February 19th, 2008
This isn’t aimed at anyone in particular, OK well actually it is but it’s also some great general advice for anybody planning on making money from a website.
Links this, links that, links, links links. There are actually a number of things that are MORE important than links when it comes to creating a website that will do what you want it to do, be it make money, increase awareness or anything else for that matter.
1. Reliable Hosting
Your website has to be where it says it is as much of the time as possible. You need a host that keeps your web pages published on the web 24 hours a day, 7 days a week so that when one of the search bots/spiders comes on by it can trawl your content. When a visitor from any source finds your website your content is there. This is how the web works, if your pages aren’t there then it doesn’t matter if you’ve got 10,000,000 inbound quality links because eventually your going to not only lose your listings in the SERPs but even more importantly you’re going to piss off a lot of visitors. This is even more important if you’re running a business, you can not afford to have a domain holding page over your website for days at a time, it smacks of amateurism. If you want to change hosts and you rely on your website then remember the 6 P’s. Proper planning prevents piss poor performance. Plan with military accuracy. If you can’t manage that then kiss good bye to your rankings, visitors and reputation. Do it often enough and you can kiss good bye to your SEO Consultant as well 
2. Unique Content
You should not syndicate your unique content to other websites, sales agents or anybody else for that matter. I repeat you should not give away copies of your website for people to re-brand as their own. IF people require content for sales literature then by all means supply them with cut down, altered content that links back to your website as the original source. This goes for people who like article syndication as well. If you’re going to syndicate an article make sure that you retain a full unique version on your website that can be pointed to as the authority copy of that content. Duplicate content penalties are not imaginary, it is something that the search engines really do take into account which means if you rely on your website it has to be unique.
I can’t believe that in this day and age that “big” companies would fall into the above mistakes and yet it’s still happening. Do you ever get the feeling that you’re talking to the wall? All I can say is that it’s a good job I keep a punch bag in the office!
November 15th, 2007
The e-mail I got went something like this:- “AN Hosting is currently running a limited time special. 999 GB of Disk Space, 9999 GB of Ba ndwidth, 999 Domains on 1 Account, Just $4.95/month to the end user“. Wow, that’s a crazy offer and they must know it because it’s limited to the 22nd of November.
So that’s pretty much unlimited domain hosting, with more bandwidth than you could ever use for only $4.95 a month. I’ve signed up, even if I only put 2 or 3 domains on that hosting it’s still amazingly cheap, heck, even if I only put 1 domain on there it’s another class C IP address to link to and from with my other websites. The single domain (resellers resale) hosting that hosts this website with its tight limits on bandwidth and storage space costs me more than $4.95 a month!
As you expand you’ll want to add more hosting options (and the ever important Class C IP’s) to your inventory, this is one offer that should be very hard to pass up on.
September 26th, 2007
As part of my ever growing online empire I’ve been looking at starting another Blog, the idea being that I take what I’ve learnt from his one and apply it to an area that is worth more than the “Make Money Online” market. To keep things cheap I was looking at free hosting via either WordPress or Blogger. Boy was I disappointed. Neither of these give you anything like enough flexibility to make real money from your blog, templating with hosted WordPress is rubbish whilst Blogger can’t give you static pages etc
Get 3 Months Of Hosting For Free
In the end I decided that cheap paid hosting* with a WordPress install would be good. Now I’ve let my feelings about Midphase by known in the past, I had a really rough time with them. In a strange twist of fate one of my client accounts couldn’t be moved, mainly cos the client was a being a pain. Since I wrote that post things have changed radically. Midphase are now providing the sort of service level that I experienced during the great times. I’ve not experienced any down time since their move to a now much more robust hosting data centre. In fact if anything their servers now appear even quicker as well. In being one of the biggest yet cheapest hosts out there and with their new much improved service it was an easy choice, especially seeing as how they are now running a promotion that gets you 3 months for free. Simply use the coupon code CHICKEN and 3 months will be subtracted from the checkout amount. Cheap ($7.95 a month), fast, reliable hosting with 3 months free and up to a massive $150 in free advertising credits will get my vote every time! This allows me to host my own WordPress install which I’m sure will help to pay for the hosting in no time!
You can sign up for the new improved Midphase service here or alternatively if you have friends that you think might be looking for hosting you can sign yourself up as a Midphase affiliate here.
*I didn’t want to use one of my existing accounts due to IP limitations when linking.
August 2nd, 2007
It’s slightly unfortunate for one on my current hosts that I was due to post today about the importance of good website hosting. I’d go as far to say that’s it’s critical that you find a reliable company to host your money making websites. Anytime your website is down you’re not making money, if there’s one thing that really gets on my t!ts it’s not making money. Due to the majority of my websites being down for more than 8 hours this post is now going to be hijacked and turned into a who not to host your website with if you’re planning on making money from the net post.
1. MidPhase – My current “bulk” host. I’ve been using their shared hosting for nearly a year now and for 8 months it was great. However for the last 4 months it’s been a bloody nightmare. You’ll notice that this site isn’t hosted with them. My websites are down at least 24 hours a month, not 24 minutes but a whole 24 hours! That’s shockingly bad in terms of website hosting. This affects search results, Google Page Rank, visitor experience not to mention those vital PPC clicks. This morning has been even worse, its cost me a Text Link Ads placement worth $100. The last 8 hours has cost me over $220 altogether, I’ll get my hosting for free this month but it’s just not worth the trouble. And that’s if I price my time at having to chase them as being free.
2. M6.net – The buggiest control panel in history. Before moving to MidPhase my money makes were all hosted on M6.net, to be fair to them their support response time was good, unfortunately you had to contact them about EVERYTHING as the custom control panel they had developed was a shocker. I still use them for 1 clients website, but it is hardly ever updated and just ticks along. Not recommended at all if you’re likely to be making changes to your websites.
This time next month it looks like I’m going to be on a dedicated server, it’s not like I’ve sourced the cheapest hosts out there but the whole thing has become a false economy. Everybody seems to promise 99.9% uptime, but does anybody actually deliver it, please let me know?
Before I finish I’d like to mention Discountasp.net Simply the don of shared .net hosting. My very first website was hosted with discountasp.net and they have been brilliant all along. If only they had multiple domain hosting I’d transfer all my domains to them in a minute, as it stands I’m going to be splashing some cash on my own dedicated server instead.
