Egonitron

Archive Page 2

Why Don’t Web Hosts Offer Automatic Fail-over?

Published February 17th, 2008 in Webmaster. 1 Comment

Mark from 45n5 and ShowYourAdHere has been having some serious problems lately with hosting, and his recent post about Failover DNS really made me think. As Mark explains:

There is a Dns Server that gets your request for a web page first.

It takes the urladdress.com and resolves it to an ip address like 132.70.433.34

Basically, that IP address is where your files, pictures, and good stuff is located, we call it the web server.

The way it should work is if the server with your files is down the dns server will just send your visitors to another server.

But that doesn’t happen. With most hosts (all that I know of,) your users just get a “Page Not Found” screen, which is very unprofessional. What you can do with services such as DNSMadeEasy is set up a failover server (with a spare server such as a regular $8/month hosting account,) and when your primary server goes down, the traffic is sent to the failover server.

With static pages that’s very east to do with redundancy, but it’s more difficult with database driven sites like blogs (and in Mark’s case, an Ad Server.)

Regardless, why do no webhosts offer complete fail-over coverage with a remote or outsourced server? They could offer excellent (or ever 100%) uptime, and they wouldn’t be exaggerating. Yes, you can do it yourself, but customers shouldn’t have to go through the hassle of setting up a fail-over solution - that should be the job of the web host. Who wouldn’t mind paying a couple extra dollars a month for that service?

If I’m mistaken, please let me know, but I don’t know of any regular web host to offer this as a standard feature.

Make sure to visit Mark’s post about this for more detail: Web hosting fail-over

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Very Interesting New AdSense Format…

Published January 31st, 2008 in Google and Internet. 0 Comments

Check this out, I saw this on one of my car sites today:

AdSense Format

Do you think this will increase CTR? People love to interact with websites, and I think people would click out of curiosity. However, I also think this will draw attention away from the ad itself.

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Submit How-To Articles at Howto.fm

Published January 26th, 2008 in Content and Sponsored Post. 1 Comment

text You can never really have too many article submission sites. Both for researching topics and marketing, these sites are a great resource. The newest kid on the block is Howto.fm - an article submit site that focuses on how to articles and tutorials.

This site seems to be more focused on getting people to submit their articles as opposed to being an actual resource for articles, since the menu of tutorials is at the bottom of the page, and the first half of the page is dedicated to telling you why you should submit your unpublished articles to them. The articles have to be unique, in that they cannot have been published anywhere else on the internet.

Howto.fm has an attractive design, and is logical to navigate. Things are mostly laid out how you would expect them to be, so it’s easy to find what you’re looking for. Most of the articles I looked over are quality-written, and the authors display a knowledge of the subject.

They also have a “get free content for your website” page which allows you to place some javascript (or XML) on your site that automatically updates with the most recent content from whatever category you choose. It’s a good idea but I couldn’t find it particularly useful. Each article title generated links back to the respective howto.fm page, and the articles themselves are simply excepts. Plus you have the obvious duplicate content issue. Continue reading ‘Submit How-To Articles at Howto.fm’

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$0.99 .info Domains

Published January 18th, 2008 in Internet. 0 Comments

Every once in a while we all find ourselves in need of some extra domains. $8 to $20 for a .com domain can get expensive if you’re buying more than a few of them, so .info domains have been the best choice for those of us who need some quick throw-away domains.

Right now, Dotster is offering .info domains for under $1, no limit, so grab a few while you can!

$0.99 .info Domains from Dotster

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Let’s Clear Some Things Up…

Published January 2nd, 2008 in Blogging and Misc. 2 Comments

It’s come to my attention that there are quite a few misconceptions regarding this blog. I can only attribute the mistakes to my own fault; I’ve led people in the wrong direction.

Egonitron.com is not my primary website. It never has been, and it never will be. Contrary to my tagline (”Helping Geeks Make Money Online”,) this is not just another Make Money Online blog, it’s not an affiliate marketing blog, or anything of the sort. Egonitron.com is my personal blog on which I write about whatever the hell I feel like writing about at the time. That’s the very reason I don’t update as often as I should, and it’s the reason I don’t do any marketing for the blog. I’ve never intended on making any money from this blog (although I have,) and I never intended on getting this blog to be popular (which it really hasn’t.)

While I do give the occasional tip on blogging and marketing and SEO, etc, it’s only because I feel like sharing some information on the subject. Those subjects interest me, so I write about them.

Let me give a little bit of background. While many newer bloggers just name their blog after their own first and last name (there’s nothing wrong with that,) the term “Egonitron” actually came from a nickname back in high school. When I met Danielle and Gary at BlogWorld Expo outside smoking, I believe it was Gary who made a comment expecting me to look like Egon from the Ghostbusters cartoon. If fact, that’s where the name came from; I used to look identical to Egon from the cartoon. I digress…

I like to dabble in all sorts of online ventures, and test out everything. While my primary business is blogging, I play around with PPC, affiliate marketing, domaining, SEO, web development, and all sorts of other stuff. What I really need to do is focus on one or two things and become very good at that before I try other stuff, but it’s really fun For my day job, I actually work in IT for a very large company, but that gets monotonous very quickly.

Again, Egonitron.com is my personal blog in which I do give the occasional tip, list, or other article about things I’ve learned along the blogging way, as well business stuff, marketing, IT stuff, SEO, or any other cool stuff I feel like writing about. I hope you’ve found some interesting things along the way, and I hope you continue to return to read more. I’ll probably be changing some things soon. Nothing major, but I’ll most likely play around with changing some things on the sidebar, etc.

Don’t be shy, let me know your thoughts…

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Lesson Learned - Buying Expired Domains

Published December 21st, 2007 in Google and Internet. 0 Comments

I love buying expired domains, but you have to be careful. In the past, it’s served me well, but I just had my first negative experience. The previous registrant apparently did a few naughty things and broke the AdSense terms and conditions:

From an AdSense rep:

Unfortunately, as you suspected, the ******.info domain was
previously found to be in violation of our program policies and is no
longer eligible for participation in the AdSense program.

Should have checked before registering, but at least it was a .info domain and only cost me $3 instead of an $8 .com.

I asked for an exception since I’m a new owner and have nothing to do with the previous violations:

I apologize for the inconvenience. However, as was previously mentioned, since the site was found to be in violation of our program policies, it is no longer eligible for participation in AdSense.

You are welcome to place Google ads on other sites which comply with
AdSense policies.

Drat. Oh well, looks like I’m just putting YPN on this one.

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Archive Page 2

Why Don’t Web Hosts Offer Automatic Fail-over?

Very Interesting New AdSense Format…

Submit How-To Articles at Howto.fm

$0.99 .info Domains

Let’s Clear Some Things Up…

Lesson Learned - Buying Expired Domains

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