The Black Friday offer is not valid for Renewals or Transfer and will run through 28 Nov 2011 or until all 10,000 domain registrations are gone, whichever comes first!

If you’re looking at cheap web hosting in Singapore, read my review on www.timmguru.com/2010/10/godaddy-singapore-web-hosting.html. I think it’s a good deal for those who want to set up a new website for personal interest or home-based business.

Not exactly.

The Difference: Infrastructure vs Services

Strictly speaking, cloud computing refers to the infrastructure, as in a network of data centres. Web hosting is a service which could be provided on a single server, a group of servers in a data centre or a network of data centre spread across different geographical locations.

Here’s an excellent article which explains…

The difference between Web Hosting and Cloud Computing

One advantage of using cloud computing to host your website is the reliability of the hardware. Also you can rent a cloud server at hourly rate and set it almost instantly.

Saving Development Cost with Cloud Hosting at Hourly Rate

I have been using Rackspace Cloud Hosting and saved a bundle on development cost. However, Rackspace’s data centres are located in the United States and took a little bit longer to access from Singapore. It would be really nice to be able to rent a Cloud Server located in Singapore and save on time too.

Here’s a quick web hosting review of the GoDaddy’s Economy Plan on their Singapore-based servers.

If you live in South East Asia, India and Australasia this got to be good news to you. Now you have one more reliable web hosting option at very affordable pricing.

GoDaddy means Huge Storage Space, Unlimited Bandwidth

GoDaddy web hosting offers you a lot more storage space(10GB) and unlimited bandwidth for as little as USD3.99/month (12-month prepaid).

  ==> Unlimited Hosting at GoDaddy.com!

This is probably one of the cheapest web hosting plans with unlimited bandwidth you can get for a Singapore-based data center. All the other local hosting plans will cost you at least SGD5/month for a paltry 0.1GB storage and 3GB bandwidth.

Fast Local Access Speed: 25ms Ping

And you get very fast speed when accessing Go Daddy APAC data center. I know because I have been hosting one of my new website with GoDaddy Singapore data center for the past 10 days.

Affordable VPS Hosting Plans

Now that I am quite happy with Go Daddy shared web hosting, I really hope to upgrade to a $29.99/mo VPS hosting so that I can migrate my other domains to GoDaddy Singapore VPS plan.

And you get an even better deal on domain registration and web hosting when you sign up as a reseller.

With more people spending more time on the Internet and increasing online marketing activities, web hosting, be it shared, VPS, dedicated servers or cloud hosting is expected to grow exponentially in Asia over the next 5 years.

So don’t wait, go get the Unlimited Hosting at GoDaddy.com! now.

Disclosure: I receive compensation when you purchased products and services via the affiliate links in this page.

It’s been 2 years since I started using VPS hosting and I confirmed it’s not a good idea to use cheap VPS hosting at rock bottom price. Since May 2007, I’ve tested more than 7 VPS hosting companies and the worst was that cheap VPS hosting in Singapore.

VPS Hosting vs Reseller Hosting

Why use VPS hosting when reseller hosting is easier to manage and cheaper? Well, I have listed the following advantages to let you decided which hosting is suitable to your need and budget.

Advantages of Reseller Hosting

• Low cost. Starts from US$6.95 per month
• Perfect for static websites

Advantages of using VPS Hosting

• High cost. Starts from US$19.95 per month
• Secure, stable and more reliable
• Ideal for dynamic websites which require database
• Root access. It’s just like having your own server.

Static HTML Websites Are Dying

Generally, you can have tons of domains on reseller hosting plan if you do not have website that are dynamic and require MySQL database e.g. WordPress, Joomla or Drupal. However, not many people are building websites with static HTML nowadays unless you are a 1-page sales letter Internet marketer.

If you still insist on using reseller hosting because of the cheaper price then I’ll recommend you to check out Hostgator. I don’t use Hostgator reseller hosting personally but I have several friends who are satisfied with their service so far.

Hostgator Coupon Code:
TIMMGURU25OFF

My Very Own VPS Hosting Comparison

After using more than 7 web hosting companies which specialized in VPS hosting over the past 2 years and read hundred of VPS hosting reviews on blogs and forums, I guess I am ready to offer you my recommendation.

More importantly, I have been using this VPS hosting service for several months now. So far, no complaint. I really appreciate the ultra fast response to support ticket and the recent free upgrade to double the RAM to 768MB and bandwidth to 1000GB per month.

Before I tell you who is this preferred web host, let’s take a look at my criteria when selecting a VPS web hosting company:

1. Gauranteed RAM: 512MB or more
2. Price per month: US$50 or less
3. Hard disk space: 20GB or more
4. Bandwidth: 500GB or more
5. OS: Linux/Centos 5.x
6. Fully managed
7. Control panel: CPanel/WHM

Initially I also wanted the server to be based in Singapore but it was impossible to find one that offered 512MB for less than US$50, there is really no cheap VPS hosting in Singapore at all. So I have to make do with the slow connection speed and used VPS hosting based in the USA.

Currently, the US-based server is consistently giving me transfer rate at 2500kbps download and 380kbps upload. And here’s the result of the most recent speed test I did on the server: 3195/755 kbps.

VPS Speed Test – East Coast Data Center

The connection speed may not be as fast as compared with a Singapore-based VPS hosting, but I rather have 100% uptime than intermittent downtime at 10Mbps/800kbps. I believe most users of my website are used to accessing websites which are based in the USA.

VPS Speed Test – West Coast Data Center

For Singapore and other part of Asia Pacific, the new data center situated in California offers speedier access.

If You were to ask for my VPS Hosting Recommendation

You can’t go wrong with a 30-day money back guarantee for a powerful VPS with 960mb of RAM at only US$35 per month.

Go find out more information at webbynode’s blog – Beta Testing – join the club!

And here’s what people saying about the webbynode free VPS servers…

• Fabio Sasso abduzeedo.com
• Scotty Yang hostingfu.com
• JimmuVu justtalkaboutweb.com
• Alex Santos alexsantos.info
• Daniel Lapoint threevolve.org
• Joseph Buford josephburford.com

Please note that VPS web hosting is quite different from cloud computing. VPS is sharing a web server whereas cloud computing is sharing the resources of several servers or even data centers from different geographic locations.

Speed and Reliability Come at a Price

If you are looking for fast and reliable VPS hosting, you will have to pay for it. Here’s my VPS Hosting Recommendation.

VPS hosting is more secure and reliable than shared hosting. However, the technical level required to use VPS hosting is quite overwhelming for me.

WHM and CPanel are so much easier to use. And I am so used to AWSTAT…

Virtual Private Servers or VPS hosting is likened to a poor man’s dedicated server. A VPS server makes use virtualization software to slice up a server resources e.g. CPU time, RAM, disk storage and etc. The popular server virtualization is Virtuozzo. The other alternative is Xen, which is open-source.

The VPS hosting that I am using is powered by Xen. Why? Because it is cheaper and the data center is situated in Singapore. Although it is affordable for me to get started with a virtual dedicated server, the VPS hosting package does not have WHM/Cpanel and AWSTAT!

Your Web Server Location and SEO

One of the important criteria for my VPS is server location. I want a server in a data center located in Singapore. One reason is for the speed and the other reason is for SEO. Google is serving results based on where your server is located. So for websites that are for Singapore-based traffic, I need to have the server situated in Singapore.

To find out more about my findings on why location of your web server is important to your search ranking results, read my previous post on Google is Serving Localized Search Results Listing.

The first thing I’m going to do in the new year is to migrate to WordPress. I will probably migrate my web hosting server too. And will delete other none blog pages. Yes, I have many pages in this website.

Over the next few days, maybe weeks, I will need to come up with a new design suitable for me to customize with my limited knowledge of WordPress template commands. I could have use it as is. But, I am the SEO expert, right? So I need to tweak the template so that it is as search engine friendly as possible.

I have done some work on Shi Hengcheong’s Blog and learned how to have individualized title tag, description and keywords meta tags. However, with this blog I may need to do a bit more. As you can see this blog is more complicated. The layout of the main page is different from the post item pages and archive pages.

Anyway, I’ll have to figure it out. Wish me luck!

Happy New Year!

One quick and easy excuse would be Yahoo algorithm is faulty!!! Is it really like that?

Ok, here’s the true story. The server hosting www.indexfuturestrading.com was down for 3 days just prior to my discovery that it went to no. 1 on Yahoo search. And it took me another 2 days to fixed up all the pages before the website was up again on another server. Total of 5 days off-line – ranking sure suffered!

On top of that, the new web hosting server has different configuration and so I could not just restore the files from the backup but had to rebuild all of the TE pages. In the process of rebuilding, I changed the layout and move the link to the TE generated pages deeper into the directory.

The homepage was also redesigned. I listened to the “experts” advice and remove all the “hidden” links to the TE pages on the homepage. Then this week, the ranking plummeted from no. 1 to no. 19.

However,we must understand that this website is barely 3 months old and already made it to the top 20!