12/01: Goodbye GVO Hello MKHostingUSA and A New Wordpress Blog

GVO Reviews - MK Hosting USA Reviews

As mentioned in my last post I was about to move my hosting arrangements to another provider. 

I'm pleased to say that this has now been done over the course of the weekend and visitors should not have noticed any interruptions in service. So, after four years with GVO, I now have a new home on the web with my data tucked away on the Planet's servers in Texas. Hopefully these will be far more secure than those in the same state belonging to GVO! 

Whilst it is too early for a review as such, I did post a detailed run down of the move and the new company who are now hosting my sites for me - MKHostingUSA. I recommend reading it and if you are in the market for a marketing and hosting service all under one roof, they can set you up with a great set of tools including email marketing software and unlimited autoresponders. This is not some cheap and nasty kit either, it is a very fully featured system offering in depth delivery, click and bounce statistics for all your email campaigns and autoresponder messages. There are also a whole raft of email templates to facilitate a professionally branded newsletter along with customizable opt in or lead capture templates for your marketing efforts.

Here's a quick video overview of the company website: enable annotations if you watch it here or just click to view on YouTube.

As a hosting customer you will get a free dot biz domain name, "unlimited" hosting (MySQL databases, FTP accounts, email accounts, storage and data transfer). They also throw in $145 worth of PPC advertising credits, over 4500 website templates from Hostgator but most importantly the trusty Cpanel and Fantastico with all the major scripts including Wordpress.

My initial email contact with the company and subsequent Q&A session was what made me decide to forge ahead with the move. Extremely efficient and professional even on a Friday afternoon/Saturday. They even moved everything for me and took care of the DNS changes and it went as smoothly as you like! It's all explained in full detail in the MKHostingUSA review post on my main site.

They also have a similar affiliate program to GVO that pays recurring monthly commissions, so if that is appealing to you it's another bonus for being a customer. The icing on the cake - less than $20 a month for the whole kit and kaboodle.

Take A Quick Video Tour Of MKHosting Here 

I've also been busy working on a new blog/article directory. After my experiences running a general directory on Article Dashboard I swore off ever doing it again, but........

The new site is focused on hosting, domains, blogging, internet marketing, SEO and similar related topics and has been built using Wordpress. It's a bit of an experiment in terms of using a subdomain to see how well it can do in the SERPS. If you are familiar with writing posts in Wordpress as a blogger, the experience will be pretty much the same when submitting your content to the new TCH Article Directory. Sign up for a free account and get posting - the site has been optimized so that your posts should get indexed quickly and start seeing some reasonable traffic once the spiders pick it up. At present the content is non existent but that won't last for long.

Unlike most directories you can include hyperlinks in your posts as well as in a resource box - the only hard rule is "no affiliate links" which will be stripped out before publication if they are used, or, the article will just be rejected. If you want some backlinks and your content syndicated to a wider audience, drop by and give it a run sometime. You can include images and embed video into your posts too, just as you would in your own WP blog. All I ask is that you keep it relevant, read the submission guidelines and have fun. 

I've also upgraded my helpdesk to a a far better system using the open source software from OSTicket which should make for better experience when using the contact forms on the sites.

That's about it for today :-)

TCH