It is not unusual for individuals who are busy with their day to day work to overlook which registrar the domain was registered with. The Domain Renewal Group try to take advantage of this fact. They feel it is quite legitimate to catch people off guard and scam them for money. A quick google search on their company turned up lots of information about this scam. In fact all the results I see in Google are complaints about this company rather than any services they provide.

If you read the letter carefully, you realise that they are using an approach called slamming, which tricks you into switching your domains to another company. Specifically, they are highlighting each domain that is due to expire and that I risks associated with losing the domain name unless you renew with them. They don’t highlight any risks such as losing all your email and website when you switch over to them.

Although the letter states that it is not a bill, it has been designed to look like an invoice. An interesting aside is that they offer other variants of your domain name in the hope they can SCAM you registered other domains too.

If you receive a letter like this from Domain Renewal Group or from anyone else contact your own registrar or the person who maintains your website before parting with any money.

The existing geo-targeting practices for search and display media focus on targeting by country, state, region and city. This is all based on IP addresses many of which are dynamic or inaccurate.

You can however custom target by entering a street address and defining a radial boundary a mini Google Maps interface. Getting down to detail there is the option of using longitude/latitude coordinates which can be as accurate to within 100 meters.

So, how do you put in place an alternate solution bypassing the inherent limitations of IP targeting? In search, we often develop a second campaign, ideally with a larger targeting radius and implement geo-specific keywords. While the geo-targeted campaign may have the keyword “pizza” this may only hit a portion of the intended geo-targeted audience. To reach the remaining audience, we typically extend the geo-target radius within a completely new campaign with extended keywords such as “Fitzroy pizza”.

But let’s look at how this works when we use IP address location as the basis of location based targeting.

Google uses MaxMind’s database for mapping IP addresses to a geographical location. They claim it is 99% accurate. What is in the fine print, is that it is 99% accurate in determining the country. This figure will not improve, but drop dramatically with the rise in mobile devices, wireless connections.

Accuracy is also defined as being within 40km which means Melbourne and Frankston are local to each other. So searching for a local Pizza Hut while you are in Frankston might give you Universal Pizza in Lygon Street. Still, probably worth the drive as their pizzas are great.

But from an end user point of view, is this considered local? Well no, not to me, I consider local to be within 5km. Like the ads for local businesses in your local newspaper.

The real happening place for location-based targeted marketing is clearly in mobile and mobile applications; in particular, social media applications that emphasize check-ins and connect you to places and people nearby. There is a world of difference, opportunity, and data between marketing location to where a computer resides and marketing location to the person who self identifies, checks-in, and announces their preferences and next stops.

Google has emphasized that location is an immediate and important relevance enhancer. However as the technology continues to evolve it remains both a limiting factor and a promise. HTML5 can allow permission-based, location-targeted ad delivery to consumers browsing on the mobile Web. Currently, it is supported in Chrome and Firefox, but not in Internet Explorer. The use of location-based data remains a point of debate, and just last week Apple posted a warning in its developer forums that if they use location-based data primarily for targeting ads the app will be rejected. Many apps already ask your permission to use your GPS location for app functionality, like the Google toolbar and Foursquare. You can even optionally geotag your tweets.

Likewise, the sharp increase in smartphone adoption all over the world raises both opportunities and challenges. Not only are more people using smartphones, but the devices now cover more of their needs and their day with a multitude of rich, engaging applications – many GPS driven.

Today the database at MaxMind states that it is 83% accurate for the USA and 62% for Australia. I believe this number is overstated and will only get worse which is why the data has not been updated since 2008.

All this makes geographical location services based on IP address unpractical and obsolete.

Let’s say for example that a server hard drive is 80GB and has 1200GB of bandwidth. The hosting company has a look around and decides that to be competitive they need to offer plans with 2GB of disk space and 40GB bandwidth. With these figures they can only offer 30 hosting packages per server. This leaves quite a bit of wasted disk space and after a few months the company will probably notice that their users aren’t using all of the available bandwidth. Because of this the company then assumes that it can safely sell at least 10 more packages on the one server. If the original number of customers already covers general costs then the extra packages provided by overselling are pure profit.

The advantage of overselling for the host is that they make more money off each server than they otherwise normally would be able to. The advantage for the client is that this extra revenue is usually transferred on (at least in theory) by cheaper hosting packages with more features.

The problem is that these features are often ‘smoke and mirrors’. A few users would be able to use their entire allotment without any trouble, but if every single client were to build their website up to maximum capacity the host wouldn’t be able to handle the sudden increase in demand without adding extra hard drives, buying more bandwidth, or perhaps even another server. This would most likely lead to a fair amount of congestion and maybe even downtime.

Web hosts aren’t going to advertise the fact that they oversell. It’s not something that will gain them customers and it’s likely to drive away a few. In general however, they’re likely to get away with it without any real problems. The reason the idea even exists is that it is true that the majority of websites don’t use all of the space that’s allocated to them. The problem is that it’s not a particularly honest way of dealing with clients.

Overselling will generally not be a problem unless a host gets too greedy and ends up selling much more than they could possibly provide for. On the other hand, it’s not even necessary as the host can usually make enough money to make ends meet without overselling. It will generally be quite difficult for you to find out whether or not a host oversells unless they specifically advertise it, or they’re well known for having problems due to excessive overselling.

Just make sure you do some research and choose a reliable host, not necessarily the one that appears to offer ridiculous amounts of bandwidth or disk space for far too little money.

As my grandfather used to say, if something is too good to be true …, it usually is. First sniff and then review your choices.

This factor you can control by choosing a hosting company with the fastest speeds available. Have you ever looked at the same video on 2 different websites and found 1 of them loaded much slower than the other? This is because the bandwidth speed was lower with the slower server. So if you have a website that will have photos, images or videos or other speed intensive items then it’s important to find a hosting company with high bandwidth speeds. If most of your viewers will be from Australia then choose a fast Australian hosting company, but be prepared to pay for it.

When in Australia your internet can access Australian hosting servers slightly faster. For many the difference is barely noticeable as we are taling about fractions of a second, but it can be annoying to have a website load too slowly. The cause may well be attributed to the site being hosted in another country, however well designed and optimized websites (without excessive pictures, videos etc) will often often be the major bottleneck.

There are a few things to take into consideration when choosing a website host.

Service:

I consider this more important than price. The service difference can be huge. If something goes wrong with your site you need to be able to contact your hosting company quickly and get it remedied fast. Things will go down from time to time as this is a fact of life. Your hosting company needs to treat downtime as a priority ahead of sales.

Disk Space

As a general rule, a single website page should not be more than about 100KB, including all images. Remember that most people who visit your site will be using a modem to connect to the Internet and if your pages take too long to load, they will simply leave and go to another site. Whilst there are, obviously, exceptions for sites aimed specifically at broadband users, most web sites do not fit into this niche category.

Working with 100KB as guide, a 10-page website would require approximately 1MB of disk space.

The cost of disk space does not vary on where your site is hosted. This is because hosting hardware costs are fairly similar around the world. Watch out for hosting providers that do not specify this and may charge you per web page. On the other hand, watch out for providers who offer unlimited disk space. They usually have acceptable usage policies that over-ride this, i.e if you use more disk space that is considered reasonable (whatever that is) your account will get suspended or terminated.

Bandwidth

In the most simple of terms an analogy using water flowing through pipes gives the easiest explanation of bandwidth, the wider the pipes (i.e. higher bandwidth) the more water can be moved per second (or data).

So Bandwidth is the amount of data passage per second and is generally measured in Gbps (Gigabits per second).

It is easy to confuse bandwidth, i.e. the speed of your connection with data allowance, which is the amount of data that can be transferred to and from your server or web site per month and is measured in Gb. Most web hosts actually incorrectly use the term bandwidth in place of data transfer allowance, and it is important when choosing a web host, or a web hosting plan that you have a rough idea of the amount data transfer you will require.

Put simply each time somebody looks at a page from your site they download that page from your server, using up some of your data transfer allowance, if your average page size is 100kb and each of your 100 visitors a day looks at say 4 pages then per day you are using 40Mb which equates to a data transfer of 1.2Gb per month. Unfortunately customers visiting your site are not the only ones to use up your data transfer, sending and receiving email, uploading new pages to your server, and believe it or not GoogleBot, MSN Bot and the Yahoo! Robot to name but a few of the countless spiders out there, all use up a portion of your data transfer depending on how many of your pages they spider. In-fact the various web spiders out there can use up a significant amount of your data transfer especially when it is in it’s infancy as they attempt to categorise it for production in organic search results sometimes spidering your web site up to 10 times a day. It is possible to tell these spiders not to crawl your site, not to crawl specific pages or not to follow specific links but that is beyond the scope of this discussion, and generally they are your friends because it is these spiders which will get you listed in the major search engines and ultimately drive customers to your site.

For really cheap hosting providers the trick of the trade here is called Over Selling. Think of it like providing a 1 inch thick water pipe to a small number of people in a town, lets say 10 people. Through this 1 inch thick water pipe a maximum flow 1 litre per second is possible determined by the bandwidth. When only 10 people are connected to your water pipe the water will be flowing fast most of the time. When you then sell this to another 100 people, imagine what happens during the morning shower rush. They get some water, but it will be flowing very slowly.

The same analogy can be used for ADSL in Australia. You may order an 1.5MB ADSL line from Telstra. Telstra descibes this 1.5Mb ADSL as super fast, while the rest of the developed world uses 24MB. Yet even on this super fast 1.5M ADSL you will get nowhere near this speed 99% of the time because they oversell and put many subscribers on the same circuit.

Bandwidth costs money for providers. And in Australia Bandwidth costs over 20 times more compared to USA. We largely have our monolpoly telecommunications provider Telstra to thank for this. Despite their huge profits, the investment in the network bandwidth has been minimal. The wholesale costs have beed steady over the last 10 years, while in the USA they fall substantially year on year.

This forces many hosting providers to limit bandwidth and data allowances.

The lower your Bandwidth provided by your web hosting provider, the slower your site will download to users’ computers, irrespective of how fast their internet connections are or whether they have their site hosted in Australia or USA. If multiple users are accessing your site at once, they may find that they experience extremely slow, or no, connectivity.

Data Allowance

Again a popular misconception among many people, as well as web hosting providers, is that bandwidth and data transfer are the same. This is probably because they are very closely linked, but for anyone who is subscribed to a web hosting service, knowing the difference can save both time and money.

Put simply, bandwidth is the quantity of data that can be transferred from a website at any one time, while data transfer is the amount transferred over a period of time. This is where the water and pipes come in. A pipe would be bandwidth—the bigger the pipe, the more water could pass through. However, data transfer would be the amount of water in the pipe in a month, for example. Essentially, data transfer is the use of bandwidth.

Data transfer allowances control how much data can be transferred from your site over a certain time. For example, a web hosting provider may impose a limit of 2 gigabytes of data per month. If your website exceeds this, it may be taken offline until the next month.

For customers who really want to make use of the Internet this allowance can dramatically increase.
In particular emails where the trend is for people to rely on email more and more including file attachments and on-line document storage.

Unfortunatelly Australia is way behind in this area. The value for money in USA in this area is in the order of 20 to 30 fold. If you want your site hosted in Australia be prepared to have very little Data Allowance, often less than 10GB.

In my opinion this overriding factor makes the choice to host in USA very simple based on value for money.

Price

It is important not to have to pay twice the going rate for the same disk space, speed and data allowance.
Choosing between a company offering $5.95 AUD per month for slower service, slower download speeds and loaded servers… or $19.95 AUD per month for faster service, fastest available download speeds and optimized servers and good software ?

In my opinion, you should host in Australia if value for money or budget is not a concern.