This has been an exciting year around WestHost for our talented and hard working team of employees. At our company Christmas party in December of 2006, it was announced that we would be giving away a BMW Z4 Roadster at our 2007 company Christmas party to one very lucky WestHost employee! With much anticipation throughout the year our staff has been excited for the drawing to finally be here. Employees have had the opportunity to earn ping pong balls during the year based on performance reviews, awards and other recognition. Those ping pong balls then went into a random drawing.

At our company Christmas party last night, the wait ended with a new set of car keys for one very excited employee who had one of their ping pong balls selected from the container. We would like to recognize and congratulate Jonny Fillmore who won the BMW! Jonny wasn’t able to be present at the party, so we called his cell phone to congratulate him on his new prize. While on speaker phone, Jonny responded with an unconvincing “you’re kidding”. After a few seconds realizing this wasn’t a joke, the shock began to set in and some laughter and “Wow” were conveyed. I’m sure Jonny will have a great time with the car as it fits him perfectly. Now he will just have to try and accommodate all the requests he will receive from co-workers, friends and family for a ride in his new car! Congratulations Jonny!

WestHost is pleased to announce that we now offer affiliates the ability to earn a $95 commission when referring clients that sign up for a dedicated server. This addition to the affiliate program has been one of the most frequently requested additions, so we’re certainly excited to fulfill this request.

If you’re an existing WestHost affiliate, we hope you’ll enjoy this new opportunity to make some additional commissions. We suggest you take some time to look over some of our dedicated server plans to familiarize yourself with our offerings.

If you’re not already a WestHost affiliate, feel free to sign up at our affiliate program page. There’s no monthly minimum payout, and you don’t necessarily need to be hosting your site with WestHost to be an affiliate.

This is not a question many people think about when selecting a hosting provider, but I believe it is something that should be considered. What happens when your Web site really starts to take off and you’ve outgrown the server resource limits of shared hosting? The last thing you want to worry about is whether your provider can meet your needs.

With many companies there simply is no option, and they will kindly ask you to leave. Several hosting providers offer dedicated servers, but that is not always an easy solution. Hosting providers run various control panels on their dedicated server offerings, and often there is no seamless way to make an upgrade. This requires DNS changes, re-uploading files, etc. You must also consider whether the dedicated server offering is managed by your hosting provider or if you are responsible for maintenance. Are you ready for the burden of being a systems administrator? Most people don’t have the time or experience to handle that responsibility.

At WestHost we are fully prepared to seamlessly accommodate your growth. Clients starting with our shared hosting packages can upgrade to our semi-dedicated offering. From there you can advance to a fully-managed dedicated server. Throughout each upgrade, you don’t have to lift a finger. There are no changing platforms or control panels. From start to finish WestHost maintains the responsibility of managing your hosting infrastructure.

The days of meta tags and keyword stuffing as an exclusive means to drive your site to the top of the search results are long gone. Today, webmasters who are serious about attaining respectable search results for competitive keywords have to spend an ample amount of time researching and testing to produce quality results. Fortunately, in the ever increasing competitive environment of ranking well for popular keywords, the online community’s desire to release tools to assist the webmaster has increased as well.

By far one of my favorite webmaster-assisting tools available is the SEO plugin for the Firefox browser. The plugin displays great “at a glance” information appended to the bottom of each of your Google search results. Included in the plugin results are great stats, such as the ranking of the search result, the PageRank of the search result, the age of the domain returned in the search result, and a number of other listings relating to links from outside sources to the domain referenced in the search result.

Using the plugin is easy as well, and requires only a quick download and restart of your browser. You can even customize what information you want the plugin to display, what information you want to automatically display, and what information you prefer to display only on demand.

The plugin is also easily enabled disabled by simply clicking a button in the lower right hand corner of your browser:

SEO for Firefox is enabled:

SEO for Firefox is disabled:

To read more about the SEO plugin for Firefox, or to download this useful application, visit seobook.com.