We often get asked “Why isn’t my website showing up on Google searches?”

For a large majority of internet users, Google is the internet.
Therefore; if your website is not in Google, then your website effectively doesn’t exist!
While not necessarily accurate, this is a viewpoint many people have.

In this post we will cover two important aspects of the relationship between your website and Google.

1. How do I get my site on Google?

You may or may not of heard about search engine “spiders”, these spiders crawl the internet as a spider crawls around it’s web.
These spiders are no more than intricate computer programs that visit every website they find.
Once your site has been visited by one of these spiders your pages will begin to be indexed in Google’s search results.

The question is, how do they know your website exists to visit it?

There are a few ways to ensure Google’s spiders know your website exists.

1. Probably the best way for Google to find your site is through a link on someone’s website. However this can be difficult to accomplish if you are new to this whole area.

2. Submit your site to Google; Google have provided a form that can be completed and submitted online. It can be found here : Submit your site to Google This can take a while however so it requires some patience.

3. Add Google’s Analytic code to your website; signing up to Google’s Analytic software alerts Google to your website’s existence.

All three of the above methods will end up with your site being indexed by Google. Once indexed your site will appear for searches for your domain name : e.g “hostingireland.ie”

2. How do I get more visitors from Google?

Getting top spot for competitive search phrases can bring your website the visitors you need. It’s all well and good coming top spot for people searching for your domain name, but how often do people search for that?

It is far more important to come high in the search results for terms around your business. For instance if you are running a car hire website, people looking for car hire in Dublin will generally type in to Google search phrases like :

Car hire Dublin
Cheap car hire in Dublin
Dublin car hire

This is where website optimisation comes in, optimising a website for performance in Google requires an understanding of the search phrases people are searching for around the services or products your website is selling.

Hosting Ireland offer services to assist you in getting your website to perform to it’s maximum in Google and other search engines. For more information please see our web marketing information or give us a call on 1890 987000 to discuss what we can do for your website.

The changing face of PHP

As of the 22nd of July, PHP 5.2.x is no longer supported and the latest release 5.2.14 marks the final bug fixing release in the 5.2.x branch. However, if you are like me, you will appreciate that the amount of new features in 5.3 makes this a welcome change as we see new features for 5.3 roll in like namespaces, late static binding and goto functionality, I am happy to see this new face of 5.3 become the standard face of PHP.

However, if you have an existing site, which was written in 5.2.x or before you may be concerned that an upgrade of the PHP on your server will cause issues for your PHP code, and you may be right. Fortunately the amount of deprecated functions from 5.2.x to 5.3 are minimal and even less features have been removed, hence most developers can breathe a sigh of relief.

Tips for updating your code

We will be trying to help you through the upgrade procedure as much as possible, as we roll out 5.3.x to all of our PHP web servers, and of course http://www.php.net can be referenced for the most in-depth discussion of upgrading, we will be trying to focus on the changes most likely to effect an existing site.

For anyone who isn’t even remotely familiar with PHP, it is most likely that you are using a pre-made product, like WordPress, OSCommerce or Joomla, and the best thing to do would be to contact the support/community of whichever product you are using, and ask them for help upgrading your installation to the latest version.

Alternatively, you probably had your site built by a web developer and you will need to contact them, to find out if changing to PHP 5.3 is going to cause you any trouble.

Backwards incompatible changes in PHP 5.3

For the rest of you, you will clearly be looking for some details on what isn’t going to work any more, firstly I want to mention that it is quite unlikely that any of these features are currently in use, but for the sake of completeness I will list them here:

• clearstatcache() no longer clears the realpath cache by default, to make it clear the realpath cache, send a ‘true’ as the first argument to this function.
• realpath() is now fully platform-independent. Consequence of this is that invalid relative paths such as __FILE__ . “/../x” do not work anymore, to correct this, replace __FILE__ with dirname(__FILE__).
• The call_user_func() family of functions now propagate $this even if the callee is a parent class.
• The array functions natsort(), natcasesort(), usort(), uasort(), uksort(), array_flip(), and array_unique() no longer accept objects passed as arguments. To apply these functions to an object, cast the object to an array first, to do this, put ‘natsort((array) $object)’ instead of ‘natsort($object)’.
• The trailing / has been removed from the SplFileInfo class and other related directory classes.
• The __toString magic method can no longer accept arguments.
• The magic methods __get, __set, __isset, __unset, and __call must always be public and can no longer be static. Method signatures are now enforced.
• The __call magic method is now invoked on access to private and protected methods.
• func_get_arg(), func_get_args() and func_num_args() can no longer be called from the outermost scope of a file that has been included by calling include() or require() from within a function in the calling file.

The words ‘goto’ and ‘namespace’ are now reserved.

Deprecated Functions

• call_user_method() (use call_user_func() instead)
• call_user_method_array() (use call_user_func_array() instead)
• define_syslog_variables()
• dl()
• ereg() (use preg_match() instead)
• ereg_replace() (use preg_replace() instead)
• eregi() (use preg_match() with the ‘i’ modifier instead)
• eregi_replace() (use preg_replace() with the ‘i’ modifier instead)
• set_magic_quotes_runtime() and its alias, magic_quotes_runtime()
• session_register() (use the $_SESSION superglobal instead)
• session_unregister() (use the $_SESSION superglobal instead)
• session_is_registered() (use the $_SESSION superglobal instead)
• set_socket_blocking() (use stream_set_blocking() instead)
• split() (use preg_split() instead)
• spliti() (use preg_split() with the ‘i’ modifier instead)
• sql_regcase()
• mysql_db_query() (use mysql_select_db() and mysql_query() instead)
• mysql_escape_string() (use mysql_real_escape_string() instead)
• Passing locale category names as strings is now deprecated. Use the LC_* family of constants instead.
• The is_dst parameter to mktime(). Use the new timezone handling functions instead.

Finally…

So it is clear that upgrading the code from 5.2.x to 5.3.x is not a difficult procedure, and all the new features that will become available in 5.3.x will be very useful in any new projects being built in our hosting accounts. If you have any questions concerning the upgrade of PHP on our servers please contact us at info@hostingireland.ie

Busy Website
If you have a website that has become popular and is quite busy, then the website may need more resources in order to serve the website quickly to every visitor that hits one of its pages. Vps servers offer more resources than standard shared hosting and they also offer greater configuration options.
vps hosting information


Multiple Websites
If you are interested in setting up multiple websites, a vps can be a good way to achieve this. This is especially true, if you were to opt for one of the Hosting Management software packages such as WHM ( web host manager) or HELM for windows. These packages allow you to easily manage your vps through a simple web based interface. Each account created also has its own Cpanel or Helm interface so that each individual account can be managed quickly and easily.
vps hosting information


Specific Code Environment
Some projects may require a specific version or setup of PHP or ASP for example which may not be available to you through a shared hosting account, a vps lets you configure these environments exactly how you need them.
vps server information


Server Configuration
With a vps you are in control. If you want to run a particular type of software on your server then you can do this. There are also several packages which you can choose to have installed on your server such as Softaculous and R1soft CDP Continuous Data Protection & Server Backup

Introduction
It is important when ordering VPS Hosting to ensure that the VPS you order has sufficient resources available for the task you have in mind. Fortunately though, if the initial specifications turn out to be insufficient, the VPS can have its resources increased with only a small amount of downtime required. Unfortunately the same is not true of the platform that your provider chooses to run your VPS on, a fact which can be easily overlooked. The host machine that your VPS runs on as a guest is part of the smooth operation of your VPS.


Memory and swap space
The most important factor in the smooth operation of a VPS is the amount of memory (RAM) available to it, the swap (Virtual RAM) it has available should only be used in exceptional circumstances, as in the event of unexpectedly high traffic.


Some VPS providers may offer a comparatively large quantity of memory, but this may be because the memory is being shared with every other VPS on the host machine, but the VPS will not perform in the same way as with dedicated RAM.


If your host machine offers dedicated memory for the VPS then you have an amount of memory to use that no other VPS on the same host has any access too, which is clearly an advantage.


Host machine processors
It is essential for host machines to have a processor with multiple cores, so that all of the guest machines will have access to a processor core when they require it.


Our host machines have more than one multiple core processors so that each VPS can have access to two or more processor cores, so that each VPS has plenty of processing power available when they need it.


Virtual Hardware
Some VPS providers do not use true hardware virtualisation, but instead use a software layer with which the guest machines must communicate. This software layer must then relay the commands to the operating system. This approach causes a reduction in performance as the software layer is shared among all of the guests on the host machine.


Our host machines use true hardware virtualisation, so that the guest machine accesses to the hardware as directly as possible, which adds a significant increase in performance.


File System
Some VPS solutions use a single file in the host machine’s file system as the disk for the VPS. This approach decreases the performance of disk activity in the guest VPS, particularly as the size of this “file system” file increases. For this reason we offer direct disk access wherever possible.


Conclusion
It can be very difficult to pick a VPS solution that you can rely on for solid performance and a reliable host machine. At Hosting Ireland we pride ourselves on high quality products and fantastic after sales support, if you are interested in a VPS I highly recommend that you take a look at the VPS offers we have here, and if you have any questions then post a comment or send an email to info@hostingireland.ie


Philip Brookes


Server Technician

Uploading files to your Hosting account is an important, but sometimes confusing process.  In this article I hope to make it simple for you to understand what is invlolved.


Getting Started:


The First thing that you will need is an FTP client. There are many of these available and lots of them are free. The one that we recommend and use ourselves is Filezilla. You can download a copy of this free sofware here
Filezilla Download

Once you have downloaded and installed this software it can be run just like any other program on your computer.

Connecting To Your Hosting Account

So now that we have the client lets get connected. The simplist way to connect is to use the quickconnect option.

You will find this at the top of the filezilla window. There are 4 empty fields. Host, Username, Password

In the mail that we sent out with your hosting account details, you will see a section dealing with ftp details
These are the details that you will be using.

The Host Field

In the host field you will need to put  ftp.yourdomain.com  or  you can use the ip address of ther server

The Username Field

In here your will need to put the username sent out to you in the mail

The Password Field

In here you will need to put the password that was sent out to you in the mail

And thats it click quick connect and if you have entered the details correctly, you will be able to see the files in your hosting account on the right hand side of the filezilla client (Under Remote Site).

Storing A Connection

At the top left of the filezilla client there is an image of a computer with a little down arrow.

Click this icon and the site manager window will open.

Click the new site button

Where the new site appears name it something meaningful.

On the right hand side fill in the Host as you did previously for a quick connection.

Now change the logonType to Normal.

Then Fill in the user and password fields as you did with the quick connect (note: it is not secure to store passwords, we reccommend that you store them either off your pc or using some form of encryption tool. A  free password safe is available at Keypass.info).

Finally press ok. The connection is now stored. You can access this and  other connections by clicking the down arrow on the computer icon in the top left hand corner.

Changing File Permissions

Occasionally it is neccessary to change the file permisions on certain files within your hosting account. The reason for this is often to allow an application access to write, execute and read certain files.

Filezilla makes it easy to do this. Simply open up your hosting account locate the file that you need to change permissions on, then right click the file or folder and choose the file permissions option from the menu.

A simple interface for changing the permissions then pops up. You can then set up the permissions as needed.