Amazonaws S3 and EC2 are transforming the landscape for small businesses.  Take cheap hosting from a reseller to host your business site and enhance this with cheap storage and video serving space payable on demand to Amazon.

Now they are enhancing their EC2 services as this recent news release shows.

“We are excited to introduce Reserved Instances, an additional pricing option for Amazon EC2 that gives you an option to make a low, one-time payment for an instance to reserve capacity and further reduce hourly usage charges. As with On-Demand Instances, you will still pay only for the compute capacity that you actually consume, and if and when you do not use an instance, you will not pay usage charges for it.

Customers of all sizes continue to enjoy our existing, pay-as-you-go pricing for On-Demand Instances, but some have told us that they are ready to reserve capacity in order to achieve even lower costs. Reserved Instances give you the option to make a low, one-time payment for each instance you want to reserve and in turn receive a significant discount on the hourly usage charge for that instance. After the one-time payment for an instance, that instance is reserved for you, and you have no further obligation; you may choose to run that instance for the discounted usage rate for the duration of your term, or if and when you do not use the instance, you will not pay usage charges on it.

Reserved Instances are complementary to existing Amazon EC2 On-Demand Instances and give businesses even more flexibility to reduce computing costs. Because Reserved Instances function identically to existing Amazon EC2 On-Demand Instances, you can now plan for an anticipated amount of capacity using Reserved Instances and then instantly spin up On-Demand Instances if your compute needs exceed you reserved capacity. Of course, you can also choose to handle all of your capacity needs using only On-Demand instances or only Reserved Instances — it’s entirely up to you. Reserved Instances are available in 1-year or 3-year terms.”

Obviously you need to do a small calculation to check that the cost of the up front payment is covered by the ongoing savings on the amazonaws usage charges.

Video is comming and low cost high bandwith is enabling a rapid adoption for the masses. In the new environment some businesses such as CISCO are experimenting with less rigid, formal video clips.

Have a look at http://blogs.cisco.com/consumer/comments/cisco_behind_i_will_survie/ where you can see Gloria Gaynor in a totally new light. Well done CISCO.

20 great websites for any developer recommended on this external website.

A good start point if you are starting to move down this road.

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This link connects to information on software which can help you build your own (Yahoo) Answers site.

ANOVA answers software, the first script that allows webmasters to build answering communities online where users can ask questions and answer in text, audio and video.

If you have some time for R&D you ought perhaps try this and see if you can develop the next mega social site.

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This article recognises that AdWords organization will either help you or kill you. Make sure you organize your adgroups or else risk getting Google Slapped.

In short a properly structured adwords campaign will outperform a badly structured one and time is money with advertising as you pay even if you have no success.

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There are many keyword services which sell you keyword volumes for developing your online campaigns.

They are probably worried today. Google has decided to release accurate information on actual search volumes in their keyword tool.

Saw this item on Digg which spilled the beans.
Google Releases Keyword Tool External with Accurate Search Traffic Numbers

Google released its new Keyword Tool External tool which relays Accurate Traffic Data for Keyword Terms!! Learn More

Have a read and grab the data quickly!

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When searching Digg I came across this article – Powerful ways to integrate Google Adsense into Wordpress.

Wordpress is a blogging platform which can be extended through plugins to make it whatever you want. There are literally hundreds of plugins – thats why this post helps as it points to to some of the best.

Check it out and see which could help you.

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I have been conducting a test on the relative performance of Google ad sense text and link units versus that of adsense image units. The test has been conducted over a number of months and involves 100,000 page impressions so that it is statistically significant.

Whilst Google’s terms of service prevent the disclosure of precise click through rates it appears that the comparative performance assessments are allowed.

The ads linked unit and the text unit had very similar performance levels, both these units were positioned on the left-hand side of the page.

The image unit was positioned on the right-hand sidebar near the bottom of the page and as such, would have been expected to perform worse than the other units. Notwithstanding this it actually had a click through rate one fifth of that of the other units and carried advertisers with a lower click cost.

Google publish heat maps of pages showing the best place to position your ad units, these results are consistent with this thought the very poor performance of image units is surprising. Needless to say my first action now is to substitute on any image units I am promoting with a suitable text unit.

The experiment was interesting that, given that it has highlighted a loss of income, I am not going to delay by continuing it any further.

The forums are awash with comments concerning the status and impact of the Google Big Daddy update. Whilst Google is pursuing this to improve their infrastructure and the returned search results the implementation seems to be having an adverse impact on many online businesses.

Search results have become random. Some sites Read the rest of this entry »

Google adsense revenue is 78.5 percent of advertisers payments according to an article in the New York Times today, 16 January.

This is hot news as Google has not been keen to disclose adsense commission structures before and this has held back some sites from participating in the program. The costs of Internet Marketing with Pay Per Click programs is known but why join the publishing club when you have no idea of what the rewards will be and whether you will be fairly remunerated.

The article further states Read the rest of this entry »