THC Hosting To The Rescue
Let me start by saying that this is not a paid post or paid review. This post is based on appreciation for the help Top Hosting Center has given me. I only recommend companies, services or features that I use myself and/or feel will be of benefit to you the reader.
While this blog is relatively new, I have other blogs in the stable, one of which is very successful in its niche; so much so that it has been killing the VPS it is hosted on.
I started this other blog, back in 2006 on a normal shared hosting plan, with the usual features of large storage, large traffic and guaranteed uptime. All worked well until it began to get too much traffic. Without warning, the site was taken offline by the host and I was unable to even access it by FTP to get my files off.
After much discussion, about how, when I hadn’t come anywhere near my guaranteed service levels the site had been taken offline, I was informed about my site using too many resources on the shared server and how this had been killing other sites. I was given reasons for why this could be, none of which actually appeared logical to me, but I followed along with it. I was told the only solution was to upgrade to a VPS and everything would be alright.
After still being denied access to my cpanel, I eventually negotiated access so that I could remove the offending file, that was causing the problem, as they saw it. I removed one MP3 file, and cleaned up as much other things as I could and all worked well for a while without having to upgrade to a VPS.
They Had Me Over A Barrel
Not long after this though, the site was taken down again, for the same reason and this time they would not put it back up without upgrading to a VPS. With no access to my site to even transfer it to a different host, I was left with three alternatives, fight it, walk away, or upgrade.
As walking away was not an option and fighting it would have been a waste of time; I had already tried this and having the site down for a few days kills it big time, I chose to upgrade to the VPS. I was guaranteed that this would solve all the problems and that they would never occur again. What a load of crap.
The site kept growing and soon the guaranteed never fail VPS, started falling over. the next solution was to upgrade to the highest VPS. I refused, as the reasons being given for the VPS problems were not totally honest. The problem I identified was a DNS issue. This was denied, but it later turned out to be correct and blamed was put on a junior admin. Anyway, before this error was identified, I was placed on the highest level VPS as a ‘trial’ to solve the problem. Now, as the problem was with a mis-configuration, this upgrade had no effect until the actual fault was rectified.
When the actual problem was rectified though, the site remained on the highest level VPS. It has remained this way since, with only minor issues until recently. As before, the site has continued to grow and once again, started killing the VPS. This time the problem is due to the site’s popularity. Obviously, this has a very negative effect on the site, with it going down anything up to 40 times per day. Checking the logs, in some time periods, it was failing every 7-9 minutes.
Not good at all. This time the only solution was to go to a dedicated server, which the host was pushing for very strongly. The problem with this, was, that with this host, the entry level dedicated server costs $200 per month. Now, based on my past experience, with this particular host, I was not felling particularly enthusiastic about shelling over more money to them. Enter Eric, the CEO of Top Hosting Center.
I spoke with some other people about my problem and was advised to talk with Eric. I knew that some other large sites has recently switched to Top Hosting Center, which made me think it must be pretty good. I took their advice and contacted Eric. Let me say, from the outset, Eric and Top Hosting Center have been great. I explained my situation and Eric was only too happy to help.
Top Hosting Center acted very quickly and handled everything for me, setting up a new dedicated server and migrating all of my sites from the existing VPS.
Read The Fine Print
During the migration, some things that I was not aware of with the previous host came to light. I had assumed and was lead to believe that the VPS was on a 100Mbps connection. It was, kind of. While it was on a 100Mbps connection, it was actually 100Mbps burstable. In reality, it was only operating on a 10Mbps connection speed. Here I was trying to figure out why the site was always so slow on the VPS. At Top Hosting Center, this is a full 100Mbps, so the site is much faster.
A Blogger’s Friend
Another great thing about Top Hosting Center is that they are friendly to bloggers. Rather then trying to constrain your requirements, they actively promote the blogger. Top Hosting Center was a sponsor for SOBCon07 and are a sponsor again for SOBCon08, so you can see they are serious about bloggers and blogging as a business.
THC Hosting Plans
Whether you are looking to start a blog, or transfer to a host that understands your needs, Top Hosting Center has some of the best, if not the best hosting plans available. Their features are too numerous to mention, so just go here and compare for yourself.
Excellent Support
Great hosting deals are ok, but without good support, things can quickly turn sour. The support staff at Top Hosting Center are a great bunch, queries are answered promptly, with none of the waiting normally associated with hosting support. The staff seem to know their stuff and go out of their way to assist and make the experience a good one.
Dedicated Hosting
If you are at the stage where you are looking to upgrade to a VPS or dedicated server, then you wont find better deals then at Top Hosting Center’s dedicated hosting plans. If you are thinking about upgrading to a VPS, you will probably be better served going straight to a dedicated server, as this will help you avoid many of the problems that I have suffered.
So thanks to Eric and the crew at Top Hosting Center, my sites are online and doing what they are meant to do, allowing me to concentrate on blogging, without having to worry about whether the site is going to fall over.
ProFlogger Deal For You - 15% Off
I was speaking with Eric again today and asked him if there was any way he could help ProFlogger readers and give them an even better deal then they would normally receive. Eric, being the good guy that he is, came to the party again and created a special discount just for all the aspiring ProFloggers. To take advantage of this great discount, all you have to do is click here and sign up for a hosting package, then enter StarHostMe in the relevant box and you get a massive 15% off the already cheap prices. This special discount is only available to ProFlogger readers who click here, so if you are serous about getting the best hosting deal you can, go and grab it now.
Posts That Keep On Giving
About three weeks ago, while viewing my Web stats, I noticed something interesting on one of my other blogs. A story I posted way back in December had suddenly become the top story for the day.
What is unusual about this post is that although I hadn’t previously checked how much traffic it was bringing in, it had never been near the top of the stats, so hadn’t jumped out at me as an effective post. Sure, the day I posted it, it received a quick spike in traffic, but after that, nothing major.
Now though, that one post has brought in somewhere around 30,000 new visitors to the site in the last three weeks and is regularly rating as the top post on most days. Even better, each visitor is averaging 4 page views per visit.
The story itself is not that good, I have, and do post much better content. When I wrote this particular post I set out with the intention of generating a lot of traffic and while the content may have been simple, it took some time to put it all together.
What’s The Story
So what caused this sudden boost in traffic for this ‘old’ post?
Several factors came together at the same time, but the primary one is that I redesigned my theme. The new theme seems to generate a lot more Google search traffic. So it would seem that with the previous theme, the post simply wasn’t being indexed as well by Google. It jsut goes to show the value of a good SEO enhanced theme.
Will It Last?
So how long do I expect this surge in traffic to last? Going by the stats of my other posts that rate quite highly, I expect this post to do the same. It will taper off and eventually drop down to bring in 300 - 400 new visitors a day, but that is still a nice healthy figure.
Capitalize
Now there is not a lot of point in generating traffic, if you are not prepared to take advantage of it. Rather then sit back and simply wait for the surge to drop, today I wrote another post along a similar thread to the previous one. Rather then simply wait for this post to be found by the search engines, or by readers looking at the related links, I put a link in each of these posts, promoting the other one. I also did a couple of other little things… 
Now my new post is rating number two on my stats, not all that far behind the top rating one.
Know Thy Stats
Of course, none of this would be evident unless I was actively following my Website stats. I do this several times a day, and it takes nothing more then a quick glance at the dashboard to see how things are going. There are a lot of stats tools you can use for doing this. My favorite though is this one. I have posted about it previously here and I can highly recommend it as an invaluable tool to have.
Traffic Kahuna Is Coming
I received an email from the founders of DealDotCom this morning announcing the launch of their new service, an excerpt of the message is repeated below.
Something BIG is coming. Next Wednesday (April 16th) the founders of DealDotCom are launching a “get traffic” service.
What Is Traffic Kahuna?
I will have more details for you soon. But, in a nutshell Traffic Kahuna is a high-quality network of 650 blogs and 1100 websites that will publish your articles and content (and give you high-quality backlinks).
If you have even basic knowledge of how the search engines work, you are probably jumping out of your chair right now!
Yes, this is VERY exciting.
There is nothing out there like Traffic Kahuna. This has been 2 years in the making.
Look for more details early next week as we move towards featuring Traffic Kahuna on DealDotCom next Wednesday.
As I am a DealDotCom member, I am able to take advantage of the affiliate program when it launches. By the sound of it, it could be very big. If you are not a member of DealDotCom, I suggest you join now, because the affiliate progr
Jooce Beta Invite
Tonight I received my Jooce beta invite. If you have not heard of Jooce, it is a Web based virtual desktop. What this means is that it can be accessed from any Internet enabled computer. If that was all it offered, it wouldn’t provide too many advantages over similar offerings. Jooce goes a bit further, by providing both personal and public desktops. OK, so tell me about the features .
Features
- Multi-network chat - instant message your friends from your jooce desktop, no matter which IM client they use
- Instant file sharing - share files instantly with your friends just by dragging and dropping
- Youtube upload - upload your favourite YouTube videos to your jooce desktop and share them instantly with friends
- Public desktop - express yourself with your fully customizable public face on the internet
- Media player - play music, watch videos, create playlists
- File storage - secure online storage of all your files - accessible from any internet connection anywhere in the world.
You can customise both your personal and public desktops with a background image and your avatar. You can add all kinds of documents, files and videos to your desktop, as well as contact friends through the IM service that imports contacts from your AIM, MSN, ICQ and Yahoo accounts.
Jooce also has some cool animation when you switch between your personal and public desktop, see the image below.
Another feature that will appeal to the Web 2.0 social set is the ability to view and share other users public desktops. Being public, it is avaialbel to any other Jooce memeber. If you find something you like on someone else’s desktop, you can grab it by dragging it to your desktop icon, or right-clicking on it. This will also give you the option of downloading it to your own computer as well.
As i have said, I have only received my beta invite tonight, so haven’t had too long to evaluate it, but on features alone, it would seem to have some potential. The developers are working on more features, which should be good.
Don’t miss a thing, stay up to date with all the latest flogging news.
P.S, it is coming up to Flogger Friday again and I want to hear from you so go ahead and comment, or email me with all of your Flogger Friday entries.
Massive Traffic In Just 1 Week
Here is proof that you can get great growth with a new site with minimal effort.
As you can see in the graph below, ProFlogger.com has a steep growth spike even though it is a very new site. The site has only been live for 11 days and the stats have not dipped yet. Most of this traffic comes from just 1 week, which makes it even more impressive.
Yesterday the site made it into the top 100,000 Traffic Rank on Alexa. Not too shabby really. Even better when you consider the site as not been Dugg. It has received a bit of Stumble traffic as well as being Zoomed a little, but I have not really applied a great deal of Buzz to the site yet.
This is just a quick post to illustrate that you can get good growth and traffic with a new site with minimal effort. In the next couple of days, I’ll show you how easy it is to do the same with your site.
Don’t miss a thing, stay up to date with all the latest flogging news.
First Flogger Friday Photos
This is the first entry in the Flogger Friday category (other then the original post describing it). If you are not sure what Flogger Friday is, take a look here.
This weekend I went to the Miss Surfgirl Ball. This is held across many coastal communities, where finalists go on to the State finals. It is always a pretty big night. As I promised, I have posted some photos of the night, although I didn’t get as many as I was hoping to, due to spending too much time talking and drinking with people. All up it was a good night.
I even missed the backstage photo op I had organised. But, here are some to kick things off.
The Fort
The image below shows the beginnings of my can fort. The goal was for the table to drink enough cans of alcohol to build a fort out of the emoties. We were well on our way, before the organisers decided that the fort was becoming too much of a hindrance to peoples view of the event.
Stef Second Runner Up
I got my photo taken with Stef, who was Second Runner Up. Actually, she should have won, but that’s often the way it goes.
Dancing
Dancing after the event. You can see me right over the back there…..
So now I want to hear from all of you and see what you did on the weekend, so go ahead and comment, or email me with all of your Flogger Friday entries.
Don’t forget to stay up to date with all the latest flogging news.
71,000 Reasons To Quit Blogging
- It takes effort to think of topics for posts
- You have to spend time actually writing posts
- You have to try and make posts sound interesting
- You have to spend time on marketing
- Spending lots of time reading and researching articles
- Reviewing stats can be disappointing
- Nobody is reading the blog
- Analyzing SEO techniques is boring
- Checking keyword density takes effort
- Too much contradictory advice
- Shitty spam sites have higher PR
- Shitty blogs rate higher on Alexa and Technorati
- Getting rid of spam takes time
- Get tired from all the negative comments
- Responding to comments takes time
- Not enough readers
- Not sleeping enough from staying up to date with news
- Hosting fees cost too much
- Making no money
- OK, I am bored with this list now, if you can think of any others, leave them in your comments and I’ll include them here.
- Trying to explain to your girlfriend why you blog takes up a lot of time. Contributed by Jani Helle
- Trying to make her understand that blogging is not a COMPLETE waste of time takes up even more time. Contributed by Jani Helle
- Trying to make a long list such as this one stops you from thinking about anything else (I try to limit myself to lists of ten, althouh 71,000 sounds a lot better) Contributed by Jani Helle
- Having to explain to everyone that a blog is not necessarily an online diary is a lost cause. Contributed by Jani Helle
- Unable to make the Front of Digg Contributed by Saedel
- Reddit users downmodding post submissions Contributed by Saedel
- Readers not stumbling post Contributed by Saedel
- A click on Adsense is worth .01c. Wow. Contributed by Saedel
6 Reasons CPC Is Not Fair For Publishers?
In light of the punishment Google has been handing out recently, I have been thinking a little bit more about the current play with blog advertising. It would be fair to say that most blogs use Google for monitization, but are they getting a fair share of the pie?
CPC Advertising
If you are unsure of the different advertising terms, see my post on Online Advertising Explained; CPC advertising is basically what the majority of sites use, with Google Adsense being the perfect example. Most of us should be familiar with CPC, but how many actually click on these ads on other sites? I know some of the ads Google serves also have a CPM value, but this is normally quite small, with the publisher seeing little income from it. Is this fair?
Online / Offline Advertising
As I have said, I have been thinking about this topic lately and one conclusion I have come to is that CPC is heavily waited in favor of Google and the advertiser. Alright, not a startling conclusion you may say, but have you really given it much thought?
I make some generalizations here, but If you liken traditional advertising to advertising in the online World, there are obvious synergies, as well as differences.
Similarities:-
- Print media circulation helps determine advertising rates
- Ratings figures perform the same task in Television and Radio
- Online media has similar measurements including, number of uniques, page views, feed subscribers, Alexa ranking, Technorati, and the contentious Google Page Rank.
The differences are that in traditional media, if you purchase adspace or airtime, even on poorly rating space, you have to pay a specified fee. This fee is not based on any performance measure beyond the circulation figures. The publisher gets paid irrespective of the direct performance of the ad. Why is this?
The advertiser is generally not expecting direct sales for every eyeball that sees their ad. They recognize that there is value in the ad just by itself and that over time it helps build credibility and brand recognition. The same is not true in the online World for CPC advertising.
If anything, the success of online ads is far easier to measure, with greater directs metrics then print, radio or Television.
6 Reasons CPC Is Not Fair
You may say that most CPC ads do not directly promote anything by themselves, but that they are there to draw people to their particular site promoting a product or service, and that without a click, the ad is useless. Maybe so, but that is the fault of the ad copy itself, rather then the model of the service.
The reasons CPC is not fair:-
- Google serves ads across millions of sites, with millions of eyes seeing the ads
- If there are no clicks, the advertiser pays nothing, yet still gains value
- The advertiser can gain great exposure for relatively little cost
- The publisher is only paid for clicks
- With no clicks, the publisher devotes adspace for no return
- Smaller publishers can serve many ads per day, yet still receive no return for their effort
There are sites that receive thousands of page views per day, thus serving thousands of ads per day, yet receive virtually zero revenue from CPC ads. Irrespective of the reasons for this, such as lack of optimization, etc. The fact remains, they are providing value to others, with no return for themselves.
A Fairer Solution
A simple solution to this problem would be to have the ad network, in this case Google, have an extra charge for CPM for each advertiser. A percentage of this could then be distributed across all of the publisher sites. Obviously there would be some issues to overcome, and some economics to work out, but it really should not be too difficult to achieve for someone like Google. The extra cost for the advertiser would not have to be that great either, but it would go someway to providing a fairer model for smaller publishers.
There is also another advantage to this model, it would help to deter some of the more spammier, lower paying ads from cluttering the Web.
Don’t forget to stay up to date with all the latest flogging news.
Content Is King - Not
Once again Carlo has a post with some very pertinent points. In this post, Carlo interviews Dean Hunt who talks about his Buzz Marketing and gives pointers for success on the Web.
I have to say, I totally agree with both Carlo and Dean on this post. While quality content is important, without marketing and presence, you will struggle to succeed. If you really want to see an example of how effective marketing is, see my post on Paris Hilton and what she can teach you about marketing.
While Dean doesn’t tell you how to perform Buzz marketing, he mentions his book which is coming out soon, where he details buzz marketing on a budget of zero. If you think this isn’t possible, you;d be very wrong. I practice zero dollar marketing in the offline World, and it is amazing how successful you can be.
Probably the best bit of advice is to not be concerned with what people say or think about you. After all, if you want to be a ProFlogger, you have to step out of your comfort zone a little. The road to becoming a ProFlogger is littered with the bodies of failed Floggers.
If you want to achieve some Floggerdom yourself, check out Flogger Friday.
Don’t forget to stay up to date with all the latest flogging news.
How I Got 4000 Readers In One Day
Well not quite one day, but near enough. This story is based on something I posted on one of my other blogs, but I thought the readers of this blog will find it useful as well.
How To Easily Bring Massive Traffic To A New Blog
Some people have commented on this blog about their success of using Blogging Zoom to bring traffic to their sites, which is great, so I thought I’d mention some methods I use that are extremely effective at gaining massive traffic with minimal effort.
The details that follow relate to a site I recently started. I had done no marketing, optimization, commenting, or forum posts to gain traffic to the site; it was effectively a virgin site, I think just over one week online at the time. The day before the traffic boost, the site had a total of 10 unique visitors; not real flash at all.
Stumble That Post
So what to do? I wrote a rather short post, that I thought may be popular. At about 8 PM I decided to Stumble the story. 8 PM is not an ideal time to post to StumbleUpon, but I did it all the same. As you can see from the image below, with just a few hours left in the day, the 266 users coming in was not exceptional, but still better then the previous day. The next day however, saw a massive increase in users, topping out at 3,164 for the entire 24 hour period.
All up, this one post has brought in nearly 4,000 users, which is vastly more then the 10 I had on Tuesday.
Show Me The Actions
Now a traffic boost like this is good, but if all they do is quickly check the post and leave, it does not provide any other value. As you can see in the image below, Tuesday the site received 57 actions. This jumped to 574 on Wednesday, and went up massively to 5,994 on Thursday when it had received a full day of Stumbling.
Other Points
There are a few other thing worth noting about Stumble readers.
- They generally don’t click ads
- You get a massive spike of readers, then a sharp downturn
- A good Stumble can go for a week
- Your stats and ranking get a nice boost
- Your ranking on StumbleUpon can increase if people make the post a favorite
StumbleUpon is one of the most effective means I have found for bringing instant traffic. I have basically written this post to get a comparison between the traffic generating potential of Blogging Zoom and StumbleUpon. I do not expect Blogging Zoom to be anywhere near as effective at this stage, and not because Blogging Zoom is not an good means of generating traffic, rather it does not have the same size of audience, but it should provide a good indication of its ability at this stage of development.
Don’t forget to stay up to date with all the latest flogging news.
