to heuristically data mining sites on the World Wide Web to determine a search result. However, the twin threat of Facebook and content farming (a content-gaming strategy) has forced the search giant to acknowledge that oftentimes its results are flawed and imperfect.

They thus turned to an army of engineers and human-testers to implement quality control and decipher the quality of page-one search results.

“Human quality testers rated thousands of websites based on measures of quality, including design, trustworthiness, speed and whether or not they would return to the website,” said Wikipedia.

The result? Nearly 12% of all search queries were immediately affected in an effort to reward quality over quantity. Thus, the previous mechanisms you used to gain SEO traction on Google may now instead be hurting you, all because a human being is now analyzing the worth of your page rather than a machine exclusively.

There is perhaps a lesson here: If you design your website for Google specifically or SEO in general, you may actually be doing your website a disservice. It may come to the point where a website owner who does not pay any attention to SEO will actually rank higher than your site over the long term.

Filed under: News, SEO, Tips and Tutorials by Clint Reeves
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Whenever the term cheap or affordable comes up in a conversation relating to web hosting companies there may sometimes be a natural tendency to assume that there is a consequent loss in quality, features and/or benefits.

However, over the last several years a small minority of cheap hosting providers have been carefully fine-tuning their infrastructure to bring down costs and pass these savings onto website owners in the form of lower prices.

They have been able to do this by using the power of open-source software, including Linux, WordPress, MySQL and PHP to offer a range of services and applications required by cost-conscious small businesses across the United States.

Midphase Web Hosting has also gained further economies of scale by migrating shared hosting infrastructure to Tier 3 C7 Data Centers in Utah, which feature some of the highest levels of security (and accompanying bandwidth gains) in the United States.

This means that shared hosting plans are now priced as low as $2.95 per month with these additional benefits pinned to various plans:

• FREE Domain
• 24/7 U.S. Based Support
• 99.9% Uptime Guarantee
• 30-Day Money Back Guarantee
• SSL Secure Website Access
• Midphase cPanel Control Panel

For those reading this blog who are interested in the web hosting features and benefits mentioned above, but are currently stuck with a hosting provider that does not give your website the stability or feature-sets you require, you can consider contacting Midphase for a FREE site move.

There may also come a point in your lifetime, where you shared hosting platform above may not no longer accommodate the growth in website traffic or e-commerce activity that may be occurring in your small business.

When you reach this point, you have various options at your disposal including upgrading to a Virtual Private Server or pursuing a dedicated server.

All plans come with the industry-leading cPanel that controls all your server infrastructural power.

It all starts with a cheap hosting package on a reliable hosting provider that has been consistently putting infrastructural bricks in place to lower cost, complexity and bottlenecks relating to running a healthy website.

Filed under: General, Web Hosting by Clint Reeves
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At a recent conference Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s webspam team announced that Google was working on an algorithm update that would level the playing field for sites that don’t participate in “over-optimization” strategies. He later clarified that “over-optimization” wasn’t the best way of putting it because it is really about webspam. According to Cutts, “The change will decrease rankings for sites that we believe are violating Google’s existing quality guidelines.”

After the official announcement earlier this week, Google released the new update, which has been officially called the Penguin Update. The Penguin Update will impact “about 3.1% of queries in English to a degree that a regular user might notice,” said, Google. Despite the recent update, many webmasters did notice the changes. Some search results have been turned completely upside down. Unrelated sites and sites without content have even managed to rank at #1 after this update rolled out. Other search results like searches relating to web hosting have seen some pretty good improvements.

Google emphasized that the Penguin Update was targeting sites that participate in certain types of webspam tactics; mentioning keyword stuffing and link schemes as two specific examples. Keyword stuffing is not something new to SEO. Many webmasters have been doing it and finding different ways to hide it from search engines in order to game the algorithm and get higher rankings. Link schemes have been around for a while now and can also be effective for propelling websites to the top of the search results. Earlier this year Google targeted specific link networks as part of their ongoing war on webspam. Many blogs that were part of these link networks were removed from Google’s index. The result was that many websites which had been getting links from these networks saw their rankings drop as those links lost their value.

The Penguin Update is taking the war on these types of link schemes one step further by penalizing sites which have participated in them. Specifically, the update targets sites with “unusual linking patterns” or links from pages with spun content where the content is “spun beyond recognition” and the links may or may not even be relevant to the content. It makes sense that these types of links should not be rewarded because they are clearly for the sole purpose of manipulating search engine rankings. However, by penalizing sites which have unusual linking patterns, Google has opened the door to “negative SEO” tactics.

Can negative SEO really work? While I wouldn’t personally attempt to knock a competitor out of the search results using any form of negative SEO, this strategy could absolutely work with the Penguin Update. What would prevent someone from getting these types of links to a competitor’s website to knock their site from the search results? If you think about it, if I was tired of ranking #2 to a specific competitor, all I would have to do is get some of these webspam links to their website and their site drops from the top position. I hope that in the light of negative SEO being a real possibility now that Google might reconsider penalizing sites for the types of links that they have and look for other ways to devalue those links. Giving links from link schemes no value in the search engine’s algorithm would result in no reward being given to webmasters who participate in those webspam tactics and would also prevent the possibility of using the same link schemes for negative SEO.

Filed under: News by Dustin Williams
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A recent survey put together by Midphase Web Hosting reveals that nearly 80% of all current clients have transferred their website, blog, e-commerce site or content management system from another hosting provider to Midphase.

Wow! That’s a BIG number and these statistics demonstrate four areas an affordable web-hosting provider must dominate in:

Reputation

Generally, the length of time the web host has been in a business plays a big role.  Midphase for instance has been in business since 2003 – almost 10 years.

Industry recognition from external publications, such as Find My Host and CNET, are also key factors in helping establish the merit and pedigree of a hosting company.  Midphase has one time or another been awarded top billing from these and other rating entities. Finally consider whether the hosting provider is part of a broader group of companies that complement one another in the hosting field. UK2 Group runs and owns an international stable of hosting companies, including Midphase. This means your risk is diversified within a strong, stable parent group, which can push resources and infrastructure when needed, quickly.

Price

If you are paying more than $3 for a shared hosting plan you may be paying too much. Midphase now offers hosting packages as low as $2.95.   Further, affordable plans are available for dedicated servers and virtual private servers (VPS).

Reliability

An unreliable web hosting platform could impact your website performance and even lose you customers. Midphase offers a 99.9% uptime guarantee across all web server packages.  Also consider the benefits of 24/7 round the clock support.

Features

Unlimited web space, unlimited bandwidth, free domains, website builder tools, WordPress support, and $100 worth of search engine credits are just some of the great features of a stable, reliable, powerful and cheap hosting provider.

Conclusion

Those areas above help explain the growing success of Midphase in attracting customers away from bigger, slower-moving hosting providers.  Midphase will move your website files over to your new hosting account AND get your site up and running completely FREE.   Even if you don’t decide to take up Midphase’s offer of a free website move, use the benchmarks of reputation, price, reliability and features to help you make decide which cheap hosting provider is best for you.

Filed under: Web Hosting by Clint Reeves
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The reason this provocative question comes up is because a lot of small businesses are becoming overwhelmed by new social media avenues that are seeking to siphon off your energy from networks you have just gotten familiar with, including Facebook.

Most small businesses are now using Facebook to manage their social updates. That’s there first port of call, followed probably by Twitter. True, there are few early adopters using Foursquare and many of us are using Linkedin Pages. But the reality is that Facebook has become the lynch pin for social media marketing even if customers may be moving elsewhere.

But the problem with Facebook is that just about everyone is regarded as your friend. This includes your boss, your dog, and anybody you may have briefly bumped into at website marketing conference or online web hosting seminar.  Facebook pages and ‘Likes’ of course helped solve some of the business aspects of online marketing, but on a personal level everybody on your Facebook is regarded as a friend.

Thus, the arrival of Google +, which takes care of this sticky issue by introducing Circles as a way to differentiate relationships including friend vs. acquaintance vs. business contact. These groups now allow you to define your relationship to that person rather than simply being lumped into one friend category.

And, people can be in more than one circle just like real life. That means you can have a friend that resides in both your co-worker and friend circle.  Now you can share information or updates with some people or all people. You decide.

This concept extends further into Google + -pages for business which allows you to further distinguish between clients, partners and suppliers.

“Different people are interested in different parts of your business. Whether it’s breaking news, updates, promotions, links, photos – even talking face-to-face with groups via easy-to-use video chat – Google+ lets you easily share the right things with the right customers,” said Google.

This is just a quick insight into how Google Circles may overtake Facebook in the business arena. Of course, it is quite possible that Facebook will probably start introducing new ways to manage and define your relationships, in business and in your personal life, but for the moment Google Circles seems to have the edge.

It’s thus highly suggested you add a Google + button to your existing website which we hope resides on our cheap, affordable hosting plans priced below $3!

One more thing: Check out this fun video that gives you a quick look into the general differences between Google Circles and Facebook.

Filed under: Industry Trends, Tips and Tutorials, Web Hosting by Clint Reeves
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