There are a couple of key things to look at when starting a hosting company.
Basically there are four major factors
to look at provided you have the
servers, and technical abilities.
1. Site design is the first thing a prospective
customer sees!! I have seen some horrible designs
for hosting
companies. If you think putting some
text, links and a logo on a page is enough, you
will likely fail before you even realize. You
will also notice a lot of companies have a generic
template that can be found online at
templetemonster or any other temple
site. Avoid these. It is very hard to
develop a company image when you look
like 134,000 other hosting companies. I suggest
put a bit of effort and creativity into a well
designed “professional” looking home
page for your company. The bottom line is a new
customer will not even consider you as their
host if they feel you are an armature
no matter how great or cheap your
packages are.
2. Develop your website as a total package to it’s clients. Don’t just present your hosting
packages and leave it at that. Offer
tutorials, articles, support forums
etc. These additional services not only
provide additional content for you
clients, but if developed correctly will bring
additional traffic to your site which will potentially lead to more sales.
3 You MUST understand how search engines work.
Over 90% of your business will likely come directly
from search engine results. Therefore, it is
absolutely essential to optimize your
site for search engines. You could have
the greatest hosting plan in the
entire world, but if no one knows about it, then
it’s useless. Do a search on google for Search Engine Optimization (SEO). You will find tons of great information on how to create a website
that is both user friendly and search
engine friendly. There are also a
countless number of companies out there
who offer SEO services. Just be cautious
of their offers and do your research first
3. Find your niche. The hosting business
as a whole is a huge industry which is
very competitive. Your best chance at
success is to simply find a market and
develop your business to cater to that
specific niche.
Maybe in the early 90’s the idea of “if
you build it they will come” might have
been true. But in the year 2005 the internet
is a far more competitive and complex place.
To be successful today, you have to develop
a business plan which works from all angels. If you can develop a hosting company
which has a professional design,
some extra content, search engine
friendly and which targets a specific
niche, you will have a far greater chance at
success Of course there are many other factors
to consider as well, but if you can master these
four, everything else should fall into
place.
Tuesday 2 October 2012
Friday 21 September 2012
Dawn Sees Hydrated Minerals On Giant Asteroid
Pothole-like features mark some of the asteroid's surface where the volatiles, likely water, released from hydrated minerals boiled off. While Dawn did not find actual water ice at Vesta, there are signs of hydrated minerals delivered by meteorites and dust evident in the giant asteroid's chemistry and geology. The findings appear today in the journal Science.
One paper, led by Thomas Prettyman, the lead scientist for Dawn's gamma ray and neutron detector (GRaND) at the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Ariz., describes how the instrument found signatures of hydrogen, likely in the form of hydroxyl or water bound to minerals in Vesta's surface.
"The source of the hydrogen within Vesta's surface appears to be hydrated minerals delivered by carbon-rich space rocks that collided with Vesta at speeds slow enough to preserve their volatile content," said Prettyman.
A complementary paper, led by Brett Denevi, a Dawn participating scientist based at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., describes the presence of pitted terrain created by the release of the volatiles.
Vesta is the second most massive member of the main asteroid belt. The orbit at which these data were obtained averaged about 130 miles (210 kilometers) above the surface. Dawn left Vesta earlier this month, on Sept. 4 PDT (Sept. 5 EDT), and is now on its way to its second target, the dwarf planet Ceres.
Scientists thought it might be possible for water ice to survive near the surface around the giant asteroid's poles. Unlike Earth's moon, however, Vesta has no permanently shadowed polar regions where ice might survive. The strongest signature for hydrogen in the latest data came from regions near the equator, where water ice is not stable.
In some cases, other space rocks crashed into these deposits later at high speed. The heat from the collisions converted the hydrogen bound to the minerals into water, which evaporated. The holes that were left as the water escaped stretch as much as 0.6 miles (1 kilometer) across and go down as deep as 700 feet (200 meters). Seen in images from Dawn's framing camera, this pitted terrain is best preserved in sections of Marcia crater.
"The pits look just like features seen on Mars, but while water was common on Mars, it was totally unexpected on Vesta in these high abundances," said Denevi. "These results provide evidence that not only were hydrated materials present, but they played an important role in shaping the asteroid's geology and the surface we see today."
GRaND's data are the first direct measurements describing the elemental composition of Vesta's surface. Dawn's elemental investigation by the instrument determined the ratios of iron to oxygen and iron to silicon in the surface materials. The new findings solidly confirm the connection between Vesta and a class of meteorites found on Earth called the Howardite, Eucrite and Diogenite meteorites, which have the same ratios for these elements. In addition, more volatile-rich fragments of other objects have been identified in these meteorites, which supports the idea that the volatile-rich material was deposited on Vesta.
The Dawn mission is managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. It is a project of the Discovery Program managed by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Ala. UCLA is responsible for overall mission science. Orbital Sciences Corporation of Dulles, Va., designed and built the Dawn spacecraft.
The framing cameras were developed and built under the leadership of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Katlenburg-Lindau, Germany, with contributions by the German Aerospace Center (DLR) Institute of Planetary Research, Berlin, and in coordination with the Institute of Computer and Communication Network Engineering, Braunschweig. The framing camera project is funded by the Max Planck Society, DLR and NASA. The gamma ray and neutron detector instrument was built by Los Alamos National Laboratory, N.M., and is operated by the Planetary Science Institute, Tucson, Ariz.
JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena.
Physicists Reveal Striking Similarities in Sporting Performance
Finding the similarities between volleyball and snooker may seem quite
tricky. However, a group of physicists have found that the spread of
scores, otherwise known as distribution, across their ranking systems
are almost identical.
They've also shown that this is the same for almost all sports, whether their ranking systems are based on points or the earnings of each individual or team.
Publishing their study September 21 in the Institute of Physics and German Physical Society's New Journal of Physics, the researchers came to this conclusion by statistically analysing the ranking systems across 12 different sports: tennis, golf, table tennis, volleyball, football, snooker, badminton, basketball, baseball, hockey, handball and fencing.
Rankings are a direct measure of a player or a team's performance and come in different forms. Some sports are ranked using a points system, while others are ranked using earnings. By statistically analysing the rankings and plotting them onto graphs, the researchers found that the distributions for each sport were almost identical.
The reason why the ranking systems have a common distribution is unknown and is the latest example of a phenomenon that abides by the mysterious 'power laws' -- a term used to describe phenomena where large events are rare and small events are common.
In the past, research has shown that the frequency of words in different texts, the size of cities and people's income all abide by the same power law.
Co-author of the study, Dr Wei Li, said: "Let's take human wealth. The chance of being a billionaire is small, but not zero as we see thousands of them in the world. At the same time, the chance of being poor is very high. We call this distribution a power law and, for some unknown reason, witness exactly the same distribution in other everyday phenomena.
"The sports ranking systems we analysed all follow similar power-laws."
The researchers, from Hua-Zhong Normal University, ISMANS (LUNAM Université), Université de Maine and Max-Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences, also found that the sport rankings agree with a maxim known as the Pareto principle.
Also known as the 80-20 rule, this states that, for many events, roughly 80 per cent of the effects come from 20 per cent of the causes. Vilfredo Pareto noticed this in 1906 when he found that 80 per cent of Italy's land was owned by 20 per cent of the population. The rule also applied to a variety of other countries he analysed.
In all of the sports analysed, 20 per cent of the players possessed 80 per cent of the total scores of the whole system.
"We all want to be the best or at least one of the best in some aspects. A businessman wants to be Bill Gates; a model wants to be Cindy Crawford; a tennis player wants to be Roger Federer. The idea of ranking is ubiquitous throughout our human society and we have found that for a number of sports, there is a similar law which dictates how these rankings pan out," continued Dr Li.
They've also shown that this is the same for almost all sports, whether their ranking systems are based on points or the earnings of each individual or team.
Publishing their study September 21 in the Institute of Physics and German Physical Society's New Journal of Physics, the researchers came to this conclusion by statistically analysing the ranking systems across 12 different sports: tennis, golf, table tennis, volleyball, football, snooker, badminton, basketball, baseball, hockey, handball and fencing.
Rankings are a direct measure of a player or a team's performance and come in different forms. Some sports are ranked using a points system, while others are ranked using earnings. By statistically analysing the rankings and plotting them onto graphs, the researchers found that the distributions for each sport were almost identical.
The reason why the ranking systems have a common distribution is unknown and is the latest example of a phenomenon that abides by the mysterious 'power laws' -- a term used to describe phenomena where large events are rare and small events are common.
In the past, research has shown that the frequency of words in different texts, the size of cities and people's income all abide by the same power law.
Co-author of the study, Dr Wei Li, said: "Let's take human wealth. The chance of being a billionaire is small, but not zero as we see thousands of them in the world. At the same time, the chance of being poor is very high. We call this distribution a power law and, for some unknown reason, witness exactly the same distribution in other everyday phenomena.
"The sports ranking systems we analysed all follow similar power-laws."
The researchers, from Hua-Zhong Normal University, ISMANS (LUNAM Université), Université de Maine and Max-Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences, also found that the sport rankings agree with a maxim known as the Pareto principle.
Also known as the 80-20 rule, this states that, for many events, roughly 80 per cent of the effects come from 20 per cent of the causes. Vilfredo Pareto noticed this in 1906 when he found that 80 per cent of Italy's land was owned by 20 per cent of the population. The rule also applied to a variety of other countries he analysed.
In all of the sports analysed, 20 per cent of the players possessed 80 per cent of the total scores of the whole system.
"We all want to be the best or at least one of the best in some aspects. A businessman wants to be Bill Gates; a model wants to be Cindy Crawford; a tennis player wants to be Roger Federer. The idea of ranking is ubiquitous throughout our human society and we have found that for a number of sports, there is a similar law which dictates how these rankings pan out," continued Dr Li.
'Half-Match' Bone Marrow Transplants Wipe out Sickle Cell Disease in Selected Patients
In a preliminary clinical trial, investigators at Johns Hopkins have
shown that even partially-matched bone marrow transplants can eliminate
sickle cell disease in some patients, ridding them of painful and
debilitating symptoms, and the need for a lifetime of pain medications
and blood transfusions. The researchers say the use of such marrow could
potentially help make bone marrow transplants accessible to a majority
of sickle cell patients who need them.
After a median follow-up of two years, the transplants successfully eliminated sickle cell disease in 11 of 17 patients. Three were fully matched to their donors and eight received half-matched donor marrow. All 11 patients are free of painful sickle cell crises and 10 no longer have anemia. There were no deaths and no unexpected toxicities.
Six of the 11 patients (all half-matched) have stopped taking immunosuppressive drugs, although some still require narcotics for chronic pain because of sickle cell-related organ damage. Blood tests on the six patients show that their red cells are now completely derived from their donor's marrow.
Patients with severe sickle cell disease (SCD) face shortened life spans, intractable pain and eventual organ damage as a result of their disease, an inherited disorder caused by a mistake in the oxygen-carrying hemoglobin molecules in red blood cells. The flawed genetic code stiffens red cells, and shapes them into a pronged "sickle" that clump and stick into blood vessel walls, cutting off blood and oxygen to tissues and organs throughout the body.
SCD occurs in approximately one in 400 African Americans, and rarely in Caucasians. An estimated 100,000 people are currently living with sickle cell disease in the U.S.
Most patients die before age 50, and many suffer poor quality of life with frequent episodes of "off-the-charts" pain, and an increased risk for kidney failure, stroke, deep-vein thrombosis, and lung disease.
Treatments include blood transfusions and a drug, hydroxyurea. Many patients use narcotics to control severe pain and have repeat hospitalizations. Bone marrow transplants have been successful in curing some cases, but matching donors are rare and the procedure itself poses risk.
In the current study, 17 patients at the Johns Hopkins Hospital were offered bone marrow transplant options, including the use of half-matched donor marrow to try and replace their "sickled" blood cells with new, healthy ones. The transplants were successful in 11 of the patients, of whom eight were only half-matches. Results of the trial were published in the Sept. 6 early online edition of Blood.
"We're trying to reformat the blood system and give patients new blood cells to replace the diseased ones, much like you would replace a computer's circuitry with an entirely new hard drive," says Robert Brodsky, M.D., director of the Division of Hematology at Johns Hopkins and The Johns Hopkins Family Professor of Medicine and Oncology. "While bone marrow transplants have long been known to cure sickle cell disease, only a small percentage of patients have fully matched, eligible donors."
National registries often are of little help in finding donors for sickle cell patients, because most of those in need are African American and other minorities who are vastly underrepresented in registries, say the Johns Hopkins researchers.
To overcome the shortage of donors, investigators at Johns Hopkins developed techniques, recently tested in leukemia and lymphoma patients, to transplant with bone marrow that is half-identical or "haploidentical" to the patient's tissue type. Half-matched bone marrow can be obtained from parents, children and most siblings, and is extracted by needle from the hip bone.
For the study, the Johns Hopkins team screened 19 patients to find bone marrow donors with either half-identical or fully matched tissue. Each transplant candidate had experienced many severe pain crises, significant organ problems, or had failed hydroxyruea, the only drug known to curtail sickle cell symptoms. The team found donors for 17 of the 19 patients: 14 were half-identical and three were fully matched siblings. The youngest patient was 15; the oldest 46.
Before each transplant, sickle cell patients received a "conditioning" regimen of low-dose immunosuppression drugs, low toxicity chemotherapy, and low-dose total body irradiation. Brodsky says this gentler approach to pre-transplant therapy has made transplant possible for sickle cell patients whose tissues and organs have been ravaged by the disease.
After the transplant, all patients received high doses of the chemotherapy drug cyclophosphamide, which kills remaining blood cells, including diseased sickled cells, and preserves the donor's stem cells responsible for making new, healthy cells.
Of the 17 patients, six transplants were not successful; however, because of the reduced intensity of the conditioning regimen, all of these patients recovered their own blood cells.
There were no deaths, some infections, and only slight skin-related graft versus host disease symptoms in one patient, which cleared without therapy, the researchers reported. Some brain swelling occurred in three patients during the conditioning period and resolved without neurologic damage.
The Johns Hopkins doctors say that while the majority of patients in the trial had successful transplants, about less than half did not.
"Sickle cell disease patients undergo multiple blood transfusions throughout their lives and may have acquired antibodies against many different blood types, making it more difficult than usual to give patients donated bone marrow." says Javier Bolaños-Meade, M.D., associate professor of oncology at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center and principal investigator of the study.
Improving the rate of engraftment in haploidentical transplants for sickle cell disease remains a challenge, they say, but the researchers are looking for additional ways to overcome it, including increasing the number of stem cells transplanted and using other immunosuppressant drugs during the transplant.
After a median follow-up of two years, the transplants successfully eliminated sickle cell disease in 11 of 17 patients. Three were fully matched to their donors and eight received half-matched donor marrow. All 11 patients are free of painful sickle cell crises and 10 no longer have anemia. There were no deaths and no unexpected toxicities.
Six of the 11 patients (all half-matched) have stopped taking immunosuppressive drugs, although some still require narcotics for chronic pain because of sickle cell-related organ damage. Blood tests on the six patients show that their red cells are now completely derived from their donor's marrow.
Patients with severe sickle cell disease (SCD) face shortened life spans, intractable pain and eventual organ damage as a result of their disease, an inherited disorder caused by a mistake in the oxygen-carrying hemoglobin molecules in red blood cells. The flawed genetic code stiffens red cells, and shapes them into a pronged "sickle" that clump and stick into blood vessel walls, cutting off blood and oxygen to tissues and organs throughout the body.
SCD occurs in approximately one in 400 African Americans, and rarely in Caucasians. An estimated 100,000 people are currently living with sickle cell disease in the U.S.
Most patients die before age 50, and many suffer poor quality of life with frequent episodes of "off-the-charts" pain, and an increased risk for kidney failure, stroke, deep-vein thrombosis, and lung disease.
Treatments include blood transfusions and a drug, hydroxyurea. Many patients use narcotics to control severe pain and have repeat hospitalizations. Bone marrow transplants have been successful in curing some cases, but matching donors are rare and the procedure itself poses risk.
In the current study, 17 patients at the Johns Hopkins Hospital were offered bone marrow transplant options, including the use of half-matched donor marrow to try and replace their "sickled" blood cells with new, healthy ones. The transplants were successful in 11 of the patients, of whom eight were only half-matches. Results of the trial were published in the Sept. 6 early online edition of Blood.
"We're trying to reformat the blood system and give patients new blood cells to replace the diseased ones, much like you would replace a computer's circuitry with an entirely new hard drive," says Robert Brodsky, M.D., director of the Division of Hematology at Johns Hopkins and The Johns Hopkins Family Professor of Medicine and Oncology. "While bone marrow transplants have long been known to cure sickle cell disease, only a small percentage of patients have fully matched, eligible donors."
National registries often are of little help in finding donors for sickle cell patients, because most of those in need are African American and other minorities who are vastly underrepresented in registries, say the Johns Hopkins researchers.
To overcome the shortage of donors, investigators at Johns Hopkins developed techniques, recently tested in leukemia and lymphoma patients, to transplant with bone marrow that is half-identical or "haploidentical" to the patient's tissue type. Half-matched bone marrow can be obtained from parents, children and most siblings, and is extracted by needle from the hip bone.
For the study, the Johns Hopkins team screened 19 patients to find bone marrow donors with either half-identical or fully matched tissue. Each transplant candidate had experienced many severe pain crises, significant organ problems, or had failed hydroxyruea, the only drug known to curtail sickle cell symptoms. The team found donors for 17 of the 19 patients: 14 were half-identical and three were fully matched siblings. The youngest patient was 15; the oldest 46.
Before each transplant, sickle cell patients received a "conditioning" regimen of low-dose immunosuppression drugs, low toxicity chemotherapy, and low-dose total body irradiation. Brodsky says this gentler approach to pre-transplant therapy has made transplant possible for sickle cell patients whose tissues and organs have been ravaged by the disease.
After the transplant, all patients received high doses of the chemotherapy drug cyclophosphamide, which kills remaining blood cells, including diseased sickled cells, and preserves the donor's stem cells responsible for making new, healthy cells.
Of the 17 patients, six transplants were not successful; however, because of the reduced intensity of the conditioning regimen, all of these patients recovered their own blood cells.
There were no deaths, some infections, and only slight skin-related graft versus host disease symptoms in one patient, which cleared without therapy, the researchers reported. Some brain swelling occurred in three patients during the conditioning period and resolved without neurologic damage.
The Johns Hopkins doctors say that while the majority of patients in the trial had successful transplants, about less than half did not.
"Sickle cell disease patients undergo multiple blood transfusions throughout their lives and may have acquired antibodies against many different blood types, making it more difficult than usual to give patients donated bone marrow." says Javier Bolaños-Meade, M.D., associate professor of oncology at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center and principal investigator of the study.
Improving the rate of engraftment in haploidentical transplants for sickle cell disease remains a challenge, they say, but the researchers are looking for additional ways to overcome it, including increasing the number of stem cells transplanted and using other immunosuppressant drugs during the transplant.
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