New Weycrest Blog

This blog is slightly broken in an attempt to import it into Wordpress, but its still readable and we will keep it online, but it will no longer be added to or updated. You can see our new blogs here: http://www.weycrest.co.uk/blog Main Company Blog http://status.weycrestcolo.com System Status Alerts and Announcements

Using Keywords in your Domain Name

Believe it or now but using keywords in your Domain Name doesn’t directly help improve your search engine rankings on that search term. Search engines actually concentrate more on what is in the body and content of your pages, not the Domain Name. However, choosing a domain name is important as it can dictate how people link back to your site. When Google ranks sites, one of the things it looks at is how many inbound links are pointing back to your page. You will get a better rank if the links are high quality and related to what your site is about. When Google and other search engine rank a site, they look into many factors. One of the most important is the number of (quality) inbound links. You achieve a better rank if the links are high quality and related to the content of your site. So when someone decides to link to your site, the easiest thing is to copy the URL of your web site and use that as the "Anchor Text "for the link. If the name means nothing, you may not get any clicks - or PageRank help - from the link. So let us say you had setup a really good "web design self help group" site and your chosen domain was bcwwwsh.com. If you were surfing the web and ran across that link, would you be more likely to click on it? What does it mean? Needless to say, this could be a very poor choice of domain name. Not using a keyword in the domain name could make life much harder. When you ask for a link back, you have to specifically ask site owners to put in the descriptive anchor text like "self help web design group"; some will, but most simply won't bother. So choosing the right Domain Name can still help in the long run. If you can get a domain which has a good keyword phrase as part of the name, it will be more plain sailing to get more inbound links that are considered by Google to be related. However I would still avoid too overlong or "spammy" sounding domain like "get-out-of-credit-card-debt-for-free.com." Its still important to keep the domain short and snappy (to avoid typo mistakes). Also keep it memorable. Register domain names here: http://www.weycrest.co.uk/domain-names.php

Turning Network Free-Riders' Lives Upside Down

"You discover that your neighbours are using your unsecured wireless network without your permission. Do you secure it? Or do you do something more fun? A few minutes with squid and iptables could greatly improve your neighbours' Web experience ..."

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Track Bandwidth Usage with RTG

If you're interested in monitoring bandwidth and have done a little research, you've probably run across MRTG, RRDtool, and Cricket. While these three packages are all fantastic and popular tools, you should also consider a lesser known tool named RTG.

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New VPS Solutions with Plesk

VPS solutions combine the power and flexibility of a dedicated server, with the low cost and maintenance overhead of a shared hosting account. Weycrest VPS solutions operate on the Linux platforms (Windows planned early 2007). Plans starts at £29.99/mo for 10 GB of space and 50GB of data transfer. All virtualized environments come with root access, powered by Virtuozzo and each plan includes the latest version of SWSoft's Plesk and a free managed software / template update service. http://www.weycrest.co.uk/vps-compare.php

New Plesk 8 Flash Tutorials Online

Latest Plesk 8 Flash Tutorials walking through tasks such as creating Mail Accounts to using Webmail can be found here: http://www.weycrest.co.uk/psa8-flash-tutorials.php

Weycrest becomes SW-Soft Gold Partner

This week we became an SW-Soft Gold Partner. Gold Partners are "Hosting providers that leverage SWsoft technology to offer, implement and manage the best-of-breed hosting solutions." SW-Soft provide most of our hosting automation and server virtualisation software such as Plesk and Virtuozzo. Achieving Hosting Technology Partner status will enable us to broaden support for our VPS and Dedicated Server range.

Linux Web Hosting Plans Boosted

Well it happened a few weeks ago now, but I have delayed press releasing it due to other matters but once again disc and transfer quota's have been increased across all shared hosting plans. So now the plans are: 500 MB Personal Web Hosting 1 GB Soho Web Hosting 2 GB Enterprise Web Hosting New Plan introduced called "Corporate" with 3GB Disc Space. Traffic and Disc quota's also increased on Reseller Plans also. A hosting comparison can be found here: http://www.weycrest.co.uk/web-hosting.php --Paul

Nominet re-elect Board Members

Gordon Dick and Fay Howard were re-elected to serve on the Board of Nominet UK for a period of two years as non executive members. However only 263 members voted, representing less than 10% of the electorate. Some members complained about missing voting papers and the organisation has promised to investigate an online voting system. It was a close fought contest with Peter Gradwell getting the largest numbers of votes of any candidate in the first round but eventually coming in third after the votes were reallocated. Andrew Bennett of acorndomains.co.uk, obtained a respectable vote but went out in the third phase of voting after Lord Erroll . Peter Gradwells election platform was mainly to appeal to the larger tag holders such as Pipex and thinks that the future for Nominet is to look "beyond domain names" and expand its pervue to running the large databases required by "communications identifiers" of the next decade on a neutral non profit making basis. The voting results can be found here: http://www.nominet.org.uk/digitalAssets/9300_results_table.pdf Earlier Nominet had managed to miscalculate the voting rights of Nominet members. Weycrests voting allocation was originally calculated at 263 but this was later amended to 967.