Web Hosting Merry-Go-Round

April 22, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Wow, web hosting is something else!  I’ve been going around in circles this week.

Because I’m creating a lot of niche affiliate sites, I have hosting with a number of different companies.  I prefer to spread the sites around a little bit for the sake of inter-linking and in the event a server goes down for awhile.  That way, just some of my sites will be offline but not all of them.

Just after the winter holidays, Dreamhost came out with a great promotion, 2 years of hosting for around $20.  I jumped on it.  Later I realized that Dreamhost does not provide cPanel access.  They have their own system that is absolutely nothing like cPanel, including displaying traffic stats.

I figured it would be no big deal and I created a number of sites on Dreamhost, learning their system along the way.  But as I have gone along, I’ve come across more and more programs that will only work with cPanel.  Like WPManagerDX which mass installs wordpress in a flash.  I use wordpress for all my sites now and this saves a ton of time.  I’ve become aware of  other programs that only work with cPanel as well.  So I decided to move all those sites and to get another hosting account with unlimited domains allowed.

In the mean time, I have an account with another company that provides 5 unique IPs with your account to use for link building.  I have little good to say about this group so I’ll just refer to them as “NS”.  My experience has been that with 4 of the IPs the sites are either down or I can’t log into cPanel or I can’t connect via ftp.  If it isn’t one problem it’s another and it’s constant.  They’ll fix it and something else quits working.  I sort of feel sorry for them!

The person who created the hosting packages appears to be a really good guy and to have good integrity.  So, I hold out some hope that they’ll get past this phase, and turn into a valuable, reliable asset.  I had a total of 3 money sites on those servers and I moved them today, to avoid any further rollercoaster rides with them.

I did get some new hosting today, too.  I did lots of research and decided on FatCow.com.  Good price and good reviews.  I logged in and found they did not offer cPanel.  They advertised having a cpanel, and I clearly assumed they meant the same cPanel most other hosting companies have.  But, no.  Good thing they have a 30 day money back guarantee.

I ended up getting another Hostgator account.  I have had great service and uptime with them over many years and just decided to go with what I know, instead of being surprised by what some other company offers.  I can recommend Hostgator without reservation.  Boy do they have a lot of servers!

These are my current criteria for shared hosting:

  1. They provide cPanel.
  2. They provide a 24 hour telephone number for support.
  3. They allow unlimited addon domains.
  4. They allow unlimited MYSQL databases.

When I could finally get onto the NS servers last night, I notice huge files labeled “CORE” in all of my blogs.  After panicking about being hacked, I did some digging and learned the core files are created when an unstable plugin is being used on a blog and the junk it creates is being “dumped”, or the servers are unstable.  I’ve never seen that kind of file before and I have a ton of wordpress blogs, all using very similar plugins.  So plugins are not the problem here, unstable servers are.  I was very glad to learn I could just delete these files but was not surprised at the cause.

I apologize that this has gotten kind of long and probably boring.  I learned of another method for selecting niches and domains recently and I’ll talk more about that soon.

Until then, have a good one!

P.S.  One last point!  I have gotten VERY good at moving wordpress blogs from one server to another, so if anyone needs any help with this, contact me and we’ll see how I can help.  I can also set up and customize blogs very well too.  The first 5 people to contact me looking for help with a blog will be totally free.

Filed Under: Progress Updates

Promoting Niche Affiliate Sites

April 18, 2009 By Leave a Comment

I published my first press release this week.  That feels good. I wrote it to promote one of my niche affiliate sites.  I’ll be interested to watch for results in traffic and search engine placement, but it’s probably a good idea to get another press release going while I watch.

As an update, I did finish creating the 6 niche blogs I wrote about earlier and am now promoting them.  I submitted the RSS feeds to about 40 aggregators and have done a little social bookmarking.  Each has an article in the pipeline to be published on numerous article directiories.  So that’s a start.  I’m getting a trickle of traffic and 1 ebay affiliate sale so far.

I have so many plans for promotion and link building, now it’s time to follow through. The main strategy is to implement Kim Roach’s 10x method from Instant Payday Formula with the articles for each site. So this will include creating a video and a press release, among other things, for each site.

Entering all the sites into the Neurolinker network is also on the list.  This is a backlink network with tons of add ons.  You can do article marketing and social bookmarking through them.  The social bookmarking is automatic, and you can do your sites and other members’ sites, while they bookmark yours.  Pretty cool.

After I get the promotion moving with these recent sites, I have identified 24 more that show great promise.  I said I wanted 50 niche affiliate sites up by June and I can still achieve that.

So, why do fresh clicks for links that I have removed from my sites still show up in the Go Try This database?  The link is no longer on the site so how could someone click it?  I asked this question on their forum once, and didn’t get an answer.  Makes me question the validity of all the data.  But I’m moving to a new system soon, with much better reporting features.  Lots of links to replace, though.

Is it Spring where you are?  It’s gorgeous here in Minnesota these days.

Have a good one everybody!

Filed Under: Progress Updates Tagged With: , , , ,

From XSitePro to WordPress and Beyond

April 2, 2009 By Leave a Comment

I just successfully completed the transition of a static website to a wordpress blog.  That wording sounds kind of awkward so I’ll try again.  I just took one of the sites I originally created in XSitePro and turned it into a WordPress blog, keeping the page urls consistent  in the process.  I’m thrilled.  I’ve been wanting to do this for quite awhile but have felt anxious about it, not wanting to screw the whole thing up in the process.

There are a couple reasons that I wanted to do this. I find wordpress to be much easier to add content to.  With all the plugins, it’s so much easier to get the design and functionality I want.  It’s also much easier to build in participation by the visitors, which really helps keep people on the page and coming back again. WP also  has build in RSS which helps with promotion and link building.  So lots of very good reasons.

Now, I’m not sure my process was the most orderly, but it worked.  I started by installing wordpress in the root directory of the domain.  The index.html file of the website automatically overrides the index.php file of the blog, so the website stays up in its original form while you’re working in the background.  I created the database and all the other stuff that has to happen to get the blog up and going. Then I created the posts with the current articles from the site.  I created the contact and about pages, and got the privacy policy and TOS links on there – all the basics.

By that point I could start deleting the XSitePro pages from the server and the blog was up and running as a blog. Finally I did all the design work of trying out different themes and color schemes, loading the sidebars, and installing adsense and banners.  Ultimately I like what I came up with, although I couldn’t find the theme layout I had in mind.  (I can always keep my eye open for it in the months to come and make a change later on.)

It’s time to start a real promotional blitz.  I have 5 new articles ready to submit to Ezine Articles and other directories.  I woke up this morning composing my press release (and wrote it down quickly before I forgot it!).  I recently purchased a program put together by Kim Roach called the Instant Payday Formula.  She shares a virtual TON of promotional ideas and step by step methods for implementing them.  I’m planning to follow those as well.

A final big promotional effort will be a video.  I’ve not tried to do this before but I’ve heard too many times how vital it is for traffic generation and so I am determined to create some.  Kim includes a segment on video in her product and I have superb information from Kevin Riley of Warrior Forum fame as well.  It will happen.  It will be good.

Oh yeah!  I’ve been slowly building a list over these past months but not started any kind of email marketing campaign with them yet.  That’s also on the to do list.  I’ve been composing the first email in my head as the day has gone on.  I guess I’m excited to get out there and try some new stuff. Article marketing is great for traffic, but there is so much more that I could also be doing. Yes, this will be good.

Filed Under: Internet Marketing, SEO Tagged With: , , , , ,