Hosting Metro Community

Hosting Metro, Inc. announces that it has acquired Drupal Value Hosting and further expands its internal support of Drupal by offering comprehensive Drupal development and support. Hosting Metro is a Web hosting company that focuses on website hosting, business solutions, search engine optimization, VPS and Dedicated Servers and application hosting services.

Bellevue, WA July 27, 2010 – Hosting Metro, Inc. announced today that it has reached an agreement with long-time Drupal web host company Drupal Value Hosting.  With the agreement in place, Hosting Metro will migrate existing services and marketing to its own operations.  In doing so, Hosting Metro will be able to offer expanded customer support through a dedicated 24/7 support line, as well as additional hosting features previously unavailable to Drupal Value Hosting customers including VPS, Dedicated Servers and shared web hosting.

Tony Chu, CEO of Hosting Metro stated, “By acquiring Drupal Value Hosting, we looked increase our support of Drupal and its corresponding community by integrating the knowledge and brain share of Drupal Value Hosting’s development team into our already reliable infrastructure.  As a hosting company who specializes in application support, this is something that our customers have been asking for and with more than 1% of the web running on Drupal there is a still a lot of room for growth.”

Amit Ghupta, former CEO of Drupal Value Hosting has agreed to stay on with the new company and will continue to provide development and consultation services dedicated to the Drupal community.  “Hosting Metro is a great company, and I am very confident that they will exceed the needs of their customers by delivering outstanding support and I have been especially impressed with their solid infrastructure that is focused on delivering the most reliable uptime in the industry.”

About Hosting Metro

Hosting Metro is dedicated to developing innovative services and providing exceptional technical support to meet the Web hosting needs of its customers. As an independent company, they have 13 years of experience in the web hosting industry, and work to integrate emerging technologies and provide comprehensive, integrated solutions to their hosting clients. With their innovative Campfire Support system, Hosting Metro moves beyond standard domain hosting to provide leading technical support and a range of hosting solutions that are focused on improving productivity, increasing profitability, and empowering their clients' to achieve their goals. For more information go to: www.hostingmetro.com or visit their forum for the latest news.

Hosting Metro, Inc. announces that it has selected PEER 1 Hosting Seattle data center as its new colocation facility for the Pacific Northwest. Hosting Metro is a Web hosting company that focuses on website hosting, business solutions, search engine optimization, VPS and Dedicated Server hosting and server management services.

Bellevue, WA July 1, 2010 – Hosting Metro, Inc. announced that it had selected PEER 1 Hosting’s Seattle data center as its new U.S. based colocation facility for the Pacific Northwest.  Hosting Metro is an independent Web hosting company focused on delivering business-class hosting solutions (Shared Hosting, VPS Hosting and Dedicated Servers) at competitive prices.  In combination with this new data center, Hosting Metro will also be expanding its enhanced business solutions by offering new feature rich hosting packages that include one-click installation of many popular open source applications like Drupal, Joomla and WordPress, as well as new traffic building features including free Search Engine Optimization tools and Social Media brand building. 

“With this new facility and services, we will continue to provide our customers with the exceptional service that they have come to expect, but also give our customers access to features and tools that were previously unavailable at our price point.  Our customers will now have the flexibility and reliability they need to build their businesses, all while delivering cost savings on both the front- and back-end services they need to be online.” Said Matt McKinney, Hosting Metro’s Director of Marketing.

PEER 1 Hosting’s Seattle data center offers Hosting Metro redundant bandwidth, connectivity, speed and minimal latency for its customers.  It is located in downtown Seattle on Sixth Avenue and is ideally located to deliver content to end-users in the Pacific Northwest, especially for end users in Seattle and surrounding areas like Bellevue, Tacoma and Redmond.  “The level of data center reliability and security was key factor in our decision,” said Tony Chu, CEO of Hosting Metro.  “PEER 1 Hosting’s reliability is one of the highest in the world, and by giving our customers access to their SuperNetwork^TM, we can help safeguard their business by keeping them online and secure.”  The data center features redundant UPS and diesel generator power systems making it able to sustain any possible power outages, as well as military-grade pass card access are used to ensure total security in the facility.  In addition, a Network Operating Center (NOC) team monitors and manages the network 24x7x365 to ensure 100% uptime. Redundant HVAC Systems, climate control with particle filters and humidity control create optimal conditions on site for severs and system operation and eliminating any hardware failures caused by the environment conditions.

About Hosting Metro

Hosting Metro is dedicated to developing innovative services and providing exceptional technical support to meet the Web hosting needs of its customers. As an independent company, they have 13 years of experience in the web hosting industry, and work to integrate emerging technologies and provide comprehensive, integrated solutions to their hosting clients. With their innovative campfire support system, Hosting Metro moves beyond standard domain hosting to provide leading technical support and a range of hosting solutions that are focused on improving productivity, increasing profitability, and empowering their clients' to achieve their goals. For more information visit their home page at www.hostingmetro.com or visit this forum for the latest news.

Google's telephony management application Google Voice is now open to all U.S. residents, according to PC World.  As of today, the company has removed the requirement for prospective users to receive an invitation in order to sign up for the service.  Already, there are 1 million people with Google Voice accounts. Service features include a single phone number that, when called, rings a person's multiple lines, such as their home, office and cellular phone. Google Voice also offers voicemail message transcription, free calls to the U.S. and Canada, low international calling rates, conference call capability and a central, Web-based voicemail inbox. A subset of Google Voice features can also be used by people who don't want to get the single Google "phone number for life," but rather use one of their existing lines.

"We're proud of the progress we've made with Google Voice over the last few years, and we're still just scratching the surface of what's possible when you combine your regular phone service with the latest web technology," wrote Google Voice Product Managers Craig Walker and Vincent Paquet in an official blog post.

IDC analyst Al Hilwa sees Google Voice as a clear attempt by the company to go head-to-head against Skype and attract the attention of people using IP-based voice services.

"With the focus on monetization in telephony shifting away from the actual voice services and minutes by carriers, it looks like that area may in time be ceded to IP-based voice services such as Google Voice," Hilwa said via e-mail. "Availability of Google Voice on smartphones and other mobile platforms will put pressure on mobile carriers to further unbundle their services.

Google recently announced changes on how it categorizes and value long tail searches. The “long tail” in relation to search engine traffic is the visitors you get who have used complex or less popular queries on a search engine.

According to an article by Vanessa Fox on Search Engine Land, Google recently implement an algorithmic change in Google, “looking for higher quality sites to surface for long tail queries," and based on the all discussions Google say the change is here to stay.

So what exactly is changing?  And Why does it matter?  Based on the article, Vanessa says the change appears to be affecting content that is buried; i.e. it takes few clicks from the home page to access or doesn’t have many links pointing to it, either from the site itself or outside sources. We see this a lot with our e-commerce customers who manage large sites where it takes some drilling down through categories to get to a specific page.

Now that the changes have been implemented, the article suggest that you if you want to get SEO back on track you need to do several things.  First, you need isolate queries where changes have occurred, which can easily done with Google Analytics using the keyword report in conjunction with the date comparison function. Second, you should then run those queries on Google and see who’s ranking well and look at what they are doing that you aren’t.  Third, the article recommends that you flatten your navigation structure, meaning that you should restructure your navigation to ensure less clicking from the home page to specific product pages or articles; as each click is also an extra step for a search engine spider to take. The deeper something is buried, the less “important” it may appear to be in terms of ranking calculation.