I’m not a linux guru by any means. I can get around, use yum, install cpanel, and all that good stuff, but ask me to setup apache, php, etc. from source and I cringe at the thought. I’ve been hosting on dedicated servers for the past year now. In fact, I have 6 of them that do various things on the internet, mostly scraping data. Most of my sites available to the public don’t receive a huge amount of traffic or have big database back ends. In fact, most of my sites are simply landing pages. I’ve decided to start taking my landing page sites and putting them up on reliable shared hosting services. The reason being is for the past few days, my main dedicated box has been going up and down. I was told by my dedicated server provider that I was probably going through a DoS attack. After having to explain to them that everybody loves me and no one would ever do such a thing, I got them to look into the issue to find out my NIC card had died. After they replaced the NIC card it took over 3 hours for their router to begin to recognize all my IPs because the new NIC card had a different MAC address which the router didn’t recognize. All in all I was paying for advertising to a down server for probably 6 hours before I noticed it. So basically, the reason I’m making the switch is pretty simple. I know with a decent shared hosting service, if the server goes down, a million people will want it back up. The second reason for my move is stated in a previous blog. Good luck finding all my landing pages on whois.sc if I’m using a shared host.
Archive for May, 2008
From Dedicated to Shared
May 27th, 2008Dig Tool on Wordze
May 21st, 2008I haven’t used this tool much, but I’m definitely going to start using it more after seeing how accurate it is. Basically what this tool does is find related keywords to a particular keyword or phrase you throw in. For example I used to the dig tool on the word “dating” and here are some of the results:
dating
online dating
singles
personals
love
matchmaking
romance
dating service
matchmaker
date
relationships
internet dating
dating site
marriage
free online dating
chat
personal ads
relationship
match
single
women
dating advice
Most of these words/phrases are really dead on related to dating and you’ll get the same type of accuracy for any other keyword out there. It’s a really quick way to find a good niche.
Torrents for Massive $$$
May 21st, 2008So it’s not really a new concept but it’s one that’s been at the back of my mind lately. Uploading torrents and requiring people to visit your website and complete a task to get the password to the zip/rar file you just downloaded. If you download torrents at all I’m sure you’ve run across these. They are annoying as heck but sometimes when you’re desperate enough for the content you’ll do whatever it asks. This idea brings me back to my Hotline/FTP days when people used to do this when CPC was still huge. Back then you could make .25 cents every time someone clicked your banner on your site. With enough advertising it wasn’t uncommon to make a $1k a day running a Warez Hotline/FTP server. Those were the days. With that said, I’m honestly surprised people have not began to exploit torrents more so. Why torrents haven’t become a complete wasteland I don’t understand since it’s so easy to fake file size, multiple users who say content is good, spammers to upload the torrents to multiple sites etc. Someone needs to get on this and make me proud.
ScriptLance/Elance Gold. How to Get Free Code, Ideas & More.
May 21st, 2008This came to me today as I was browsing around scriptlance. I haven’t actually tried them yet, but it makes sense.
Free Code:
This is pretty simple, if the code you are trying to get someone to make has high demand on any of the forums you read, chances are you can resell it for at least the amount you paid for it. So the next time you are worried about blowing $1200 on a script you’re not sure is going to be profitable, think about how many people you can find that would buy that script from you.
Stealing ideas:
The second thing I love about freelance sites is reading other people’s projects. Sometimes you can find people that you can tell are already successful doing what they do but they are trying to find coders to scale what they are currently doing. I’ve found many projects I was interested in, simply waited for someone to bid and accept the project with good feedback, waited a week for them to finish the project and then simply offered them a private bid at half the cost as the other person paid them. Of course they were willing to give you the code because they had already coded it out. For them it’s icing on the cake.
Getting paid for work you would do for yourself anyway:
Being that I hate wasting my time on projects I’m not sure will be successful, here is where being a LAMP developer comes in. If I find an interesting project I can actually code myself on scriptlance, I can bid on it myself on scriptlance. If my bid gets accepted I’ll code everything out for the person that hired me to do it but I’ll also keep that code for myself (a lil unethical sure). I’ll then run those scripts myself after I’ve delivered the project. If the idea fails, I still was paid by the person who hired me. It gives me a bit more motivation to know that I’m going to at least see some return from my time even if it isn’t nearly what my time is worth.
Ready to move forward
May 21st, 2008I’ve been in the affiliate marketing business for the past year and a half or so. I began dabbling in PPC about 6 months ago and had some great success with it. However, I’ve gotten to a point where I’m ready to move forward onto bigger and better things. Now, I’m not saying that there isn’t money to be made in affiliate marketing, I just feel that affiliate marketing, at least promoting network offers has very little stability. You constantly have to know what’s going on in the market, find new ways to promote network offers that a million other people aren’t already doing, etc. You can keep up if you like reading and have a creative mind, but eventually, at least in my case, you start getting burnt out. Another problem with the stability aspect of promoting network offers is the fact that your campaigns can have a million different things that can and will go wrong with them. You can wake up to find the offer has been pulled, the advertisers site went down, a new person has stepped into your niche and is competing with you on the exact same offer, using your ad, and a similar landing page, your quality score for some reason can just decide to tank after running fine for 2 months straight. The list goes on and on. With all that said, most of my affiliate marketing efforts have been put on hold for now until I find some direction. I’ve been coming up with ideas to build a business however nothing for me has really stuck. I’ll come up with something, lose sleep over it for a week or 2, and then eventually come to a realization it’s not feasible for some reason or another. With that said, I’m still planning to get an office here in the bay area within the next month. The plan is to hire a few college interns when they are just finishing up school in June (at least the local colleges) to do several coding projects I have in mind. I can get them cheaper than college graduates and I can also find some real talent that many big companies have overlooked and won’t go near because they are CS or CE majors (at least I think).
