Project AdSense

When you first start thinking about building your first web site you are faced with a lot of choices. You need to choose a domain name, but also somebody to register that domain name. You need to decide on whether you'll use a CMS tool like Joomla or a blog engine like Wordpress, or maybe you'll purchase a nice template and use that. One of the biggest choices you'll need to make is your hosting service. The right hosting service can be the difference between spending time installing and configuring your site and spending time adding content.

Once you've chosen your hosting service you will be asking yourself one more important question. Do I choose shared hosting or dedicated hosting? There is not an easy one or the other answer to that question. In fact I'm having trouble even phrasing it generically so that you can size up your situation and decide, but I'll lay down a few rules and gotcha's and see where we end up.

On the surface shared hosting seems like a great deal. For instance from Go Daddy you can get shared hosting plan for just $3.99 a month. The plan will give you 5GB of disk space and 250GB bandwidth. For a little more, $6.99 you get 100GB disk and 1000 GB bandwidth. Now, I just used Go Daddy as an example, but Host Gator and others are similar, some with slightly higher prices and some with slightly lower, but all have the same rules.

Hidden somewhere in your shared hosting agreement there will be a clause about not hogging system resources. What that means is that even if your site is not busy 99% of the time, if you get a big spike they have the right to shut you down. You see, the factor to be concerned with is not bandwidth or disk storage, it's CPU cycles. It's not average CPU cycles over the month, if you spike even for a short time all hosting services will shut down your shared account.

How do I know about the shared host shutdown? It happened twice to me. I'm not complaining, that's the price of having a successful web site while paying for bargain basement hosting. In my one case I got shut down because I had 8000 hits in about an hour. My daily average was about 500 hits. It seems that the blog engine I was using was using too much CPU time on my shared host, so they shut me down. Okay, so you're thinking that you can go shared and when you get to around 7000 then you can switch over to dedicated. Maybe that'll work, but in another case I was shut down with just 346 hits. Now for the 346 hit case my host sent me the log file and to my eyes it didn't seem that I was using much CPU at all. It showed my account using 100% CPU for .2 seconds. It also showed (in another case) my process taking 29 seconds, but using 0% CPU. I believe this was a case of mistaken identity. They saw that their server was slow and looked for long running processes, but didn't look at actual cycles taken. The long wait by the way was because of a YouTube vid running on my site.

So, after a full year on two shared hosting accounts, from two different companies, it was time to try my hand at dedicated hosting. One thing you must know about dedicated hosting is that you are running and responsible for all aspects of the box. That means that you are "root". There is nobody else monitoring for hung processes, nobody else installing software for you, but the best part is nobody kicking you off for using too much CPU for 10 seconds of the month.

My shared hosting accounts were $6.99 and $10 (total of $17/month). My new dedicated hosting account started at $79/month, but I bumped up the memory and CPU on the box and the final price is $111/month. That's a huge difference when you're just starting out, and over the first year I've saved $1200 going that way, but now I feel to move forward with my web sites I need the freedom that dedicated hosting allows. Freedom to have a busy day, freedom to be successful.

I don't want to make you shy away from shared hosting when you're just starting out. It's a great way to get your feet wet, establish a proof of concept and build your knowledge while keeping your budget low. Many small businesses or personal pages may never need more than a shared hosting account. For me, one year on shared hosting gave my little business enough time to grow enough for me to justify paying for dedicated hosting.

As a closing note, my ongoing move from my shared hosting accounts to my dedicated hosting account has taken about two weeks. The first couple of days was experimenting and learning, followed by a few days moving my best performing sites over and the last week has been spent moving the rest of my web sites over, cleaning up security and doing more learning. In the end, I chose Go Daddy as my dedicated host. I figured they deserved it, at least when they shut me down at 8000 hits it was conceivable that I was over stressing my shared account. As for the other company, the one who shut me down with the log file which proved nothing at 350 hits, sometimes you only get one mistake and in the web business when your site is having it's best day ever and your host shuts you down without good reason, it's time to move on.

It's taken me about a week (not solid, but doing something every day) to migrate most of my sites from my two shared hosting accounts to my new dedicated hosting account. I ran across some security issues and had to figure out some mysql command line options. I also needed to figure out what needed to be changed in the .sql files which represented backups of my databases and which were the core config files for Serendipity, but other than that it was fairly painless. I've written an article about migrating your Serendipity blog and posted it on some article sites and on my Open Source Depot site as well.

Things have calmed down a bit now (money wise), but September was still my best month ever with approx 50% more being made than any other previous month. Note that this is about a year into Project Adsense, so we'll see how it goes from here. I'm certainly not going to retire any time soon and with my new dedicated server costing me $111/month this isn' t paying back what I'm putting into it yet...but I will not quit.

I think my next step will be an article on shared vs dedicated hosting and the perils of each.

What a difference a week makes. Last week I was very happy with the performance of my web sites. My martial arts site is doing quite well and my Christmas and Halloween sites are coming along nicely. The recipe article site is now making around $30/month or so ...

Last Saturday I submitted one of the entries from best ever recipes to stumbleupon and a couple of hours later my hostgator hosting account was suspended. I only had 350 hits on the site. Hostgator said I was taking up too many resources on my shared hosting account. I was nowhere near my bandwidth limit and my account should be capable of handling more than 300 hits in a couple of hours.

So, I started looking into dedicated hosting options. Since I already had dealings with hostgator and godaddy I checked theirs first. Godaddy had the cheaper options (more bang for my bucks), so I decided to purchase a "virtual dedicated" server account to test the migration waters before going full dedicated (which is more expensive). My testing was almost complete when UFC 76 hit.

First of all, my MMA site is hosted on godaddy shared hosting. I have had hits of 12000 and 18000 in a day on that account without so much of a word from godaddy, but UFC 76 would be different. At about 8000 hits and on my way to my best day ever they shut me down (same reason as hostgator). So, I found myself without a web site for the biggest two days of my existance. My MMA site does the best during the fights and the day after...thus it's name "UFC Results".

So, I completed my testing and I've ordered a dedicated server from godaddy. My config will cost me about $111/month and includes a p4 3ghz, 2gb of ram and 500G/month transfer. I have the machine all to myself, so no shared hosting woes of them shutting me down for using too many resources. My server should be set up soon and I will start moving my sites over to it.

So, this month could have been a $300 month, but it looks like I'll be closer to $220 or $230...still by far my best month ever. Of course next month a huge amount of my earnings will be tied up in hosting fees, but with the config I ordered this should not be an issue in the future. I may (hopefully) need to bump my bandwidth, but I think my largest month so far is under 10GB bandwidth anyway, so I won't need to worry about that for at least a year.

Note to self: If I do 50x the bandwidth, that's 50x the potential earnings...50x300=$15000/month...it's safe to say if I hit the 500GB / Month then I will not mind adding another $20 to go to 1000GB bandwidth.

Anyway, take care...I've got server migrating to do.

This is dedicated to our good friends at google...who keep us on our toes and are the rulers of all things internet.

Welcome to the Google Circus

One of the most over discussed topics on the net is whether or not PageRank actually matters to search engine results. 99% of the time, the discussion ends with some "authority" giving you an example of a search which shows a lower pagerank site higher than one with a higher pagerank.

What a load of bull!

Let me tell you this, PageRank counts. Now, that statement requires a little extra explanation. Let me give you some point form notes:

• 2 sites with the same PageRank on the Google toolbar do not necessarily have the exact same pagerank!
  
• When all other things are equal (SEO wise), then PageRank is the deciding factor for search engine placement.
  
• The PageRank you see on the toolbar, or by looking at those "Future PageRank" sites is almost always out of date.
  

So, if you have a site with PageRank 3 and you're comparing it to another site with PageRank 3, they are not the same PageRank. PageRank is more finely granulated than a 0-10 numbering system.

Here's my concrete example (you knew it was coming, didn't you).

I had a web site: http://recipes.gocurious.com, entitled "Best Ever Recipes". I added a bunch of content to the site and got some backlinks.

I then decided to register a domain: best-ever-recipes.com because I know that domain name helps in SEO results. I then permanently forwarded the old to the new (so that I didn't lose any of my old backlinks) and proceeded to get backlinks to http://www.best-ever-recipes.com and add more content.

Just before the latest PR update, I decided to use new software on the recipe site, Serendipity instead of Jooma. My better half (who does all the work on that site) was not happy about loosing the old site's look. So, I decided to split the sites into two distinct sites. The old one using Joomla and the new one using Serendipity.

Now, just before the split the site was ranked #1 or #2 on google for the phrase "Best Ever Recipes", depending on which day you did the search. It was also ranked well on "Best Recipes Ever".

Apres split, both sites had PageRank 3 (cool), but neither site was #1 or #2 on the phrase "Best Ever Recipes". The old site (http://recipes.gocurious.com) was ranked #9 and the new site not ranked at all even though it had the exact same domain name and had the phrase "Best Ever Recipes" all over the place.

This leads me to one conclusion.

3/2 = 3 (in google terms...in other words, there is a lot of difference between 3 and 4 in PageRank), and PageRank matters. You can take a high 3 in pagerank and split it to two low 3's.

The new site is coming along well and getting ranked much better than the old (hooray to Serendipity), but the old still wins on the phrase "Best Ever Recipes"...

For those of you new to Project AdSense, this blog is not necessarily meant to draw conclusions, it is meant to document what did/didn't work so that others can learn from it. The bottom line is that PageRank matters, it is always out of date (on the toolbar) and getting quality backlinks is something that you should strive for.

Yep, we're #1 on Google, #1 on Yahoo and #3 on MSN. It's all about SEO, page title and domain name choice. Cool!

Of course, it's #1 for the search term "Project AdSense", but this confirms a number of things.

1) Domain name counts (even sub domain)
2) Page Title Counts
3) Irritating repetition of keyword phrases counts.

Of course, I'm getting absolutely no traffic on this site from that search term, but hey...it's nice to know that it's listed as #1 for even one search phrase.

Well, I had my best 3 day period ever this week. It's all thanks to UFC 68. I scored about 1500 visitors to http://mma.gocurious.com the day of the event, 2100 the day after and another 1400 two days after. Traffic has calmed back down to normal levels today.

I saw the ramp up start earlier this time, starting a week or more in advance of the event and peak traffic was three times what it was last month. That is very promising and makes me conclude that traffic increase goes up exponentially as your rank in google searches gets better. This makes perfect sense if you think about it. Most people who do a search click on the first or second item, going much below that there will be less and less. By the time you get to 15 or so, you're probably not getting clicked. So as an example, if there are 100,000 potential visitors on "UFC 68 Results", I would guess that first place gets at least 30,000-50,000 second getting 15,000 and it drops of quickly once you get below 6th place.

So, we'll see if I can climb another spot or two and get more visitors for April 7th UFC event. I am still promoting my other sites, alternating between recipes, the two christmas sites and halloween. DMOZ still hasn't listed any of my sites (they sure take their time).

Later

Earnings have been very weak for the second half of Feb. My traffic numbers have been good, but CTR has not. I think this likely indicates that I am getting return traffic as opposed to new traffic. Return traffic is less likely to click ads. Hey, any traffic is good traffic!

I expect things to pick up as the next UFC event gets closer( March 3rd). I am still ranking high on UFC 68 Predictions and my articles seem to rank pretty high for other ufc type queries (although the articles are hosted elsewhere...article directories), they all have links back to me

If you'd like to take a look at some articles I've written (when reading, remember that my #1 reason for writing this is to create backlinks and traffic, I know that I'm not a very good writer).

My Articles on Ezine Articles

It wasn't easy, but I've finally found a combination of configuration and hacks which made the mod_rewrite based SEO URL's on Serendipity work on my GoDaddy account.

Basically a combination of changes to permalinks (adding a trailing slash to certain items) along with a change in one of the php files with respect to rss links seems to have helped out. I would have preferred a totally Serendipity based solution (i.e. a fix to Serendipity) or a GoDaddy solution (i.e. a mod_rewrite setting), but I guess this will do.

I fully expect my next upgrade of Serendipity to undo my changes

Here's my personal notes on the subject. They are not comprehensive, but they are meant to remind me of what I've done:

1) Enable mod_rewrite
2) Change appropriate permalinks to have trailing /
3) Change include/plugin_internal.inc.php
- Changes here are second instance of index.rss to
have trailing slash
- Also do index.rss1 index.rss2 and comments.rss2

I decided to switch the UberWisdom site from Joomla to Serendipity. I hadn't done any work at all on the site and I figured it's really more of a blog concept type site anyway and I am really starting to like Serendipity.

Since the last UFC event (February 3rd) my MMA Site has really taken off. I'm getting a combination of traffic from search engines and from an MMA top site that I registered with.

Now, I'm not going to retire on the money I'm making, but it's nice to see an improvement.

Oh, btw:

search for ufc 68 predictions in yahoo or google and my site is #1 (at least for today).

UFC 68 is being held on March 3rd and if I can stay (somehow) in the #1 spot until then, I should clean up!

In other news, GoDaddy finally approved my affiliate link (too bad it was after the superbowl). Here is one of their ads. I've had pretty good experiences with GoDaddy, so if you're interested in bying something there, feel free toclick on my link below:



I'm also testing out an affiliate program for filling out survey's online. My sister in law is testing this one out for me (actually purchasing and trying to make some money with it). I will post in a month or so to let you know how that went...in the mean time, feel free to sign up below

I've seen people saying that the Google sandbox does not exist. I say this is both true and untrue. I have seen my site appear in the google index in as little as a week, however there are portions of googles searches which I believe are way behind current. Let me give you some examples.

I have a Christmas site

http://christmas.gocurious.com

I started developing this site, probably in October 2006. Google shows 9 backlinks to this site (as seen by going to advanced search and choosing links.

I have another site

http://mma.gocurious.com

I started developing this site, slightly afterwards.

Google shows 2 backlinks to this site (same method).

Here's the rub. I have recently written 10+ MMA related articles. These articles at minimum should be worth 1 backlink each (however, they are distributed to multiple article sites, so maybe more).

So, I go to one of my competitors sites (although competitor is not correct...they are Christmas sites, aren't they). Anyway doing a link search on that site yielded 43 backlinks, most of them internal. I know my site also has these internal links, but they aren't showing up.

Conclusion1: The backlinks and links shown currently were harvested sometime in early November, a full 3 months prior to the pagerank update. So, if you are wondering how old the data is which is being used for the current pageranks, it is 3 months old. This is just an educated guess, but probably correct.

Conclusion2: Assuming I am correct with #1, then the next pagerank (perhaps April or May) should show a dramatic increase in backlinks for both sites, but my MMA site should go through the roof.

OR

For some reason, Google is not seeing the real backlinks to my site as existing...yikes! Or most/all of these article directories are blocking outbound links...I prefer to use the stale data theory.

Note: This does not mean that google uses old data for search engine rankings or search results. I know they index my MMA site (at least the main page) about every week or two.

So, if you are thinking about setting up a web site and you have a target date to reach pagerank or full SEO, you'd better start 6 months in advance. Start by putting up your root page, then get your linking done (either by article marketing, buying links or smart link trading). Then add relevant meaningful content. Of course everyone else will tell you to build up the content on your site first and perhaps they are correct...what do I know? Not much, but I am learning!