Here at the Make Money The Honest Way blog, while this is actually not a full-blown review as such, I want to write a quick note about a serious problem that several people that I know about have had with their hosting company. This has come to light due to a member of the forum here who has really been dragged through the grinder over an issue which should have been resolved easily and without fuss.
The hosting company in question is Dreamhost.
First, the reason this is NOT a Dreamhost review is because there is a perfectly well written one that I have linked to at the end of this post. Second, the title says Dreamhost Review because it made you look and it also gives more weight to the keywords in the link I have sent to the author of the review in question!
Ok, my take on hosting, if you’ve been reading this blog for a while you already know is that I have long been an advocate of hosting your sites with Hostgator. The main reasons for this are because I have been with them from my early beginnings in the online world of building websites and hosting them myself and have been extremely satisfied with their service. So much so that I even actively promote Hostgator with a small banner in the right column of this blog as well as other sites that I manage. That’s not for no good reason, and here are some of them:
- Their customer support is fast, efficient and gets things done
- Their servers are stable and downtime is negligible
- They allow a variety of scripts to run
- Their billing system is easy to use and it works every time
- If there is ever a problem I need to know about, they email me
Ok, these are basic things that you should expect from your hosting company.
Well, it seems from the many reports I have heard plus this latest huge problem, that Dreamhost are not quite as accessible or amenable as they ought to be. The main problem arose from the customer having his main domain registered with Dreamhost as well as hosting it there. Now, from experience I have found this is not a good thing to do as happened in this case, should you want to move your domain to a different registrar, it is never straight forward and there can be problems.
This very website, thehonestway.com was initially registered through Hostgator, but I decided upon advice to move it to Godaddy as their renewals were cheaper and I was advised that it was good working practice to separate the two. Luckily for me, the process went smoothly and while it did take a few days, Hostgator did not cause me any hassle over it.
When our friend tried to do the same with Dreamhost, it was an entirely different story. I’ll let you read his own account of the problems rather than paraphrasing them here, so please visit his site and read his first hand version of the problems with Dreamhost here: Dreamhost Review
Stay safe, don’t get scammed and if you want the best in hosting, I have to recommend Hostgator above all others! If, however you are having problems with your hosting company, then you’ll need to be firm with them and don’t be afraid to use the law if you believe you are definitely in the right, in order to get things done. Above all…
Never give up!
Make Money The Honest Way Blog
Here’s some interesting news I just heard that might help you Make Money The Honest Way. If you are already well versed in the art of writing articles to provide your sites with strong anchored backlinks, then here is another option that has just presented itself.
Technorati have just announced that they will be adding a new feature to their already well known and high authority name and domain, which is for authors to publish original articles there. Now, details are sketchy right now as the system is not live yet and only in the announcement stage. But if they follow the pattern set out by ezine articles whereby all articles are manually checked for originality and relevance, then we could be seeing another very good source of backlinks. That is assuming they allow a resource box with a link back to your site, which I believe is pretty much the done thing when it comes to publishing anyone’s work on your site.
So technorati should be no different, and if, if they can be strong like ezine articles and really only accept quality articles, they will keep the spammers out and provide us with a strong authority source of links.
How does this help me to make money online?
Unless you are a complete noob and have no idea how this works, or you have been chasing the get rich quick scams that all the A-listers peddle online, in order to make money online you need to be able to attract targeted search traffic to your site where you sell whatever it is you sell. The only way to get search traffic is to rank well in the main search engines, primarily Google and the only way to do that is to have a strong authority site and the only way to get that is to have lots of original, relevant content that is linked to from a wide variety of strong, authority sources.
In other words, you need to build a strong site with lots of relevant content first and get links to it from as many different sources as possible for it to rank well in the serps for your chosen keywords.
Those links need to be anchored with your keywords and those keyword anchors need to be varied in order to look as natural as possible. You do this by several different means, but one of those is to write articles and post them to respected article directories (those that have good authority) such as Ezine Articles. Now with technorati entering this playing field, you have potentially one more source of authority links that you can get by submitting articles. As long as they do it right and don’t screw up like most article directories have done by allowing crap articles, or duplicate articles to be published on their site.
Are there lots of article directories that will provide good authority links? No there are not, as most of them accept duplicate content and badly written or spun articles. In fact there are probably only a handful of article directories that will do you any good with strong links, which is why any newcomer with a strong domain authority such as technorati is a very welcome addition to this sector of the Internet.
Doesn’t this mean more work for me?
Yes it does. It means you will have to write more original articles and submit them,each with a keyword anchored backlink to your site for maximum link strength. The more links you can put in an article, the weaker the link strength get, by the way. If you want the full juice from an article, you really should only put in one or two links max. One is obviously best. It means more work because you’ll have to submit more articles, but that’s the best way to get links for yourself, apart from exchanging links with other bloggers and website owners, which as we all know is never an easy thing to do, nor are directly exchanged links as strong as one-way inbound links.
There is another option if you are already making money online and that is to outsource your article writing. You take a chance on quality but if you are prepared to pay a little more for each article, you can get pretty good quality that will be good enough to put on Hub Pages, or InfoBarrels (two excellent sources of links) and may be good enough for Ezine and now, technorati.
Outsourced articles that are of decent quality can be had for around $5 per 400 words these days, which is good if you are buying and terrible if you are writing them for sale! Ok, the quality may not always be up to the standard you could write yourself, but it will save you a lot of time and if you can make more money in the long term from a well placed link in an article that cost you $5, then its worth the outlay.
However you get your articles, you have to be aware that Google’s algorithm is constantly evolving and getting ever better at finding spun content or badly re-written or duplicate articles. There are already strong rumours circulating that Google is altering the ratio of the weight it gives to sites in its index and their placement towards good on-site SEO and away from external links. That’s because Google recognizes that too many site owners now know how to game its index by fabricating their own inbound links. So the emphasis, while still on backlinks, is shifting to more weight being given to authority sites that contain lots of original, relevant content and good on-site SEO in terms of keyword relevant titles and text.
That means those of us who have been quietly building our own authority sites over the years will begin to see a shift in their serps placement for the better over crappy, thin sites with little or no original content that are propped up purely by a ton of inbound links.
So bring on more human edited, authority article directories! The real winners will be authority, content rich sites that also have lots of strong, keyword anchored backlinks from lots of different, authority sources. You mark my words. But above all else…
Never give up!
Make Money The Honest Way Blog
