Special thanks to everyone who participated in the ‘introduce yourself’ post from last week! We randomly drew from the comments added to that post and Barry Nordby was selected as the winner of the $50 Amazon.com gift certificate. Here’s the introduction he posted:

I was first recommended to WestHost seven or eight years ago and referred clients to their hosting. There wasn’t a reseller program then, so I started selling on other hosting services. After the company I was using was sold and the service and quality spiraled to an abysmal level which made for particularly difficult transition. During that time, I noticed WestHost now offered a reseller program. Since the site owners I had referred to WestHost always had good things to say, and since I was alway able to get quick and helpful service I was glad to be able to move to WestHost. Quality and service has and continues to be first rate. I love the easy to install programs. They help get things started, even though I can’t wait to upgrade some of the programs to the very latest release. I’ve been having fun using WordPress as a web site platform at http://www.adesignforlife.com/. Joomla is next!!

Thanks Westhost!
Barry

In August 2003, we launched our first VPS hosting platform (2.0). It was our goal to give current and prospective clients more control and features within their hosting account and still maintain a price point typically found in traditional shared hosting. At the time, the market definition of “VPS hosting” was still largely undefined. Many aspects of the offering qualified as what was know as VPS hosting, but one drawback was the fact our offering did not offer full root access. We chose to proceed by naming our offering VPS as full root access was not a consistent requirement at the time.

Fast forward to 2007 and the market definition of VPS is much more defined. True root access is now a primary requirement. When we launched our new 3.0 hosting platform this spring, there was discussion about changing the naming for this very reason. For better or worse we have chosen to hold off with any naming changes until we launch a high-end, root access VPS offering of our own. We still try to educate our clients up-front that WestHost’s VPS hosting does not offer true root access as shown here. We also try to make it clear of the benefits of our platform over traditional shared Web hosting. When you factor in the capabilities of a WestHost VPS, our reliability, support and the price-point, it’s still one of the best values out there, especially when you factor in the new enhancements of our 3.0 platform.

Take a few minutes to subscribe to our RSS feed and introduce yourself on our blog. Leave a comment that includes your Web site address and something interesting about your Web site. If you’re a current client, also tell us how long you’ve been with WestHost. On Monday, November 26th, we’ll draw randomly from the entries and send the winner a $50 gift certificate to Amazon.com! Make sure you also include your first name and a valid e-mail address where prompted (your e-mail address will not be shown publicly) so we can contact you if you’re the winner. It could be the easiest $50 you ever made!

Seasons are changing, there is no doubt. There is no other place that this becomes more evident than in the WestHost Technical Support Department. With the decrease in the temperature outside we have seen an increase in the volume of contacts we see on a weekly basis. I suppose that it is inevitable, when people migrate indoors some will probably land behind a monitor and a keyboard. We are also approaching the holiday shopping season and reliability, preparedness, and tracking have become hot topics.

Recently we have seen an increase in questions regarding site statistics and how to best utilize some of our applications to analyze your site traffic. WestHost offers a great statistical application called AWStats. AWStats gives you excellent statistical information on who is visiting your site. As a Web master, you might use that data for the purpose of marketing or maintenance. For instance, AWStats tells you which search engine an end user used to find your site, and the keywords they typed in the search box. AWStats tells you how many visitors you’ve had over a given period of time, what pages they viewed, the browser they used, and a whole lot more. Many of you have asked if you can use AWStats to track multiple domains you have hosted within your single Virtual Private Server. The answer is yes you can. It is fairly easy. I will point out the key steps and common traps. I know that most of you don’t want to see anything too confusing, but would rather have a few things pointed out in plain English, so that is exactly what I intend to do. I’ll just go ahead and dive right in.

First of all, we need to have an idea of what AWStats really does on a fundamental basis. The application is going to parse the access logs that Apache keeps of all of the visitors to your site looking for visit information. From the chaos therein, it will create its own data files. Those data files will then be utilized to populate the pages that you see when you view your statistics. The problem is that by default, Apache will place all of the visit information into a single access log. Now that we understand what Apache and AWStats are going to do we can extrapolate what we need to do to accomplish our task. First we need to configure Apache to separate the access logs by domain and then AWStats to parse the separate logs accordingly. Simple enough right? Yep!

The first step is to configure Apache to write its separate access logs. This can be accomplished by editing the Apache configuration file, /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf. If you open and review this file, it can look confusing. I certainly thought so the first time I opened it up for some “surgery.” Not to worry. If you handle directions like the average Joe, you won’t have any trouble. Now one thing that you have to consider is that Linux doesn’t really like to interact with configuration files that have been written or edited by a text editor that will write files in a DOS format. If you are a Windows user and are not editing this file right on the server, just use Notepad, upload the edited file and you should be just fine. You could also utilize the text editor built into File Manager to complete your editing. Now that you know which file we will be editing, and just how we are going to do it, you probably want a few examples. For simplicity sake I am going to utilize primarydomain.com and secondarydomain.com in my explanations. Once we have the config file open we will be looking for the VirtualHost entry for the secondary domain. It will be towards the bottom of the file and will look like this:

We are going to add a little something to it. We need to tell Apache that we want a custom log for this domain. We will be adding the CustomLog directive for this virtual host just below the DocumentRoot directive. Generally we will want to have the new logs written to the same directory as they would be by default, we would just want to write them to a new file name, maybe something like secondarydomain_access_log. Here is an example using the information above:

This entry will write the access log for secondarydomain.com to /var/log/httpd/ and it will be named secondarydomain_access_log. Once the file is modified and saved or uploaded, we will want to give Apache a nice gentle restart. This can be accomplished from within Site Manager or from the command line by issuing the “apachectl graceful” command. There is a catch to writing to separate access logs. By default they won’t be rotated. That may not sound like much but think about this, we have done such a good job to configuring Apache to write this log separately that it will happily do our bidding without question. Eventually our new log file will grow to an unmanageable size. We’ll need to talk about this later on. For now, let’s get back to our task at hand.

Now that we have got our logs separated, let’s tell AWStats what to do with them. We need new, separate config files for each of the newly separated domains. Relax, we have good templates to work with. The AWStats configuration files are located in /etc/awstats. Take a quick look at this directory. As long as you have installed AWStats you will see a file named awstats.primarydomain.com.conf. Let’s make this a simple as possible, just make a copy of that file, but name it awstats.secondarydomain.com and save it to /etc/awstats. Now on to the fun stuff, we need to edit our new file, open the file up and let’s get to work. The first directive we need to find is the log file directive. Look for a line like the example below:

As you can see by default this configuration will pull data from the standard log. Simply change this file to point to our new log file(s). Make it look similar to the example below.

Next we need to change the SiteDomain and HostAliases directives to reflect the secondary domain name rather than the primary domain name. They will look like this and will be on line 153 and 168 or there abouts:

Modify them to reflect the secondary domain.

Now just save any changes you made. There is no need to restart anything here but we do need to check our work. Let’s see just how good we did. First we need to give Apache something to log in our new access logs so open a browser and go visit your secondary domain. Then, navigate to your AWStats Web interface, http://primarydomain.com/awstats/awstats.pl?config=primarydomain.com. You will notice that we specified which set of stats we wanted to view by passing the config variable in the URL. Lets view the statistics for our secondary domain now, navigate to http://primarydomain.com/awstats/awstats.pl?config=secondarydomain.com. Upon initial access you may think that broke something. The statistics are not processed automatically. Not to worry, the developers of AWStats thought of this and provided us a link right at the top of the page to “update now.” Don’t hesitate, click that button, you know you want to. If all went well and you didn’t stress too much you should see a result that will contain stats that have been collected since we restarted Apache. Way to go! We are almost done.

Earlier I had made mention that the new access logs wouldn’t be rotated and eluded to the fact they would just continue to grow until they filled your disk space I also highly doubt that you want to click the “update now” button and wait for AWStats to finish updating each domain each time you want to view your statistics. Your account will already be scheduled for log rotation on a daily basis, that is unless you have edited your crontab. Ah yes, the crontab, what a wonderful tool, but we’ll leave that for another discussion. Back to logrotate, we simply need to ensure that our new logs and the AWStats updates for secondary domains are included. This is also pretty slick. We need to edit the logrotate.conf file located in the /etc/ directory. Crack it open, we’ll get this done really quickly. In that file, on about the ninth line you will see the entry for the primary access log. Here is an example:

Simply add your new access log files to the end of the line, but before the {

That will rotate our log files and manage their size. This will compress and archive our logs for a short period of time. Eventually logrotate will also delete the log files but only after adding our precious stats to the AWStats data files. Logrotate is a discussion for another time as well. Don’t close that file though, we aren’t done yet. There is one more entry we need to make to cause AWStats to update before the logs are rotated. Just below prerotate on about the 13th line of the file, you will see the following:

We need to insert a new line just below it and add our secondary domain name. Just make it look like this:

Save your changes and give yourself a pat on the back. We are done! AWStats will now show you stats separated by domain name. We have discussed a couple of simple changes, but those simple changes will provide you some significant information.

Those of you who keep yourselves up-to-date on the world of search marketing have more than likely already heard about recent changes at Google to penalize a few sites who have engaged in link buying/selling. Google, for the last several months, has undertaken a campaign to spread a message that many search engine marketers didn’t want to hear; buying/selling links for the purpose of passing PageRank is not a good idea. Still, even though over the last few months an uncharacteristic amount of chatter on paid linking was present among prominent bloggers, and at least one Google employee continued to assert that people should not be engaging in this behavior (and actually going so far as to tell us how to report sites that are buying/selling links), no one really knew what exactly Google was going to do about sites openly buying and/or selling paid links. Over the past few days, some of those site owners were the first to find out.

Google’s argument during the last few months has never been one that suggested buying text links was unacceptable on all levels. In fact, Google is completely content having Web site owners purchase or sell links on sites for the purpose increasing traffic. They’ve also suggested using the nofollow tag as a method alerting Google that while you are linking to the content, it shouldn’t receive the “influence” that a normal unpaid link would receive.

The idea of trying to manipulate your search rankings is far from new. There have been lots of tricks utilized by webmasters since the inception of search to influence their ranking favorably. Using a network of linking, whether paid or unpaid, is just one trick in a search marketer’s bag of tricks to influence a site’s organic rankings. Because a search engine’s core job is to provide search results relevant to what an end user is searching for, Google is not content to allow sites to effectively sell PageRank and potentially skew the results of natural search. In essence, Google is simply trying to make their search engine results more relevant.

Even with all the uproar caused lately by Google’s updates negatively affecting these sites who actively and openly engage in paid linking, the selling of links is far from over. Google isn’t trying to eliminate the process, only the result of some webmasters utilizing this as a method of influencing their rankings. Paid linking isn’t dead, but it can’t be approached the same way as it used to be.

Whether buying or selling a link, follow a few extra steps to ensure you’re approaching the situation appropriately:

1. Relevant Links: If you have a site on rock climbing littered with ads for casinos or car insurance, that’s going to be an easily identifiable red flag. Work on securing a link from a site relevant to your own.
2. Personal Contact: There are lots of link broker services out there. Skip them and conduct your business to purchase a link directly from a Web site owner of a Web site relevant to your own.
3. Position of Link: Look for opportunities to have your link placed within the content of the site you’re purchasing the link from. Don’t purchase a link located in a footer or a “Sponsored Links” section unless you have a good reason for doing so.
4. Do Your Homework: Purchasing a link will require more legwork than it used to, but if done properly, it will benefit your site in the long run.

We made some big changes today to our affiliate payouts that are really going to be favorable for WestHost affiliates. Previously we paid a flat $65 for all qualifying affiliate referrals, regardless of the hosting plan selected. Today we’ve implemented a system that will pay $95 to affiliates who refer clients that sign up for our higher hosting plans. Effective immediately, if you refer someone to our Personal Value, Business Value, Business Pro, or Business Semi-ded plans, you’ll receive a $95 commission. For some of you, that change represents several hundred dollars of additional affiliate income you’ll take home each month, just for doing exactly what you’ve already been doing.

Another bonus is that we didn’t drop the original commission for the smaller plans. If you refer one of our other plans, such as the Personal Basic, Personal Starter, or Business Starter, you’ll still receive the current $65.

WestHost will also be implementing a commission for affiliates who refer dedicated servers clients to us. Look for that change to come sometime in the near future.

It’s never been a better time to be a WestHost affiliate! Sign up for the program at http://affiliates.westhost.com

WestHost first explored the idea of an official corporate blog a couple of years ago. Our Marketing Department had a meeting to discuss ways in which WestHost could continue to promote our client-centric hosting philosophy, and among numerous suggestions, blogging was one of those ideas added to the list. At the time, blogging was relatively new in general, certainly among other Web hosts, and ultimately, the WestHost blog idea was put on the back burner in favor of other projects we wanted to get implemented, such as community forums, new plans, new features, new hosting platform etc.

Of course blogging eventually evolved into what it is today, with everyone from large corporations and average Joe’s using it as a tool to promote what blogs are really good at promoting: transparency and personalism. The last couple of years at WestHost we have seen some exciting projects and features released, and who knows what would have happened if we hadn’t have allocated the resources to those projects that we did at the time. Regardless, I’m pleased to report that WestHost has finally arrived on the blogging scene!

Our Plans
Initially, when we reviewed the possibility of a blog again, it was difficult to come up with what we wanted to blog about. Many of our internal staff were on board for the project, and had plenty of things to say, but the ideas of “how personal is too personal”, and “how professional is too professional” seemed to be filters on some of our original concepts. In the end we agreed on some things and came up with more than a few ideas.

For many years WestHost has maintained an opt-in newsletter called the Webmaster Connection (formerly the WestHost weekly), full of Web site tips, tricks, notable sites and WestHost specials. Moving forward, this blog will replace that newsletter. Past issues of the Webmaster Connection will still be accessible by visiting the Webmaster Connection archives in our Member’s Area. We’ve always received numerous favorable comments on the content of that newsletter, so we hope to provide the same kind of tips and tricks in this blog. We’ll also be promoting new specials through the blog, so make sure you check back if for nothing more than to get a new deal. We’ll have posts from different department heads at WestHost on topics ranging anywhere from internal affairs, to ways to tweak your WestHost VPS. In addition to that, we’ve contacted a few of our more prominent forums members and asked them if they are interested in contributing. There was largely a favorable reaction to that as well, so you’ll also occasionally be hearing from among existing WestHost clients. Finally, is our plan to invite guest contributors and industry experts on board to offer sage advice in a number of areas, such as maximizing your online marketing and monetizing your Web site.

In the end, we hope the blog will serve as a tool for us to interact with existing and potential WestHost clients, a hub for WestHost related news and specials, an occasional inside look on WestHost from some of our staff, and a resource for you to read articles written by your peers and industry experts.