A new direction? Well, no, just taking in a few more sights and expanding on some existing places really.

The hosting directory and reviews section of the site have been consigned to the history bin.  After several years it has become apparent that this kind of information is no longer much in demand from sites like ours and we were rarely getting review submissions. So many hosting companies come and go that it was also becoming a chore to try and keep things relevant and to be honest, many of the companies we were giving space were so plagued with negative feedback it seemed ridiculous to continue sending them traffic. So ,it’s all gone for good. We recommend that anyone shopping for hosting check out the major forums such as WebHostingTalk.com

We will keep our hosting recommendations simple. These are the companies we still support and recommend, not just for WordPress hosting but for whatever you have in mind as a website owner because all of them have a proven track record of reliability and service.

Hostgator – Shared, VPS and Dedicated

Knownhost – Shared, Dedicated and VPS (Our own provider)

LiquidWeb – Shared Dedicated and VPS

Page.ly – WordPress total hosting and management solution ideal for the non technical.

You will still find plenty of archived material in the Hosting News category and we will continue to add relevant content to that section of the site. However, going forward we will be shifting our focus far more towards WordPress, SEO, Affiliate Marketing and Social Media and networking which is what we feel our existing audience  are most interested in.

With such a major cleaning operation you may stumble across the odd broken link in the short term but we are cleaning those up and hopefully the revised design will help you navigate the site a little more easily.

Your feedback is always welcomed in the comments section so if there is anything on your mind let us know!

web hosting is a funny animal.

Not long ago I changed my hosting provider – I consider myself a pretty loyal customer if I feel I am getting value for money and have always believed it is a mistake to go cheap for any service, hosting or otherwise, or to use price solely as the criteria that drives your purchasing decisions.

I hosted my sites with Kiosk.ws, Now GVO, for a good number of years and I documented my reasons for migrating to an alternative service elsewhere on this site. It was not a decision I took lightly for a number of reasons but I found a service that fulfilled all my needs and seemed ideal.

When I first approached MK Hosting USA they responded positively and promptly and my experience at the point of sale certainly seemed to reinforce the good things I had read about them.  Their services and helpful attitude along with the responsiveness of their help desk persuaded me to make the move and for the first few months the service was very impressive – fast load times, very reliable with zero downtime and the email marketing and autoresponder services were a gem.

You could say I was patting myself on the back for making what seemed to be a pretty smart move!

Unfortunately, nothing good lasts forever, or in this case for much more than four months. Long story short, one evening a couple of weeks ago I was editing my sites and making backups of all the recent work I had been doing on this domain and suddenly, everything went a.w.o.l.

I could not access my sites or my admin areas in WordPress or Nucleus – everything had gone down. I’m not one to panic so I logged into cpanel and checked the service status and was confronted with a lot of red x’s. Still not overly concerned I logged in and submitted a support ticket, but I received no confirmation as is the norm. I waited and waited and as my past experience of support has been so good, started to get a bit peeved after a few hours with no response.

Eventually, after 24 and then 48 hours with not even a whisper from the company despite numerous and varied attempts to contact them, I was unhappier than a very unhappy thing. I could see what was causing the problems – a full partition on the server which was bringing down all database driven sites – even their own support desk, members area and billing area. Emails sent to all their contact addresses began bouncing. It was apparent that there was nobody minding the store, nobody at the helm and little evidence that it was going to change anytime soon. I tried to raise someone’s interest through their twitter account, obviously unmonitored, and started a thread on Web Hosting Talk – most good hosts monitor those boards for discussions pertaining to their companies – obviously not MK Hosting USA however.

Throughout this downtime I was desperately trying to secure backups because that was exactly what I had been doing before the server crashed – unfortunately, the problems were preventing me from doing so. You can read the full story over on the Web Hosting Talk thread about MK Hosting USA. After several attempts I did eventually manage to grab a working backup but it was a hugely frustrating experience and at the time of writing the issues have still not been permanently fixed and no, I have not heard a whisper from the company in any form.

So, the upshot of all this is that we have moved to Knownhost on a shiny new VPS.

I apologize to anyone who tried to visit in the past two weeks – it took that long to get a working backup and even then, it was sheer luck. I pity any customers who didn’t grab one of the two pretty short windows to secure their data.

The positive things that occurred during these two weeks – the owners of the server, Hostgator, went above and beyond the call of duty to try and provide me with backups of my database files that were not corrupt. I was very impressed with their willingness to try to help a customer, and not even one of their own, in the face of insurmountable difficulties due to the complete absence of service from another provider. This is exactly why Hostgator are at the top of the game and have a solid reputation by and large. Thanks and good karma to the techs at Hostgator who answered my call.

And so to Knownhost – I first became aware of them through a video post by Mark at 45n5.com and then subsequently through various forums where customers had little but praise for them. So far, that has been borne out entirely in my dealings with them. They answer tickets blazingly fast and are extremely tolerant of even the most basic questions – polite, helpful and very responsive.

Running my own server is a whole new kettle of fish but to be honest, I am very confident that I have chosen an excellent company to work with and the prices for their managed VPS plans are extremely good.

Now, you may still encounter a few minor problems on the sites, but that is probably due to me and the fact that some adjustments will be needed in light of a new server configuration – please let me know if you do encounter any broken bits.

For all my email subscribers – the most painful loss to me is the services I was using to manage all my autoresponders and email lists. This is going to take time to replace but I have a few options to explore and you may not hear from me for a while. However, list facilities will be restored and if you are already on one of my lists, you won’t need to resubscribe as whatever route I choose to go, it will be one where I can import all my existing list members without inconveniencing them.

I will be removing recommendations for MK Hosting USA – technical issues are one thing but total breakdown of support and evidence that the server simply ceased to be monitored is more than enough reason to stay well clear. I’m immensely relieved to have recovered my sites but it should not have taken two weeks to do so and certainly should not have been the hit and miss affair that it was due to their total failure to respond to paying customers. When a company doesn’t even attempt to offer an excuse or explanation, it’s time to take your business elsewhere.

Sorry, but I’m terribly disappointed in what looked to be such a promising service and can’t understand how they went from so good to so awful almost overnight. It’s another cautionary tale…….

I would love to hear from someone at MK Hosting USA  who might be able to shed some light on how such an epic failure was allowed to occur – I mean, there might even be some incredibly valid mitigating circumstances, but until someone steps up to the plate, all I can assume is that they are in meltdown and will disappear along with all their customers’ data in the not too distant future.

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The format of the site has reverted to a more blogging oriented style and the hosting directory page has been replaced as the home page by recent and highlighted posts. The directory is still here, and can be found in the header links, as can the customer review pages and the sitemap.

On the whole, everything that was here before is still here and I’m still working on cleaning up the categories and getting rid of some deprecated posts in certain areas. All that has really been sacrificed is a lot of the third party javascript and advertising which is probably no bad thing from a reader’s perspective. There are still a few rough temporary graphics which will also be smartened up in the days ahead. Everything seems to be working as it should but of you do notice any problems please leave a comment or use my contact form to let me know about it.

The next major change will be the importation of all the content from my marketing blog, followed by that site’s demise. I have been pondering the future of that old NucleusCMS blog for many months and have decided that running it alongside this one is just creating extra work for nothing and that the time really has come to merge the two. Moving the blog itself to WordPress is an overly complicated and problem fraught venture that I am not prepared to take on.

What will this merger mean for visitors? Well, the content of this site will expand somewhat to take in the affiliate and internet marketing related stuff that I’ve always kept on the Nucleus site and visitors to the old blog will find themselves redirected here once I’m finished with the merger. It will also mean the loss of the comments from the old blog and some short term mess following the import of all the posts – missing images and category problems are the most likely so that will probably take a while to fix as there are a lot of posts to be checked and edited.

For me it will probably mean the loss of some RSS subscribers which is a pain but the benefits to me outweigh the disadvantages. For one thing, I will no longer need to keep abreast of two blogging platforms and for another, the SEO benefits of moving everything across to WP will hopefully soon become apparent.

Nucleus is a good platform but in terms of SEO and design, it lags far behind WordPress and its huge user and developer community. The old blog looks just that – old, and tired and without spending a considerable amount of  money on a redesign, it wasn’t about to change.

It is my hope that readers of the marketing blog will come across to this site where they will still find me blogging on the topics that interest them.  For those of you already reading, thank you, and please let me know if you prefer, like or dislike the new layout – I think it is much more in keeping with 2010 than the old clothes

1) This site may well still be listed as a “dofollow” blog, but, alas, the spammers caused that to change some months ago now and our decision was posted here at Goodbye To DoFollow

Now, my reason for restating this is that it is blatantly obvious that some of the comments are being posted by services who advertise their comment spam as SEO  and link building services on the sites they link back to. These are smart people without a doubt.

Most of these comments are flagged by Akismet as spam already, so, they are charging people for something they cannot hope to deliver, having secured themselves a warm seat in the spammer hall of  shame. The point is, if you see someone advertising a service to post links for you, for a fee, on dofollow blogs, don’t be a sucker. You are wasting your money. This is not SEO or legitimate link building and in my experience, the comments are usually so poorly written &/or completely generic or irrelevant that even if the perpetrators haven’t yet been flagged it sure won’t be long until they are.

2) Hosting providers – I think it is fairly obvious what kind of website this is. It is also fairly obvious that an area entitled “Customer Reviews” exists for customers to post their feedback. Somehow, more and more hosting sites seem to interpret this forum as “place your free ads here” or similar.

I’m not going to name any names, but invariably these companies are operating out of the Indian sub-continent or the far east. So, let’s help clear things up for you – the area of the site you are looking for is titled “Advertisers” and can be found easily in the top menu bar of every page. Yes, this site owner has bills to pay too and the rates are extremely fair as some of my existing customers will tell you.

Again, a great deal of these kinds of free ad seeking comments are finding their way into Akismet’s sin bin too and if they haven’t, you can be sure I’ll be one more webmaster/blogger doing my bit to help Akismet’s filters for the future.

To make things even easier and more convenient, if all you really want is a link, once again, it’s right there at the top of the page. I realize that reciprocal linking has lost a lot of juice in recent times but if you have a related site, I have made exchanging links as painless as possible.

3) On the subject of advertising and spam – unsolicited emails are not the way to do business online, however, I recognize that sometimes, an email to a webmaster with some kind of proposal is not always a bad thing.

Having said that, I would like to make it very clear that you cannot buy a listing at this site, nor can you buy a favorable review or similar shenanigans. I am well aware that this is common practice in the industry and is also why hosting review sites often have little credibility – see the article and video on Honest Hosting Reviews for more.

Again, I am not going to name names, but there have been several occasions where an unsolicited mail has arrived, offering me what I consider pretty substantial consideration in return for a “top listing and review”. To my mind, if you have to buy good feedback for your service, whatever industry you are in, you have some serious problems, both business and ethical.

Whilst it hurts to turn down such offers (at least in the pocket) there is little hope for any kind of  impartial hosting information should every site owner be lured by the promise of easy (dirty) money.

If you want to pay for advertising on these pages there are convenient an easy channels for doing so, but bent reviews are not part of the service provided and, I’ll say it yet again,  there is no such thing as a “Top Ten” or “Top Twenty” list of hosting providers unless the criteria are very strictly defined, and, even then, it’s hardly objective.

4) Affiliate programs – the majority of web hosts here on TCH run affiliate programs (it’s all in the disclaimer) and therefore I am paid a commission should I send customers their way. I hope that if my visitors find the reviews and articles helpful, they consider this fair exchange for the site’s features and any assistance it provides for them.

Such affiliation does not guarantee either party any favors or special treatment. Well, aside from a couple of cases where affiliate status has been withdrawn because of a refusal to remove/edit negative but fair feedback. (yes, sadly it has happened). Reasonable criticism and complaint is part and parcel of a place on our real estate.

5) To those who would genuinely like to be featured on TCH, please feel free to use my contact form and submit your proposals or requests. Whilst I can’t and don’t guarantee anything, I will always consider them. Lack of an affiliate program does not exclude you either.  As I’ve always stated on these pages, I try to offer a site where visitors can give and get some honest information and also to feature hosts who have a proven track record for reliability and fair practices. That’s not to say I never get it wrong, but if  serious problems with a company are becoming the norm,  I try to keep people informed and do remove companies who perform really badly, regardless of my personal affiliate status.

I hope this clears things up for everyone. To those who have been guilty of comment spam I urge you to rethink your tactics because it really does you nothing but harm. To those who have ever considered paying for any kind of “blog commenting” service, please save your money and put it towards some legitimate marketing and advertising. Comments are about interaction and sharing, not a shortcut to high SERPS rankings.

TCH

Before reading this review further please see  this thread about MK Hosting USA at WebHostingTalk

Unfortunately MK Hosting USA appear to be on the verge of failure and despite initial great impressions, we suggest that you do not consider them as a hosting provider. Currently their members area, billing and support remain unreachable and all database driven applications are down – this appears to be due to a full partition on their server which nobody has seen fit to remedy and customers have no way of contacting them – this indicates the imminent demise of the service. If you are an existing customer you may find some help through the link to WebHostingTalk above. If you do not have backups of your data you could have some serious problems.

We apologize to anyone who read our review below and became a customer – this failure is unprecedented and came completely without warning from a company who had appeared to be solid and reliable. If service is resumed, the amount of downtime and lack of response takes them out of the equation for business hosting in our opinion.

MK Hosting USA is a relatively new name to me here at TCH but one I am going to become very familiar with in the weeks ahead.

This review is being written after only having signed up for an account a matter of days ago and in that sense it is perhaps too early to speak much about negatives, because in all honesty, I have yet to find any. That’s not to say that there won’t be any problems, ever; this is web hosting after all.  However, I thought it would be good to share my very positive experiences with the company so far and explain a little more about them and how I came to be a customer.

For many years I used Kiosk.ws as my hosting company and I’ve been pretty happy, as regular readers will probably already know. Their bundled web hosting and marketing services were, for many years, pretty hard to beat in terms of service, support, reliability and value.

In recent times Kiosk transformed into GVO and they have invested a great deal of time and money in upgrading and adding to their core services and embarking on a very high profile relaunch after moving from Canada to Texas and a brand new data center. During the course of all the upheaval however, all in the GVO garden was not rosy and after countless issues and problems I felt it was time to start seriously looking for new pastures. To be fair, GVO is not a bad company but like many relationships one party outgrew the other and the changes, whilst essential for one to grow, left the other feeling disillusioned and wanting more from life.

Having built several websites and mailing lists with GVO, as well as earning recurring affiliate commissions with them, it seemed a lot to give up and also a lot to try and replace.

Discovering MKHosting was one of those happy accidents, the circumstances of which are hard to recall. On seeing their website however, I was certain I had found a real contender for my hosting and marketing requirements.

The company are, in many ways, similar to GVO and whilst direct comparison might be unfair to both companies, the similarities are hard to ignore and their target market is indisputably similar. GVO offer a reseller hosting account, unlimited email autoresponders, lead capture templates and systems, video hosting and marketing services, VOIP conference rooms and a multi tier affiliate program paying recurring monthly commissions. The charge for their package is, at the time of writing, $45.00 per month.

MKHosting provide shared hosting with no limits on storage, bandwidth, email accounts, domains, FTP accounts or MySQL databases (no reseller account).  They also offer a complete email marketing service with unlimited autoresponders, a multi tier affiliate program paying recurring monthly commissions, a free domain for new customers (.biz) and  around $150 in PPC advertising coupons.  You’ll also get some basic rebrandable lead capture pages that can be easily integrated with your autoresponder service and for those wanting to build a site using templates, the company have teamed up with Hostgator to offer a library of over 4500 quality themes. All this comes in at under $20.00 per month.

This was well worth a look for me and I tested the waters, as I recommend all potential new customers of a hosting company should do, by firing off an email enquiring about the services and asking a few questions pertinent to my requirements and situation. I had an answer within twenty minutes (on a Friday afternoon) and it was positive, well written and to the point.

I began a series of questions via this ticket and replies came very promptly and were all from the same support guy who was knowledgeable and very efficient. It seemed that I had found a little gem and although I had decided to think carefully about my decision to move, I was so reassured by the responses that I decided the next day to pay my first month’s fee and initiate the transfer of my sites and domains.

This is always a nail biting time for a webmaster but the smoothness and simplicity of the move was impressive indeed. The fact is that the same support guy I had spoken to from day one, handled the entire move for me. I did not have to do a thing aside from provide him with required login information and the like so that he could access my various sites. All I did was kick back and answer a couple of emails and my sites were seamlessly moved to the new server, the DNS changes taken care of and in the space of a Saturday morning and early afternoon, the job was done.  More to the point it was done with no ill effects whatsoever, nothing was broken and to an outside observer you would never have known anything was happening.

I spent most of the day configuring my new autoresponder and email marketing toys, which, I have to say, may not be quite as user friendly as those at my previous host but are certainly way superior in terms of features. These tools are the best I have used and the statistical information is a match for any third party service. After a day of messing around I had pretty much mastered the system. The company were quite happy to allow me to import all my existing opt-in subscribers and the only reason it took a bit longer than I would have liked was due to the imperfect export facility from my previous autoresponders rather than anything else.

In addition to the autoresponders you also get a proper email marketing set up that provides a large number of templates for your broadcasts or newsletters . They cover countless niches and they are very easy to use.

As far as the hosting goes I have zero complaints so far. cpanel is the control panel of choice and I would not use anything else. All the features of my previous cpanel are there, including Fantastico Deluxe, plus a few new ones I didn’t have at GVO. OK, there is no reseller facility but I gave that game up a long time ago so it’s no loss to me. I have more of everything for less monthly cost.

Aside from the conference rooms and the Easy video Producer tools (Neither of which were important to me personally) MKHosting are providing me with the options to do way more than I could have done at GVO where I paid $25 per month for all services due to grandfather rights as an old Kiosk Platinum customer. However this came with pretty stringent restrictions on storage, bandwidth and things like MySQL databases (that last one is a real pain for a webmaster in 2010).

And so to the affiliate program – GVO’s much hyped opportunity is a genuine program and does reward active affiliates very well, as well as those who are fortunate enough to join under a big name networking recruiter and benefit from spillover. However, the pay plan with MKHosting is also very good and they actually pay a higher percentage to their affiliates for direct referrals at $6 a head. The earnings potential with both companies is good but in light of all the MLM focus recently over at GVO, I tink it’s become a harder thing to sell in all honesty and when times are tough, even if it does represent good value, close to fifty bucks a month is something a lot of people can’t or won’t commit to. I have sacrificed my monthly Paypal deposit from GVO in the quest for better service and a better user/customer experience. I no longer felt that it was worth holding onto the commissions when the trade of in recent times has been downtime and an indifferent attitude towards me as a customer.

If you would like to know more about all the features and services of an account at MKHosting, the marketer’s package is the sole option. Everything is laid out clearly and neatly for all to see, so you know exactly what your monthly hosting fees will get you. At this price point, you really would be hard pushed to find anything better.

If I have any criticism at all, I would say that the payment options could be explained a little more clearly on the site. You can choose to pay via AlertPay or Paypal but at the moment, Paypal customers have to do things manually and send a purchase receipt to the company to get set up – it’s no big deal, just a minor inconvenience. AlertPay users will have no problems but the site suggests that you must pay via AlertPay every month (as someone with little experience of the payment processor I found the issue a little confusing, wanting as I did to pay with my debit card). As it turns out of course, this is not a problem, and although the website showed the major credit/debit card logos the insistence on AlertPay was a little disconcerting – then again maybe I was just having a senior moment Ultimately it is easy enough to set up a free account with AP and you will need it if you want to receive commissions earned as an affiliate.

After a couple of days of exploration everything seems to work just as it should and, it seems to me, my sites’ load times are improved too. The MKHosting servers are located in the US, with the Planet, so in terms of data security and server monitoring etc. there should not be too much to worry about. This was one of my major bug bears with GVO in recent months where security issues were plaguing many customers and causing downtime of varying levels of seriousness. Unfortunately for me I suffered at the extreme end of the scale and whilst much of it was not directly the fault of the host, the responses to the issues were not good at all.  Combine that with very inefficient support and, to be frank, some pretty uncharacteristic bad attitudes from GVO staff in general and it starts to wear on you and your business after a time.

I’m hopeful of a much better experience at my new home and so far, they have certainly not disappointed me.

To sum up, if you want a very well featured shared hosting account along with a superb email marketing system, a great affiliate program and excellent 24/7 customer and tech support, you could do a lot worse than check this company out.

I will report back after a few months have gone by on how the glow of newness as stood up to the rigours of day in day out web hosting but for now, all is good and MKHosting win a big thumbs up and vote of confidence from TheCaymanHost.

First off, we are going to be moving to a new home on the web as we have outgrown our present hosting plan – more of that in a separate post. We have suffered a lot of downtime in recent months and it as done a fair bit of damage to our rankings which is another reason why we are making the move.

I have been considering the future of this blog for sometime and although the new hosting arrangements will allow it to remain without eating up too many resources, the fact that it is a non WordPress blog is one of the reasons its future is uncertain. Moving it to WordPress is so convoluted that I doubt I will try it for this site so I’m considering all options carefully before making a final decision.

If you haven’t visited our main site recently, please drop by and see what we have been up to – a new series of video tutorials on things like WordPress, cpanel and other blogging and web hosting related subjects are to become a regular feature and are proving very popular. My blogging focus will probably shift to this site far more as the year progresses – if you are reading this post here, you can see that I am slowly moving selected content over already.

I have been busy elsewhere this past few months both online and off and my wife and I are about to open a physical offline business having launched a new website last year and the move into a retail premises is the focus of our efforts at present. We used WordPress for the site and you can visit Arteccentrix for another example of what can be done with the software and associated plugins, it really is a versatile platform – it’s not internet marketing related.

So, 2010 is going to be an exciting and busy year! I hope that all my loyal readers will stick around and enjoy it with me.

To kick off this new year I’m starting with a few tips that will help your marketing efforts online this year.

URL Redirection and Affiliate Marketing – if you are still using the TinyURL service to shorten your links you may want to rethink the idea. Why? Well, it has been a much abused service and as a result you could be losing a lot of traffic and visitors if you continue to use it. Browsers like Google Chrome now include a feature for users to preview every TinyURL as so many links led to undesirable or spammy sites. This means that instead of redirecting to your page, users will see something like the image below. This is plainly not a good thing!

So, if you’re looking for a better alternative there are plenty out there nowadays – ViralURL is one option and can help you with more than just redirection, as can the excellent and new service from Skadoogle.

However, I recently discovered that ViralURL also has problems associated with it – having been unfairly flagged (imo) by the Spybot Search and Destroy software, anyone running Spybot and Internet Explorer is unlikely to see any of your links at all. I’m not sure how many users Spybot S&D has, but it’s a pretty well known tool and it’s free. CNET alone cites the number of downloads from its sitealone at 111,925,794 so it has to be borne in mind. ViralURL id certainly going to be crippled on a lot of machines out there. Rightly or wrongly SpybotS&D have decided to “protect” their users from ViralURL links and have refused to remove the flag, despite the best efforts of ViralURL to state their case. I think the people at Spybot are morons judging by the comments they made on their forum and simply do not understand viral marketing or any form of affiliate marketing at all. Needless to say I choose to use alternative software for parasite detection.

If you want a professional link cloaking script for your own domain we still say that Samurai Stealth Cloaker is the best out there. You can visit my hub on link cloaking and redirection for more tips too.

When it comes to marketing online, your list is going to be one of the most important aspects of those efforts and if you are still baulking at the thought of getting started with your own list, make 2010 the year you get to grips with building your own list of subscribers. You can choose from countless list building programs but the bottom line is that most of them are a waste of time – sorry to say that but it’s true.

For some great listbuilding tips try Josh Spaulding’s report on email marketing, it’s a steal and contains some great information.

I’m often asked what programs and services I would recommend for beginners to the world of internet or affiliate marketing but it is such a huge subject that without a clear idea of exactly what model you are intending to use it’s very difficult to answer.

If you are just starting out, there is a very good 120 video course available called IM For Newbies that covers all kinds of topics and explains how to do a whole range of things – it’s not the most advanced stuff but if you’re wanting to accelerate your learning curve it’s very worthwhile and good value for money at only $7. For anyone wanting to learn how to set up affiliate marketing sites or niche sites, the free training videos at the Clone Cash System are well worth a look too.

If you are planning to use WordPress in your online marketing there are a huge number of free and paid resources available – take a look at my main site’s WordPress tools section and check out some of the WordPress Training videos too. You can even get a free membership site software for WordPress at Memberfire, so if you are looking to set up your first membership site for free or paying members, it’s a great place to start.

As far as free services go there are a million and one that claim to be the answers to your prayers, but they can’t all possibly be telling the truth. That’s not to say that some will work better than others for different people and their online ventures. There are literally thousands of options, tools and sites out there, so many that it can be difficult to know what to do and where to begin but my advice would be to try as much as you can cope with – test and discard anything that does not bring results. Do not just take someone else’s word all the time – if you like the look of a free service try it – there can often be some nice surprises when you do so.

You will have noticed  several buttons in the sidebar for free advertising sites – if you have no advertising budget to speak of these can be quite effective – I know because I’ve seen some good results with them in recent months so give some a try and see if they can help you too. In my experience if you have the right product/service they can be good for list building and even sales. I’m also currently trying some banner advertising with an exchange that seems to be performing reasonably well although I’ve never been a fan of such things before – it all depends on what you’re advertising but it’s a no cost way of getting your sites seen in more places and there is a WordPress plugin available too.

If you stick with me on this blog or subscribe to my list, I will post results and ideas of my own to help you further your online goals at the start of this new decade!

I’ll report back on the hosting move once it’s underway – if the new service is as good as people claim, you can be sure I’ll be giving a full and detailed review of my experiences and the services provided so look out for that in the weeks ahead.

TCH

Last week we were targeted with thousands of queries per second that brought the server to its knees and caused massive problems. These attacks came from hundreds of different IP’s and there seemed to be nothing that could stop them. Why we were targeted is a mystery as these kinds of attacks are normally aimed at very high profile and high traffic sites but attacked we were and it has caused many days of hair pulling and grinding of teeth.

We are slowly putting the site back to normal but if you do notice any missing features or strange behavior over the next few days please bear with us while we attempt to return to normal service.

If you do notice anything broken, please drop us a line via the contact form at the top of the page and we we look into it as soon as possible.

I apologize to readers and visitors who were unable to access the site recently but it was a situation beyond our control.

TCH

I normally proceed with caution each time a new WP version hits the streets to let them iron out the inevitable bugs and to give the plugin authors time to catch up, but this time I decided to forge ahead, upgrading another blog before this one just to see how it went.

The good news is that it went pretty smoothly so I moved on to The CaymanHost without too much trepidation and set the WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin in motion. I’m pleased to say that aside from a few minor glitches and irritations the upgrade went well here too, but there are one or two plugins that don’t want to play with 2.7 and have thrown their rattles out of their prams. More of that in a bit.

Rather than regurgitate all the details of the changes in the look and feel of WordPress 2.7 from an admin point of view I will refer you to K-InTheHouse’s excellent and comprehensive post entitled “Top WordPress 2.7 Tips, Hacks, Plugins & Resources” where you will find plenty of very useful links and information.

For a quick peek at the new backend admin interface and some of the new features I’ve included a pretty detailed video below to demonstrate how it all works. Personally I’m finding it does take a little while to find your way around after having got so used to the WordPress backend of old.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUDM4q7utGQ

So, as you can see, there have been a lot of changes compared to the normally slow development of WordPress, this latest incarnation represents some major differences from the WordPress you know and love.

As far as plugins go, you might want to heed the advice given in the above video regarding a test installation on a subdomain and check the list of compatible plugins listed in K-InTheHouse’s aforementioned post.  I forged ahead and I’m pleased to say that the majority of my plugins worked fine although I did have to deactivate and reactivate a couple of them to get them functioning.

Notable exceptions, at least for me are a couple of RSS plugins, including the excellent MultiFeedSnap so you will probably notice a couple of feeds missing from my sidebars for a while. The other plugin that refuses to work is Max Banner Ads from MaxBlogPress, but I’m sure they will soon fix those issues. Until then I shall have to do without it.

The following plugins are all in use and working fine although at least one will effectively be made redundant due the new capabilities of 2.7 Coltrane.

Akismet | aLinks (site down/ no longer being developed?) |AllInOne SEO Pack | Blog Mechanics Keyword Link | CoComment Enhancer | DoFollow | FeedBurner Feedsmith | Feed Footer | Google XML Sitemaps | Got Banners | Insights | KB Advanced RSS Widget | Maintenance Mode | MaxBlogPress Favicon | MaxBlogPress Stripe Ad | My Ad Manager | My Page Order | No Self Pings | Peter’s Custom Anti Spam | Psychic Search | Redirection | Share This | Simple Tags | Simple Trackback Validation | Smart Youtube | StatPress Reloaded | Subscribe Me | Subscribe To Comments | Twit This | What Would Seth Godin Do | WP Automatic Upgrade | WordPress Link Directory | WP-Affiliate

Sez Who and Bumpzee have both been kicked into touch as a result of two much conflict with other plugins or slow load times. This was done prior to the upgrade. SezWho are working on my issues so it may make a return at some point in the future.

Once I get used to the navigation I’m sure I’ll be a happy bunny, but until then it has slowed me down a little As WordPress 2.7 Coltrane includes an automatic upgrade feature, tedious WP updates will hopefully be a thing of the past. The king is dead, long live the king.

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Making regular backups of files really is essential and this chore should certainly be a matter of routine for all webmasters.

A backup refers to a copy of existing files on a separate storage device to preserve data in case the original has been damaged or deleted. Don’t rely on your hosting company to backup your data, they may well do so but you must have a duplicate of all your files stored safely in another place, independent of your host. No matter how reliable your hosting company has always been, they can suffer server failures just like anyone else, so, for your own peace of mind backup everything and store it either on your own PC’s hard drive, or an external drive, preferably both if you can.

Never underestimate the importance of having a backup. There is no excuse nowadays as the task really is a simple one and there are a variety of options.

1. Back Up With cpanel
Every time you log in to your hosting account, you are usually greeted by your control panel, the place that contains all the tools you need to manage your website. C-Panel is one of the most commonly used control panels for Linux based hosting and if you are a cpanel user, backups could not be easier.

To perform a full backup using cpanel, you just have to find and click the Backup icon on the main interface. (sample below)

This offers you options to generate various backups including your databases. Backup everything, including those vital database files. It’s simple. Then download the generated files to your PC, or other storage medium.

Below is an excellent video courtesy of TechBasedMarketing.com showing the exact steps to follow in cpanel to make complete backups of your websites and databases. Where you store your backups is your choice of course and I recommend at least two separate locations.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IsJBIBs-V1c

Additional Resources: Mohamed Bhimji has also provided an ebook in PDF format covering the full process. You can download a free copy below.

cPanel Backup Guide PDF

2. Backing Up Using Online Storage
Your server is already an online storage medium of course, but if you want more security for your files, you could get another. You may already have another hosting plan where you could store data or you could just sign up to a free online storage service instead. Some of these may not offer enough space for larger backups however.

3. Backing Up Databases Using phpMyAdmin
Databases are the most common repository of important records. If you are running MySQL, but don’t have cpanel, you can back up your databases using phpMyAdmin, a common database management tool. It is very simple – log in to your phpMyAdmin account and click the Export option which will take you to a list of your databases. Select them all and save – you will be prompted to provide a name for the backup file and the desired location. Click OK and your backup database(s) will be created.

Wherever you decide to backup and save your data remember to do it on a regular basis – the more often you update your website or blog the more frequently you should backup. I prefer to store backups in two separate locations which gives double the security and peace of mind.

If you haven’t backed up in a while, make time to do it today.

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