The market for buying and selling web hosting companies ebbs and flows with the general business climate. It may be the case that the current economic downturn has created a buying opportunity for anyone looking to step up and buy a hosting company. You might think that buying a hosting company would take tons of cash. In some cases that is true, but in many others the size of the property is so small that the entire web hosting operation can be bought for thousands of dollars - not millions of dollars.

If one were inclined to seek out a website hosting company to buy - where do you look? How do you know what the market prices for any given type of hosting company are right now? I asked the advice of the experts at website hosting company 34SP.com. Here are a few resources they recommend you check if you are researching or considering buying a web hosting company.

MergerNetwork was the first online marketplace for buying and selling businesses. It went online in May 1995 under the name M&A Marketplace. The site now claims to have an additional 2,000 businesses listed for sale each month. You can see a number of different types of businesses for sale as well. The category link that displays web development and web hosting businesses is: http://www.mergernetwork.com/businesses-for-sale/industry/135. You will need to register if you want to see the listing details.

Claiming over 50,000 businesses for sale, BizBuySell is the ‘’Internet’s most active marketplace for businesses and franchises for sale. Each month BizBuySell receives over 700,000 visits from individuals looking for new business opportunities and from business owners looking to sell their business or franchise.'’ Similar to MergerNetwork, you can search by category or geography. The site is vast and the categories and search make zeroing in on a web hosting company for sale pretty tricky. The site is here: http://www.bizbuysell.com.

Flippa is billed as ‘’The #1 marketplace for buying and selling web sites.'’ Clean and easy to use, just go to the homepage and click the ‘Buy a Website’ button. I did a quick search by using the keywords ‘web hosting’. The results of that search query are here. While there are many other types of sites included in the search results, there were a few web hosting companies listed as well. The nice part of this site is that the information about number of visitors, PageRank, and Alexa rank are all listed for each site on the right column. This saves you a few steps of research. Also has a ‘Buy It Now’ feature in addition to bidding.

Another option in looking for a web hosting company to buy is Web Hosting Talk forums. This is a community made up of web hosting professionals, so the offers tend to be right to the point. You can usually find at least a few companies currently for sale under the category of ‘Other Related Offers’. Here is a direct link to the section that frequently has the web hosting companies listed for sale: http://www.webhostingtalk.com/forumdisplay.php?f=97.

As described on their website, Cheval Capital is: ‘’A boutique investment bank that specializes in mergers, acquisitions and corporate finance.'’ The company is run by Frank and Hillary Stiff. Together the team has vast amounts of experience and have handled many hosting-related transactions over the past few years. What I have found to be supremely helpful over the years has been a list of web hosting companies for sale that the company distributes via email. Dubbed the ‘’Cheval Opportunities List'’ it is comprised of assets currently for sale. The companies for sale are usually in the range between $50,000 US and $5 million US. The list is emailed out about every 2 weeks.

Cheval acts as an advisor in the transactions and is paid a modest fee by the buyer. The fee is paid as the buyer pays the purchase price - so if the seller is paid over time, Cheval Capital is paid over time as well. To get added to the mailing list for the Cheval Opportunities List, contact Frank Stiff at: fstiff[at]chevalcap.com, or phone directly at 703-549-7390.

So there you have it. A few places to check and see what types of hosting companies are for sale and get a sense of prices as well. Good luck in finding the right web hosting company for you.

Although many are now touting the strength and reliability of ‘Cloud Computing’, it is apparent as of today that every large computer system is potentially vulnerable to failure. It is hard to imagine a hosting enterprise more complex and more considered than the data centers and network behind Google. The company processes the vast majority of the world’s search traffic queries every day - in addition to supplying both Google AdWords advertising and Google Analytics to a huge variety of the world’s websites. In order to keep this complex website hosting operation going, the company has a literal army of engineers and systems administrators who spend their lives ensuring that disaster won’t strike.

Yesterday disaster struck.

The outage is well documented online including this coverage in the San Francisco Chronicle. According to published reports Google suffered an outage affecting 14 percent of its audience. The outage lasted for 2 hours according to Google. You can see an interesting graph here which visually displays the impact to bandwidth when Google is taken out of the equation.

So why did Google’s hosting fail? According to the official Google explanation, ‘’An error in one of our systems caused us to direct some of our web traffic through Asia, which created a traffic jam. As a result, about 14 percent of our users experienced slow services or even interruptions.'’

One of the website hosting companies effected by the Google outage was UK web hosting firm 34SP.com. Co-founder Daniel Foster explained, ‘’While we had complete connectivity and speed here in the UK, we observed a few client notes regarding the speed of the website. It became apparent that the Google outage was affecting the general Internet when we checked out the worldwide conversation on Twitter.'’

In fact, Twitter.com became a haven for those suddenly without Google - many for the very first time ever. Here is a small sample of the comments gleaned from Twitter during the heat of the outage.

‘’Note that when Google is down, searching for news about Google Outage on Google is pretty fruitless.'’

‘’OH GOD HOW DO I USE THE INTERNET GOOGLE IS DOWN.'’

‘’I didn’t realize how many non Google sites break too when they’re down.'’

‘’Want more info, but would use google to find it. I don’t know how to use the Internet sans google?'’

‘’google is down.. is this the apocalypse?'’

‘’due to Google analytics and adsense’s ubiquitous nature, the entire internet is reduced to a creeping ooze.'’

Here is some news about a great new website hosting product. Customer focused website hosting company, 34SP.com, has announced the introduction of a new professional website hosting account. According to information released by the company, the new service is entitled the Professional Hosting plan and breaks new ground in account specifications and customer support.

While the main specifications of the account are among the highest in the industry - 5GB disk space, 20GB monthly transfer, 100 emails, 10 MySQL databases, included shell access, SMTP, and comprehensive weekly backups
- the value proposition for 34SP.com customers has always been the company’s commitment to service and support. When a recent 34SP.com client survey asked, ‘’How likely are you to recommend 34SP.com?'’ a stunning 98 percent affirmed that they would refer the company. The company points to this data as confirming the positive effect that outstanding customer service has on referral rates.

Co-founder of 34SP.com, Stuart Melling, explained the reasoning behind the new Professional Hosting plan, ‘At 34SP.com we are constantly asking our clients what we can do to enhance our services. This new Professional Hosting package reflects what our clients told us they needed to grow - more space, more resources and more features. Critically, our clients told us that weekly backups, SMTP, and spam filtering should be free as well, and we listened to that too. Of course customer service and technical support continue to be our core focus, and we strive for industry leading uptimes as well.'’

The new Professional Hosting account from 34SP.com requires no minimum contract, and every plan is sold with a 30 day money back guarantee. The price of the plan is £3.95 per month.

To learn more about 34SP.com and its Professional Hosting services, please visit: http://www.34sp.com/professional-hosting.

European web hosting conference and exhibition, WebhostingDay 2009, has reached capacity and is no longer accepting new registrants. The show will be held from March 18-20, 2009 in the Phantasialand theme park in Bruehl near Cologne, Germany. According to the show’s organizers, pre-registrations had been running at 80% above last year’s levels indicating that there was a high degree of interest in WebhostingDay 2009. The venue in Bruehl was capable of handling 2,500 attendees.

Founder and organizer of WebhostingDay, Thomas Strohe commented, ‘’The event is sold out with about 2,500 registered top-class representatives from the hosting industry and online registration has been closed on March 6. Also both of the Phantasialand hotels as well as our backup hotel in Bruehl are sold out. However, since some people might not come to the event in spite of having registered, there is still the opportunity to register directly on-site. The regular attendance fee is charged then.'’

So if you are feeling very lucky, you could just show up at the event and see if there are any spots that have gone unclaimed. That wouldn’t help you with the hotel accommodations though. The show organizers confirmed yesterday that every hotel room within a 25 kilometer radius of WebhostingDay is booked up. So how is it that this European web hosting conference and trade show is sold out - when other trade events are suffering? Take for example CES (the Consumer Electronics Tradeshow) held in January in Las Vegas - attendance was down 22 percent from last year. The magazine for the tradeshow industry, Tradeshow Week is reporting that ‘’the Global Association of the Exhibition Industry found that 62 of show organizers around the world saw their businesses decline in 2008. Nearly 70 percent said they expect at least a 10-percent decrease in revenue in the first half of this year.'’ This would have you thinking that the WebhostingDay show would be suffering. It’s not.

Here are a few thoughts from industry experts on why the show is so popular this year.

Manuel Jaffrin is the EMEA Business Development Manager in the Web Industry Practice at Sun Microsystems. Mr. Jaffrin explained the attraction of WebhostingDay to Sun, ‘’The current economic climate obliges every single company to look at new and innovative solutions to cope with the current rise in demand for their Web infrastructure while maintaining low costs. The Web 2.0 industry has created a massive culture of participation which is now extending to the enterprise. The demand for efficient, cheap and flexible hosting solutions is booming. Cloud computing is emerging as a possible answer to many of the current limitations our customer are facing.'’

cPanel will be an exhibitor at WebhostingDay 2009. Dave Koston with cPanel explained why cPanel sees value in the show, ‘’We have many partners in Europe and most do not travel to the U.S. for HostingCon or the cPanel Conference. It is only natural that we travel to Europe to meet with our existing partners and gain exposure to new partners.'’

First time attendee, Phil Robinson, is a developer and programmer with UK business hosting company 34SP.com. Mr. Robinson noted, ‘’Trade shows are the ultimate in a very fast education in the up to the moment technologies and techniques. It is important to keep abreast of new developments in hosting and virtualization right now, as things are moving quite quickly. The fact that the world is experiencing an economic slowdown doesn’t mean that technology will pause until conditions improve.'’

WebhostingDay founder, Mr. Strohe added these thoughts on why the show is succeeding in these tough economic times, ‘’The reason might be the large number of famous partner companies who contribute with talks and exhibitions. Moreover, it is the great success of the previous events which made many people come back. And in Europe, there is no other event that unites so many top level executives from such great and important companies. It is an ideal opportunity for people from the hosting sector to come together, to network and to form new business relationships. Therefore, the relatively low investment for coming to the event gives a very good return. You might even go as far as to say: the event is a must for every member of the web hosting industry, especially when doing business in Europe, because it is the right place to meet the right people.'’

This content was written by Derek Vaughan exclusively for PingZine.

As you may have heard, Google this week experienced an outage of its Gmail email service. The outage began just after 9:30am GMT on Tuesday February 24, 2009. Since GMT happens to be the local time zone in the UK, one observant UK hosting company - 34SP.com - both spotted the outage and alerted customers to the problems. Since there are somewhere around 113 million worldwide Gmail users, it is likely that some fraction of most web hosting company customers are using the service as their primary email. That means that during a prolonged outage (the outage on Tuesday was about 3 hours long) customers will not receive email replies to sales or service queries if they are on the errant email service.

So it was that 34SP.com decided to publish information about the Google Gmail outage on their corporate blog. The post was simply entitled ‘Gmail Outage‘ and alerted customers to the fact that there appeared to be a major problem with Gmail. From the blog post: ‘’34SP.com conducted extensive internal staff testing - both within and external to our firewall - and then sought outside confirmation that the service was indeed down. The URL: http://mail.google.com/mail/ remains unresponsive.'’

The posting was among the first on the Internet to identify the problem and document the outage. According to Daniel Foster, co-founder of 34SP.com, ‘’A lot of our customers use Gmail addresses as their primary contact address, so this was an issue that affected a large portion of our customer base. We wanted to let them know that we were aware of the problems they were experiencing and inform anyone that didn’t know about it of what was going on. We’re always looking for ways to keep in touch with our customer base and the blog provides another superb way to do that. It’s a great option when the message isn’t something that needs to be communicated by e-mail or by getting directly in touch with individuals. Hopefully the nature of a lot of the posts can give people an insight into life at 34SP.com and satisfy the curiosity we know some people have.'’

The latest Gmail outage was sixth disruption in the service within the past eight months. Google has promised to credit paying customers for 15 days of service. Gmail has two categories of users - those paying the $50 per year as a corporate user, and the free consumer service. Gmail has service-level agreements for paying customers with a guarantee of 99.9% uptime per month.

So what exactly caused the most admired Internet company to drop the ball on Gmail? According to the Official Google Blog on the subject, ‘’There was a routine maintenance event in one of our European data centers. This typically causes no disruption because accounts are simply served out of another data center. Unexpected side effects of some new code that tries to keep data geographically close to its owner caused another data center in Europe to become overloaded, and that caused cascading problems from one data center to another. It took us about an hour to get it all back under control.'’ The short version? Human error.

This content was written by Derek Vaughan exclusively for PingZine.com.

In my work with web hosting companies and also those designers and developers looking for a website host I often encounter a specific set of needs that falls clearly under a web hosting niche. Why would a hosting company focus on a niche? Which niches are out there for those desiring a great hosting provider? Here are a few specifics.

Niching by Price
Probably the most obvious and pervasive niche in website hosting is that of price. One typically sees three tranches of pricing emerge: discounters, mid-tier providers, and premium hosting services. Examples of discounters would be: 1 and 1, and GoDaddy. Mid-tier companies are represented by firms like Hostway. Premium hosting is the scope of web hosting companies like Orcsweb and Rackspace.

Geographical Niches
While web hosting is easily accessed via an Internet connection anywhere on the globe, there are still strong boundaries of culture, language and currency that draw customers to a local firm. For example in Japan one will prefer to read website content in the Japanese language, access sales and support in Japanese, and pay bills in Yen. There are as many examples of geographic website hosting niches as there are countries. Here are just a couple of website hosting companies in this niche: UK website hosting firm 34SP.com and Australia’s Digital Pacific.

Niching by Operating System
A powerful niche can emerge based on supplying a particular operating system. Since most web hosting companies prefer a LAMP (Linux, apache, mySQL, php) environment, the prevalent OS in this niche is Linux. Typical of this type of host is linuxwebhost.com. Another operating system that has tremendous market power is the Microsoft developed and supported OS - Windows (now Windows Server 2008 or ASP.NET). Microsoft has built this niche among Windows developers. Hosts specializing in the Microsoft platform would be DiscountASP.NET and Maximum ASP. Another operating system that was once much larger, but is now being replaced by Windows and Linux is ColdFusion. Although ColdFusion is typically installed over a Windows operating system, it has properties that make it unique and desirable for ColdFusion developers. HostMySite.com is a web hosting firm that offers strong expertise in ColdFusion.

Reseller Hosts
It is possible to buy multiple accounts from just about any web host. However, those companies that have developed the reseller niche have honed their expertise in making accounts that hold a bundle of separate websites under one owner. These reseller accounts also often come with substantial discounts for each sub-account. This enables the account holder to resell the hosting and gain a profit. Examples of reseller hosts include the venerable HostGator and Resellers Panel.

Niche by Account Type
Another very common segregation of web hosting firms occurs by account type. These are usually a separation between shared accounts, VPS and dedicated servers. Shared hosts offer multiple customer accounts sharing a common server. For example, DiscountASP.NET. VPS companies have fewer virtual accounts per server - often with isolated environments and guaranteed resources. An example would be SliceHost. Dedicated server firms will give a single server to each customer. An example would be managed dedicated hosting firm NaviSite.

As you can see, there are many ways that website hosting companies have created niches for themselves and their customers. While the above list is certainly not exhaustive, it does give you a sense of how the marketplace has established niches for both buyers and sellers of website hosting products and services.

This content was written by Derek Vaughan exclusively for PingZine.com.

I am often asked which is the best web host or account for business web hosting. My answer is always, ‘’That depends'’. The reason that I say that is that there are many different business needs and applications which can be supplied by a variety of web hosting vendors on a plethora of operating systems and hardware configurations. Let’s look at the basics.

Email
The single most requested application for business is email. More specifically, email that arrives to an inbox which is addressed as ‘mail@mycompanyname.com’. If you are like most smaller businesses, all you need for mail is a domain name and a very basic hosting account. Here are a couple of options:

GoDaddy offers a variety of email only accounts that run from around $2 to $10 per month depending on the features. You can also easily register a domain name of your choosing with GoDaddy as well. A ‘dot com’ domain name will run you another $9.99 per year - that’s so you can have your business name in the email address.

If you are overseas you can check out business web hosting from UK based hosting provider, 34SP.com. This company offers very competitive rates on UK domain names - right now a ‘.co.uk’ domain is 5 pounds per year.

Standard Business Hosting
Standard business web hosting is available from many service providers. Typically, a smaller business is in good hands if the web hosting company is service oriented. For that reason, I would suggest checking out HostMySite.com and their standard business plan. The cost is $8.95 per month when purchased annually. This account comes with a very high level of support that businesses will prefer.

Another service oriented host is Hostway. You can view the various standard web hosting options here. Hostway is more expensive than many other hosts (plans start at $15.95) but presumably this allows more margin for greater service.

More Sophisticated Options
If a company grows large enough or has enough website traffic, at some point it becomes advantageous to move up to a virtual or dedicated server. These hosting options require more skill to administer and operate, but permit truly isolated hosting environments and vastly greater resources to run your site and applications. If you are in this category, I would recommend (in addition to those companies already mentioned above) checking out NaviSite Managed Hosting. The company offers both virtual and dedicated servers, and often has one of the best price to value ratios in the business.

The very highest end of the spectrum is generally regarded to be Rackspace - a managed server provider. The company is known for its great service and robust operating environment. Prices are generally higher, but the name and reputation dictate a premium price.

Final Thoughts
Of course there are many other great options out there for business web hosting. You can also conduct a Google search for either business web hosting or business hosting. The companies that are listed can be further investigated and their reputations and plans researched.

Good luck finding that superior business web hosting company. It’s worth the effort to obtain a great business partner in hosting.

This content was written by Derek Vaughan exclusively for PingZine.

I subscribe to many website hosting newsletters, Google alerts, and have a pretty decent amount of hosted accounts and domains at various web hosts that I have tried out over the years. So it is that I receive a nearly continuous stream of web hosting and domain-related special offers.

Most of the special offers that I come across aren’t really all that special - for instance, getting free setup on a standard shared hosting account doesn’t strike me as a particularly interesting deal. Over the past couple of days I have received offers from two companies that I thought I would point out. The two companies are a bit different, but their offers are interesting - and also for different reasons.

The first offer was in the form of an email from UK website hosting company 34SP.com. The offer is a pretty compelling proposition: VPS hosting for just 1 penny for the first month with no setup fees or minimum comittment - this is a limited time offer so check the website for details. The company is also known for providing great service and support for developers and designers - in other words, website professionals.

This is a full scale VPS account - not a stripped down account for promotional purposes. You can view details of the VPS offer here. Here’s a bit of the text from the email offer: ‘’To conclude the year of 2008 and kick off the New Year with a bang, 34SP.com has listened to your requests and we are therefore offering you a great chance to try our latest product offering: Virtual Private Server Hosting. Virtual servers permit quick scaling and testing of online applications and can host unlimited websites. They can be supplied with the Plesk interface installed, and you have full root access to both the server and Plesk. Alternatively, you can have a plain VPS without any control panel software for maximum flexibility. Often a virtual server can do everything that a dedicated server can do for a fraction of the cost, and the upgrade path to a full server is very simple with no downtime.'’

Go Daddy is the other company that sent me an email with a ‘Holiday Savings’ deal. It was a bit more graphical and featured Go Daddy spokesperson and IndyCar Series star, Danica Patrick. The deal is to save 12 percent off of any Go Daddy product (if I am reading the offer correctly). There are no minimums to this offer either. So you simply enter the offer code: gdp1230ab into the promo box on the order form between now and December 31, 2008 to save. Not an incredible offer, but a decent savings if you are going to order something anyway.

There is also a great new article that includes Go Daddy in the Wall Street Journal entitled, ‘’Where Stunts and Strategy Collide'’. It’s a quick and entertaining read and gives an overview of Go Daddy’s recent Super Bowl advertising activities.

I hope that these two offers help you save some money during this Holiday Season. Best wishes for a happy holiday and a prosperous New Year from PingZine.

This content was written by Derek Vaughan exclusively for PingZine.

If the state of Kentucky gets its way, then you may someday have to hand over all your domain names to the government. According to information originally distributed by the Associated Press and covered at Business Week Online, an appeals court consisting of three judges will decide whether or not a state can seized a web site domain name to prevent online gambling within state borders, even if it means cutting the rest of the world off from the site. Bear in mind that all of the websites and domain names in question in the case are hosted outside of the state of Kentucky - in fact all 141 of the sites in question have their businesses running outside the United States. The companies are licensed and regulated in the countries that they have their businesses in.

So what is the root cause of this action in Kentucky? According to published reports, ‘’Franklin County Circuit Court Judge Thomas Wingate ruled in October that the state’s lawsuit seeking to block Kentuckians’ access to more than 140 online casinos could go forward. Judge Wingate also ruled that he planned to hold a hearing about whether the state could seize the web sites.'’ It appears that Kentucky’s estimated 13,000 citizens who currently gamble online at the sites are being bilked by the outside entities. Eric Lycan, who represents the Kentucky Justice Cabinet is quoted as saying the online gambling business is a, ‘’massive, global, offshore criminal enterprise'’ that receives more than 80 percent of its revenue from the United States.

Now whether or not a business web hosting company feels that a domain can be confiscated by the government, the company must protect itself against business disruption or prosecution for simply hosting a domain or website that the government finds objectionable. So how does a web host protect itself and the customer at the same time? It is commonly done through the stated ‘’Terms and Conditions'’ contract agreed to by customers upon signing up. With the help of business hosting company 34SP.com, PingZine offers this example of language that makes up part of the ‘Acceptable Use Policy’: ‘’The Customer acknowledges that they are responsible for all actions with their account and Services provided by 34SP.com. Whilst it is not the intention of 34SP.com to monitor, control or otherwise effect any Services or content of on-line communications, 34SP.com reserve the right to edit, remove or otherwise deal with content that in their sole discretion are or may be in breach of this policy or otherwise harmful or offensive, regardless of the standard or subject matter. This policy is designed to assist in the protection and preservation of Services to the Customer and other 34SP.com customers and other Internet users from improper and/or illegally related activity.'’

These statements can protect a business web host from sharing any blame when a customer takes on questionable business activity. If you are searching for web hosting, look for this type of language in the ‘’Terms and Conditions'’ document of your web host. If you run a web hosting company, be sure that your ‘’Terms and Conditions'’ include language that limits your liability in the event that the government (or anyone else) finds that the business activity of one or more customers is dubious.

This content was written by Derek Vaughan exclusively for PingZine.

Many web hosting webmasters are using Google’s AdWords system and its counterpart - AdSense - to monetize their websites. While coming up with a truly great keyword list for your Google AdWords campaigns can be challenging, there is an important final step in the keyword list generation process - keyword matching.

What is Keyword Matching?
According to Google’s AdWords support website, there are three basic types of keyword matches: broad match, phrase match and exact match. Each type of keyword matching is designated by the syntax used to set up the keyword phrase in AdWords. Broad match has no associated brackets at all, phrase match uses the quotation marks symbol ( ‘’ ) on either side of a term to designate it as a phrase match, and exact match terms are bracket with the [ and ] symbols. Here are how the three would look for a typical search term - website hosting:

broad match = website hosting

phrase match = ‘’website hosting'’

exact match = [website hosting]

Broad match is the default option. Google explains how it works this way, ‘’With broad match, the Google AdWords system automatically runs your ads on relevant variations of your keywords, even if these terms aren’t in your keyword lists. Keyword variations can include synonyms, singular/plural forms, relevant variants of your keywords, and phrases containing your keywords.

For example, if you’re currently running ads on the broad-matched keyword web hosting, your ads may show for the search queries web hosting company or webhost. The keyword variations that are allowed to trigger your ads will change over time, as the AdWords system continually monitors your keyword quality and performance factors. Your ads will only continue showing on the highest-performing and most relevant keyword variations.'’

So as I understand it - when you set up a term like ‘hosting’ as a broad match your ad can show up for any and every term that contains ‘hosting’. Some examples of where I expect that your ad will show up if you use broad match are: website hosting, hosting a party, hosting support, what is web hosting - and some forth.

Phrase match is described by Google as follows, ‘’If you enter your keyword in quotation marks, as in ‘’tennis shoes,'’ your ad would be eligible to appear when a user searches on the phrase tennis shoes, in this order, and possibly with other terms before or after the phrase. For example, your ad could appear for the query red tennis shoes but not for shoes for tennis, tennis shoe, or tennis sneakers. Phrase match is more targeted than broad match, but more flexible than exact match.'’

So if you used the term ‘website hosting’ then your ad will show up for discount website hosting, website hosting services, and what is website hosting. Got it - I think.

So here is where I get confused by Google: I am constantly running into situations where these rules as stated by Google just don’t seem correct - at least for the web hosting industry. It’s difficult to elucidate specific examples without giving away some great keywords - but here is one clear cut example. The keyword phrase: ‘image hosting’ almost never seems to have any AdWords ads around it. Huh? How can that be?

There have to be dozens, if not hundreds of companies that are broad matching on ‘hosting’ and terms related. So according to Google’s rules - wouldn’t all the companies that are broad matched on ‘hosting’ show up for any term that contains the word hosting?

Here’s another example: ‘.Net framework’. There are many hosting companies that use ‘.Net’ or related on broad match. So why aren’t there AdWords ads on this term?

I suspect that there are many many oddities like this in AdWords. It would be great to understand what exactly this list of ‘outliers’ are - and also understand the reasoning at Google for why these keywords are so special. If anyone knows, please respond in the comments.

This content was written by Derek Vaughan.