Granted, this is a web hosting company so, for the most part, you expect this blog to be primarily about web hosting. Occasionally, an event takes place and I feel the need to say something about it because to ignore it seems patently ridiculous. George Carlin dying is one of those events.
I don’t know when I first heard Carlin - it seems like I’ve just always known who he was and he’s always made me laugh. I do know I first saw him on HBO, and was amazed that he was saying the things that he was saying. Other people have HBO Boxing Nights where everything stopped for the big fight - I had Carlin HBO special nights, where everything stopped. I would sit with college friends and drink, then later I would watch it on the small screen in my own apartment, and later I would snuggled down before my LED Big Screen with my husband and dog in suburbia. Most of my adult life, Carlin was there to re-phrase the obvious, point out the absurd, and make me laugh about it.
So, screw web hosting for a day.
Today I want to share one of my favorite bits Carlin did which is probably a little lesser well known. The following is “Modern Man”:
I’m really going to miss him, and honor one of the most mainstream radicals we’ve ever had the honor to be touched by.
I’ve been pre-washed, pre-cooked, pre-heated,
pre-screened, pre-approved, pre-packaged,
post-dated, freeze-dried, double-wrapped
and vacuum-packed.
Most folks know that DrakNet has worked with the Bonneville Environmental Foundation to “green” our company. Well, we’re also on their mailing list and we got an email yesterday letting us know that Jack Johnson has also chosen BEF to green his 2008 World Tour.
Jack’s gone a step further, though and we wanted to tell you about it since it gives you a chance to raise money for BEF just by getting educated - he’s got a number of video ads on his web site located here addressing a number of issues, and if you click this link and watch the video:
Video Title: Bonneville Environmental Foundation Ad
Date Added: 06/11/2008
Community Group: Bonneville Environmental Foundation
Areas of Interest: Climate Change, Ocean / River / Watersheds, Renewable Energy
Video Language: English
Video Duration: 1:51
on his web site all the way through, the Jack Johnson All At Once charitable foundation will donate $1 to BEF.
In addition, any BEF Green Tag orders placed online by September 14 that reference Jack Johnson will be matched by his foundation. In other words, your purchases will have double the benefit to the environment!
For those of you who live in the Pacific Northwest, you can visit the BEF Blog ( blog.b-e-f.org) to learn more about how you can win a free pair of Jack Johnson tickets for the August 20 show in St. Helens, Ore.
Nope, we don’t host Jack Johnson - but we do listen to him an awful lot while working on the servers!
Stop emailing me and asking me for a Dedicated IP address because you read that this utterly fantabuolous guru swears that you can pull one over on Google and make them think you have your own server, it will make your site faster, grant you first choice in resources, and in general just immediately rocket you to PR 10.
After I stop laughing, I will tell you no.
Every domain name that has a web site on it or a computer or network at the end of it has an IP address assigned to it. An IP address is the “real” address of the website or server or computer or network. Domain names came along because it wasn’t exactly fun to try and remember long IP numbers like 123.456.789.101. Most of the time now in shared hosting when there are a bunch of sites sharing one server those same sites will share one single IP address.
There’s a reason that’s more popular, and it’s not “laziness” or “ease” on the part of the hosting companies. IP4 addresses are running out, fast. (See IPv4 Address Exhaustion on Wikipedia for more info on it). The American Registry for Internet Numbers is in charge of doling out those precious IP addresses, and now, they make you justify exactly why you need them.
As SEO (Search Engine Optimization, or better known as “trying to pull one over on Google so Google will like you better”) has grown, there are persistent myths flying around that paying for a Dedicated IP on a shared server will somehow get you better rankings on the search engines. A whole host of completely bogus myths have popped up surrounding the mythical dedicated IP address, and while I can’t say for sure whether Google really cares whether you’re on a shared IP or a Dedicated one since what they use for PR rankings is proprietary and they’re pretty tight-lipped about it, I can tell you that some of the justification and reasoning being thrown around by the “experts” who apparently haven’t got a clue about how a web server functions is just bunk.
This article written in 2007 touches on a lot of the more common myths that are still flying around, and so we’re going to use it as a springboard to tell you why these suppositions are horse pucky.
One of the reasons using a dedicated IP can have a positive influence on rankings is because the engines take into consideration how fast your site loads in comparison to other sites. If you’re sharing your IP with 500 other Web sites, the server, like all good customer services departments, will deliver the files in the order they received them. If there are 10 people ahead of your visitors in line, they’re going to have to wait, resulting in a slower page load times and frustrated users.
If there are ten people hitting the server waiting in line to use Apache to view a web site, they’re going to be in line whether you have a dedicated IP or a shared IP. A dedicated IP doesn’t get you your own Apache server or anything like your own dedicated server. It just gets you your own special number on the same server. You still have to wait in line for services that are shared just like everyone else. The server does not load pages based on whether you paid extra to have your own super special IP address; the idea that it does is a myth that seemingly won’t die.
There’s only one way your own dedicated IP address will get your site priority service on the machine - if your IP address sends people to your own machine where you are the only one on it.
Sharing an IP address also doesn’t allow you to control who your neighbors are. If you’re sitting on the same IP as a gambling site, a porn ring, a Viagra dealer, and a priest, and one of those addresses gets banned by the search engines, you’re banned too. Search engine’s don’t just ban domains, they ban whole IP ranges.
Google removes sites themselves, not IP ranges. The only place that this actually comes into play is with RBLs (Realtime Blackhole Lists) and having a Dedicated IP doesn’t get you out of those consequences, either, since your mail comes off the server’s IP regardless of whether you have your own Dedicated IP or not. The way you avoid this is by not hosting with a host that would host the gambling site, porn ring, and Viagra dealer in the first place - or a host that’s vigilant in monitoring and responding to issues on the server.
Another issue to note is that the slower your server, the fewer pages the spiders will be able to index on each visit (they don’t want to crash it). Fewer pages indexed equal fewer pages in the SERP, which decreases your ability to properly theme your site, which in turn will hurt your rankings. I think the connection is pretty clear.
A Dedicated IP will not speed up the server. If it would, we’d bend ourselves over backwards working to get all of you Dedicated Ips so the server would magically hum and purr, rather than, oh, buying really good hardware and tweaking configurations all the time. A Dedicated IP does not equal a Dedicated server, and a Dedicated IP on a shared hosting server is not the web hosting world’s equivalent of a DisneyWorld FastPass.
If you are on shared hosting, you still have to share. Period. If your server is so poor that crawling will slow down or crash the server, that will happen whether you have a Dedicated IP or a shared IP.
If you find out you’re not on a dedicated IP, we recommend calling your hosting company and asking them to switch you over. There may be a small fee, but it’s nominal and is worth the charge.
Any hosting company worth their salt will not provide an IP to you simply because you’ve bought into the myth that somehow Google will find your content far more dazzling simply because you finagled your way into a Dedicated IP. “SEO” is not a justification to ARIN to grant you a Dedicated IP, and considering the run on IP addresses for legitimate purposes and not because they’re seen as fairy dust that will somehow make your site faster, you won’t get one just because you want one.
The best way to get good ranking with Google is the same as it’s always been - create a good site. Have and offer something people want. Create original content that people want to read. Do it the old fashioned way - tweak your meta-tags, submit your URL, and work at it.
The best way to get your PR up is still the hardest - good, old-fashioned work.
Update after publication:
I’d like to thank an un-named source at The Google itself that pointed out that Google has, in fact, openly dispelled this myth publicly back in 2002 in a Slashdot Interview with Google Director of Technology Craig Silverstein.
5) Google and IP address.
by Anonymous Coward
Why in this day and age does google continue to penalize sites that are virtual hosted? With ip addresses becoming harder to get/justify every day why does google discount the relevance of links that don’t come from a unique ip address. Please don’t just deny it, I think the Internet community deserves an explanation.
Craig answers:
I can’t just deny it? What are my other choices? [:)] Actually, Google handles virtually hosted domains and their links just the same as domains on unique IP addresses. If your ISP does virtual hosting correctly, you’ll never see a difference between the two cases. We do see a small percentage of ISPs every month that misconfigure their virtual hosting, which might account for this persistent misperception–thanks for giving me the chance to dispel a myth!
Thanks, Mr. Un-Named Source - I love to be able to publish something from 2002 that makes a whole lot of people that have been selling snake oil for 6 years about, especially when I didn’t know that ya’ll had gone on record saying this was BS.
That means that you are environmentally friendly and you fall under what is a scam in my opinion with the whole carbon offset project.
jumps out at me. Ouch, Mitch.
There seems to be a misconception regarding Green Tags (Renewable Energy Certificates) and Carbon Emissions Trading in that some folks seem to think “buying offsets” either through certificates or through cap and trade is the same thing, and that’s not actually the case. For one thing, cap and trade is an enforced trading scheme set up by governments to bring down carbon emissions where companies trade their allotments among themselves, so if you can buy enough credits and someone didn’t use all theirs, you can pollute more - renewable energy certificates are an entirely voluntary program that anyone can participate in.
We purchase our REC’s from BEF, and if you visit their site you can see exactly where the energy that we buy comes from. Again, this is voluntary, and its a megawatt for megawatt replacement, not a “carbon emissions trading” scheme where we’re allowed to pollute a certain amount and then buy more if we need go over. The way this works is that we purchased whatever energy we need (which, since we lease servers, is factored in to our fees to the NOC) and then we buy it again, clean, if we are unable to buy it clean initially - our home office is powered by 100% renewable energy because we pay a premium to do so to our electric company so we don’t re-buy that. Our NOC is not, and so we re-purchase our portion of that energy to be fed into the grid so that someone, somewhere, will use the solar energy we paid for when they would have chosen or had to use non-renewable energy instead.
REC’s are a simply economics game - for every REC that’s purchased, a renewable energy plant gets money to sell the more expensive energy to an electric company without their paying a premium rate, and their purchase price is offset or negated by our choice to voluntarily purchase it. The plant can then charge less for the more expensive renewable energy, and someone else somewhere else gets to pay no more than they are willing for their energy and get the more expensive, premium solar energy we purchased because we paid for it for them. If more people do this, renewable energy demand will go up, prices will go down, and more clean energy is put into the grid to replace non-renewable energy. It is an entirely market-driven solution - those willing to pay more cover the rear of those who won’t, and it doesn’t matter whether you have direct access to an electric company to do it with.
The argument that people can pay more and sin as well is something that perplexes me - for a small company, I can tell you that buying solar to cover just what we have running is not exactly cheap. In addition, we chose solar and not wind or wind/solar combo certificates even though it was much more expensive because we don’t want to feel like our money is going into chopping up birds and if given the choice, we’d prefer solar.
I personally have no incentive to choose more power-hungry servers, or drive more, or pollute more when I have to re-buy the energy again to cover our usage - I would venture a guess that most web hosting companies that attempt to go carbon neutral have the same motivating factor. It’s not cheap to be green, and the less energy you use in general the less you have to buy twice to green yourself, so it has a two-fold effect.
And let me tell you, at a time when paying for oil-derived energy is rapidly rising, it can be a bit un-fun to have to pay your electric bill twice in the same month, which we have done every single month for a year now.
I have to admit I’m surprised when anyone calls Green Hosting a “scam” - even if a hosting company undertakes purchasing Green Tags solely as a marketing angle, and they don’t recycle at home, and the color green and the carbon neutral claim appeared only because of market forces and not because of any real specific desire to help out the earth, that’s not necessarily a bad thing as long as it’s a legitimate and honest purchase. It’s certainly better than the many hosts who are doing absolutely nothing at all.
We personally didn’t do it as a marketing angle - we freecycle extensively, recycle extensively, purchase used whenever and where ever we can so that we don’t contribute more than we have to for what we need. When we go camping, it’s in a tent and not a fossil-fuel burning RV (even though, admittedly, I long for an air conditioner in the Texas heat sometimes), and live in a small house instead of constantly trading up for bigger (and more expensive to heat and cool). We have no offices, and never will - there’s no point. Instead of paying for advertising, we participate in Kiva and we have had a significant and extensive non-profit program since the day we opened. I personally know where our motivations lie, and I’m not really very worried that our clients are going to suddenly question our commitment to the environment. Since our only new business tends to come from word of mouth, I don’t tend to feel that I need to be worried people will think we’re scamming. And if ya do, fine.
What I do worry about is that this idea that green hosting and green tags is a “scam” will become prevalent in the industry and that people who would normally host somewhere that claims green will avoid them if this idea of it all being a “scam” becomes entrenched. It also worries me that other companies will avoid the green designation altogether, or worse, refuse to participate in the REC programs for fear of being branded scam artists by others in the industry.
We grew as a company before we stuck the “We’re Green” badge on our site, and I have no doubt that we would have continued to grow regardless of whether we had done it, or claimed it - the designation seems to make our clients happy, and the fact that we’ve done what we done makes our clients happy. Since it is something we’re doing, and since it’s true, it is something we have a right to claim. Any company that buys their energy twice to support renewable energy deserves to make that claim.
I’ll admit its disconcerting, though, to see people claim it’s a scam because of the wider implications of people rejecting it outright and companies refusing to participate.
So, we’ve been asked a lot of times over the years where the names of our company and our servers came from, and since I haven’t had enough coffee this morning to do a good tip post yet, I thought I’d make a post about that.
DrakNet doesn’t really stand for anything or imply anything all that interesting - in 1996 and 1997, we were essentially a micro-hosting company without a name. In 1998, my son was born, and in the summer of 1998, I decided that the hosting clients and hosting services needed their own identity. Like everyone else, I searched for that very short name that hadn’t been taken yet, and looked for wildly varying combinations of words. I finally settled on drak.net which is simply a modification of my son’s middle name, which is Drake, without the e. It was short, to the point, and an open identity since it wasn’t a “real” word.
Our servers are all named after Pokemon - we currently have Squirtle, Blastoid, Warturtle, and Mudkip. When we upgraded all our servers in 2006, the above-named child was very into Pokemon, and was also taking an interest in the company that was named after him. Since its a family owned business, we decided to let him come up with the new server-naming scheme (which had been mighty boring, with host1 and host2, etc.) and he came up with a Pokemon scheme as well as the specific Pokemon names that would be assigned to the servers.
Yes, for those of you that are Pokemon fans, Warturtle should be Wartortle, and I spelled it wrong. Cut me a break here, he was 7 and I didn’t know squat about Pokemon other than the fact that we have cards everywhere. It sounded like “warturtle” to me when he said it.
As for our logo, it’s a symbolic representation of a dragon - dragons were originally all over our site, but we toned it down over the years. We still wanted a logo that somewhat represented our original dragon-focus, and so we came up with a very simple logo-like triangle.
For accounts, most were not named after something with the exception of the Jaz and Drake accounts. The Jaz account was named after Jaz Gordon, one of our clients, after we asked for input from folks as to what account allotments that would like to see, and she came up with such a complete and exacting list that we used it exactly and she came up with it, and then named it after her. The Drake account was, obviously, named after the kiddo and we thought that it would be the most popular account, being the median specs offered - but it turned out Jaz was more on the ball than she knew and the “Jaz” package has continued to be our #1 package for 8 years.
We’ve got some interesting feedback on the blog - while on the phone. Apparently, more of ya’ll are reading then we anticipated! Apparently, there’s micro-blogging, too, and we’ve been told we should do that. So, we’ll give it a shot.
By request, we’ve signed up for Twitter so you can be subject to even more of our mindless banter… and, well, folks on DrakNet can find each other, or check in with us and see what we’re doing. If we remember to use it. We’ll try.
I read Web Hosting Talk religiously. It’s a great place to stay plugged in to the twists and turns of the web hosting industry. Since its inception, Web Hosting Talk is where the web hosting savvy come to dish and bitch, and anyone can learn a lot just by stopping by there.
Compared to Dreamhost and Lunarpages and Bluehost, we’re pretty small potatoes in the industry. Granted, we’re not that small - at the moment, we host about 1750 domains. But, we’re not some three-headed corporate monster driving the industry, we’re the little quiet guy in the corner humbly scooting along as we always have. We generally don’t advertise, don’t run around begging people to sign up for our affiliate program, don’t invest a $100 payback to bribe someone for a client, and we don’t send staff in to make fake reviews on forums, or create fake sites telling everyone just how great we are.
OK, once we paid money to be #2 on a Top Ten list for a week. I didn’t feel like buying the #1 slot and I was curious as to what it felt like to be on a top ten list. To be honest, it felt skeevy. I knew I’d bought my way on the list. It felt wrong.
A lot of the things in the industry feel all kinds of wrong these days (aside from the fact that there’s almost nowhere to get honest reviews and ratings of any host because nearly every ratings site charges hosts to be on there, and many hosts pay companies to plant fake reviews), and one of them is these allotments that are all over the damn place. I literally cannot stand them. It’s not even a jealousy thing. It’s just a disgust thing.
I personally will not offer a shared hosting allotment that’s larger than reasonable specs on a high end server - it’s a bald faced lie. It’s wrong. I don’t get how companies can do it. I don’t understand how on earth the industry has gone down this road, and a lot of the time I am totally baffled how customers can buy a shared hosting account from a company for $7 a month who’s specs outstrip the server that same company is selling for $200 a month and not have alarm bells go off in their head. It baffles me.
One of the most honest posts I’ve ever seen from a web hosting company was HostGator’s post entitled “Selling Out”, made the day after they raised their account allotments from “crazy to downright insane”. To my chagrin, they caved - to my admiration, they admitted they caved. They decided that they had to remain competitive, the top 5 hosting companies were offering things you could never hope to use, and even though they knew (and were telling you) you’d never used all of it, they felt they had to offer it. I call it the “mythical account allotment”.
It’s a ceiling that doesn’t exist. The number people compare to see what bang they get for their buck? In practicality, they’re essentially meaningless.
First of all, you’ll likely not be one of the 2% that uses a lot of resources. The vast majority of our accounts, regardless of what they’re paying for, never see more usage in space and bandwidth than would fit in a Junior. Second, if you are, your site is likely robust and will process a lot - and you will slow down a server because you’re hogging all the CPU and Memory before you ever get within eyeball distance of any of those allotments that these companies are selling you. They simply don’t exist. They’re not real. It’s a bill of goods. Disk space and bandwidth on these supercharged accounts are totally and completely meaningless. It’s a marketing technique, nothing more. It’s a marketing technique that works because people don’t know.
I think I’m just old school. I believed all that morality crap that they taught me when I was growing up - don’t trick people. Don’t lie to them. Don’t mislead. Don’t be dishonest. Do what you say you’re going to do - at the core of it, all of these account allotments that are being offered drive me crazy because they only work because of one person’s ignorance, and another person being willing to take advantage of that person’s ignorance.
I just hate that.
I have podcast sites serving 100 Gigabytes a month that the server barely notices is there. I have Wordpress sites serving 35 Gigabytes a month that show up in my “Top Ten Resource Users of the Day” list. People don’t yet know that it doesn’t matter how many gigs they serve, and that it really is hard to pack files in a site in Gigs, that what matters is how much they process, and that can’t be quantified - most hosts won’t quantify it. You don’t know - you find out when you get the email from the host saying that they have been the sole determining decider that your site has to go (off completely, or to a server).
And your first thought is “But I’m nowhere near the Terrabye of Bandwidth!”. Yeah, and you were never getting there, either.
It seems unfair to me that popular sites get nuked based on something they cannot see, and that so many hosts deliberately refuse to define. We may be one of the only hosts that have chosen to define cpu, memory, and mysql usage per account in our Terms of Service. It seems unfair that “regular” users base their site’s health on how close they are to their bandwidth limit when that number is meaningless regarding how many resources they’re taking up. Sites don’t get shut down for serving too much bandwidth - they get shut down for using too many resources.
And that’s a number that NONE of these gazillion terrbyte $7 accounts will give you. You can’t see it coming, you can’t feel it coming, and there’s no way you’ll know until it hits you. You’ll think that you can because of those handy dandy graphics in your control panel telling you that you still have another three gazillion terrabytes left. You’ll be wrong.
So, we’re probably going to stay small because we’re not going to go there. To all the people rushing to get their $7 accounts with more bandwidth and disk space than my $600/m servers, we’ll be too expensive, too little for too much money when compared to the leaders in the industry, and we’ll continue to only get clients based on word of mouth because we’re all old school and don’t buy our way onto top ten lists or hire minions to post fake reviews.
Ok, there was that one time, but we didn’t get any orders from it, I swear.
I’m ok being old school - I’m ok just offering a good product for a good price, growing slowly because our clients tell their friends, only advertising by donating free sites to non-profits who kindly stick a button on their site, paying affiliates a token instead of a bribe. I’m very comfortable with the fact that what I say you can use, you can really use, and it’s not a deceptive trick just to get you here (and likewise, I’m ok when you go somewhere else because it’s not what you want and you’d rather pay a few bucks for a gazillion terrabytes of bandwidth you’ll never use). I’m glad that our bandwidth allotments are actually a good indication of how far you can take your site in this environment, in my opinion and in my experience.
The web hosting industry is, admittedly, an entertaining animal. I think considering what it takes to get to the top, I’m happy DrakNet’s existing quietly somewhere near the lower-middle.
As if snagging domain names you just look up wasn’t bad enough, The Web Host Industry News is reporting the Network Solutions is now monetizing subdomains of domain hosted with them even when the domain name itself is in use. The information came from TechCrunch earlier this week when Win Betteridge of GotGame went public with it, and TechCrunch discovered that:
According to a search on DomainTools there are 294,438 sites on the same Network Solutions IP address as GotGame.com.
Only one of those 294,438 sites are presumably the actual GotGame site. When we read the story, we checked the app.gotgame.com site given as the example, and the networksolutionssucks.gotgame.com that TechCrunch grabbed a screenshot of - in three days since the story broke, the site now resolves to a “page not found” - even though there’s really no purpose in 404ing pages that don’t exist and excessive 404’s can certainly hurt a Google page rank.
We really don’t have any desire to use this blog to slam competitors but, frankly, Network Solution has gone so unreasonably beyond the pale as far as corporate arrogance, here, we believe they deserve derision and mocking in as much abundance as the blogosphere can think up.
There are 219 folks on the DrakChat list on Yahoo!® and it is a pretty active list. A few times, we’ve tried to move folks to a forum like everybody else in the entire darn industry - it appears, though, that our clients are determined to be different. They like the list, and they like that it’s off network in case of a crash. So, the list remains.
One of the more important discussions that’s happened in the last few months was a discussion about domain tasting, domain kiting, and domain front running brought to you by your old friends at Network Solutions getting busted being jerks. I won’t even link to them, I’m just that annoyed with them.
In the past six months, we saw an upsurge in hosting orders naming new domain names that when it came time for us to register them they were not available. Now, we’ve seen this before and frankly, usually it was a case of PEBCAK (problem exists between chair and keyboard) and a situation where someone a bit newer to what all this web hosting stuff was either didn’t do a whois to see if the domain was available, or did something they though was similar to a whois (like simply typed the domain in the browser and assuming that if it didn’t resolve it wasn’t available), or something along those lines.
Network Solutions changed that assumption. They have admitted to holding any domain name looked up on their availability checker so that it cannot be registered by any other registrar, forcing people that wish to buy the domain name they looked up to purchase through Network Solutions - who still charge $35 per year, a price that has not come down since registrar competition was instituted. They claim to be doing this to thwart domain tasters that seek to monetize domain names, or hold them for ransom - perhaps feeling that holding them for a $35 ransom is the lesser of two evils.
It is ironic that they are guilty of domain tasting with a stated reason being they are trying to thwart domain tasting, which also has the side effect of forcing people to do business with them simply because they used a free resource on their site to check availability - a free resource that doesnot openly list any disclaimer that by simply checking availability, the domain name will be held and will only be able to be registered at Network Solutions. There is absolutely no notice to inform the consumer at all.
So, don’t ever check domain availability at Network Solutions, unless you have some burning desire to pay $35 a year to register your domain name. (There has been some argument/insinuation that GoDaddy is guilty of this as well, but at least they’re cheaper.)
company. Well, we’re also on their mailing list and we got an email yesterday letting us know that 
