Well you’ve probably already noticed the new look for Moongrabber. I’ve gone ahead and re-designed my blog to clean up and organize everything better, plus the old theme wasn’t quite so easy on the eyes. The new theme is based off of the great “Amazing Grace” Wordpress Theme by Vladimir Prelovac, with modifications done by yours truly.
I recently wrote about the problems I’ve been having with Dreamhost, and I just can’t take it anymore. So I’m also writing here to let everyone know that I’ve decided to change webhosts, and I will be moving to a VPS provided by LiquidWeb. I’ve been trying out their shared hosting for a few weeks now and I’ve been really impressed with their service and support. I would definitely recommend them if you are in need of a new web host.
So if you have a minute, drop me a line, or leave a comment and let me know what you think of the re-design and the change in hosting.
Tags: amazing grace, dreamhost, liquidweb, moongrabber, redesign, Vladimir Prelovac, web hosting, wordpress
Well, I hadn’t seen a review for Dreamhost lately so I thought I would write about my experiences with them here (also on Web Hosting Talk, a great site for everything web hosting).
I originally registered for Dreamhost in April ‘07, on their “Crazy Domain Insane” Plan (I prepaid for a full year for $29.40!!!):
Disk Storage: 200GB (Grows 2GB/week)
Monthly Bandwidth: 2TB (Grows 40GB/week)
Unlimited Domains, MySQL Databases, and FTP Accounts
PHP 4 and 5
Perl Support
Python Support
Ruby on Rails
Enhanced Web Security
One-Click Installs (Wordpress, Zen Cart, etc.)
Setup was a breeze and everything was up and running within minutes. I setup my domains with the Dreamhost Nameservers, and the DNS changes began to propagate. For the first 6-8 months I had no problems, my sites responded quickly, and the few times I had to contact support the were very helpful and quick to respond (subdomain DNS issues for one of my sites).
Then right after christmas they had the big billing fiasco (read: http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/2008/01/20/billing-issues-update/), and I ended up getting charged for another full year of hosting (resolved within the next day or two).
Well April rolled around again and I decided to renew my account as I had relatively few issues and didn’t want to deal with moving all of my sites to a new host. I was hoping to renew my account and use a coupon like I had the first time around, but Dreamhost no longer offers my plan (they only have a 1 size fits all plan now). I bit the bullet and renewed my plan for another year to lower the price to $120 ($10/month), and I was off on another year of Dreamhost.
Right around this time I had also started to move some of my client sites over to Dreamhost, and we started having more and more issues (DNS, slow response times, slow connections). I also experienced an outage or two with no warning from Dreamhost (supposedly planned).
Dreamhost has a status blog available at: http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/ where you can read about the latest status updates, problems, follow up, etc. And I’ve found it helpful in the past to go here to get my updates (Dreamhost doesn’t like to send email updates or alerts when they are making changes), but trying to explain this problems to my clients when I don’t even get a heads-up from Dreamhost is a real pain.
Fast forward to August, and I am experiencing MySQL outages and slow slow slow connections/queries, as well as network troubles with Dreamhosts’ bandwidth provider. Support has been reasonably quick to respond (telling me they’re working on it), and the Status blog has some information as to what’s been happening, but I think it’s time for me to move on.
So in conclusion, you get what you pay for (and in Dreamhosts’ case, that’s a cheap shared hosting account). In fact, if I didn’t rely so much on sites with MySQL (Wordpress/Zen Cart/vBulletin/etc.), I would probably stay with Dreamhost, as I have found their servers to be rather speedy and not overloaded/oversold (at least on the CPU side of things, not their MySQL servers).
Final Dreamhost Ratings:
Uptime and Reliability: 7/10
Server and Connection Speed: 6/10
Tech Support: 8/10
Customer Service: 8/10
Value: 9/10
Final Score: 7.6/10
(Stay tuned as I document my journey into the realm of finding a new web host to replace Dreamhost!)
Tags: dreamhost, web hosting, website load time, wordpress
Well I took the weekend off from posting an update here, but that doesn’t mean I stopped my link building efforts. Over the weekend I’ve been joining and posting on many different forums, blogs, and sites that fit into the niche or keyword that I am marketing my sites for, as well as requesting feedback and reviews for each of the sites.
Let’s see how we’re doing on backlinks and visitors compared to the previous numbers:
Jon’s Blog and Photos - http://www.moongrabber.com
Inlinks: Google - 269/269/269/280, Yahoo - 150/152/145/199, Altavista - 181/186/181/227, Alltheweb - 180/185/179/225
Traffic: Google Analytics - 15/29/52/39
Minnesota Design and Photography - http://www.jbdesignandphoto.com
Inlinks: Google - 108/108/108/123, Yahoo - 126/130/133/172, Altavista - 150/154/158/198, Alltheweb - 149/154/157/197
Traffic: Google Analytics - 11/14/14/20
Gamer Junkie - http://www.gamer-junkie.com
Inlinks: Google - 0/0/0/0, Yahoo - 0/5/12/40, Altavista - 0/5/14/53, Alltheweb - 0/5/14/53
Traffic: Google Analytics - 0/47/44/32
Gamer Junkie Forums - http://forums.gamer-junkie.com
Inlinks: Google - 0/0/0/0, Yahoo - 0/6/13/40, Altavista - 0/6/15/52, Alltheweb - 0/6/15/52
Traffic: Google Analytics - 0/error/error/13
Threads - 0/8/17/27, Posts - 0/10/33/70, Members - 0/5/10/14
So where do we go from here? At this point many new webmasters can lose hope in there efforts as it can take days/weeks/months for the search engines to pick up on all of our site and link building efforts. Well the key here is to continue building links and advertising the sites to the best of my ability across the web (and especially in each sitse niche/keywords).
Don’t lose hope! The most important thing now is to stay consistent in your efforts because it shows the search engines that you’re commited and it keeps your site’s growth steady (which the search engines prefer).
I am going to continue building links to my sites, and I will post back here with my findings every so often. I will also try to keep everyone up to date if I find some really great resources for site and link building that just have to be shared. Stay Tuned!
Tags: gamer junkie, jbdesignandphoto.com, link building, moongrabber.com, site building
