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Network Solutions now offers VPS Hosting

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As many of the regular readers of The Webfiles know I’ve had quite a bit of hosting troubles in the last few months. I’ve had to change hosts three times because my sites – 10 domains with 17 sites between them – have overused the CPU resources at which ever web hosting company I was using a the time.

As I tried to explain on one of my other blogs, even a huge surge of traffic such as one that might come from a very well stumbled or dugg post could push my current hosting account over it’s limit! This problem will become worse as my new domains start to gain traffic.

I’ve got to face it. I’m going to have to move my sites over to a hosting provider that can offer me VPS hosting. It’s a reality and it would be better if I make the move before I encounter problems with my current host.

One company that has just begun to offer VPS Hosting is Network Solutions.

As some of you might know a Virtual Private Server hosting account is the step between shared hosting which is what most people start out with when they decide to host a website on their own domain and a dedicated hosting account.

With a shared hosting account you share the servers resources with all the other account holders that use that service. Some web hosts oversell their accounts and an account holder like myself with websites that have fairly high traffic and that use databases and other software to run them can get into trouble quite easily by overusing the system resources allocated to them on that server.

With a VPS account the server is virtually partitioned so that each account holder has the ability to run their own operating system and applications (ie wordpress, databases, CMS, Forums and so on) and if something goes wrong they can reboot their portion of the server independently from the rest of the VPS account holders on the same system.

In other words as a VPS account user you’d have more control over your hosting account and the server that you are using.

Companies, like Network Solutions, that provide VPS hosting services often allocate more resources to their VPS accounts than they do for those with shared hosting. So there should be a higher percentage of CPU resources and RAM allocated to each account.

Network Solutions offers three VPS hosting packages – VPS Standard, VPS Advanced and VPS PRO. The basic features of each account are the amount of disk space offered – 10 GB to 50 GB, Monthly Data Transfer 500 GB up to 2000 GB, the maximum amount of domains that can be hosted in each VPS account ranges from 10 to 100, and each comes with the ability to create 50 to 200 POP E-Mail accounts.

The VPS Standard and Advanced hosting packages come with SWsoft light Pack software, and the VPS PRO package comes with SWsoft Deluxe. I believe that all of the packages include Virtuozzo and the Plesk Control Panels.

Their pricing for VPS hosting looks reasonable to me. The Standard package starts at $50 per month, where as their Advanced costs $75 per month and their PRO VPS hosting costs $100 per month.

There are a few things that I like about Network Solutions VPS Hosting service. The will assist you with the creation of your account and the creation of a domain. Certainly as a newbie to VPS I, for one, would need that service! They will also assist you with the installation of applications from their application vault as well as customizing the Plesk desktop and other server related service issues. They have a toll free number and they offer both online and live 24/7 support. Believe me, whatever type of hosting account you have, a company that offers both a toll free number as well as 24/7 support is something you’ll want to have when you run into issues with your hosting account!

I’m going to look further into Network Solutions VPS hosting because as I said I’m going to need to upgrade my hosting very soon. If you think you might need to switch to VPS hosting or that you might want to move your current VPS hosting account over to a new host do visit the Network Solutions site to see if their VPS hosting packages suit your needs.

The New Amazon Widgets

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Hey did you hear that Amazon has created new and easy to use widgets? I love them!

There are several types of Amazon widgets that you can configure for your site so that you can feature various products or product categories in your sidebar or on your pages. It literally takes one minute to set up a new widget for your site.

Amazon announced their new widgets on the 21st of September, but I’d discovered them and had started playing around with them the day before they were publicly released.

You can select colors, the layout and or theme to match your website.

Amazon affiliates will earn referral fees of up to 10% on these new widgets.

There are 6 new widgets – Slideshow, My Favorites, Quick Linker, Wish List, Product Cloud, and the Amazon Unbox Video Previewer.

Go explore the new widgets. They should be easy to find in the left sidebar of your affiliate dashboard.

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Have you monetized your blog?

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Over the last year I’ve been experimenting with various ways to monetize my websites and blogs. Some affiliate programs have worked well and others have only netted me no more than a few cents! I’m sure you’ve had the same experiences and what works for one website owner might not work for another because it all depends upon our blog category and audience.

I’ve written about some of the programs I’ve tried on this site, WebStyle and of course my main blog Tricia’s Musings either as I’ve added them to one or many sites or after I’d been using them for a while.

I’ve been using Amazon on my main website for a number of years. I can’t remember exactly when Amazon started up it’s affiliate program but I’ve been using since the late 90’s I believe! In those early years I made quite a bit of money with Amazon and it was in fact the only way I monetized my website. These days I still make money with Amazon, but no where near as much as I used to due to changes in the program and I suppose a huge increase in the overall amount of affiliates!

I added the WP-Amazon WordPress plugin to my blogs a couple of months ago, but I’ve yet to really get going with using it. I think I’ve only created two affiliate links within my posts so far! Shame on me. Part of making money with affiliate programs is using them when appropriate. Of course I can still go over my old posts and add some Amazon links to them.

Text Link Ads has also been a very successful program for me. I joined a couple of years ago when I only had one HTML based website. I could never figure out how to get Text link ads to work on that site though! (if anyone can help me with this I’d really appreciate it! I know there’s a way to do it.) So I didn’t earn anything on my account until I got around to starting some blogs in 2006.

Google Adsense has worked out fairly well for me too. I don’t earn anywhere near as much as I think I could be making with the program, but I earn more than enough to get paid every month by Google. Again, I only had Google Adsense on my two websites for the longest time. Then sometime last year I put it on a couple of blogs but not my busiest ones. I’ve now rectified that mistake and I use Google Adsense and the utilize the Adsense Deluxe plugin on all of my blogs.

I only added Google Adsense to my busiest blogs about a month ago and I’ve already almost doubled my income. Hopefully once the Google Media bot fully indexes those sites I’ll really start to do well with Google Adsense. I’m still of course going over old posts and using the Adsense Deluxe plugin to add ad blocks to older posts. I don’t like to use them in my newest posts. Perhaps I’d earn more if I did, but I prefer not to irritate my regular readers with too many ads. Those coming in from search engines to the older posts will get the full extent of the advertising on my sites.

This actually brings up a good point.

When you monetize your sites do you consider how it might appear to your visitors? We’ve all seen sites with far too much advertising and for me it’s a total turn off. Links everywhere, advertising to the full extent, all kinds of different affiliate program banners and so on … I try not to do that. As I’ve just said I’ve been going back to older posts and adding in a bit more advertising, but I still try to keep it as tasteful as possible.

Everyone’s got to find their own balance between developing content, advertising and continuing to build traffic. Too much advertising can make people close your site and never return.

It’s fine to experiment with different affiliate programs. Even trying different badges and products to advertise on your site with each company. Just don’t try everything at once. If you overwhelm your visitors they won’t click on your ads. They’ll just click over to another persons website.

How do you monetize your sites? Do you think you’ve accomplished that fine balance that allows you to successfully monetize your site while keeping your visitors happy?

What programs do you use to monetize your site? I’ll discuss other programs that I’ve been using successfully in future posts.

Proper etiquette when using others photos on your site

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Earlier today I got a message on Mybloglog account. Someone was contacting me through that social networking site requesting that I add them to one of the blogrolls that I run. I must say that’s not how people usually contact me when they want to be listed on one of the five blogrolls that I run. No, they usually either email me or leave a comment on the specific blogrolls information page.

I decided to visit this persons site and much to my surprise I not only saw posts that looked like they might have once been mine, but had been re-written to some degree, but also, the only photograph on the site was a photo that I’d taken of a car in the streets of Toronto that had been converted into a garden. It’s a very cool picture of a very cool car.

I couldn’t really prove that the person had copied and altered my posts, but I could prove that the blogger had taken my photograph so I decided to leave a message for the blogger on their garden car posts comment section telling them that the photo they were using was mine and that it’s normally considered proper etiquette to either ask a persons permission before using their photography or to at the very least link to the page that the photo was found on.

This person wrote back to me all indignant, stating that they’d found the photo on flicr – yes flicr, not “flickr”. LOL They also told me that if I had a problem I’d have to prove the photo was mine, asked for details about the photo and were it was posted and told me to contact their lawyers who’s email was “sales@” some affiliate related sales website that hasn’t even opened yet.

I wrote back to the person stating that well, yes, I store my photos on Flickr. I stated my account user name and gave them the links to three Flickr photo pages in my account where different angles of the car in question was published. I also gave them links to my website posts where I’d used the photos a year ago. All my photos on Flickr are listed with “All Rights Reserved” on them.

My whole point in contacting this blogger was just to inform them that it’s not nice to just take other peoples work. I know that some people don’t realize they are doing something wrong when they use things they’ve found on the internet. Others are fully aware that it’s wrong and do it anyway.

I realize that posting my photos on a public site of any kind puts them at risk of being stolen or used without permission. Still, I don’t agree with the practice.

Some people think that once somethings posted on a publically accessible site that it’s no longer covered under copyright laws. That’s not true. Anything you create – whether it’s a note on a piece of paper at home or a published article is your copyright as soon as it’s created. It’s your intellectual property.

Unfortunately, once a work is stolen or plagiarized the onus is on the person who originally created the work to prove that it’s there own.

The reason why I’m writing this post today is just to remind you that if you see a photo that you’d like to use on your site, you should make an attempt to contact the person who took the photo. If you can’t reach the person who’s photo you are using at least mention and or link to the site where you found the photo.

Got an old cellphone? Check out CellForCash

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Have you ever wondered what to do with your old cell phone? I’m sure that there’s a lot of people out there with an old mobile phone or two stored in a drawer some where in their home that they’ve kept simply because they didn’t know what to do with it. Worse, there’s a lot of cell phones in landfills throughout North America possibly leaching toxins such as lead into the soil and eventually into the ground water.

I think it would be great if all cell phone providers, when they come out with their awesome deals on new phones that we must have, would offer rebates on our old phones no matter how old they are or their condition. They don’t though, do they?

That’s where CellForCash.com. They’ve create a program that allows US residents to recycle their old cellphones. Simply visit their site and use their mobile phone manufacture and model search to see if your phone is listed and how much of a rebate you’ll receive from CellForCash. You can then finish filling out your contact information, decide if you want the rebate or if you’d like to donate it to a charity called the 911 Cell Phone Bank which benefits seniors and victims of abuse and then CellForCash will send you a free postage paid box with which you can submit your phone.

Cellforcash.com currently lists over 600 cell phone models that will qualify for rebates. The rebate payout ranges from $4 to $300 or more.

Just think about it. When you use Cellforcash to recycle your cell phone, not only will you be protecting the environment by keeping one more old cell phone out of the landfills, but you can also benefit by receiving some money back for your phone or donating those funds to a worthwhile charity.

You should read the article “Why should I recycle my cell phone?” which explains why recycling cell phones is so important. Did you know that each year more than 140 million cell phones are retired and that not even 5% of those old phones are recycled? Isn’t that a terrible shame?

Did you know that the circuit boards and other components that make up cell phones contain toxic materials such as arsenic, antimony, beryllium, cadmium, copper, lead, cobalt, copper, mercury, nickel, and zinc, and brominated flame retardants. As I said earlier all of these chemicals and heavy minerals could leach into the ground waters and eventually effect our drinking water or damage the environment in ways that would eventually have an effect on ourselves and our health.

Old cellphones in decent condition might be used in other markets or countries, or the components and materials within your turned in cell phone might be recovered, recycled and then other industries might use those recycled materials to make new products.

Site trouble yet again!

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I’m having site problems yet again.

This is really starting to tick me off.

At about 9:30 pm last night the index.php file on my main blog domain Feverishthoughts.com was accessed repeatedly. I received a note from Hostgator shortly after this happened telling me about the problem and also saying that they’d shut down access to that directory.

At least this time round it’s a little better than when I was with Lunarpages. They’ve actually been able to tell me specifically what time the problem occurred and which domain was affected. They also only shut down that domain rather than my whole account. So at least I’ve got two blogs and two websites still functioning.

At this point – 3:30 a.m. I’ve been going back and forth with support. I think we’ve exchanged email three times now. The last one stated that they’d let me back into my directory to add the wp-cache plugin to my site and then monitor my directory after that.

The thing is that I’m already using wp-cache. So I just wrote back to them and told them that. I also told them that all my plugins and blogs are up to date.

Hopefully they’ll activate my directory again and monitor it as they said.

I have no idea what’s going on. I don’t know if the domain was under some kind of attack or if I just had too many visitors all at once. I really don’t know. I suspect a bot attack of some kind as I’ve been getting hit with a lot more spam across all my blogs lately and bad behavior and akismet just aren’t cutting it.

I know that I certainly don’t need to be having site troubles this weekend! It’s a long weekend and I’ve got a family reunion going on with my brothers and sisters. I won’t be home much and when I am home I’ll probably have guests so if my main blog domain isn’t back up soon and or if it runs into trouble over the next four days I just won’t be able to deal with it. Which sucks.

I keep flirting with the issue of possibly having to move my sites to VPS. Hostgator doesn’t offer VPS. They have Semi-dedicated which is still part of their shared account service and then they have dedicated servers. Their semi-dedicated package offers just about everything I have with my current account but I believe it has much higher CPU resource limits. That’s something I have to check on. Semi-dedicated costs $74.95 per month. Big jump from what I’m paying now.

So again. If anyone has any advice for me or can suggest a hosting company that offers VPS, hopefully at a reasonable price I’d appreciate it. I want to deal with this issue before my sites end up being totally shut down like they were in July with that other webhost I was using.

BTW 4 a.m. my feverishthoughts.com domain is back up and running. Fingers crossed that it behaves now.

The War on Comment Spam

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Have you had an increase in general spam on your sites lately?

For some reason all my sites are getting more spam in the akismet spam folder. I’m using the bad behavior plugin, and I’ve been using it since February. The bad behavior plugin greatly reduced the amount of spam that was even reaching my akismet spam folder. Since February I went from having 500 spam a day per site (well my sites with fairly high traffic) to only one to ten spam per day thanks to the bad behavior plugin.

Lately though, I’ve found that I’ve been getting more and more spam in my spam folder and some that’s not even being picked up by akismet. Either akismet isn’t working quite as well as it used to or some thing’s changed out there.

Enough about spam that’s being generated by bots and hopefully being caught by akismet or whatever system we have in place to catch it. The spam that has continued to upset me throughout the summer has been human generated comment spam on my do follow blogs.

The other day I had one persistent comment spammer. This person left very lame comments “nice photo”, “I agree”, “I’m not in AUS” and so on, on two of my blogs. Lame comments are one thing, but this person left about 16 of these comments on the two sites and left links for two different businesses. In one of the SEO type keyword links were the words (use this as much as possible) beside the keyword Teeth Whitener. So the comment looked like this:

Teeth Whitener (use this as much as possible)
Nice photo!

I’m assuming that the line use this as much as possible was instructions to use that keyword as much as possible because in later comments other words were added to the keyword phrase.

I use Lucia’s Linky Love do follow plugin now so people have to leave a certain amount of comments before their links will follow. I love that plugin. Ever since I began using it the human generated comment spam has reduced greatly. I think this person was attempting to leave enough comments to qualify for links that followed.

I was angry at this persons blatant attempt to spam my sites, so you know what I did? I visited the two companies that he or she had attempted to leave links for and found their contact page. I then left them a comment that said something like this:

Have you recently paid a company to leave your links in the comment section of blogs? If you have, this company is doing your business a disservice.

In the last 24 hours someone left 16 comments on two of my blogs with links to your business and another business. The comments were left on fairly lengthy and detailed blog posts yet the comments were most often only two words such as “nice photo” or one line comments that didn’t make much sense.

Here’s an example of the comments that were left on my sites:

Example that includes keyword for link, ip address, commenter’s email address and comment

I’ve deleted all the comments left by this person, so if you’ve paid to have links added to blogs you’ve just wasted your money.

Other bloggers have stated they’ve been receiving these types of comment links as well and they’ve also been deleting them. I think you’d have much more success advertising your company if you approached individual bloggers directly or created an advertising campaign. You’d have links within articles if you did that and links within articles are much more highly regarded by search engines.

Since the comment spammer left their email address I also sent them a note asking them why they were spamming my site and I told them that I’d contacted the companies for which they’d left links. I also warned them that they might soon be out of a job if the companies stopped buying comment links.

So far neither business nor comment spammer have replied.

If you’ve also been getting comment spam similar to the kind that I’ve discussed in this article please feel free to follow my lead by contacting the companies who’s links have been left in your posts comment section. You can copy the letter that I wrote above and simply paste it into a businesses contact form. This should save you some time. Be sure to include an example of the type of lame comment spam you were bombarded with when the spammer hit your site.

Who knows, maybe the company you contact will reply to your note and ask you to write a blog post for them.

Check your feedburner stats

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I was just visiting feedburner and much to my shock almost all my sites said that they had zero subscribers!

Obviously something strange has happened at feedburner or at least I kind of hope that something has. I mean, some of my sites have a few hundred subscribers or they did up until I checked my feedburner stats a few minutes ago.

Check your feedburner account and see if your subscribers have suddenly decreased or worse fallen to zero.

Let me know what you find out?

FeedSmith Plugin might help reduce CPU resource issues

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A couple of weeks ago when I was having hosting troubles I was trying to find ways to cut down on the amount of CPU resources that might be used by my sites. I updated my plugins and got rid or some that I suspected were eating up CPU.

So far every things been going well on my new host. I’m keeping my figures crossed. Of course it’s summer and there’s been a small dip in traffic across all my sites in the last month or so as well so I guess I won’t really know if I’ve cured my CPU resource problems until everyones back from holidays or back to work and school and using the web the way they were before summer got in the way.

Andy Beard had suggested that I try using the FeedSmith plugin for Feedburner. He found articles on other blogs that seems to infer that bots, feed readers and visitors constantly hitting a sites feed could be a substantial drain on CPU resources.

I’ve always been pretty good about checking my site stats and keeping track of what’s been happening with my sites as far as traffic goes and I’d already noticed that my feeds were hit more than even the main index page of my sites. So I decided to try using the FeedSmith plugin in order to see if it helped cut down on resource usage.

The plugin is very easy to use. Just download the FeedSmith plugin, upload it to your WordPress content plugins folder and activate it. All you need to do after that is create a feedburner feed for your site if you haven’t already. Once you’ve done that you can go to your WP dashboard, click options and then go to the admin panel for Feedsmith and input your feedburner feed for your blog. You can also create and list a feedburner plugin for your sites comments too.

What the Feedsmith plugin does is consolidate all of your sites feeds into a feedburner feed. As you probably already know, your themes header lists a variety of feeds that can be used with your site. The most common are rss1, rss2 and atom. You might very well have subscribers for each of these feeds. How can you keep track of how many subscribers you have when they are all subscribed to different site feeds? Funnel them all to your feedburner feed.

Now when a bot comes along to read your feed, or someone accesses your feed via a feed reader they’ll be directed to your feedburner feed.

In theory this should take some of the load off your site, or that’s what Andy and the articles that he pointed me to presumed.

Looking at my stats for this domain and my main domain feverishthoughts.com it does look like hits to my feeds have gone down substantially. Now the month isn’t over, and I haven’t blogged that much on this site this month so the stats on hits to the feed for this domain might not mean all that much.

At this point it looks like hits on this sites feed have been cut in half. Hits on my busiest website, the main blog on feverishthoughts.com are down by two thirds! Again, the month isn’t over and traffic has decreased a bit this month, but that’s my busiest site and there’s been a marked decrease in hits to that sites feed. So the plugin must be working.

A nice side effect of using the FeedSmith plugin is that it is now gathering better stats for all my subscribers so when I visit the Feedburner site I see that the number of subscribers listed for each of my sites has gone up.

I mean UP. Like 300%.

I knew that some of our sites had a lot of feed subscribers, but because they weren’t all being picked up properly by feedburner I realized that the numbers I’d been seeing were low. The new numbers that I’ve been seeing since I installed the plugin are much more believable.

I’ll check on the feed stats at the end of the month to see if there really have been less hits to my feeds thanks to the plugin and I’ll also check on them at the end of September which I expect will be back to normal traffic levels.

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