The CaymanHost Web Hosting Directory

I normally write about comment spam over on my marketing blog but in recent times I seem to be getting more and more that emanates from web hosting companies on this site so I thought I would make a quick educational post for these SEO lost causes and free ad seekers.

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

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We have just launched a free marketing blog here at the CaymanHost where members can post their best hosting, marketing, SEO, blogging and Wordpress related content.

Register For A Free Author Account Here

If you have a review or an article dealing with any aspect of web hosting or want to promote your websites to the world you can register for free and post away – there are only a couple of rules and provided they are followed this will be a great way for you to earn backlinks and syndicate your content to a wider audience.

As article directories go, there are none of the usual restrictions – you may include video in your posts as well as hyperlinks in the body of your articles as well as the resource box at the foot of your posts.

The site runs on Wordpress, and it has been set up to be search engine friendly using a range of plugins to ensure your content gets spidered and indexed quickly. If you already blog on Wordpress the members area will be very familiar to you.

As it is a brand new site, now is the time to register and start posting your content and links – we are accepting articles on all web hosting and domain name topics as well as internet marketing articles, SEO, Wordpress, general blogging and website design and promotion. If you write about any of these things you can sign up as an author and start spreading your message.

As an author you may post as often as you wish. All we ask is that you refrain from using affiliate links (including redirects) and stick to the topics allowed. This is not a general article directory but one aimed at those looking for information on specific subjects.

After registration make sure you fill in your profile details to gain as much advantage as possible as when people click on your profile they will see your website links etc.

When posting be sure to include your relevant targeted keywords and tag your posts so that they can be more easily found.

If you are a publisher looking for content you may use any of the articles in the database for your own sites provided that they remain unchanged in any way, including all live hyperlinks which must be left intact – the content is free so please respect the author’s and their right to exposure if you are using their work.

Other than that, all we ask is that you enjoy the new site and help us make it a success

TCH

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SEO for Wordpress is a topic that many people have an interest in for obvious reasons and experts argue that it is not the most optimized platform straight out of the box. Fortunately there are a lot of plugins to help users fix the most common “problems” but there is also a lot of advice out there that can be confusing, particularly to newer users or non technical types which includes a lot of Wordpress bloggers.

In this sort video Michael Gray tackles structural advice and the hotly debated duplication issues – you will note his comments at the beginning of the video regarding google’s statements about duplicate content and his own experiences. Ultimately, how much of a problem this may be is often argued in SEO circles and there seems to be varying opinions. Nonetheless it is a fact that Wordpress does store the same content in various places such as the archives, the main page of the blog, the individual post pages etc. If all this is new and confusing to you, you might want to learn more about setting up a robots.txt file for your Wordpress installation and use a plugin like google XML sitemaps in conjunction with All In One SEO as a starting point.

Ultimately, if you can make the Googlebot’s life easier it certainly won’t do you any harm.

Tips on how to avoid duplicate content and set up theming or siloing on your wordpress blog installation.

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With the first stable release of Wordpress 2.7 or, wordpress 2.7 Coltrane to give it its correct title, there has been a flurry of posting around the blogosphere and the usual avalanche of questions and answers. If you are a blogger and you’ve managed to miss out on the fact that Wordpress 2.7 represents some significant changes over all previous versions you might want to check your pulse, but then read on to find out what all the buzz is about.

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.

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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Dot5 web hosting – Full functionality on a small budget is DOT5’s claim. They offer deals from $4.95 ($3.95 current special offer) monthly which includes free domain forever, up to 6 domains, 5000 email accounts/autoresponders and unlimited storage and  monthly transfer. You get PHP5 MySQL Perl CGI and Ruby plus google Adwords and Yahoo search credits and Constant Contact email marketing feature.

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Lunar Pages basic hosting starts from only $4.95 per month with their latest offer but like our other featured hosting companies they offer a range of services including business hosting, reseller hosting, VPS, dedicated servers and more. All annual plans include a free domain.

cpanel, Fantastico, Ruby on Rails and SSH access all come as standard with all shared plans and if you need more powerful features than the basic plans provide, or than shared hosting can cope with, dedicated servers from Lunar Pages start at $99 per month. For all plans in detail, please visit the company’s website.

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By Joshua Spaulding

SEO isn’t nearly as hard as it’s made out to be. A good majority of the so-called “SEO Experts” are out to get your money. They run services, so they want you to believe SEO is some kind of a science.

In the past several years, I’ve been creating and marketing Websites. For the longest time I believed all the hype of mumbo-jumbo that’s constantly floating around out there about how you need to study search engines and stay on top of them 24/7 if you want to see good rankings.

During that time I continued to do all of the basic things we know we should be doing in order to rank well:

- Work on a lot of quality incoming links.

- Research your keywords and target relevant keywords

- Compose a good META title and description

I worked on those few things as well as a few other basic SEO techniques and over time I found myself competing for the first page of google for some very competitive keywords!

I’m not talking about baby keywords either. I’m talking about those like “make money online,” “article directory” etc.

The fact is; there are loads of myths involved in the education of SEO online. Many of these myths come from those who are looking for customers for their SEO consulting firms and services.

It wasn’t until I stopped worrying about the latest search engine changes etc. that I started to see some extremely impressive results.

If you’ve been running a Website for a few months and you think SEO is hard, think again! Just learn the basics because that’s really all it takes.

Do your basic on-page optimization and build a lot of quality links! The rest will fall into place naturally and you won’t be paying ungodly rates to “SEO consultants” who nine times out of ten don’t know what they’re doing anyway!

To see the exact SEO Strategy that I use to conquer loads of extremely competitive search terms, visit http://www.theeasyseoreport.com/ where I offer the best SEO Report on the market FREE of Charge!

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Joshua_Spaulding
http://EzineArticles.com/?SEO-Experts-Are-Full-of-It—SEO-is-Easy&id=1007888

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Fellow blogger and internet marketer Josh Spaulding sounds off about his recent experiences with HostGator in this customer review.

OK, I know I told you I’d be reducing the number of rants that I publish on this blog. Well, since I’m about to start http://www.crackerjackseo.com/ (newly registered) I’ve decided to start ranting once again right here. So all my long, how-to’s etc. related to SEO will be published at crackerjackseo and all my other Internet marketing musings, including rants will reside here.

About 12 hours ago I ordered a dedicated server through HostGator. During the ordering process I chose PayPal as my payment option (I wasn’t asked for my PayPal email.

Order was complete, nothing was charged. A few minutes later I received a call from a HostGator rep telling me they need my PayPal email to get this going. No problem. I provided the email and was told my server would be up within 24 hours. I also replied to a ticket telling them my PayPal email just to be sure.

-PayPal email given to HostGator twice-

This morning I wake up and see an email from HostGator. I open it up and I see login details. The server is up and ready, right? Of course not.

They reinstated a reseller account I had over a year ago. Not that it matters, but that didn’t even work trying to login through the provided IP, UN and PW.

I call HostGator to see what’s up. I get some kid (sounded like he was about 16 y.o., who sounded mad at the world.) He very rudely said “You’ll just have to wait for your ticket to be replied to, Sir”

After hanging up I got a little P.O. and called back. This time I spoke with a helpful female agent, but after 15 minutes or so I was told I need to reorder the server because a PayPal email wasn’t sent. About that time I thought this was some kind of joke! I had given it to the guy who called me, I replied to the ticket with the PayPal email and I had given it to her. Yet, they were unable to charge me and fix this big mess.

-PayPal email given to HostGator for the 3rd time-

By the way, while I was on the phone with her I received another email from HostGator stating that I need to go to some URL to change my primary domain and I need to pay $5 for that to happen.

So, I figured I might as well just order and get this all over and done with (thinking they would take care of it right away.) I said “OK, I’ll just reorder.” She said OK, the people who set it up are gone right now, so they should get to this later today sometime. “When?” …”I don’t know”

Does HostGator even care whether they make a sale or not? I mean, I don’t care how much money I make, if I have a customer who is ready and willing to give me $200 EVERY MONTH I’m going to bend over backwards for them!

Now I’m in a predicament. It took me 2 weeks of looking at various dedicated server deals and nothing compared to what HostGator had to offer for the price. I don’t want to spend over 200/month for a server, but it looks like I’m going to have to.

The best deal in the world isn’t worth it if the support is the worst in the world!

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The massive and rapid growth of the internet, along with its inevitable commercialization, has seen the term SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, gain a place in the popular language of the early 21st century. The increasing need for businesses and website owners to drive visitors to their little corner of the web has resulted in the creation of an industry, focused on helping them do just that.

Unfortunately, the pressure to perform and the financial rewards for doing so, was bound to bring forth the shadier side of some people, and, fairly or unfairly, the world of SEO has often been tarred with the fallout caused by some of the sharp practices that have been employed. Depending on your point of view, this is either an inevitable result of intense competition, or nothing but a damaging trend that does little but taint the overall understanding of SEO and the impression it makes upon the internet community at large.

There are of course plenty of practitioners of ‘ethical’ SEO techniques and conversely, there are plenty of others who take the approach that the end always justifies the means.

If you are unfamiliar with the concept of SEO, and the majority of people probably still are, what do you need to know and how do you ensure that either you, or your SEO advisers, stay within the bounds of acceptable and ‘ethical’ methods? There are some simple guidelines that will help you to achieve better rankings without stepping into the murkier side of SEO, and which will hopefully help you to avoid the cowboys whose only real concern is to relieve you of your money.

The whole point of looking at SEO, is of course to improve your position in the SERPS or search engine results pages, in relation to competing websites. Internet users invariably use a search engine to find information online, and your goal is to try and ensure they find you if you are providing what they are looking for. It is no simple task, particularly if the field in which you operate is very competitive. It is usually webmasters who are struggling to rank well, who are eventually tempted by ‘the dark side’ in an attempt to raise their profile. As search engine technology has has improved however, many shady tactics from the past have ceased to be effective and usually end up being more harmful than helpful.

So, where do you begin with a clean SEO campaign? If you are not intending to try and optimize your pages yourself and prefer to use a third party to do the work for you, it is always wise to try and find out a little about them first. Look for testimonials and word of mouth recommendations if you can. Beware of big promises – it has to be said that at the pace things move with the major search engines such as google, nobody can really guarantee anything and many will tell you that SEO is as much an art as it is a science. Grandiose promises of a guaranteed number one spot on google are often little more than hot air, or trickery – what search term are you being promised the top spot for?

It’s not difficult to get a top ranking for something so obscure that virtually nobody is going to search for it after all – the simple fact that so few people are ever likely to type in a search query makes it all but useless, so don’t be fooled by slick talking sharks.

You need to decide what search terms you wish to do well with and this in itself is an uphill task if you’re new to the game. There is plenty of advice and tips available online to help you with keyword research so this will be your starting point. If you are using the services of someone else to help with your SEO strategy, it is of course vital that you are both on the same page on this matter.

The techniques employed in SEO and the opinions on which are effective would probably fill a complete series of books so we’re not going to cover them in any great detail in this short article, but a few pointers should help you to start on the right path.

Websites are, first and foremost, for human visitors. You should never lose sight of this while you are delving into the finer points of SEO.

Make sure that your content is relevant, well written, and regularly updated. You need to make your visitor’s experience a pleasant one. Poorly written and poorly organized pages will not encourage people to stay, or to return, so quality is vitally important. It is therefore pointless to exaggerate or manipulate the content of your site purely for SEO purposes. Attempting to mislead, will basically achieve little. Improving your rankings by distorting the actual content of your site may result in a short term improvement in the SERPS, but disappointed humans won’t stick around for long! Ethical SEO practitioners do not encourage such tactics – they are effectively self destructive, nothing more.

When people talk about “black hat SEO” (referring to the practitioners of trickery and deceit to garner search engine rankings) don’t be fooled by the catchy title. Black Hat tactics cannot be dismissed as useless, because in the past, some of the ideas have been extremely effective, but things move rapidly and a lot of so called “black hatters” are still trying to use techniques that have long since been recognized by the likes of google and therefore rendered ineffective. Even if you are tempted by a black hat shortcut, if you don’t know much about SEO, the chances are you will find yourself in trouble with the search engines and possibly excluded from their results entirely. It’s simply not worth it for most business owners and webmasters.

Ethical and clean SEO is really the only way to go – it may not get you a spectacular overnight result, but if your long term goals are to be fulfilled it is still the wisest course of action. The advocates of Black Hat techniques will of course laugh at the whole concept of ‘ethics’ in relation to SEO and claim theirs is the only path to success. Maybe they are right in some cases, until they are caught or snitched on by other webmasters for using underhand methods – that’s fine if it is their own site(s) that are ostracized by google and other major engines, but do you really want your painstakingly built pages to suffer the same fate?

I guess you could safely say; “It’s not big and it’s not clever”. Play by the rules and if your site is good and sensibly optimized it will do well enough in time.

If you wish to learn more about SEO there are plenty of blogs and experts in the field who publish up to date and detailed information. A quick search will return plenty of results on what is a very complex subject, but now, at least, you will be a little more aware of how to go about optimizing your sites correctly and not run into any nasty surprises along the way.

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Review by Ricky Lim

I have been hosting some of my websites with Site5 for about a year now. I also have other websites hosted in other web hosting companies. Here is my review for Site5 based on my own personal experience with them

Why I chose Site5

I got to know about Site5 through the webhostingtalk forums. At that time, I was searching for a reliable and reputable cheap web hosting company for a couple of my new websites. I’d heard a lot of good reviews about Site5 and decided to try them out. Since they have a 60 day money back refund, I figured if I did not like it, I would ask for my money back. Anyway, I was basically testing their web hosting on my new websites so I was not terribly worried.

Site5 Hosting Plan

Site5 only offer two types of hosting plan : shared and reseller, so I took the superhosting extreme package. Basically here are the brief web hosting package details (see footnote for latest):

Diskspace : 8GB
Bandwidth : 500GB
Multisite Accounts : 5
Unlimited : domain pointers, ftp, mysql

It also comes with fantastico and cpanel. All this for about $109 annually which is pretty cheap. (see footnote) Please note this hosting plan is no longer available and is replaced with multisite dynamite plan. It is basically the same as my previous plan except for more diskspace and bandwidth. As I’m writing this, they have a promotion where you can get this hosting plan for 2 years at only $149 which I consider to be a good deal.

Unique Features of Site5 hosting

One feature I like about Site5 hosting is the multisite accounts. It is basically a full featured control panel for each domain. Unlike other shared web hosting companies which uses domain pointers, a multisite accounts exists on its own with its own subdomains, domain pointer, ftp, mysql etc. This help me to organize my websites better especially if you have a lot of domains. You can set the diskspace and bandwidth from the main pool of your web hosting account.

The other feature is the flashback which allows you to undo any changes you make to your website. It is a life saver especially when a website breaks down and you do not know the cause.

Things that can be improved

Though I like
target="_blank" >Site5 and would recommend it to friends, there are a few things that could make it better. One of them is the upgrade option. I recently upgraded my hosting plan to multisite dynamite and was told I had to shift to another server. The problem was I had to do the data transfer myself. With 3GB of data to transfer, not to mention the dozens of ftp, mysql and email accounts, it was a real hassle. Something I am sure their staff could have easily completed in a short time.

The other thing I didn’t like was I could not request for more IP addresses. If you know about SEO, then you know how having multiple IP addresses can be useful.

In all, I would still recommend Site5 due to its cheap web hosting plan, good support and high availability.

(Since the author wrote this review there have been some changes to the pricing and features of Site5 ’s hosting plans. Shared hosting is currently available for $5 per month for a two year contract. 12 month plan works out at $7 per month billed annually in advance. Monthly billing will cost $15 per month. Reseller accounts start at $20 per month billed annually in advance. Full details of all plans are available at the Site5 ’s Website).

About The Author
Ricky Lim runs a cheap web hosting reviews site. Visit his site at http://www.epromote.info for more information on Site5 and the best cheap web hosting services.

Technorati Tags: Site5 Hosting Review , Site5 Web Hosting , Site5 Reviews , Cheap Web Hosting Review , Site5 Shared Hosting , Site5 Reseller Hosting

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