Archive for March, 2008

Self Managed Server Hosting

Monday, March 31st, 2008

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3 clicks to your own website
Layered Technologies (LT) is the leading provider of dedicated hosting and utility computing solutions with thousands of clients in over 120 countries. We offer on-demand IT infrastructure including robust dedicated server hosting and grid computing solutions for customers considering a colocation service. We provide self-managed hosted infrastructure in world class, top tier datacenters that delivers an optimum blend of affordability, flexibility and reliability.

Why Choose Layered Technologies?

Eliminate the capital investment and the headaches of building and maintaining IT infrastructure by leasing servers from Layered Technologies. Layered Technologies delivers all the benefits of colocation without the start-up costs, the commitments, or the challenges. Outsource your IT infrastructure nightmares so you can get back to thinking about your customers.

Test Drive here

DynaVol Storage Solution

Wednesday, March 26th, 2008
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DynaVol is a web-based storage solution that is simple to use and easy to manage. Whether storing your data or serving static content, DynaVol offers a reliable, affordable and secure environment for your data management needs. Dynavol’s functionality is simple and robust and ensures your data will always be available when you need it – and scalable as you need it.

  • RELIABLE: Robust data storage with 99.9% availability. No single points of failure and no downtime - Guaranteed!
  • FLEXIBLE: Any server with a broadband or higher connection can access a DynaVol account using various protocols. Plus, DynaVol is host agnostic, you can use whether or not you’re a Layered Technologies’ customer.
  • REDUNDANT: DynaVol managed data is protected with full-redundancy. All data is mirrored to a different server as backup, with almost instant automated recovery.
  • SECURE: Gain peace of mind in knowing your data is securely stored within our World Class, Top Tier Data Center and part of Layered Technologies’ fully redundant backup network.
  • DYNAMIC: Reduce bandwidth needs and backup execution times by combining DynaVol with a backup application (like R-Sync), which allows you to conveniently schedule backups and only copy files that have changed since your last back-up occurrence.
  • AFFORDABLE: DynaVol is the best value in data management. Enjoy redundant backup storage as well as serving static data – all for the price you normally pay for basic backup storage solutions.

Test Drive here

Scale your SaaS application with On-Demand ‘TRUE’ Grid Technology

Monday, March 24th, 2008
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Scaling Your SaaS ApplicationA recent McKinsey survey shows that 63% of enterprise CIOs plan to adopt at least one SaaS app in 2007. IDC estimates the SaaS market’s compound annual growth rate to be 20% between now and 2010. Credit Suisse’s projections are even more optimistic: 36% annual growth between 2006 and 2011.If you’re a SaaS developer, you’re most likely already familiar with these stats. For you, the unanswered question is, what will it take to scale your application from proof of concept to prime time? You don’t want to over-invest in hosting infrastructure that might not be utilized for some time. On the other hand, you need the ability to ramp up on-demand. Most importantly, you absolutely must keep each and every customer’s data safe.

The good news is, there’s one simple solution to all of these challenges: TheGridLayer.

On Demand ScalabilityOn Demand ScalabilityOur hosting platform is powered by 3Tera’s AppLogic Grid OS…. read more here

Hosted Windows Dedicated Servers plus Free Microsoft Expressions Software and Training

Monday, March 17th, 2008
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Hosted Windows Dedicated Servers plus Free Microsoft Expressions Software and TrainingOutsourcing your infrastructure needs enables your organization to derive more value from your IT budget while lowering the overall computing costs.Dedicated hosting with Windows Server 2003 provides a server platform that integrates with existing Microsoft technology offering the reliability and security you’ve come to expect. Web services, networks, and Microsoft .NET-connected applications can be powered by Layered Technologies’ infrastructure including HP hardware running Windows Server 2003 and hosted in our word class top tier datacenters. 

As an operating system, Windows Server 2003 provides an integrated server environment for agile business solutions to improve business productivity and drive connected applications. Microsoft technology provides a foundation through Windows Server 2003 to:

Leverage crucial information from across your organization 
Distribute collaborative project data 
Deliver your corporate communications to potential customers across the Internet 
Acquire orders from around the world

Find out more about Windows Hosting

Virtual Private Servers

Wednesday, March 12th, 2008
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Virtual Private ServersVPS eliminates failure points and enables growth beyond your wildest expectation by creating a Virtual Server on our Grid Computing Layer. Your site or application is no longer tied to an individual hardware server, rather it is spread across many nodes. The model allows you to scale and grow beyond the capacity of older shared server systems and even radically exceed dedicated server performance.

  • Eliminate single points of failure and never worry about hardware emergencies again.
  • Allocate separate resources for each one of your clients while running your own private name servers.
  • Eliminate the need to worry about managing a dedicated environment.
  • Customize your VPS by installing your own software, applications, control panel and more.

Performance is nothing without stability. At TGL we maintain all aspects of server hardware and system software while enabling you to install the control panel of your choice. You gain all the benefits of a 3tera’s Utility Computing solution without the increased levels of frustration that often go hand-in-hand with maintaining a dedicated environment.

Hosted Grid-based VPS starting at $49/month

COMPARE: VPS(Virtual Private Server) to
VPDC (Virtual Private Datacenter)
Hosted Grid-based VPS 

Scale your SaaS application with On-Demand ‘TRUE’ Grid Technology. 

DynaVol ‘Store & Serve’(Compare to Amazon S3)

Store data and serve static content with DynaVol 

Hosted Dedicated Server 

AMD | Athlon 4200+ Dual Core 

INTEL | 5310 1.6GHz Clovertown 

Hosted LINUX Dedicated Servers including CentOS, Debian, Fedora,
RedHat & Unbuntu 

Hosted BSD Dedicated Servers including FreeBSD, NetBSD & OpenBSD 

Hosted SOLARIS Dedicated & Virtual Servers (Exclusive Monthly
Discount) Find out more 

Hosted WINDOWS Dedicated Servers (Standard, Enterprise & Web) PLUS
FREE Microsoft
Expressions Software & Training* ($1398 Value) 

Take
a test drive today

Comare Virtual Private Server to a Virtual Private Datacenter

Monday, March 10th, 2008

3 clicks to your own website


VPS (Virtual Private Server) to VPDC
(Virtual Private Datacenter)

3t Controller Shell Access 
Applogic Edit Access 
Full control of all available grid resources 
Ability to scale applications 
Ability to add more appliances 
Highly Available data storage 
Automatic Application Fail Over
Applications Migration Support 
Start and Stop Grid Applications 
Application design, create, modify, destroy and more 
Application volume create, resize, copy, repair, migrate, destroy and
more 
Application RAM Resize Support: 
Application CPU Resize Support 
Add and Remove Additional Grid Nodes 
Back End Network Communication Support (1000mb/s) 
Front End Network Communication Support (100/1000mbs/s) 
Front End Network Communication Support (100/1000 mb/s) 
Access to TGL Application Library (Load Balancers, firewall’s etc.)

 

Find
out more here

  COMPARE: VPS(Virtual Private Server) to
VPDC (Virtual Private Datacenter)
Hosted Grid-based VPS 

Scale your SaaS application with On-Demand ‘TRUE’ Grid Technology. 

DynaVol ‘Store & Serve’(Compare to Amazon S3)

Store data and serve static content with DynaVol 

Hosted Dedicated Server 

AMD | Athlon 4200+ Dual Core 

INTEL | 5310 1.6GHz Clovertown 

Hosted LINUX Dedicated Servers including CentOS, Debian, Fedora,
RedHat & Unbuntu 

Hosted BSD Dedicated Servers including FreeBSD, NetBSD & OpenBSD 

Hosted SOLARIS Dedicated & Virtual Servers (Exclusive Monthly
Discount) Find out more 

Hosted WINDOWS Dedicated Servers (Standard, Enterprise & Web) PLUS
FREE Microsoft
Expressions Software & Training* ($1398 Value) 

Take
a test drive today

 

Grid Web Hosting

Tuesday, March 4th, 2008

   

3 clicks to your own website
Traffic’s Up; Website’s Down, Preventing costly crashes. Tina Henson, founder and CEO of Plastic Jungle, in Fresno, California, had high hopes for the holiday season. She had hired a public relations firm in November to promote the launch of Plastic Jungle’s redesigned website. It’s an online marketplace where visitors can buy and sell unused gift cards–or swap, say, a $25 Target (NYSE:TGT) gift card for a $25 Starbucks gift card. Although Plastic Jungle ended up getting mentioned in newspapers in several cities, Henson didn’t anticipate just how many people would be interested in trading in the gift cards they had received for Christmas. When December 26 rolled around, some 40 times the normal number of visitors flocked to PlasticJungle.com, overwhelming its Web server. Early that morning, the site crashed, the first of several outages and slowdowns that would occur that day. Henson doesn’t know how much business she lost because of her server troubles, but she figures that about half of the more than 10,000 visitors who were dropped from the site, many of whom were in the middle of conducting a trade, never returned. “We thought we were prepared,” Henson says. “But it was the culmination of bursts, the spikes in traffic, that got us in the end.”A single unexpected burst in traffic can overwhelm a website that isn’t prepared, as Plastic Jungle discovered. In this age of blogging pundits, all it takes is one positive review to steer an onslaught of visitors to an unsuspecting website. And because so many companies rely on online sales, surviving sporadic traffic surges is more important than ever. “One trend we’ve seen is start-ups that crash upon launch because they can’t handle traffic from sites like TechCrunch and Digg that cause an ensuing blogstorm of linkage from other sites,” says Rich Miller, editor and publisher of the technology blog Data Center Knowledge.

The only way to be prepared for a sudden traffic burst is to have an immense amount of server capacity and bandwidth on tap. Traditional Web hosts typically either lease access to a shared server (used by many customers at once) or to a dedicated server (used by only one customer), either of which provides a fixed amount of capacity. Shared hosting providers, which pack hundreds of websites onto a single server, offer prices as low as $4 a month–an attractive feature for early-stage businesses. But if one of the websites on the shared server has a big spike in traffic, every website on that server will slow down or crash. That’s why it’s common for shared hosting providers to ask customers with frequent spikes to either take their business elsewhere or upgrade to a dedicated server. But for some companies, using a dedicated server, which can cost hundreds of dollars a month, is like buying a bus instead of a sports car because you might occasionally need more than two seats.

Now a new breed of Web hosts has emerged. They offer more capacity when needed and use so-called grid hosting, a network of formerly standalone servers that work as a team. Because the servers are connected, if a website is inundated with traffic, the grid can assign more servers to help carry the load. And it can be done for a fraction of the price of a dedicated server. Pioneers in this burgeoning field include Media Temple of Culver City, California; 3Tera of Aliso Viejo, California; and Mosso, a San Antonio-based spinoff of Rackspace, a large hosting provider that specializes in dedicated servers. Media Temple offers the lowest price for grid hosting, with its $20 a month Grid-Service package. For that price, customers get 100 gigabytes of storage and 1 terabyte of bandwidth, which is backed by hundreds of clustered servers functioning like backup generators, ready to kick in with extra capacity when needed.

Media Temple’s system works by assigning each customer a monthly allotment of 1,000 GPUs, or grid performance units. It’s a way of measuring how much computer-processing power is needed to handle all the hits to a customer’s site. So, if a site like Plastic Jungle was particularly busy only in December, its website wouldn’t go down, even if those surges put it over its limit of 1,000 GPUs. It would simply have to pay 10 cents for each extra GPU it needed that month. For websites that routinely go over the limit, though, those overage fees can add up fast. Still, Media Temple’s CEO, Demian Sellfors, points out that only a few customers see huge spikes that cause them to exceed their 1,000 GPU limit. Media Temple hosts more than 200,000 websites in 40 countries with Grid-Service.

One of those customers is Jeff Schroeder, CEO of an Atlanta company called CulinaryPrep, which markets a $399 kitchen appliance designed to eliminate harmful bacteria from meat and vegetables. When the company’s website, CulinaryPrep.com, debuted in August, its product was featured on Gizmodo, a popular gadget blog that draws about two million daily visitors. Traffic to CulinaryPrep’s website soared, but the site never faltered, says Schroeder. The real test, though, came a few months later, when the product was featured on CBS’s The Early Show. Not only did the site survive unscathed despite a surge of several thousand hits a day that lasted for days, but Schroeder says he didn’t even come close to using up his allotted GPUs. “I don’t think about the spikes with the website anymore,” he says. “You know how some people always check to see if their site is up and running during the holidays? We just assume that our uptime is 100 percent.”

For all the benefits that grid computing can bring, however, it also results in complexity. Sellfors concedes that he needs to periodically iron out the wrinkles in Grid-Service, which has suffered occasional outages of its own. Sellfors has high hopes for the company’s next-generation grid-based product, Cluster-Server, which he says will feature improved redundancy, more servers, and better software. The one thing that won’t change, Sellfors says, is the flexible price tag. “It makes a whole lot of sense for customers to pay as they go,” he says. “If you can do it with your gas bill or your phone bill, why shouldn’t you be able to pay for what your website uses, too?”

Learn More about The Grid Layer Today!

Sign up for a free demo to see if Grid Technology
is right for you. Click here now

COMPARE: VPS(Virtual Private Server) to VPDC (Virtual Private Datacenter)
Hosted Grid-based VPS 

Scale your SaaS application with On-Demand ‘TRUE’ Grid Technology. 

DynaVol ‘Store & Serve’(Compare to Amazon S3)

Store data and serve static content with DynaVol 

Hosted Dedicated Server 

AMD | Athlon 4200+ Dual Core 

INTEL | 5310 1.6GHz Clovertown 

Hosted LINUX Dedicated Servers including CentOS, Debian, Fedora, RedHat & Unbuntu 

Hosted BSD Dedicated Servers including FreeBSD, NetBSD & OpenBSD 

Hosted SOLARIS Dedicated & Virtual Servers (Exclusive Monthly Discount) Find out more 

Hosted WINDOWS Dedicated Servers (Standard, Enterprise & Web) PLUS FREE Microsoft
Expressions Software & Training* ($1398 Value) 

Take a test drive today

Published March 2008
By: Darren Dahl

Offline Marketing Strategies For Online Businesses

Monday, March 3rd, 2008
3 clicks to your own website
How to Use Offline Advertising in Internet MarketingKnowing how to use offline advertising in internet marketing can give you a significant advantage over your competitors, since many do not use offline methods to advertise their products.

Offline advertising is particularly relevant if you are selling a product, or offering a service, that attract customers locally. For example, you could offer a fitness aid at your local leisure center. Many leisure or fitness centers will allow you to put a free poster offering your product, but even if they charge you for it the price is usually small. Perhaps you have a golf training aid that you can advertise at your local golf club.

Local classified ads are also a good means of getting your product some local publicity. The classified ads pages or even adverts placed on selected pages of your local press, frequently provide you with local orders. The beauty of these is that they are very easy to follow up, either with back-end products or new ones. You need not even restrict yourself to the local press. How often have you seen an internet marketing advert on the national press? They are not uncommon, and although expensive, they must produce a good return.

If you have a niche website, it could be worth your while browsing round your local newsagent and checking out the magazines on display. You know the kind - all these racks upon racks of magazines on every topic you can think of. Have a word with the newsvendor and find out some of the more popular magazines that cover your niche. These could be good publications for placing your adverts, especially if they are not too expensive and they have a good circulation.

Poster campaigns can also work well. You can advertise with posters in many shopping malls, and some stores also offer you the opportunity place an A5 poster for only pennies a week. Have your own business cards printed with your internet business contact details, such as website address and email address in addition to your phone number. Put your website address on everything, and have a signature that use on all correspondence. Not just emails and forum postings, but also offline correspondence such as letters, invoices, receipts and anything else you send to other people.

Another form of offline marketing that most people have never heard of, let alone use, is buzz advertising. This type of advertising has been growing in popularity recently, especially by offline businesses. It is used extensively by some auto companies and by cosmetics companies. Buzz advertising involves getting a verbal buzz going about your website or product. Some companies pay people specifically to verbally promote their products by approaching strangers, striking up conversations and bringing up the product in the conversation.

“Say, have you heard about the latest perfume from —-!” While not yet common it is getting more popular. Of course, the buzz need not be started off by someone you have employed to do it, but you can do it yourself. You can get your family and relatives involved as well. Before you know it, everybody might be talking about your product or your great new website. That’s how YouTube and MySpace got so popular.

If you have a van or pick-up get your business name and website address painted on the site. It’s easier to get a buzz going if people see your website in their face all the time, on vehicles, on posters, in newspapers and magazines, and even chalked on walls! Well, perhaps not the last one, but that would sure get people noticing your website! Do you get the idea? Get your website name known in every way that you can.

How about a local radio slot, with you explaining the virtues and benefits of your product, service or website? Stress the benefits, and you need not restrict it to local radio. Try for a national radio slot or even TV if your business is sizeable enough. There are no restrictions to the advertising methods you can use. Hire a loudspeaker and shout it from the rooftops!

Online advertising methods are very effective in internet marketing, since they can be visible to people all round the world, but if you know how to use offline advertising it can also work very nicely for you, and bring you a lot of business you would not otherwise have.

Click here for more details on Advertising your Online Business Offline. Andre Sanchez - How to Use Offline Advertising in Internet Marketing was originally published at http://www.affiliatemarketinglife.com