• Security - IIS 7 builds on the security features of IIS6 to offer the most secure web services ever offered by Microsoft.
• High-performance, reliable PHP hosting on the IIS web server using FastCGI.
• Cost-effective modular architecture - IIS 7.0 is already established in more than 40 feature modules that can be independently, quickly, and inexpensively installed.
• Improved functionality with IIS 7 Extensibility - The IIS7 core web server features use a new set of public web server APIs that all developers can use to extend, replace or add functionality to their web servers.
• Unified Configuration - Distributed configuration files can now be stored along with Web site or application content.
• LINQ - The LINQ (Language Integrated Query) Project is a set of extensions to the .NET Framework that include language-integrated query, set, and transform operations.

Whether you’re planning the launch of your first site, or wondering why your site counter is actually moving backward, stop. You need a strategy to promote your site to search engines and to visitors. A plan of action based on five key factors, all of which should be weighed carefully before you take another step. Here are the five, most important considerations in the development of any search engine promotion.

1. The Site’s Objectives

What are your expectations for the website? These will usually point you to the site’s objectives. In the case of commercial sites, the broad objective is straightforward – to sell enough goods and/or services to become profitable.

However, you might also want to educate, motivate, persuade and inform in addition to, or instead of, selling. A top-down analysis of your site’s objectives is the place to start the development of your action plan.

Once you’ve determined the site’s objectives, keep them front and center during the entire development of an SE promo strategy. It’s important that any search engine understand your site’s objectives on the very first spider visit.

2. Market Analytics

Essential. Who are you trying to reach – your sales demographic? What do the members of your demographic need? How do they make purchase decisions? Are they computer savvy? Critical to the design and implementation of a search engine promo strategy is to know your market.

And the best place to learn is from the competition. Pull a Google on the competition to see how the successful sites do it. Perfectly ethical and a measurable, absolute guide to what works and what doesn’t.

But you can’t stop there. Market metrics are also a part of a successful promo strategy. The development of multi-dimensional metrics will be useful in virtually every step of the design, development and SE optimization phases. There are plenty of metrics software packs on the market. Some are even free.

The problem with these number crunchers is simple: all they do is provide the raw data. Number of hits. Average number of pages viewed. Ratio of visitors to buyers. Just stats, not strategy.

Analytics gathered using a variety of apps and tools must be properly correlated and analyzed to develop an effective search engine promotion. It’s not enough to have the data. You must interpret the numbers in order to take actionable steps.

3. Techno-Factors

An over-achieving website doesn’t just happen. It must be crafted. It requires highly-specialized knowledge of everything from HTML, SEO and CSS to human nature and purchase motivators.

Search engines spider sites in a variety of ways. The simpler and clearer your site is to an SE spider, the greater the likelihood that your site will be assessed and ranked properly. Conversely, if the technical design of your site isn’t dead on for search engine spiders, a site may be mis-indexed or even banned from SEs altogether for what spiders perceive as black hat tactics, though it’s simply inept (and therefore costly) programming. You might as well hang out the ‘Going Out Of Business” sign.

Techno-factors come into play during the design phase, the development and testing phases and after the site’s launch when refinement, optimization, content updat
es and routine site maintenance are undertaken.

Any well-considered strategy must provide the means to design (or redesign) the site, develop it, promote it to the SEs and optimize it over time. Search engine promotion and site optimization aren’t goals. They’re part of the process.

4. Plan Your Presentation Layer

Once the technical aspects of the site have been incorporated into your promo strategy, turn your attention to the presentation layer. The presentation layer can make or break a site, regardless of how well-designed the technical structure supporting the site’s skin.

Navigation should be simple. Buttons and links clearly labeled. The user should always be able to go ‘Home’ from any page. Check-out should be clear, uncluttered and instill buyer confidence. A site map is useful to visitors and SE spiders. Anything less will hurt the bottom line.

The site skin also presents the look, feel and tone of your on-line enterprise. Stately and dignified, WiLd & KraZy, helpful and concerned – all determined by the look of the site. Color combinations, type font and size, type placement and the tone of the content make up your public persona.

And the skin is spidered right along with the back office so it should appeal to eyeballs and make spiders happy, as well. Header placement, number of headers above the fold, keyword density and other SE search parameters must be fine-tuned for successful search engine promotion.

5. Promotion and Optimization

Once you’ve gone live with your site, you’ve only just begun. The world of ecommerce is fast-paced and cutthroat. And if you don’t promote your site to search engines and to potential buyers your chances for success diminish accordingly.

Today, site success depends on promotion - search engine promotion and eyeball promotion. You can promote on a shoestring or you can launch a pedal-to-the-metal campaign with banner ads, Google Adwords, links building and opt-in cultivation. If you aren’t SEO-experienced, you’ll be best served by professionals who can track site activity, develop useful metrics and devise and implement a strategy for improved site performance.

The same goes for the process of optimization. Sites must be search engine optimized and conversion optimized – two very different things. Much of SEO takes place behind the scenes. That’s why it’s essential that you use SEO pros to actually build your site. This is not where you can cut a few corners.

Then there’s conversion optimization – converting visitors to buyers. Most of this takes place at the presentation level. Does the site meet or exceed the visitor’s expectations? You have 6.4 seconds to convince a visitor to explore your site. That’s how much time web users devote to site evaluation.

DYI or Go With The Pros?

94% of all ecommerce ventures tank. Down in flames. Many of these failures are based on poor business models, but just as many are due to poor site design, lack of SE recognition, an off-putting presentation layer or a home page that looks like a carnival midway.

If you’re a start-up and you don’t know much about SEO and SE promotion, do not let your teen-aged nephew design your site. And if you’re the owner of an underperforming site and you can’t figure out why, don’t waste your time tweaking. You’re losing sales every day.

If you know ecommerce, develop a strategy that encompasses all five of these critical facets. If you don’t know ecommerce, hire somebody to do it for you.

It’s the best money you’ll ever spend.

About the Author
Frederick Townes is the owner of W3 EDGE, a business web design company out of Boston, MA. W3 EDGE provides SEO copywriting services as a key compliament to their design and web hosting offerings. If you have any questions about web design, SEO copywriting, hosting or online marketing feel free to contact Frederick at ftownes@w3-edge.com.

There are mainly two types of guarantees used by the web hosting companies:

1. the money back guarantee and

2. the uptime guarantee

The reason they offer them is simple. It’s a very wise and effective marketing technique. Meaning what? Meaning that the ultimate reason for them giving these guarantees is that they will bring them more clients and thus more money. Don’t take me wrong, I have nothing against that. It’s just that we have to know the reason to understand the behavior.

Take the money-back guarantee for example. It’s definitely not a promise made by web hosting companies alone and most services/products come with a guarantee of some kind. Almost every time the guarantee is there to make you say: I’ll buy this! After all, it’s guaranteed!

This whole technique is known as “risk reversal”. Way back when no one (or very few companies) guaranteed anything about their products, marketers realized that there was something that stopped clients from buying freely (especially impulse buyers). It was the risk involved in any purchase that was made! When you buy anything you make a deal. With no guarantee, you risk everything in case the service/product doesn’t make you happy. The seller on the other hand, has nothing to lose.

A money back guarantee shifts the whole risk, or a part of it, back to the selling company. The most generous kind of guarantee is the “no questions asked” money back guarantee. Nothing beats that except a “no questions asked” money back guarantee + a free gift . But that’s not something you will see in the web hosting business… Now, if you think about the fact that they would have provided the service for free if they give you a refund, you can consider that you receive a gift!

I do recommend you to look for money-back guarantees when shopping for hosting. There is a problem associated with them though: the guarantee has a value only if the word of that particular company has a value. If that company treats its customers right, then you have reasons to believe that the money back guarantee is worth believing. To find out if the company treats the customers fairly, you have to look for company reviews.

Now there are money back guarantees and money back guarantees… Some are “no questions asked”, some are “for any reason” and some are “for the following reasons”. The “for the following reasons” guarantees tend to be tricky. Not necessarily because the hosting company wants to trick you, but because the company tries to minimize “unfair” risks. A “no questions asked” guarantee leaves the hosting company exposed to the real risk of being robbed by unscrupulous individuals who might take advantage of this complete risk reversal.

However, a guarantee that is not “no questions asked” opens you to a whole new set of risks, which depend on the exact conditions applicability. The negative thing about conditioned guarantees is that they can be easily overstretched by the hosting company to its advantage, meaning that whatever the reason they usually can argue that your reason is invalid.

So I’d prefer to go with either no guarantee, and decide based on customer reviews, or to go with a company offering a “no questions asked” guarantee. A conditioned guarantee is too difficult to weigh when you’re buying especially when you’re not very sure if the company is reliable (based on what former or current customers said about it).

What I mean is that between a company with no guarantee but a spotless behavior towards its customers and a company with a conditioned type of money back guarantee, I’d go with the one with the spotless record. Not because the risk would necessarily be lower, but because it would be easier to assess.

It’s a weird choice I guess, but I have another reason for my choice. Most of the good web hosting companies would issue a refund if real problems would emerge with respect to their service, even if they don’t actually have a money back guarantee.

Money back guarantees differ not only with respect to conditions, but they also differ in length. Basically there are two types of guarantees according to length: 15 days and 30 days. Of course, 30 days is better and considering the fact that most web hosting companies offer a 30 days money back guarantee, I recommend you to try and find a company that offers this. The advantage is clear and very important, especially if your website uses scripts, databases etc. because 30 days give you enough time to set things up and see if everything runs smoothly.

About the second type of guarantee, I discuss in this special article dedicated to the uptime guarantee.

About the Author
Daniel Lemnaru is a young man with a dream, that of building a very extensive resource, WHReviews.com, to help people find reliable hosts. He believes that credible customer reviews along with a fair amount of knowledge should be the foundation of all purchasing decisions and he made it his duty to educate potential hosting customers.

If there’s one thing constant in the IT and hosting industries, it’s that technology is constantly evolving. For me, keeping up with it all has been nothing short of a challenge. When Microsoft SQL Server 2005 came out towards the end of 2005, and now SQL 2008, I pushed it to the side. It was just another thing I didn’t have time to learn. But as my customers started asking for it, I realized I had to bite the bullet and get it installed.

The problem is I knew that when I implemented MS SQL 2005 (and eventually 2008) in my hosted environment my customers would need help connecting to it. I had to find a simple way for my customers to easily access their SQL databases. Since I was already using MyLittleAdmin (MLA) for my MS SQL 2000 installation and my customers were happy with it, I naturally looked to myLittleTools who by now had created a version of MLA for MS SQL 2005.

I can hear you ask, why not save the money and let your customers use SQL Management Studio to access their MS SQL 2005 databases? As a host, it’s often difficult to recoup the costs on tools like this since they’re typically “value added” as part of the hosts offerings. Well, consider that opening up your firewall ports to allow direct access to your SQL Server via SQL Management Studio would make the server more vulnerable to DDoS , script kiddies, and viruses. Second, many hosted users have no experience with MS SQL, much less the management tools and how to find and install them. They just know the app they just bought and paid for is asking them to set up and configure a SQL Server database. Third, external access to a SQL Server costs money in terms of bandwidth. Customers will often tend to try and permanently connect their external web sites to your SQL Server which causes large spikes in external bandwidth usage and, as many of you may know, is hard to track back to an individual database.

A web-based tool like myLittleAdmin takes all of this out of the equation. You don’t need to open the SQL ports directly to the Internet since users are accessing their databases via the web interface over port 80 (or even better, port 443) and the interface, in turn, is communicating with the SQL Server behind the scenes. You can then lock your internal firewall policies down as necessary to control connectivity to your database even more.

But, you might also ask, what about the free MS SQL web-based management tools you can find out there? Well, the short answer is IF, and that’s a big IF, you can find a decent web administration product for MS SQL 2005, it’s probably going to be nowhere as complete as MLA.

So, that being said, let’s get started. This article is meant to provide you with a high level overview of MLA 2005 from a web hosting perspective and how it helps you provide very comprehensive control of your MS SQL 2005 using a web-based administrative interface. This review is no way fully comprehensive of MS SQL 2005 or MLA2005. There’s just too much to talk about and too little space to do it. But it should give you a good idea of what MLA 2005 is capable of and how well a fit it is for web hosts who need to offer their customers easy but robust access to their SQL 2005 databases.

Installation

Installation in IIS 6.0 on a Windows 2003 Standard SP2 box, as you would expect, is straightforward. There is no executable to install. In fact, it goes in much like PHP installs. Just copy the files into a web accessible directory, enable the version of .NET you want to use on the site (MLA 2005 supports both .NET and .NET2), configure the MLA folder as an IIS application, edit the config XML file to setup the database connectivity, then browse to the web directory you installed MLA. Oh, and don’t forget to copy the license file to the root of MLA. That’s it!

The MLA installation documentation is very simple and spells this all out clearly so I won’t go step by step through the install process here. Just follow the install guide step by step and you won’t have any problems.

Where I did have an issue, and this was not related to MLA, was configuring MS SQL 2005 to allow remote connections. You need to ensure you do this or you’ll pull your hair out trying to figure out why MLA can’t talk to MS SQL 2005. The following KB article will get you set up right: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/914277

Configuration

Once MLA is installed and connecting to MS SQL 2005 correctly, you can configure the features that customers will have access to by modifying some XML configuration files. You can easily turn on or off features you want to offer, which in turn affects what the user will see in the MLA web interface.

Once you’ve done this, and log into MLA, you should see something like the following. In this case, all features are turned on so you can see what is available through this app.

Some features in the navigation tree that you usually don’t want to show to end-users, such as System Databases, can be removed from the XML file that handles the tree view hiding these options from users. All the config options are conveniently located in one XML folder which makes it very simple to modify and customize MLA to display only what you want the customer to see and use. And the manual does a nice job of explaining what you need to modify to remove some of the more worrisome features for shared database setups.

Features

In addition to a wealth of features already included in MLA 2000, including easy management of your MS SQL data, table structure, stored procedures, backups, and more, MLA 2005 sports a cleaner, more intuitive interface, support for database schemas, SSL certificates and asymmetric/symmetric keys, database synonyms, database snapshots, and an enhanced editable data grid making data editing a breeze for end users.

The administrator-editable config file allows you to turn on or off practically any feature that MLA 2005 offers so if you want to just allow customers to view and edit their table data you can, or if you want to allow them complete control over their databases then you can turn all the features on. It’s up to you.

I’ll briefly discuss each of the main areas of MLA 2005 below since these pretty well mimic the features of SQL Management Studio which you are already hopefully familiar with. Each area is accessible via an expanding contents menu at the left side of the application.

Connection

The Connection menu area has a couple of options: Connection Info and Disconnect. Connection info has two tabs that shows the connection information being used to connect to the database and the license information. You’d probably want to remove the license tab through the appropriate XML file as it’s not necessary for the end-user to see. The disconnect option to log the user out of the interface.

Databases

The Databases menu section is where your customers will be doing a lot of the real work they need to do. Here is where users can view their databases, edit their tables, etc..

You can see in the capture of the expanded menu from the databases section.

The System Databases section shows you the usual list of system databases. Users can view the data but without explicit access to the tables, they can’t modify anything. Still, I would remove this tree item from the XML to ensure they don’t “play around”. There’s no need for them to see this information.

The Database Snapshots area allows you to create a read-only, stable snapshot of a database at a point in time. This is useful for recovery of a database if, say, you damage data. Snapshots have pros and cons that are beyond the scope of this article, and are an Enterprise-only feature so many of you smaller hosts probably won’t be able to offer it. As with all tree items, you can remove it from the tree so it can’t be used. The point is, it’s there if you need it and can take advantage of it.

The User Databases is where users can administer their databases. Users will only see the databases they’re entitled to see. You can see by the expanded view image at left that on each user database there are more features than many customers will probably ever need or use, but the important thing is they’re all there and available and all able to be turned on or off depending on your needs.

Within the User Databases section, users can modify their tables, views, create synonyms for their databases, create and manage Stored Procedures and Triggers, create and view Full Text catalogs, and manage security on their database.

Many of you will be using a Control Panel of some sort to allow your customer to create and manage their database users so the Security section probably can safely be hidden from view since we usually don’t want users creating users at will outside of the control panel.
I’ll briefly cover some of the main areas of MLA 2005 to whet your appetite!

Tables

When clicking on the database name in the contents menu, the list of available tables appears in the right window pane. Left clicking on the table name pops up a nifty little menu containing the operations available to that table. You can easily create a new table, modify the structure of an existing table, open a table to edit the data, and much more. This is a nice feature that MLA 2000 didn’t have and it’s a welcome addition.

Creating a new table is quite simple. Choose New Table from the menu and the following screen opens.

As you can see, you have all the options available to you to create the table as you would in the SQL Management Studio. You can even simply create T-SQL scripts by clicking the little script icon at the top left of the section (circled).

If you instead click the Open Table menu item, the table opens and the data is then available for viewing and editing as in the following screenshot. Note the small menu icons. At the top you can go back up a level, refresh the data, or synchronize the treeview with the database. Below that you can export the data a XML, XLS, or CSV, and create a new data item. Then next to each row of data you can either delete the row or edit the row. You can also modify the content just by clicking on the column data.

When editing the row, you can easily modify the data contained in the row as in the following screenshot .

Views, Stored Procedures, and other Advanced Database Operations

Views, Stored Procedure, and most other more advanced operations on the database can be created through the respective content menu items. Creating these operations can be done by entering the T-SQL code into the script area and then clicking the create button as in the following screenshot.

Notice that a nice template is created for you so you can just plug your T-SQL code in, click the create button, and you’re done. Most of the other more advanced operations are set up this same way so I won’t bore you to death with an explanation of each section.

Synonyms

New with MS SQL 2005 and MLA 2005 was the ability to create a database synonym so you don’t have to use the long notation to reference a database and it’s perfect if you need to switch to another database temporarily to, say, do some testing then switch back. Customers should like this feature quite a bit and it’s easily configured through MLA 2005.

Security

« I would argue that this section isn’t really appropriate for a shared server environment so it should be hidden from the user by modifying the appropriate XML file. But if this tool is being used to manage your server in a non-shared environment, it could be very useful. Again, like all features in MLA, they’re there if you need them and can be hidden if you don’t.»

The Security contents menu section allows you to create, view, edit, and delete all logins on the server, assign server roles, and manage server credentials. I would argue that this section isn’t really appropriate for a shared server environment so it should be hidden from the user by modifying the appropriate XML file. But if this tool is being used to manage your server in a non-shared environment, it could be very useful. Again, like all features in MLA, they’re there if you need them and can be hidden if you don’t. (Users with no admin rights can only see their own login)

Server Objects

Server Objects allows you to create server-level objects such as backup devices, linked servers, and triggers. This section allows you to view any available backup devices, linked servers, and server triggers.

Management

The management section allows you to view any active sessions related to the currently logged in user. If you log in as the system administrator, you’ll be able to see all active sessions on the server. The error logs are usually only viewable by system administrators.

Tools

The tools section provides a number of useful features such as the database query, backup wizard for web hosting, detach and attach wizard, shrink database, and a tie-in to myLittleBackup.

The New Query feature makes it simple to type in some SQL and get a result set back, much like the old Query Analyzer. You can also import a pre-made .sql script using the folder icon at the top right of the screenshots as well, and set limits on the number of results you want returned in the options tab.

The results of the query are returned nicely formatted

You can also easily generate insert scripts to reimport data into a table, and use the CSV import wizard to import data from a CSV file.

Backup and Restore Wizards. myLittleAdmin also offers two wizards for backup and restore. One is a complete backup wizard and shown in the screenshots below. However, as a web host you probably don’t want to give your users access to all these capabilities so there is also a built-in web hosting version of the Backup and Restore wizard which is substantially limited but will allow users to do a basic backup and restore of their databases if necessary.

Detach and Attach Wizards. myLittleAdmin can detach and reattach databases just as you can do via the SQL Management Studio. While detaching a database is probably not something you want offer web-hosted customers as they may inadvertently disconnect their databases, the attach feature may be handy since many users are coming from other hosts and need to easily import their MS SQL database into their hosting plan. The attach features makes it easy for them to do this.

Detaching a database.

Attaching a database.

Shrink Database. How many times have your users databases grown out of hand? If you haven’t set your MS SQL databases Recovery Model to Simple the transactions logs will grow rapidly and you’ll end up running out of disk space before you know it. The Shrink Database feature allows you to shrink the database size and dump those old transactions just as you can in the SQL Management Studio.

Change Password. If you so choose, you can allow your database users to change their database user password through this function. Most web hosting control panels do this through their interface so this is really not a necessary feature for hosted operations, but for individual and company operations this would be a very handy feature.

Preferences

Finally, there is a preferences section that the user can use to change their desired display and language preferences. They can change features such as skins (if you have additional skins installed), their language settings (by default English, French, Deutsch, and Japanese are available), their date formats, and how many rows they want to be displayed in data grids.

Conclusion

Hopefully this article gives you a quick overview on myLittleAdmin for SQL Server 2005. As you can see, this is a complex and very complete application that gives you almost all the features you have in the MS SQL 2005 Management Studio, but it’s totally web-based and totally customizable.

For you hosts out there, this is an excellent piece of software to consider providing to your customers. It helps keep your SQL Servers protected by allowing you to close off all external ports to your SQL Server but still allowing comprehensive control of your customer’s databases. And your customers won’t need to know how to install and use the SQL Management Studio software on their desktops. That will help reduce the number of daily headaches you have to deal with from Denial of Service attacks, script kiddies, viruses, and bandwidth spikes.

No MS SQL database management software I have looked at comes close to the completeness of this application and your customers will appreciate having the ability to truly manage their databases from anywhere they have a web connection.

About the Author
Anthony Wilko is president of Infuseweb LLC, a webhosting company located in San Antonio, TX.
You can find more info about Infuseweb on http://www.infuseweb.com

About myLittleAdmin
myLittleAdmin software is developed by myLittleTools. You can find more info about myLittleAdmin on http://www.mylittleadmin.com and http://www.mylittletools.net. You’re also encouraged to have a look at myLittleBackup, a web-based backup/restore solution for shared MS SQL hosting.

There are two forms of growth - internal growth and external growth. Internal growth can be done by investment in new servers, new branch offices, etcetera. External growth (integration of amalgamation) can be done though expansion (through mergers with other companies/firms), mergers (mutually agreed partnership), and acquisitions/takeovers (hostile buy-over of the majority (at least 51% of a firm’s shares by another firm)).

External growth exists in 4 different forms, which will be elaborated below.

Firstly, there’s horizontal integration. This involves the mergers or acquisitions of firms in the same stage of production in the same industry. In this case, an example would be UnitedHosting merging with HTTPme. This is usually done for two reasons. Firstly, to exploit the potential economies of scale reaped from a larger scale of production (EOS comes in various forms including technical and managerial EOS. I could give you a thousand word essay on it but it’s a whole new ball game. Secondly, to achieve monopoly power in order to capture market share. However I don’t think the second reason applies here in a saturated market with relatively elastic demand.

The second form of external growth is vertical integration. This involves the integration of firms engaging in different stages of production within the same industry. There are two types of vertical integration — backward integration and forward integration. Backward integration is the acquiring of firms engaged in the previous stage of production (e.g. UnitedHosting buying EV1Servers). Forward integration is the acquiring of firms in the next stage of production (e.g. EV1Servers buying UnitedHosting). Vertical integration is done for 4 main reasons. Firstly, to achieve greater control and stability in the supply of inputs through backward integration (e.g. If UH could control all of EV1’s servers, they could ensure optimal uptime and put greater focus on their own servers). Secondly, it is to restrict the supply of inputs to competitors through backward integration. This is pretty self explanatory — with backward integration, you can make your competitors suffer and deny them access to your servers, which they require to run their business. The third reason is to obtain greater control of the demand for your products through forward integration (e.g. EV1Servers could market their services adequately to different markets with different packages if they bought out UnitedHosting). The fourth reason would be to penetrate and capture new markets through forward integration. Again, taking the example of EV1 and UH. EV1 would be able to appeal to the lower end users who consume fewer resources if they bought UH.

The third form of external growth is lateral integration. This involves the integration of firms engaged in the same stage of production in related industries (e.g. UH buying out DemoDemo). Again, this is done for 4 reasons. Firstly, to diversify and spread risks. If one of their businesses went bust, they have another one to fall back on, in a relatively different market. Secondly, to achieve economies of scope from R&D and marketing. Products can be marketed together, and this saves advertising cots. Thirdly, to develop greater compatibility and dependency between products so as to make the demand more inelastic (e.g. UH could put up a promotional offer like “If you buy 10 tutorials from DemoDemo, you get plan 2 at a 50% discount!”. The fourth reason is to penetrate related markets in order to jointly market products; this has been explained earlier on already.

Finally, the fourth type of external growth is conglomerate integration. This is the integration of firms in completely unrelated industries (also known as ‘diversifying’ integration). An example would be UH buying out a local chicken farm. This is done for 2 main reasons. Firstly, to acquire and strip the assets of sunset firms for the purpose of converting its real assets (land and capital) into more productive alternative uses. For example, UH could eventually use the chicken farm’s land as a site for a future datacenter that it’s about to build. The second reason is to diversify into different non-related markets in order to spread risks and exploit potential infant markets.

About the Author
Knogle has been closely involved in the webhosting industry for over 4 years. He’s currently studying Economics, Physics, Chemistry as well as Mathematics at a college in Singapore. He is an active participant at WebHostingTalk and strives to contribute to the community as best as he can.

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