Is your blog hosted on a shared server such as BlueHost, Dreamhost, or whatever? Then you might be in for some surprises later down the road if you ever get more than 500 visitors per day. You can check how many websites are hosted on your shared server by entering your domain name at myIPneighbors.com.

I bet you though if you are on a hosted server, you will most likely find at least 10 other websites. Yes, this is bad.

When I first started blogging, I also started on a cheap $100/year hosting from bluehost.com. No shared hosting will ever be as good as a dedicated server so if you are serious about making money blogging or handling massive traffic, you should get a dedicated server.

I remember Zedomax got digged, bluehost went down like that! and never came back up until I transferred everything to a dedicated server.

But then, amazing thing happened after switching to a dedicated server. Since your website runs faster and doesn’t ever go down (unless you got digged AND stumbled again at the same time…), Google indexes your site faster and you get more search results on Google. It’s common sense that if your site has uptime of 99.9%, Google-bots and other search engine bots will crawl the site more faster.

Sometimes, I find that search engine robots are the ones gobbling up most of your bandwidth. You can always edit your robots.txt file and not let them crawl, but then you lose SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and eventually get no traffic from major search engines.

Here’s a summary of Zedomax traffic ever since its beginning in August 14th, 2006:

As you can see, well, as you can’t see also, I’ve upgraded my server numerous times due to diggs, stumbles, DOS (Denial of Service) hacker attacks, and whenever I made a new site.

You should really pay attention to how much traffic will be coming to your blog everyday to make sure your web hosting service can handle it.

Believe me, I tried these following shared hosts and they were all terrible when it came to traffic more than 500 per day:

BlueHost - The most reliable of the shared hosting I’ve tried.

DreamHost - They give you SSH2 access which is good but again, they host WAY too many websites on their servers. Result? I paid $100 for a year of hosting that I never used because my site kept going down. DreamHost is worst because they lock your site automatically when you exceed the maximum allowed bandwidth. Bluehost is much nicer in my opinion as they don’t have that system. Don’t fall into their “green” marketing scheme, when it comes to your website, you want it done right.

Lunarpages - Similar to BlueHost

I’ve tried many other ones for my previous job at Comfile, but I won’t list them all here, they all really suck in my opinion.

So, what is the best dedicated hosting?

Well, I’ve only tried 2 so far.

Aplus.net - These guys are pretty reliable until one day they had some type of packet-loss problem and ALL my 20 or so websites were down for more than 5 days!!! The funny thing was, Aplus.net itself was fine, it’s just all their customer’s servers were down. They put themselves in front of their customers. That was the end of doing business with them.

That’s when I moved everything to Cari.Net, which I already had couple sites running on. The most annoying thing is that Aplus.net seems to have customer service centers overseas. Not that I have anything against saving Aplus.net’s money, but when you are in America, you want to talk to someone in America, and want to get things done fast. Another thing about Aplus.net is that they are way too big a company now that they don’t care about little guys. All they are about is making money and who pays them more. This is an honest review of my experience with them and I am not being bitter about it, it’s the truth.

Cari.net - Right now, I am running all sites on Cari.net due to their reliability through my actual experience. I will probably try other hosting later down the road or even run my own servers but Cari.net is also priced much better than most hosting companies out there.

In my opinion, you should stick with a small to medium sized dedicated hosting company that cares about you. You want a simple host that you can call anytime anywhere without knowing your stupid registration number or get man-handled by stupid receptionists who redirect you 3 times before you get the dedicated support team.

Another thing you should think about is that the hosting company should only provide “dedicated hosting”. If they provide both, you are probably going to run into bunch of bs such as the company not providing enough support for dedicated server customers.

In all, I did learn a lot about Linux, servers, scripts, and everything you need to know about running a website through various server upgrades. If I didn’t do that, I’d probably have to pay a lot of money right now just to make new websites.

So, if you are going to make more than 1 website, get 1 dedicated server and bunch of dedicated IP addresses.

This article inspired by AhTim and LiewCF

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This is really funny…

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Here’s a demo of how you can browse new interesting websites on your iPhone or iPod Touch with SiteHoppin. Now, you can surf the web faster on the go, on your iPhone or iPod Touch, simply by pointing your Safari browser to http://sitehoppin.com.

Yeah baby! We did it! We are going to build the tightest browser-within-browser for the iPhone and iPod Touch baby!!!

Oh yeah, you can drop Entrecards too using SiteHoppin on the go.

via SiteHoppin

As you well know, my blogger friend John Chow was on Entrepreneur this month! He’s coined as the “Blogging Seinfeld”. I couldn’t agree more. There’s a lot of people saying how John Chow is a spam blog but I disagree with that. He made a new blogging topic, “Making Money Online” so explosive that now you see thousands of blogs like John Chow’s.

If it wasn’t for his blog, I doubt there would be such an enormous “buzz” around the internet about making money online with blogs.

Well, I honestly think there’s still a lot of money to be made on the internet.

This will probably keep growing for another 20 years, especially in the US, where it’s hard to find a job fresh out of college. I bet job hiring rate is a lot higher in India.

Not that I am complaining since I am “jobless and broke”. But I am figuring my way around the internet like John by selling off some of my websites steadily and taking on some random jobs.  If you wanna help me from going bankrupt and live on the streets, go check out SiteHoppin.

Anyways, congrats to John Chow for gettin’ on Entrepreneur!

(p.s. I have an advertisement on John Chow for SiteHoppin, I hope this article boosts John’s blog traffic. )

Here’s a little video of my February edition of Entrepreneur, do you have a copy yet?

Click Here to View in Full Screen Mode

via JohnChow

Alright, we are so broke we are putting some of our major websites on sale including MattressZine.com.

The Buy Now price is set at $50K, which is a pretty good deal to any online mattress dealer.

If you are interested go bid!

Bid for it here.

Okay, if you want to be a dumba*s and don’t listen to people who are smarter, fu*k off and stop reading this post. If you are a smartass like me, then do listen carefully as I am going to show you how to shave 10 hours of your stupid ass “Entrecard” clickin’.

Simply goto SiteHoppin.com and choose “Entrecard” or the topic you desire. (Right now, we only have a couple Entrecard topics as we are still getting drunk but check back later for more topics)

Then, simply click on the “SiteHoppin” button and you go to the next blog with an Entrecard widget where you can drop cards like BOOM SHAKALAKA baby!

Okay, that was the secret. Make sure to not tell or blog to any dumba*ses and we will be fine with that. If you want to listen to any dumba*ses who still says a bunch of bookmarks work, then great, don’t ever talk to him/her again. (we are just kididng, did you get that? LOL…) There, you got it straight from the man who controls the black market on the net.

Yes, we know we are evil and we hacked Digg, StumbleUpon, you name it. Everything can be hacked although we didn’t hack this one, we just let you save some time for pointless clicking. (and yes, it’s shameless promotion again!)

New theme for MediaWiki and SiteHoppin’ called the iTunes Theme for MediaWiki v.0.1 by Max!

Okay, details here on the drunken blog.

via SiteHoppin

Here’s a little video of SiteHoppin’ workin’ on Nokia E90!

Remember I did a review of Blogrush and Entrecard right before Entrecard started taking off?

Well, here’s why BlogRush will die and SiteHoppin will exponentially grow! (Sorry John, we are just using your site as comparison, no pun intended)

1. SiteHoppin is like a dog. Well, here’s how I got that analogy. I don’t own a dog but I do love dogs and my parents have dogs. During the last few days I was taking care of Za, my girlfriend’s brother’s dog, I have come to realize that SiteHoppin is like a dog who takes a leak here and there so other dogs can find it and mark their territory.

What the heck does that have to do with exponentially growing? Well, dogs like to mark their territories everywhere they go. They will only “mark” their spots in certain location they sense the “smell”. I don’t know how they do it. But it’s how dogs interact or communicate with each other. Basically, every time you take a leak, you are leaving a trace for the other dogs.

Well, SiteHoppin is no different. Every time you visit a site on SiteHoppin, you are marking your territory on someone’s site. Those site owners find out through site stats and get to know SiteHoppin and start using it to promote their sites. You can see some of the stats here to see what I mean here on the new SiteHoppin blog.

So, what the heck is the point of the story? Nothing. We are thanking everyone who has signed up for SiteHoppin’ and we promise the first-comers will get massive traffic in return.

As you can see in the above graph, we should be able to eclipse BlogRush very soon if our traffic keeps rising. In just 7 days since our public beta launch, we have gained at least 50% as much as traffic as Blogrush. (not that that’s a real accomplishment…) Join the new phenomenon, go try out SiteHoppin as it’s being developed LIVE! (It’s like watching a cooking show on TV, kinda like IronChef where you get to “see” the process)

Well, we will stop selling our new wiki technology here and start blogging more about other CES 2008 stuff.

Here’s the fun part:

Check out the pageviews of SiteHoppin vs. Zedomax.com. SiteHoppin gets almost 3 times more pageviews! I guess that’s probably from all the people that are SiteHoppin’… :p