For years I rented a dedicated server until I revised what it was costing me versus what advantages it brought me. It was not that expensive, under a hundred dollars a month, but it was hard to justify spending over 1100 USD a year when I could actually spend less than 16 percent of that for shared hosting and lose very little in terms of flexibility.
I considered three of the biggest discount hosting services: GoDaddy, 1and1, and Hostgator. I ignored Yahoo hosting because what they offer is great for Joe Schmoe, but just not what a serious programmer needs. I chose HostGator because it was the only one that accepted PayPal as payment. I elected to go with their business hosting package, which allows me to host an unlimited number of sites and Mysql databases for about fifteen dollars a month. The web-based control panel has pretty much everything you need, including an easy way to add new domains and email addresses. I also have Linux shell access via ssh/sftp, which they grant you if you ask for it, and although I cannot do anything that requires root access, I have my familiar command line interface whenever I need it!
It has been almost a year and there have not been any outages. Their customer service was fairly quick to respond via email, but not always with the right answers, although eventually I hit someone who was knowledgeable. I signed-up for their affiliate program, but so far it has not yielded a single cent in commissions. Generally, it is better to join affiliate programs where you get paid per click rather than per sale, but they do not offer that option. Another criticism I might make is that they use a third party service for domain purchases instead of their own as GoDaddy and 1and1 do. 1and1 wins on that count, with discounted first year charges and low annual fees after that. Note that you can still use that part of their service even if you are hosted at the competition.
Overall, I’m very satisfied with HostGator and not planning to move anytime soon! Click here to visit their website.
It’s not evil to want to make a bit of money, even if it only covers the hosting costs. There’s referral programs you can join, but if they only pay for conversions, where your referral actually buys something, your chances are nearly nil. There’s some programs that pay you a few pennies per unique click, but again, if you don’t have the traffic, it will take some time before you get something out of it (most set a minimum accumulated commission before they pay out). Referral programs are better than nothing, so by all means use those that are most likely to yield results.
All Blogs Flooded by Comment Spam
Sunday, April 24th, 2011“Great post, thanks!”. “Very useful post, thanks!”. If you have your own blog, you have probably seen comments such as these. Thought there were just readers expressing their appreciation? Think again! While that is possible, it is much more likely that this is an insidious form of comment spam, submitted by a robot to thousands of blogs of all types.
Your first hint that this is spam is the lack of any reference to the actual topic of your post. It could be applicable to any post on any subject. Your second hint that this is spam is that the submitter never fails to include a link. In most blogs, particularly those running under WordPress, comments can include an url in the identification part of the form. Some will also include links directly in the body of the comment, making it all the more obvious that it is spam. Black hat programming sites sell or give away robot scripts that can plant such comments across hundreds of thousands of sites while you sleep!
The objective of spammers in submitting bogus comments is the creation of thousands of links back to their own web pages, which may even hide viruses. The odds are good that many unsuspecting blog minders will approve the comment, and few will report it as spam even if they don’t approve it, as they may have lingering doubts on whether or not it came from a real person. Even if the links are of the nofollow type, it’s still a winning proposition for the culprits as lesser search engines might index the link anyway and with thousands of links out there, some people will inadvertently click the comment spam’s link, thus adding to their site’s traffic as well as providing more victims.
How do you defend against such spam? First and foremost, your blog should have the Akismet plug-in, which may filter out of most of them. Also, don’t allow comments to be automatically approved — you should always review them first, even if you’ve approved comments with the same email or url before, as subsequent messages may well be forged. Better still, install a comment captcha plug-in. This should stop the flow of spam completely, although real people might find it annoying.
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Tags: blogs, comment spam, Wordpress
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