Archives for 2016

Should I use Free Web Hosting?

The short answer is no. I’ve tried many web hosting companies, some better than others. In this short article I give you the reasons why free web hosting is a bad ideas and why you should consider an affordable alternative I use myself

Poor Customer Service

I’ve discovered the main issue with free web hosting is the customer service. Free web hosting usually carries with it poor customer service. Getting an answer to a question can take significantly longer and having them solve a problem may be next to impossible..

With paid hosting, such as the one I use, you can have a problem solved within minutes and getting a reply via live chat can take just seconds

Poor Speed and Reliability

Free web hosting is usually slow or unreliable with low data transfer speed and limited bandwidth. A limited bandwidth means that once the number of monthly website visitors exceeds a limit, the website may not load and you’ll need one of their paid web hosting plans. This is usually the goal of a free web hosting company.

The less reliable your site and the longer it takes to load the lower you’ll fall in the search engine results. Google Search now takes into account page loading speed as a ranking factor.

They’ve got to make money some way, and those providing free web hosting often make their money via advertisements. This doesn’t look professional if you own a business. Some of these advertisements are non-intrusive. However others can be very intrusive, such as annoying popups.

Domain Ownership

Free hosting plans often don’t provide a free domain name you would recognize. For example .com or .net and domain registration can take awhile.

They will often provide sub domains within their own domain name, for example yourwebsite.wordpressc.com or yourwebsite.blogspot.com. If you want your own domain name (recommended) get paid hosting.

I’ve tried many affordable web hosting companies and found siteground to be the best value for money. They provide the best customer service I’ve ever received from a hosting company with live chat often resulting in an answer within seconds. Fast loading times with high bandwidth even for sites with high volume traffic. Also very reliable and flexible.

Please let me know what your experiences are with free web hosting companies and if you’ve tried more than one which would you recommend?

Top Tools to Check the Domain History of your Website

What are the Top Tools to Check the Domain History of a Website?

If you’re planning to purchase a new domain name, it might be a good idea to check the domain history. This is because domains can have a long history with ownership changing hands a number of times.

They reason you may want to know a domains past is because the site may have contained malicious code that can cause it to be blocked or penalized by the search engines, or it may have hosted questionable activities. Or you may simply need to contact the previous owners of the domain name.

When registering a domain name one step is to provide valid and accurate contact information, this is known as WHOIS info. While some prefer to make this information private others provide detailed domain history such as the name and address of previous owners, DNS records and hosting information.

Here are some tools to help you research a previous websites content, the domains history and the domain name ownership history

WayBack Machine

Probably my favourite is WayBack Machine. For many years Wayback Machine has been backing up parts of the Web that would otherwise have been lost. Wayback Machine provides snapshots of how the site appeared months and often years ago. This will help you to identify what kind of content the site once contained.
Click here to visit Wayback Machine

DomainHistory.net

DomainHistory.net is a simple website that can check domain ownership history by providing current/past whois information and reverse email/registrar/IP. All you need to do is enter the domain name in the website and click the Search button. The historical whois data is shown in the results page and you can jump straight to the specific record date from the right hand side.

To get unlimited whois, domain history and export the reports you can buy a professional membership that costs about $29.99 per month with the first 30 years being free.

Domaintools.com
Domaintools.com is one of the most comprehensive services, offering a number of premium online tools for carrying out research on a domain. One such tool provides Whois Domain name History. This enables you to look up previous registrants, Name services, IP addresses, locations and more.

Unfortunately the Whois History features is only available with a professional subscription that costs $49.95. However you can still sign up for a 7 day trial account and then cancel your membership trial within 7 days, before your credit card is charged. Your subscription however will include access to some of their other great tools.

Can you Get Paid to Read Articles Online?

Can I Get Paid Money to Read Articles Online?

The short answer is no, these are all scams. You cannot earn money reading articles online. Any company that says so is simply trying to scam you.

At best they’ll harvest your email address so they can spam you; at worst they’ll try to obtain username and password information to access Paypal or Payza.

One such company was All News Round who claimed to pay up to $5-$9 per each news article and multiple articles a day.. To earn the $9 per article, you had to grow your account from a ‘beginner status’ to a ‘professional status’. This involved referring people such as friends who also join in on this scam where you supposedly earn $38 extra when they sign up plus 20% of their earnings.

They said that when your account balance reaches a threshold of $800, you can withdraw the money. However as soon a you try to cash your earnings you’re going to be asked for your payza or PayPal account information, which will include both your username and your password! This will give them access to your online bank account.

Thankfully it appears that All News Round no longer exists. But you can bet that other similar sites exist, possibly owned by the same person.

If you have already given them your Paypal or Payza account information I recommend you change your password as soon as possible by going directly to the Paypal or Payza websites. Also check your Paypal or Payza accounts for any suspicious or unauthorized activity.

There are ways of earning money online, but it takes hard word and knowledge. I’m a member of Wealthy Affiliate which is an online training program that provides comprehensive training to show how you can work online from home and build an online business that will make you money.

You have access to video tutorials, a friendly help desk and discussion forum with other users such as yourself, where you can exchange ideas and learn from others. Join Wealth Affiliate for Free today. Click here to sign up

Why you need WhoisGuard For Privacy and Anti-Spam

What is WhoisGuard and why do I need it?

Ever wondered how spammers are able to get hold of your email address and bombard you with spam? Worried about your privacy?

A Whois search is available to anyone on the internet. This means people can find your name, address, email and phone number with a simple domain search. When you register a domain, you also include your details such as your name, address, email and phone number. If you do not make this information private you risk exposing this information to spammers, identity thieves and fraudsters.

For a few dollars a year you can keep your domain ownership details private, hide your details from spammers, and protect your anonymity

What is WhoisGuard

WhoisGuard is a Domain privacy protection service that will hide your contact details from the public by displaying the contact details of WhoisGuard instead. It will replace your email address in the Whois database with a unique address, such as xyz.protect@whoisguard.com. This protects your privacy, shields you from spam and even identity theft.

Another advantage of WhoisGuard is that it provides an option to redirect regular email to the customer’s real address where obvious spam or malicious email is filtered out through WhoisGuard’s anti-spam funnel. This means you can receive regular email while still maintaining your privacy.

The only time your data such as your phone number and address would be available is when the registrar receives a court order against you or a domain service from a provider involving trademark disputes.

Start Survey and Up-Survey Scam – A Review

Is Start Survey or Up-Survey a Scam?”

Paid surveys have become increasingly common with many sites offering money in return for your time in taking their online surveys.

Most paid surveys appear to be scams. Some of these online surveys are legitimate. However, the legitimate surveys pay out very small amounts of cash for a lot of work. If you’re short of cash, there’s better ways of earning money without investing so much of your time.

These scam surveys will tend to ask generic questions. The purpose of legitimate online surveys is to obtain specific demographic information that’s useful for advertisers who market to the public.

Often you must make a certain amount before you can withdraw the cash, so it can take awhile before you discover it’s a scam. By that time, you’ve already invested a lot of time and effort in carrying out the surveys and they’ve got your email address and personally information.

One such scam is Start Survey, which promises to pay out $14 for each survey you take. It only takes about two minutes to complete each survey and less than ten minutes per day. This is supposed to make you $42 Plus more if you sign up friends and family. You can take three surveys every day, which adds up to $42. You can then earn additional cash by referring friends to the site – $15 per sign up, plus 20% of what your referrals earn. If you have a lot of online friends this can add up to a descent amount of money for online work.

If only it was true:

While signing up to Start Survey or up-Survey is easy – you must give them your Paypal or Payza email address and a password. If you must sign up don’t give them any password you would normally use for PayPal or any other site!

Up-survey is similar in that it is supposedly easy to earn money, however you never get paid even after you’ve reached the threshold of earnings necessary to withdraw the money.

These are just scams to collect your email address – which are then added to a spam database. If they ask you for a password it’s common for people to use the same password for everything. In which case they have both your Paypal ID and your password!

Don’t bother with paid surveys. Most are a scam and the ones that are legitimate pay very little.

If you have an experience to share regarding online surveys please share in the comments below.