Make Money from Blogs » Hosting

Hosting your videos on other sites to speed up your own site

ashish — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 18:57:28 +0000

As a part of the process of optimization and enhancing the speed of your website, you should look to see what are some of the major media content that you can offload. Serving video files off your server can be heavier than serving plain vanilla HTML files and take far more bandwidth; and if you reach the stage where a number of people want to view the videos that you are showing, they can put a higher amount of load on your server.
One option that you can utilize is to use a video-sharing site where you can put your videos, and display the video from that site. Youtube is a very good example of such a sharing site and is a very good platform for putting your videos (it has some restrictions though, in terms of the maximum size of videos your can put, as well as the time duration of not more than 10 minute long videos).
So, take your video, get a Youtube / Gmail account, and upload your video. When your video is uploaded, you can also get a code that allows you to embed the video in your own site, and when the user views the site, they video is directly played from Youtube, and not from your site, thus optimizing your site. The plus for this is that Youtube has a lot of viewers, and if you add some site information to the video, this could in turn drive some people to your own site, people who have viewed the video directly on Youtube.

Hostmonster users – How to get an update of server status

ashish — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 18:33:13 +0000

Hostmonster (click here to learn more) is a popular hosting service used by individuals to host their blogs and other sites (although I have not heard of too many professional sites with huge number of users using WordPress as a hosting service). I use WordPress for my sites, and it runs fairly well, with easy installation of blogs, and other similar software. I did not have to learn much to do installation and configuration of my blogs.
However, one pet peeve I have is that the service goes down once in a while, not frequently enough to be an irritant, but I do notice once it is down (and sometimes can take 1-2 hours to come back up). At such times, it is easy enough to go to Hostmonster chat (right on the main page) to talk to somebody from support, and you can get enough detail about when the server will be back up, as well as what the problem is.
However, getting on the phone to talk to support, or to go to the chat system both take time. There is an easier way to quickly find out if there is a known problem on the server, and what the status for that problem is. There is a page called “Hostmonster Server Status Notification’ that has an update for the servers on which you have to host your sites. This page is located at this link.

Stop Plagiarism: Find the name of the hosting provider

ashish — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 18:59:42 +0000

Let us consider that you have managed to detect that somebody is copying your content (either by directly taking the content from your blog, or by reading the content from your feed). Now, you need to take steps to get them to stop doing this hosting, or atleast start a discussion with them, so that you can decide on next steps (whether they will change their method of copying so that it meets with your approval, and gives you a link back to your blog, getting you some more traffic).
Now, consider that you are not able to get in touch with the owners of the other blog since they do not have contact details, and sending emails to addresses such as admin@ or owner@, etc do not get a response. This gets you more determined to actually try and get the other blog to take down your content, and you need to work out a way to do so. One way of escalation is to contact the hosting company of the other site to inform that they are hosting content that may be copyrighted, and they should stop hosting all such content. Now, hosting companies normally have policies regarding copyrighted content (it helps that legally a hosting company can be held not responsible for copyrighted content if they have been shown to have taken some action when it has been pointed out to them).
Now, how do you actually detect the hosting company for the other site. Well, a simple solution is to use this site called http://www.whoishostingthis.com/. You just enter the name of the other site that you want to report, and WhoIsHostingThis will provide you with the name of the hosting service. It works, since I tried out a few other sites.
From the site:

Are your hosting results 100% accurate?
As far as we know, there is no way to provide 100% accurate results. However, we use several data sources to find out who is hosting a website, including feedback from users. You can help by reporting bad results for us to investigate.

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Making money from photo-blogs – second part

ashish — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 20:28:14 +0000

In my previous post, I had talked about some of the concepts around creating a photo-blog, and making money from that (through Ads primarily). This post will talk more on the same subject, and should hopefully help you move further on that line.
1. As part of a post on WordPress optimization, I had mentioned that it puts less load on your server if content / scripts, etc, are loaded from a different server. So, wherever possible, put your photos on a different server, or on some reliable web hosting solution elsewhere. For example, you can put your photos on Amazon AWS, Photobucket, Flickr, or any other photo sharing site, and have the thumbnail on your own site. Thus, when somebody clicks on the thumbnail, you will get the actual photo on your own site.
2. Make sure that you have a system of analytics setup on your site. This will help you determine which photos are being viewed the most and are in demand. You could focus more on photos that seem more in demand, and get more visitors to your site.
3. Once you start getting people to your photo blog, explore whether you want to join the world of photo stock (where you can sell your photos, either as part of Micro-stock, or as Rights Released photos). Some of the more popular sites are: CanStockPhoto, BigStockPhoto, The3dStudio, Fotolia, Shutterstock. Learn more about stock photography at these locations.
4. There are a large number of photo directories on the net (you can find many of them on Google), so make sure that you enter your site on these site; these increase the chance of more people visiting your photo sites
5. Post your better photos on places such as your Twitter account, Facebook account, etc, and refer your photo blog location. This also attracts more people to your photo blog
6. There are many sites on the web that offer free photos. Don’t feel in the least bit hesitant about copying the photos from these locations, and putting them on your blog (as long as you don’t claim that they are your own – follow the terms of their copyright).

Optimizing your WordPress account – 2

ashish — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 18:09:48 +0000

A few weeks back, I had written about how to take some basic steps towards optimizing your WordPress account. Imagine what would happen if more people started promoting your WordPress Blog, or wonders of wonders, it appears on the front page of Digg or Slashdot. In such cases, unless you have optimized your WordPress configuration already, you can be pretty much sure that your account will get to a state where the server is not able to handle the load, and will shut down; further if your account is on a shared server, you might have some uncomfortable queries from your host.
So, here are some points on how to optimize your account:
1. Since WordPress works on a database system, it pulls every bit of content from the server. If there are a large number of requests for your blog, your server has to make that many DB queries to fetch the content. This puts a lot of stress on your server. User a Super Cache plugin to Cache some of the load and serve static HTML files instead of querying the DB (link to plugin, and page).
2. When you serve various files such as binaries, videos, images, scripts, etc from your server, it becomes slow. Place them on other servers, so that the load on your server is reduced. For example, you can get videos from Youtube and Photos from Flickr, and also, you can even hire some hosting space on another server or on a service such as Amazon S3 for this purpose.
3. If you are more advanced, look at your server logs; it may be possible to determine multiple requests from a bot or script that is of no good, blocking these may make your server behave a bit better
4. Look to get stats on how your web page is loading. If it takes a lot of time to load your page, there may be a lot of plugins working, or scripts loading, and so on. Some tools you can use for this purpose are – LiveHTTPHeaders (link, displays the HTTP headers), Firebug (link, Look at loading times for various artifacts on a page),
5. Inside your wp-config.php file, remove some of the DB calls that are not necessary. For example, hard-code your Template Path, Stylesheet path (link to relevant site). You will get some improvements.
6. Review your themes. Some themes call a lot of graphics, and overall call a lot of files. If your CSS files are divided into multiple files, combine them. Replace graphics wherever possible with text.
7. Review the plugins your are using to see whether they are required. Plugins can make your site much slower, especially if they do a lot of DB access and inefficient. If you are advanced technically, monitor the performance of your plugins.
8. Refer to this quick cheat sheet for DB optimization (link to cheat sheet)
9. Reduce the number of posts on the front page of your blog. Typically, WordPress gives you 10 posts on your front page, you should reduce this to 3-4.
10. Use WP’s Built in Object Cache as described on this page (link). From the same site, refer to the MySQL Query Cache.
11. For some detailed technical analysis of what can be done (link)
12. Clean Options (Finds orphaned options and allows for their removal from the wp_ options table) – Get it from this page
13. The combating comment spam page on WordPress.org (link). If you have a good blog which is getting popular, increase in spam is only to be expected. Akismet filters out most comment spam, but just getting it into the junk spam list also adds some load to your server.
14. Page with 5 tips for making your Blog Digg / Slashdot proof (link)
15. High Traffic Tips For WordPress on WordPress.org Codex (link)

If you know more ways beyond this, please do let me know.