This blog is still hosted by blogger.com and I can't complain since I am not paying a dime for it. Apart from this website I have a bunch of other sites (client sites mostly) that need some paid hosting. In the last 2 months I was forced to change 3 hosts and my experience I am going to explain here. I am not going to get much into the details (not any technicalities) of what exactly went wrong but I do want to point out wrongful attitudes in their part, since I was very surprised myself (when I found out).
doorhost.net
I think this is a one man show, a reseller of ihsystem.com systems it seems. I have been hosting with this company since 2003 but back then the reseller account belonged to some other person. The support was always very responsive trying to find out what has gone wrong and all was solved within a matter of hours at most. Some time in the beginning of the year I think, the ownership changed and the hosting experience has turned bad since that time. I noticed that the doorhost forums stopped being so active. That my support tickets went unanswered for weeks and the deciding point was when all my sites were down for a 5 days and still my support tickets were bouncing back saying that the email of the recipient was full. Could not find even a telephone to call this company/guy to support me. I tried through the listed number for ihsystem.com and I did get through to the guy behind doorhost but even that was a disaster. Something was wrong with the line and had such noise and we could not hear each other. It took us about 5 minutes for me to tell my main domain on the account and for him to tell me another email that I could send my support ticket. What a nightmare I remember!!!
powweb.com
A hosting for hobbyists as some person that is still hosted with powweb described them. The truth is that what attracted me to them was the huge amount of hard disk space they provided and the allowed bandwidth that both seemed unlimeted at the time. Well it turned out that the servers themselves were really very fast. Static pages were running to what it seemed lightning speed. But when it came time to do a database query they were quite often not responsive. From what I realized later on there was no usage policies in place (never mind enforced programatically) as to how much resource one could use. I was very often on the live chat trying to see what the problem was.
The incident that lead to me cancelling the account was some time in October that I would see my site loading slowly for some days and then one day it was not responding at all. As soon as the live support came to answer my call 40 minutes later the site was loading OK and the support guy (it was a woman actually) assured me that there was nothing wrong with the site (duh I knew already). I told her to see if there was anything wrong with it and all she said is that they are doing some sort of update (updating their database servers) that did not know how long it would take. Not even a rough estimate in hours, days, or months ?! when I specifically asked her about one!!
The powweb community forums is full of customers that seem to be defending powweb. Now I realize they are probably just resellers that are gaining enough, and have to defend their business ... I used to post often there and I would describe the problems everytime I encountered one. People were helpful lots of times but they would be very offended when talk was done about powweb's services or failure to actually provide quality services. Today I went to check the post related to that last incident and to my surprise ITS GONE! Of course it was a bad testimony of how "well" powweb is running. I would have quoted some parts from that post but oh well. If you search their forums on any given day you will see a few"slow mysql" comments.
resellerzoom.com
Their service was excellent for 1 1/2 year that I was with them. Around September an email came that said that the prices would have to be raised in order to continue to keep the same level of quality in the services provide. The price increase was not much so I went along. Some time in October all my clients sites were all down. The support tickets were usually answered within a few minutes but this one time the answer was late (in a matter of hours). The support person informed me that the sites were all OK. So it was a never ending back and forth of emails (probably 20 in count) and 3 days of painless frustration before the issue looked like it could be solved but the lies and the wrongdoings were such that I had to cancel the account.
On the first day needless to say I was checking the site from every possible place on the planet using the remote traceroute services provided from http://www.traceroute.org/. Still the support would tell me that everything was OK. I even put friends to look my domains up from other parts of the world and they all confirmed that they could not be reached. The problem is temporarily fixed and I rest assured that everything is OK. Next day when I check again I face the same problems. In the meantime my clients are calling and sending emails asking of what the problem is and why they can't use their emails. Luckily for me the Greek networks were running slow at the time and I presented that as my excuse. I speak with a manager on email and I offer to upgrade my service to a more professional hosting package if that would solve my problems. All I ask is 15 days of trial to make sure its worth the money I am going to be paying for it. I rest assured that I can get 15 days for free; I still had about 10 days until my other hosting service with them expired. Account gets setup the next day (3rd day of trouble) and running smoothly (different servers, more powerful, triple the money that I would be paying though), but also my paypal account gets charged a little while later. Looking at the support forums I realize that they are having RAID rebuild troubles for the last 2 days on my original servers, and no one bothered to inform me on my support correspondence. I talk to the manager about that and why I was charged early and he tells me it payment was automated and could not stop it. I don't like this bull!!! I ask that all my accounts get canceled and pack my stuff and go. I was lied to twice and I had no hosting for 2 days; I don't think I could trust them anymore.
Just for the record I have to say that all of these companies have actually refunded the money of my unused services without much hassle.
I am finally with mediatemple.net and very happy. They do have a resource limit enforced and monitored in a way of GPUs. 1000 GPU is the least processor power one can get with media temple's gridservice and that is equivalent to running a continuous 10% load on one processor for one month which I am satisfied with.
They charge $20/month but with a "Special offer code" kirupa07 the price can decrease by another %15 which can brings the monthly cost down to $17/month. If you decide to pay in advance for the year the price goes down to $14.16/month after you apply the "Special offer code".
You can check the speed of the servers by checking two of my sites that run on them http://www.gamesonline4free.net and http://geoland.org.
Get more updated Media Temple Special Offer Codes
Looking at my stats today (that I had not looked for some time) I noticed that for the last 20 days quite a few people visited this very blog looking for how to make money online. This site can be found on the second page of google results for the query in question so it was no surprise. It was no surprise either that most of them left immediatelly (bounced back). People are looking for a magic formula to make money online it seems !!!
The title of this website reveals that this site is NOT about making big loads of money in any short period of time even though you could but, I am not promising it. I am just presenting ideas on how I have managed to generate some revenue and ways to improve on those ideas. I personally have managed to make enough part time money from my ventures to keep me going ... the forecasted revenues are also good so that is giving an extra boost to my endeavour...
To those that are looking on how to make money online I would summarize my thoughts as follows:
- find a subject that you are passionate about or at least one that is not going to get your bored in a month from now
- think what you want to build and what is the demand for that
- learn how to build it or hire someone to do it for you
- Get a proper domain name
- Get some cheap hosting (for starters at least)
- build it
- promote it
- monetize it (put ads or affiliate links or your products on it)
- analyze the stats
- ask questions/read/learn impove it
- cycle back to promotion until you get it right
All this is usually quite involved and it needs some time investment and some patience
The more you put into your projects the more they might give back to you. Maybe not from the first months or the first year but they will.
If you have found yourself in a position of loosing your faith about making money of the internet you can consider on a recent discussion on DP on how to make $100k in 5 years in this thread: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=525344
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