Eric Giguere has a great tip today over on his Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
Can’t think of anything to write about? Does the thought of writing an article make you queasy? Then the Question and Answer (Q&A) site is a great way to easily write good content. … A Q&A site is all about breadth of information. Each page on the Q&A site consists of a question and an answer to that question.
Why is finding a good web host so hard to do? With thousands of hosting companies on the Internet, it should be easy right? Well I’m finding it’s anything but.
I have always hosted the vast majority of my sites at GoDaddy. I know. I know. Many people think hosting with GoDaddy is the equivalent of using dial-up AOL as your ISP — real Internet people just don’t do it. Well, for a basic, low-traffic site, I haven’t yet found anyone that beats them or comes anywhere close. You can get a Windows or Linux site with virtually limitless bandwidth and storage space, plus up to five databases, for just $3.95/month. Can’t beat it.
So why am I looking for a new host then? Well, for one reason, GoDaddy customer support is basically useless for anything that isn’t already in the FAQs. I had one issue last summer that was escalated two or three levels into their customer service hierarchy, and the people still had no clue. It got so bad that I literally felt like I might be on a TV show that was seeing how long I would actually keep trying.
Second, their setup is pretty straightforward. If you need to do some more advanced configuration (like have a subdomain point at your root directory), you can’t do it there. They do give you much more control than other hosts — a surprising level of control for $3.95, actually — but there’s a limit to it.
Finally, and most importantly, there’s definitely a limit to how much traffic you can drive through a database-driven site there. One of my sites get around 100,000 page views/month, and it’s really dragging. It’s a WordPress site, so it makes at least one database call on every page.
So, I went looking for a new host. Figured I could find one in a matter of days, but it has now been two and a half weeks and I’ve had acounts with three different hosts, and looked at several others, but I’ve yet to find a good one. Here’s a brief history of my search.
Whenever I need advice, I head over to the forums at High Rankings. I haven’t yet found a better source of free, accurate advice on topics like this one and more. I asked about web hosts, and the folks there were quick to answer as usual. From all the recommendations, I was most convinced of pair Networks. So that’s where I headed next.
pair Networks came highly recommended, so I assumed that my search was over before it really ever began. I signed up for a year of hosting, to get the 24% discount, and used the coupon code REFUGEE to get free setup. My account was ready to go very quickly, and I uploaded all my files. For some reason, though, they didn’t show up when I hit the site. Turns out, I had to upload them to a particular folder, which wasn’t specified in the setup instructions, and the folder was actually a logical link so it didn’t even show up as a folder. After uploading over 1MB of files, I then had to move them again. That was frustrating.
Then it was time to upload my two databases. After several minutes of searching, though, I couldn’t find their mySQL interface. Turns out they don’t have one. Customer service said that I could download phpMyAdmin and then upload it to my pair account, but that’s 10MB worth of files, and I’d have to do it twice since I have two databases. Not a good solution. I also didn’t want to have to figure out how to configure phpMyAdmin. I’m just used to it being there.
With so many things being different than I expected them to be I knew that I would continue to have issues, so I decided to try somewhere else. pair refunded my card in full very quickly and made it very easy to cancel my account. On that basis, and the fact that they came so highly recommended, I still would recommend them if the details above don’t turn you off.
Shaun Inman gave Media Temple good pub on his site, so I took a look at them. Very impressive all the way around, so I signed up.
A few hours later, I got a call from them. They sounded very suspicious of my ownership of the domain I was claiming and asked me lots of questions. Come to find out, of the thousands of web hosts I could have picked, I picked one that the former owner of the domain still had an account with. Not only that, his account was still live. Nevertheless, it looked like that wouldn’t be a problem.
Boy, was that ever wrong.
Turns out, their management software uses the domain name as part of the authorization credentials. When they set up a second account under the same domain name, neither I nor the former owner could login. I never could get him to change his account so that I could login, and MT insisted that they had to speak with him before they could give me control, so I ultimately decided to cancel that account as well. I couldn’t wait any longer.
That’s when the real trouble began.
Turns out, to cancel an account you must login and complete a form. See the problem there? If you did, you’re still several steps ahead of their customer service department. Not only did they send me a cancellation form that required me to login, when I emailed them back to let them know that I couldn’t login to complete the form, they responded with:
According to our files it does not seem that the form was submitted. I have re-sent the form please make sure to click on the “submit” button on the bottom of the form.
That’s right, another link to the form that required me to login. That was Thursday. I wrote them back immediately explaining the problem in more detail, but have yet to hear back from them.
In the meantime, I went looking yet again. WordPress recommends Yahoo! very highly, so I went over and got set up with them. I was very impressed with the whole process — very clean, and their management center is very well organized. I was very hopeful.
Flash forward two-plus days. My site setup is still “in progress.” That’s unacceptable. More than two days to set up a site? I also notice that I can’t upload my .htaccess file, so I start poking around. Turns out, they don’t support .htaccess. Since I have an essential plug-in that requires entries in .htaccess, that’s a deal-breaker. So, I cancel my account. Unlike the other two hosts, though, they don’t refund the first month’s payment. Ridiculous. I definitely wouldn’t recommend Yahoo! Hosting. It’s Yahoo!, so I should have known better.
By now I was wondering if I could make GoDaddy work, so I upgraded to one of their larger shared plans. No go. It evidently just gave me more bandwidth and storage space (neither of which I needed), not the upgrade in performance I was looking for.
Back to the search.
This site is actually hosted with MidPhase. I had looked at them at the beginning, and several times since then, but “Unmetered Bandwidth” for just $7.95/month made me very uneasy. How can they possibly offer that without significantly sacrificing performance? Still, with all the trouble I’ve had, I went back and took another look. Their virtual dedicated plans looked promising, but they had no details on databases or dedicated IP addresses — two things that are critical for me. Their online help was no help, nor was their “Quick Answers Robot,” who evidently hadn’t been programmed very well. So, I tried the Live Chat.
Please wait for a site operator to respond.
I did. For more than 5 minutes. Any site that can’t respond to a potential customer any sooner than that via “live chat” was going to have real problems supporting customers. Thankfully, I didn’t have to actually cancel an account with them.
Good question. I’m still looking (and still trying to get my Media Temple account closed and get my money back). I’m definitely open to suggestions. If you have someone you’re really happy with who hosts your high-traffic site, let me know!
I’ve had three days to play around with MSN adCenter since getting into the beta during the open period on Monday, so I wanted to post my initial impressions for any of you who might not have had a chance to get in yet.
AdCenter adds some nice features that weren’t previously available elsewhere, like demographic targeting. There are sites who will definitely benefit from being able to target a particular demographic, so this is a great feature. Google obviously thought so, too, as they just announced their own demographic targeting.
My favorite feature not available elsewhere, though, is day- and date-parting. That’s the ability to run your ads only at certain times of the day or on certain days of the week. Every site I’ve ever worked on saw higher conversion rates at certain times of the day and certain days of the week, so this will be a huge benefit to those running on limited budgets.
The first, most annoying problem was that the site didn’t work in Firefox at all. I wasn’t the only one who found it annoying, either. Complaints were flying all over at Internet speed very early on. It doesn’t help any that Firefox usage is much more prevalent among those with Internet voices than with the Internet population as a whole. And of course, those who don’t use Firefox use a Mac, which didn’t work either. Firefox users already have a filter available that blocks MSN and Overture ads by default (but not Google) so this is just another black eye for MSN.
Turns out, the site doesn’t even work in the latest version of IE — Microsoft’s own product. Those IE faithful who had already downloaded IE7 were forced to find a way to drop back to IE6 if they wanted to get into adCenter.
More frustrating, when I finally got in, was that I couldn’t figure out how to import keywords. I uploaded a simple text file several times, and it kept telling me I was missing the max bid data but never told me where it was supposed to go. I looked and looked for a sample import file, but never could find one. I ultimately just ended up inputting my keywords by hand.
After I got through my list and submitted, I had entered some keywords twice (not surprisingly). I fixed those and entered again. More errors. Another fix, another submit. More errors. I went through that loop four or five times before my small list of 30 or so keywords was finally in. Why didn’t all the errors show up at one time?
Then I waited.
And waited.
And waited.
This morning, two and a half days later, my small list of keywords still had not been approved. Unbelievable. This is one of my biggest problems with Overture, too. Why in the world does it take two days (or more) for me to make a keyword change? When Google makes the change within minutes, taking almost 1,500 times longer really isn’t a good thing.
Around lunch, I see that a rush of leads has come in from MSN. Finally! I hustle on over to adCenter (after opening IE, the only thing I ever have to open it for) and find … nothing. It still says that my keywords are awaiting approval, so I assume the data just hasn’t been updated yet. Several hours later, though, it’s still showing the same thing. Disappointing.
(Another minor annoyance: I have to type my username and password every time I go to the site. There’s no way to remember my info or even for my browser to remember it, because of the way they do the form.)
So, high hopes but a very inauspicious start for adCenter. If they had the network to rival Overture and Google, you could overlook it. But they’re still in a distant third, so they have some real catching up to do if they hope to steal customers from the big two. It’s going to be interesting to watch.
As reported at JenSense two hours ago:
If you are wanting an AdCenter account, yet haven’t received an invite yet, they are having a three hour open call period today where you will be guaranteed a shiny new account. The sign up period has just opened up and will be open until noon PST (3pm EST).
Now, it does frustrate me that they don’t support Firefox. (How do you not support Firefox?!) But that definitely won’t stop me for signing up for an account.
P.S. Jen, I got blocked from leaving a comment on your blog again–the old “questionable content” error like last time.
