photo credit: Tim Dorr

The following is a guest post written and provided by Jonas Bates of webhostgear.com

When you’re in the market for a new web hosting account, you will soon realize that you have a large number of choices in front of you. While you have to weigh out the common web hosting options such as Cpanel hosting vs. Plesk hosting, dedicated hosting vs. a VPS account or reseller hosting, or using a Windows server vs. choosing the common Linux hosting option, there is a bigger decision you need to make. Should you choose a USA-based hosting account, or would it be better to host your website on a UK-based server?

To help you make your decision, here are some of the differences you can expect when choosing between UK and US-based hosting accounts.

Hosting costs and service quality

In terms of service options and overall quality, web hosting server companies are the same around the world. Regardless of the language or location, web hosting packages are, by and large, the same everywhere.

When you get into pricing, however, that’s where the differences start. If US Dollars and British Pounds were equal in value, pricing would be relatively similar in both the US and UK for web hosting accounts. Shared hosting accounts, for example, generally cost anywhere from £2.99 to £35.99 in the UK, but even though the pricing is similar in the USA, because of the differences in the value of the US dollar, US hosting is generally cheaper than UK hosting packages.

Support differences

Overall support, much like the available web hosting service options, is relatively similar in both the US and UK. However, there is one difference that can make a big difference for you — time zone differences. If you live in the USA, for example, you will receive responses to your support inquiries during UK time, and if you live in the UK, you will likely receive answers to your questions and trouble tickets during US business hours. Though, it is important to note that if you choose a web hosting company that offers support around the clock, you can bypass the problems associated with the large time zone differences.

Effects on SEO and search engine marketing

There is debate on how much affect hosting can have on your search engine placements, although it is generally considered to be less of a concern now than previously. Google can determine your geographical location using your domain name (e.g. .co.uk is assumed to be a UK site) and the instructions you give them via Google Webmaster Tools.

One consideration is the speed of your site, which is often noted as important for search engine positions by Google themselves. Hosting a site in the target country (e.g. UK for UK visitors) will make the site quicker for them and potentially makes your site better in the eyes of search engines.

To obtain the best search engine placement results for your particular market, it’s a good idea to host your website in the country where most of your visitors are.

Visitor experience

One important difference between US and UK hosting that is often overlooked by website owners is the visitor experience. Specifically, page load times and script execution. Anymore, it’s relatively rare to find a website that doesn’t use technology such as JavaScript or Ajax. These technologies can be problematic for website visitors who are located far away from your website’s geographic location as client-side scripting languages, such as those mentioned, must load before your web page will display to your visitors.

By choosing a web hosting account that is geographically close to your largest audience, you’re helping to keep your website page load times to a minimum.

While web hosting plans and platforms are largely the same regardless of where you set them up, and popular hosting options, such as Cpanel hosting, are available worldwide, there are still some significant differences between UK and US web hosting. For best results, you should do a little research on where your market is before you choose one hosting location over the other.

This has been a guest post by Jonas Bates of Webhostgear.com – providers of great web hosting reviews, information on hosting and resource for everything from choosing a web hosting server to comparisons of the top web hosting companies.

Unfortunately, import an SQL dump containing your data and table structure often causes timeouts via phpMyAdmin when the database is particularly large meaning you have to import data a table at a time (or even part of a table at a time) which takes a long time and is prone to error.

In the past I have done many things from writing custom import scripts to importing the database bit by bit. I have also used desktop tools (such as the excellent Sequel Pro for Mac OS X) although many web hosts disallow external access.

Fortunately I came across an excellent, flexible import script called BigDump which takes your SQL file, splits it and automatically imports it (via javascript reloads). Script and full instructions are available at http://www.ozerov.de/bigdump.php

Do you have any tips, tricks, advice or questions about importing/exporting MySQL databases? Get involved and comment below!

photo credit: Bull3t

The www prefix is essentially a subdomain of your website and although many people will type it in, some may just try to enter the domain itself.

Many websites, including high profile ones, can’t be accessed without the www subdomain. For example, barclaycardunwind.co.uk is inaccessible while www.barclaycardunwind.co.uk is.

This is essentially a DNS or server configuration problem, so a single solution is not available for everyone but it should be straightforward. Contact your web host if you are not sure or modify your server configuration if you know what you need to do.

Once you can access your site without the www, make sure that the traffic is forwarded to one or the other to prevent potential duplicate content issues with google.

Make sure you do it, or risk frustrating and/or losing a lot of your visitors!

Place the following code in your .htaccess file to automatically force www. on the front of your URLs:


RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]


You might not need the “RewriteEngine On” – check if it already exists in your .htaccess

There are a lot of other solutions using .htaccess but this particular solution does not need editing (i.e. your URL is not in the code) so you can use it in a distributed project or many websites without having to customise it.

photo credit: Mrs Magic

In this article I will be looking at the raw data that Google Analytics records, picking apart the Google cookies and showing some examples of how to extract and use that data.

I personally find Google Analytics a great free tool and use it as default on most of my sites. There is of course the old privacy accusations that follow Google around (I have some insight and warnings for a future post) but generally I don’t let this keep me up at night.

On a project I found myself wanting access to certain Google Analytics data from within my own custom admin dashboard. I had looked at recording my own information but consider it bad practice to duplicate in this way. Another option I considered was exporting )data using the Google Analytics API but unfortunately the quota limits of 10000 requests per 24 hours (more API limits detailed here) meant I couldn’t have the real time statistics I wanted.

Eventually I decided to take a look at using the Google Analytics cookies themselves and recording the data locally. This also gave the benefit of being able to link website actions (in this case adding a product to cart, removing it etc.) to a specific Google Analytics user and therefore giving me a bigger picture of my user habits.

So as an overview, this is how I did it:
1) The page loads with the Google Analytics javascript, creating the cookie and sending data to Google
2) After the Google Analytics javascript, an Ajax request is fired passing along any local website actions (e.g. adding to cart)
3) The code run by the Ajax request deciphers the Google Analytics cookies and records all the information locally

There is a good reason for using an Ajax request. With PHP (or indeed any server side language) the Cookie details are accurate to the point of the initial page request. If this is a new visitor the Google Analytics Cookies will not yet exist as the Javascript has not been executed, therefore the script must fire after the Google Analytics Javascript has run.

Using Ajax also ensures that the details of the final page request are recorded.

Picking Apart the Google Analytics Cookies

The part that required the most figuring out was what the data within the Google Analytics cookies meant. There are actually three Cookies placed by Google Analytics:

__utma – A “long term” cookie containing the main details of the user
__utmb – A “current session” cookie containing details about the current website visit
__utmc – A “no expiration” cookie which is used only to determine if the user has closed their browser (therefore initiating a new session when they next visit)
__utmz – A “current session” cookie containing referral details about the current visit

Each cookie contains data seperated by a period (.), with the __utmz cookie further seperating details with a pipe (|). The cookies break down as follows (the segments represent the data in the order as they appear in the string):

__utma
Segment 1: Unique number identifying the user. Useful for keeping track of return visits and as a primary key for storing locally.
Segment 2: Unix timestamp of this visitors first ever visit to the website.
Segment 3: Unix timestamp of this visitors previous visit to the website.
Segment 4: Unix timestamp of this visitors current visit to the website (the start of the current session).
Segment 5: Total number of sessions.

__utmb
Segment 1: Pages viewed in the current session
Segment 2: Unknown (My notes say Responses…)

__utmz
Segment 2: Referral Count
Segment 3: Source Count
Segment 4: This segment contains all the information about where the visitor came from. It is seperated by pipes and then the label/value is seperated again by an equals sign. An example for this segment: “utmcsr=google|utmccn=(organic)|utmcmd=organic|utmctr=keywords”. The information is as follows:
utmcsr: Source
utmcmd: Medium (e.g. for google it can be organic or adwords)
utmctr: The keywords used
utmcct: Campaign content. Adwords information.
utmccn: Campaign name. Adwords information.
utmgclid: Click ID from Adwords.

Some other cookies you may also see are __utmv and __utmx which are related to customer user segments and the Website Optimizer respectively.

If you have any questions on this leave a comment and I will update the article so everyone can benefit. You may also be able to glean some information from (although they don’t spec the cookies in detail):

http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/concepts/gaConceptsCookies.html