The Secret Online Geekly Articles Site is …
… rejecting one of my article proposals, because it is similar in subject to an article they had published recently (whoops!) I’m starting to like the idea of seeing my name online as a tech writer (ha ha!) So I’ll try to pitch this article idea at other sites. If nobody else wants to pay me to write it, I’ll just post it here.
PayPerPost.com, ReviewMe.com, Google AdSense
As Dave Slusher says, “forewarned is forearmed.” In order to pay for my hosting in 2007, I have signed up with Google AdSense (they’ll be in the sidebar), PayPerPost.com and ReviewMe.com. And I thought I’d let you know in advance.
I could care less about the controversy around the “paid blogging” sites. I was raised to believe that any job is dignifying when done with pride and honesty. And I’m not going to turn down $20 USD or $30 USD dollars each month, in exchange for very few hours of effort, just because some particular people might sneer at me. $20 USD or $30 USD per month will cover my hosting expenses at the moment, and that’s what I’m concerned about.
So over the next few months, I will write PayPerPost and ReviewMe sponsored articles. I’ll try to pick PayPerPost articles that I find personally interesting and are tech or web development related. Hopefully, ReviewMe patrons will make offers about tech products or about web development. I’ll do no more than three per month and I’ll space them out as best I can. I won’t spam you.
I will tag these with payperpost or reviewme, as the case may be. I’ll prefix the post title with “PPP:” or “RM:”. The first paragraph of these posts will say “Disclaimer: this is a sponsored post” or something like that. I mention this so that you can decide whether you care to read the post or not when you see the tag, the title prefix, or the disclosure paragraph.
If you don’t care about the sponsored content and really wish you could remove it, you can, after a fashion. Most feed readers today feature smart feeds, with filtering. There are also online sites that can filter another online site’s feeds. There are browsers extensions that can block Google AdSense.
It’s all up to you, really.
Server hosting changes coming
pjtrix’s server account with GoDaddy expires March 1st. Their new virtual dedicated server accounts have Fedora Core 4. And guess what? Fedora Core 4 is unsupported since exactly one month ago. Just like FC2, it’s SOL. (LOL, I like that product classification.)
I have been a customer of GoDaddy for these last two years, and they always screwed up the initial install of the account (I created new accounts each year because they had upgraded the OS.) There’s no reason what I payed for should not work from the get-go and need support to get it working. That is inexcusable, specially since it happened twice. That just shows it wasn’t a mere fluke, but instead showed me broken initial installs are the status quo.
But at least this was the only issue I had with them. I have heard horror stories about other established providers, and even of horror stories about GoDaddy itself. Maybe I was one of the lucky ones, but I’d like to give credit where it’s due: I never had any problems except for the initial install screw ups. Availability was supperb, and I’m confident I got what I paid for.
GoDaddy’s customer service was decent, for what little I used it (the initial install screw ups mentioned above.) 50 % of the time, I got someone that sent me to the very “help” pages that didn’t help. What I did was to ask the question again in a slightly different way. Then I’d reach someone that was actually helpful. Go figure.
So, because of their inexcusable initial account screw ups, and because of their iffy customer support, I’m not going to be using GoDaddy servers after the end of February. I found a few virtual private hosting companies which charge between $15 USD and $25 USD per month with no setup fee and no contract. This is less than what GoDaddy wants for the same service. Some of these other providers will even let me choose an up-to-date, supported, Linux distribution of my choice.
After some Googling for complains and reviews about the VPS hosting companies I found, I’ve settled on VPSLink hosting, and their Fedora Core 5 + MySQL + Rails + LightTPD package. I like that they pre-configure the server for Rails. LightTPD also runs about 30% faster and uses 90% less RAM than Apache, any day.
LightTPD supports most open source-based web applications without issue. I should be able to get WordPress and Trac running just fine. For the next few weeks, pjtrix stuff will continue running where it’s at right now, on the GoDaddy server. Meanwhile, I’ll be running WordPress, Subversion, Trac, and Gallery2 tests on the new VPSLink server. I’ll be making sure I can move my and my friends’ content over without problems.
Once I’m satisfied, I’ll make a backup of everything, copy it over, configure things properly, and finally, switch the name servers over to the new hosting provider. This will probably happen mid-February.
