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A Blogger’s Priority: Finding a good webhost for your blog

I’m in the process of transferring about 25 blogs away from Dreamhost. I’ve completed about 10 sites so far. Why am I transferring my blogs away from Dreamhost? Well, because they suck.

You really can’t put it any other way. I have blogs on three different Dreamhost servers. All three of those servers slow to a ridiculous crawl every day. All three of those servers go down at least once a week. All three of those servers disable vital backend WordPress functions when the servers are under stress (more often than not).

So Dreamhost sucks. That’s a fact and it’s not disputable. I wish I had known that they sucked last May when I first started using them. I wish I had taken the early warning signs more seriously. But I didn’t. I was seduced by low prices. And now you can learn from my lesson.

The fact is that crappy hosting cuts into the bottom line. I’m already seeing about an 8% jump in my AdSense earnings on the sites that I’ve moved away from Dreamhost to a fast, hoppy server. So much for all that money I saved with cheap hosting. The fact is that I’ve lost money. Now I’ve got to move on.

Ask yourself this question. Do you find yourself frustrated with your web host on a weekly basis? Do you notice slow load times on your blog at critical times of the day? Then suck it up and take on the task of migrating your blog to a quality blog host.

In the comments, let’s discuss 1) how to find a good webhost and 2) how to ensure that your webhost isn’t going to oversell their servers and 3) what are some of the consistently good webhosts out there?

pMetrics free upgrades have been distributed

Good news for everyone who posted a link to their pMetrics review in the “Get a free premium account” thread from a few weeks back. Your accounts have been credited, and are now good until May 11, 2008! Sorry for the delay, but some updates had to be made to the backend code first to properly support it. If I missed anyone, let me know.

Ryan mentioned that anyone who had also written a review PRIOR to that thread being posted would be eligible for this. If you are one of those people, please leave a comment here so I can credit your account – otherwise, I have no idea who you are!

pMetrics Widget Brainstorming

I’m in the process of developing a sidebar widget for pMetrics that displays a blog’s “rank” in relation to other pMetrics sites. It should be released at the end of this coming week if all goes as planned.

In the process of building this widget, I’d like to build in other features that might be of interest to the pMetrics user community.

So let me open this thread up for suggestions. Of the data that you see from your pMetrics dashboard, what would you like the option of easily displaying to your blog readers from your blog’s sidebar?

Blog Content from Offline Sources

Tired of sifting through your RSS feed subscriptions for a blog post inspiration? Looking for new ways to dish out content that’s unique on the Net? You can try these offline sources (feel free to list more in the comments!):

Newspapers – Not every article of the print newspaper appears in the online version. When you quote text from a print article and build a blog post around it, you can end up with original, and even linkbait, content. Of course, do some research first with the search engines. This ‘technique’ works well with:

1) National issues (an example: my old The Philippines’ ICT Ranking: Dismal post), which when marketed well (social voting, comments on your countrymen’s blogs, emails) can generate good attention and traffic – after all, national issues are always mixed with an iota of honor, pride, and patriotism; and

2) Niche topics buried deep in the paper’s subsections, with tech, health, and the arts as some examples. Niche newspaper sections = niche blogs. If I had a cactus blog, I’d be a very happy man right now, as the daily broadsheet I subscribe to has a cactus section (for some reason).

Magazines – Magazines are perfect for niche blog content as they almost always revolve around one field of interest only. Be it about mathematics or Dungeons & Dragons, a magazine article can talk about something that your blog’s readers might be interested in. A magazine article turned blog post can be seen in action right here in Performancing.

Books – We’re not talking about book reviews here. I believe this is best used with nonfiction books, though writing a political blog post about a chapter in Tolkien’s fantasy saga isn’t out of the question, too 😉 In nonfic books, what the author states as fact or as his viewpoint/opinion can get your blogging gears rolling, especially if you strongly disagree with it. Remember, it doesn’t matter if the book is old or new – a book is an eternal, tangible piece of the height of human discourse and creativity.

Events – Product launches, blog awards/meet-ups, expos, you name it, it can be blogged. These events often have press/media kits and souvenir programs, and they’ll be handy reference guides when you write a blog post. Of course, the info found in these kits/souvenirs might also be found online, and that’s why your personal experiences and self-taken photos count! One example is Ia’s post about the recent Adobe CS3 Launch in Manila.

Theme Sponsorship

With all of the excitement nowadays, concerning boosting search engine rankings, Technorati visibility and creating a steady slew of backlinks to a website, it’s hard to know which methods work in the never-ending battle against the powers and which tactics tend not to yield such flash results. One method of advertising a website and receiving a slew of backlinks that is becoming increasingly popular, is the sponsorship of WordPress themes. Some people claim it’s down-right outrageous to have ‘sponsored links’ in themes, others see it as their right. The way I see it, if a designer has worked hard, creating a theme for general use, the least that a user of the layout could do would be to have the courtesey to give something back to the Theme designer, in the form of a single, small backlink. Is it really all that much to ask?

Of course, ethics aren’t the only matter being discussed. The monetary gain included, poses questions too. What should theme designers be charging for a link in a theme? Just recently – Performancing launched it’s own “Sponsor A Theme” forum, in which users are being given a chance to openly bid for theme sponsorship, and from what I’ve seen, it’s going pretty well. This, at least, solves the problem of setting a reasonable price-per-theme. In context though, whether you’re paying $100 or $1,000 – you’re going to be getting yourself a pretty good deal.

At Text-Link-Ads, you can expect to pay $50+ for a PR5 backlink. 1,000 people download a theme which you bid $1,000 to have a sponsored link placed within. 50 of these backlinks are PR5 or higher. Equalling only $1 per link, you’re getting yourself a pretty good deal! Considering the fact that the one-way link you’ve got embedded in so many people’s blogs is placed on every single page on the website, in reality, you could be getting tens of thousands of backlinks. The way I see it, opportunity like this is priceless.

Will you be bidding on a sponsored theme any time soon?

This post has been written by David Wilkinson – 13-Year Old ProBlogger.

A Caveat for Literary Bloggers

I’m not too sure if there are many Performancing users who write literature on their blogs, but if you’re one of them, have you considered that the pieces you’ve published on your blog might be disqualified from appearing in literary publications and being entered into contests?

This isn’t an inconvenience for lit bloggers who just want to share their works with the world through online journals. It’s also not for writers who are already established (e.g. have published a book or have won contests). However, it is a problem for new writers looking to ‘break into’ the ‘offline’ (and often academic) literary circles.

When I began my first blog (Slip of the Pen) back in 2004, I wanted it to become the repository of my then-infrequent attempts at creative writing. Mercifully, a couple of good pieces sprung from the blog (or so I want to believe!). When I began to take lit submissions seriously, I naturally turned to those few good pieces. Being a lit industry n00b and all, I was disappointed to learn that these pieces couldn’t be accepted by many respected lit publications, both print and online, simply because they’re already considered self-published. Some journals even explicitly mention ‘blog posts’ as unacceptable submissions.

I personally believe this system sucks, especially if the lit blog in question isn’t monetized (and thus highly personal). But I didn’t and still don’t have a choice – I confess that I’m now writing pieces with a “publication first, blog later” mindset. It has paid off in terms of writing credits, but yeah, there’s been a trade-off – my lit blog’s content is becoming less diverse. Its recent posts have been narrowed to a single genre, that is, personal essays.

For the lit and other art bloggers (photography, paintings, comics, and so on, though I don’t know if the ‘self-published’ term applies to these works) who can see themselves in my shoes, deciding which work to put or not on blogs can be a tricky issue.

Will you save the best and post only the ‘good enough’ works? This might be construed as disrespectful to your blog readers, as they’re virtually on equal footing with print readers, and thus deserve the same quality. Will you post only the pieces which have been earlier published in journals? You’ll lose out on the early feedback and (hopefully) constructive criticism from your blog readers – and feedback is a blog’s forte. Not to mention new and raw writers need feedback, badly.

I guess one thing will help solve the problem a bit – writing more. More works to choose from, more room for a “publication first, blog later” mindset. This works well with spacing out your posts and sticking to a regular posting schedule. For example, if you post in weekly intervals, you need to resist the urge to post that spanking new masterpiece of a poem immediately a day after the last entry.

P.S. Technically, the term “literary blog” doesn’t just pertain to blogs with original works of writers and poets; the term can cover blogs that discuss books, feature other writers and their works, and deal with literature in general. I narrowed the term’s use here for simplicity’s sake. 😉

The Benefits of Persistence: Part one

Speaking of persistence, just the other day I realized that I had a major social voting niche profile page with Page Rank 6. I honestly didn’t use any trick. I didn’t even try to build up the profile page. It just happened (as do most of the good things that I encounter on the web).

Well, it’s not quite true that “it just happened” – there’s a simple explanation. And it’s an explanation that anyone can duplicate: persistent voting.

Every day, I submit articles and vote at a handful of social voting sites. About half of them are niche sites and the other half are general (reddit, digg, netscape).

I participate in social voting for the sole purpose of building traffic and acquiring links (as you know, eyeballs pay the bills). But as an unintended consequence of persistently submitting to these handful of social voting sites for about 10 months now, almost on a daily basis, I now have several PR 5 and PR 6 profile pages. For those of you not in the know, that translates into leverage and power.

By persisting and doing what works on a daily basis, as an unintended consequence, I’m now able to wield quite a bit of power with each vote (and pass PageRank right back into my sites).

Anyone else have some examples of how the side effects of persistence have paid off?