Cyza Sector

I believe this is one of the most important turning points in my online curricular @ business activities. I have just switched to an international hosting provider, hostgator.com. This is my 5^th hosting company after the other 3. Let’s put some name on those hosting companies: A, B, C, Jomhosting.net and Hostgator.com.

What happen to the 1^st hosting company, A?

It was a local hosting company, very good, reliable, good support and professional. As far as I can remember I used their service for 2 years plus. It stated to me clearly that I cannot run a forum. That’s fine and that’s why I got myself hosting B because I wanted to run a chemical engineering forum. I hosted some blogs on it until around 2009, where that time I faced some huge downtime when all my blogs was claimed to consume a large amount of their resources. It affected my income up to some level. Luckily I have some profitable blogspot.com blog that are running online. I was puzzled because I know I don’t have that much traffic and my niche wasn’t that popular ~ chemical engineering!!! I asked for further clarification and details on which specific blog(s) or page(s) really created the problem. They can’t produce the report to me. However, they recommended me to transfer to another hosting and that was when I migrated to hosting C. Hosting A administrator helped and guided me to transfer to hosting C.

What happen to the 2^nd hosting company B?

I got myself a domain and hosting from this small but quite well known hosting company among Malaysian bloggers. The owner of the hosting also runs a famous forum which attracted those who desire to make money online. My reason for taking hosting B was just to run a forum. I managed to run a forum using a platform that is easily installed via fantastico in the cpanel. Unfortunately, after one year and after having 300 plus members inside the forum, it was hacked. The poor forum cannot be accessed at all despite of staying at PR2 after merely a year. I consulted the hosting admin. He recommended me to back-up and re-install the forum. I tried but I don’t know whether I did the right thing or not. I was so forum and ftp naïve. I got frustrated and wasted a lot of time meddling with backing-up and installing the forum repeatedly. Frustrated, I asked for the hosting admin assistance. He claimed he tried but after that can’t do anything about it. So, the forum when history!!! I was so disappointed and that was a very expansive lesson for me.

What happen to the 3^rd hosting company, C?

Hosting C just started its business and offers cheap hosting packages. The support was superbly efficient and I liked it very much. I was happy to use hosting C service. I use this hosting because I want to have a back up for hosting A. I don’t want to have all blogs in one hosting, ie hosting A. So, I created few more blogs incorporate it in hosting C. When I experienced problem with hosting A in 2009 (as stated above), I also got a second hosting C account. They helped me and I immediately got all my blogs from hosting A online instantaneously. Unfortunately, hosting C cannot maintain their outstanding services and slowly I experienced problems at the end of last year. That’s when I searched for a replacement for hosting C and after a brief searched, I opted hosting D.

Hosting D = Jomhosting.net

After experiencing some problem with hosting C, I saw a good promotion from Jomhosting.net. Since I know the owner, I tried using his service. So far my blogs are doing fine with Jomhosting.net for 7 blogs of mine hosted there. This hosting company provides substantial cheap for newbie. If you are newbie (new to blogging and wanted to use a cheap hosting), you can try it out. Check the hosting packages here.

Hosting E = Hostgator.com

This is the latest hosting that I purchased yesterday and all 13 of my blogs were successfully transferred here. I have no complains or what so ever. I think it is the best hosting in the planet. Although the price is slightly expansive than the local hosting company packages, I don’t care. I need a reliable hosting provider with dedicated 24/7 support who can answer/respond to me immediately. Last month and up to yesterday, I experienced weird downtime on 2 of my blogs including this blog, cyza sector. I have been asking around about the intermittent problem which occurred, but there was no conclude answer on solving the problem. After transferring to hostgator.com, I believe the problem has been solved by hostgator.com and I’m glad. I hope Cyza Sector and my Heat Exchanger blog will continue up operating without downtime. I’m proud to host my blogs with hostgator.com. I signed up for the baby plan which requires me to pay recurring $9.95 per month via paypal.  The beautiful part of this package:

• Unlimitted addon domains

• Unlimitted bandwidth

• Unlimmited disk space

• Free $50 adwords + more and more superb features…

I’m going to use the free $50 adwords to market one of my blogs. Oh, isn’t that great? If you have low budget, you can choose their cheapest plan which is only $4.95 per month. Try it out and chat with their support. You can easily clear any of your doubts after chatting with them.

Conclusion

Selecting and after that using a hosting for your blog and website is very crucial. You need to choose the most reliable hosting. If you are new, you can try the cheaper hosting packages, probably from local hosting. Get use to hosting, cpanel, and ftp. At this stage, a newbie may have at least 1 blog or the most 2 or 3 blogs. But, once the blogs and websites have grown and start generating income, you may want to protect that.

Hosting operation is not under you control, but you have the power to choose which reliable hosting to erect your online real estate. Having a dozen or 2 dozens of blog generating cash with unreliable hosting is like suicide. When the hosting is down, you can’t even communicate with the hosting support and that is very unfortunate. You will lose your income. The advertisers will get mad and shout at you.

Check out this analogy…

Imagine you owned an oil refinery and the production requires electricity to power up the pumps, heating, pressure etc. Your production is smooth and meets the daily and monthly target. You profit margin of selling oil from your refinery is very impressive. You give out 5 months bonus to all your staffs at the end of the year. Then, one sweet day, while the plant is running, the electricity supply (@ hosting service) was cut-off. You can’t do anything and your refinery (@ your blogs) is experiencing bad downtime. No oil is produced (@ your income). Worse… the supply won’t be back until 1 week due to a major explosion at a nearby power station. They can’t repair the problem faster because they are lack of manpower (@ hosting company not enough technical support). You are helpless. You can’t produce oil. Your customers (@ advertisers) get angry because the oil you promised them is not delivered.

Although this is not a perfect analogy, but you can just imagine and picture that.

Moral of the story

When your online business is getting bigger, get the most reliable hosting. I don’t see anything else but hostgator.com.

Domain Renewal

Yesterday, i have a little time to spare to renew 3 of my almost expiring domains which I purchased from godaddy.com and cheapdomain.com [2 dot com(s) and 1 dot info]. Earlier, I received renewal notices from both parties to renew my domains or accept the auto renewal process. The auto renewal process is set/agreed when I first register new domains with them. So, instead of auto renewal, I decided to manually renew the 3 domains myself. I clicked the renewal links in the email they sent me. Then, the process was fast and easy. I used paypal for payments to the two large international hosting company.To my surprised, I only have to pay $8.17 per domain (cost of domain renewal = $7.99 + $0.18 (ICANN Fee)). So, in total, the cost of renewal was about $24++ ($8.17 x 3). I’m not sure whether this is the price for earlier + manual renewal. But, I’m happy because I saved some of my paypal cash (rather than paying $10++ per domain renewal).

Why I’m saying this?

Last July, I forgot to renew a domain which I bought from godaddy.com. Luckily, the auto renewal process took place automatically and deducted about $10.67 from my paypal account. That’s better than the company you purchased your domain from did not inform you OR you forgot to renew your domain and the domain is re-directed somewhere else. I’ve experience that before and I lost substantially a lot from that simple mistake.

Bottom line, auto renewal is cool… but, can I say that auto renewal cost slightly more than early manual domain renewal? I’m not sure on this. Anybody have any experience on this?

Conclusion:

I prefer domain auto renewal. It’s safer. I don’t really mind if they if the charge is slightly more as long as if I forgot to renew, my websites and blogs are still running 24/7.

Sebelum aku berangkat pergi kerja, aku nak share info ini. Kalau korang rasa takde modal untuk beli domain name untuk blog, adsense for domain atau bisnes korang, apa kata korang register free domain di co.tv. Korang boleh register premium domain dengan percuma sebanyak maksimum 3 domain. Pergilah register cepat dan dapatkan domain kegemaran korang secara percuma. Oh yea, benda ni lebih kurang je macam co.cc yang beberapa waktu lalu ada mula bagi domain free juga.

Aku takde dapat apa-apa komisyen pun, so, korang kalau berminat teruslah register pada:

co.tv

Macam aku, tadi waktu sahur aku register 3 domain free, 1 daripadanya aku buat forwarding je, manakala lagi 2 tu aku set-up wordpress baru dan tukar DNS setting ke hosting aku sendiri. So, amacam? Good luck and have funs with your free domains.