But before checking free hosting providers, you need ask yourself a few questions to avoid future disappointment.

#1 What resources do I need?
The common error most free hosting users make is looking for wrong resources. For example, if you just want to start a simple blog, you do not any fancy things. You can immediately get free one from reliable providers like Blogger, WordPress, Edublogs, LiveJournal. But if you need some special plugins for your blog, then you probably need ftp access or at least you can install your own copy of your blog. Most blog providers provides standard packages for all users and seldom cater for individual requests.

If you want put your own personal sites without using standard software packages, you need narrow down whether you need SQL database, whether you need PHP, whether you need Perl.

Another resource you need consider is whether the data transfer has any limitations. Some may give you 100GB data transfer, but cap your transfer at 1Mbps. Some may give you unlimited (actually does not exist) disk space, but limit the file size of individual files. Usually ad-supported providers will not limit your data transfer, but most no-ads providers may impose the limitation so that they can bet on your upgrading.

#2 What support do I need?
You need understand what support you need to setup and run your website. For example, whether you can use ftp, or you have to use web-based uploader; whether you can wrote HTML files, or you need some pre-defined templates.

Also, you need know whether you are comfortable with the support through public forum. Most free hosting providers do not have phone support or ticket support systems. You need ask question in a forum, and the reply from the provider is generally slow. So, you need know how to check forums to find answers.

If you prefer talking over the phoe or online chat, then you need make sure whether the free hosting provider provides this. Sometimes, if you can fins a local provider, you may get such service.

#3 Am I comfortable with advertisement on my site?
As I explained in how free hosting works, free hosting providers need find ways to support their service. At the end of the day, they have to pay the bills on servers at least. Advertisement is one of the major revenue sources for most free hosting providers. So, most of the time you sites may be placed some advertisements by your free hosting provider.

Some post-to-host providers may not place advertisements. But you need commit some posts each week to qualify for the free hosting service. Or if you just need host some static HTML pages, some providers may not place ads as well. The simple one is Google Sites.
#4 Will I consider upgrade if my site booms?
If you are building a community for a clan, you may consider upgrade later when your community gets larger. Usually, for large community sites, it is easy to get enough revenue from the site to support the site itself. If you community is large, members may demand more features that free hosting provider may not provide.

So, if you may upgrade your account later, you need find a hosting provider with easy upgrade options. Some providers provide free and paid hosting on different servers, and you need know whether they help you move the site if you are not sure about such jobs.

After you get answers for these 4 questions, next step is to compare different free hosting providers. I will explain to you later on how to check whether a free hosting provider is reliable or not.

The post How to find a reliable free hosting provider? 4 questions you need ask yourself appeared first on Free Hosting Answers!.

Here are 5 rules you should follow to find a perfect domain for your website, especially free hosting sites.

Rule #1: Use meaningful words, or keywords in your niche.
Meaningful words are easy to memorize. Your free hosting service need new users, and retain users. If the words used do not have any meaning, the chance is that the user may forget your website. Do not expect them to dig their email for your domain name.

Also, try to use simple words. Remember the native language of most of your users is not English. You are not Google, not Yahoo. Most users will not try to figure out the meaning of your domain name if they do not know the meaning. You may use simple words related to your service. For example, if you are going to provide free forum hosting, you may include bbs or forum in your domain name. The main purpose of including keywords in your domain name is not for memorizing, but for SEO.

Rule #2: No hyphens.
It is very common you find out all combinations of your desired words were registered. Every second, tens of thousands domains are registered. So, some domain registration system will suggest some words with hyphens.

Try to avoid such domains. Firstly, do not expect users to remember hyphens. Secondly, it signals the users that there is a direct competitor, which has longer history and track record, although this is not necessarily true.

Rule #3: No pure numbers.
Most people even cannot remember home number. How can you expect them to remember 6 or 7 digits number (most 3, 4-digit numbers have been registered)?

It seems some Asian webmasters like numbers, possibly because they have better genes with numbers. Anyway, unless your free service is targeting Chinese or other Asian users, you should also avoid pure numbers. No more than 3 numbers in your domain.

Rule #4: Dot com matters.
There are many domain extensions, or top-leve domains (TLDs) or country code TLDs. Usually your first choice of .com was registered already. So, most domain registration system will recommend you other TLDs.

Try to avoid any other TLDs if you are going to use it for your free hosting services. Occasionally, you may use .net or .org if .com was taken. Or, if your targeted users are in a specific country, you may use county code TLDs.

Never use .info for your free hosting service. Due to the promotions of .info domains, most users do not trust .info domain much. Also, as a lot of spammers, and phishing sites are using .info, your email from .info domains may have higher risk of being marked as spam in most email systems.

Rule #5: Know cultural differences
Be cultural sensitive. Try to avoid controversial or vulgar words. Unless your free service is targeted for specific countries or regions, you need check the words used for your domain carefully. Use Wikipedia or some other references to fins out whether the words have special meaning in other countries or cultures.

If you follow these 5 rules, I am sure you will find a perfect domain to start your free service. It will be costly if you have to change domain names later.

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Cut the queue if you know how.

WordPress is a great open source project for blogging and content management. Millions of users use it everyday. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed is a very commonly used feature among bloggers to broadcast latest posts and updates.

Unfortunately, the default WordPress RSS does not include any media items. Some bloggers said the image URL will be included if you choose Full Text under Settings—Reading–For each article in a feed, show. Unfortunately this is not true for the default templates (Twentyten or Twentyeleven).

There are different ways to include images in the RSS feed. You can directly modify the feed-rss2.php under wp-includes directory.

The safer way to modify the default RSS feed behavior is through your template. This will avoid some possible issues in future upgrade. So, here is how to put the URL of the first image in your RSS feed.

Corresponding to your theme (template), there is a file named functions.php, in which most template related functions (e.g., rendering comments) are placed. So, you can open this file with any text editor (e.g., Notepad++), and scroll all the way to the end, and put the following code:
function add_image_into_rss_feeds($content) {
global $post, $posts;
$img_url_to_be_inserted = '';
ob_start();
ob_end_clean();
$output = preg_match_all('/<img.+src=[\'"]([^\'"]+)[\'"].*>/i', $post->post_content, $matches);
$img_url_to_be_inserted = $matches [1] [0];
if(!empty($img_url_to_be_inserted)){
$content = '<img src="' . $img_url_to_be_inserted . '">' . $content;
}
return $content;
}
// if you want to include image when using excerts, uncomment the following line
// add_filter('the_excerpt_rss', 'add_image_into_rss_feeds');
add_filter('the_content_feed', 'add_image_into_rss_feeds');

Now, add a new post with an image, then generate the new RSS feed. You images should show up properly. A working example is a funny picture blog. You may check the feed here: http://feeds.feedburner.com/JokeslabMedia

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In this post, I will share with you how to connect to the PPTP VPN server from a Windows machine. I will use Windows 7 Home Premium as an example.

Step 0: Make sure you have a PPTP VPN account.

The information needed includes: PPTP VPN server IP, user name, and password

Step 1: Connect to internet

To connect to a VPN server, you must connect to internet first, because normally the VPN server is not in your local area network. You can connect to internet with cable or wireless. PPTP VPN has no issues with wired or wireless connections.

If you can read this post, it means you are connected already.

Step 2: Open control panel

On your Windows machine, go to Start (the button in the bottom left)–Control panel. You should get a window similar to the following screenshot (click the image to enlarge). Click the Network and Internet as illustrated

Step 3: Add a PPTP VPN connection

After clicking the Network and Internet, in the new window, click “connect a network”, then in the pop-out window, click “connect to a workplace” (make sure you click this one!!). Click Next to proceed. You may refer to the screenshot below (click the image to view the full-sized image).

In the pop-up window, click “Use my Internet connection (VPN) as shown below.

Step 4: Provide PPTP VPN server IP or hostname

In the new window, you are asked to provided the ip address (hostname is also acceptable) of the PPTP VPN server. You can get such info from your VPN service provider. If you installed the PPTP VPN server yourself, you can put the server IP here.

Optionally, you can change the destination name of this VPN connection (illustrated as 6 in the screenshot below). This is just for your own info. You can type whatever you want.

Then click Next to continue.

Step 5: Provide your PPTP VPN account info

In the new window, you need provide the user name and password of your PPTP VPN account. You should get such info from your VPN service provider. If you set your own PPTP VPN server following this guide, you can add an user name and password in /etc/ppp/chap-secrets .

If you are the only user of the computer, or you are willing to share the PPTP VPN account with other users in the computer, you can check “Remember this password” so that it is necessary to type the password next time. If you do not want to store password in the computer, do NOT check it.

Then click “Connect” to connect to the VPN.

These are illustrated in the screenshot below. Click the image to view the full-sized image.

After 1 or 2 minutes, you should get the following screen:

Step 6: Test the connection

Open your browser, go to whatismyip.com to see whether your IP is changed to the PPTP VPN server IP.

Get any problems? Share with us in the comment box below! (please do NOT post any account info or personal info).

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Proxy just like this girl, without showing face or feet, you can browse the juicy contents.

For many beginners, they want to start quickly to fully utilize the bandwidth. My suggestion is if you have idle resources, especially if you have lot of unused bandwidth, you may try free web proxy. Just after one week, you will be noticed the difference in bandwidth usage.

Web proxy, refers to a type of proxy service through web servers. A client connects to the service provider’s website (proxy server), then type the web address he/she wants to browse. The proxy server fetches the contents, and passes them to the client. (source: TheProxyGuide). Basically, you web server will be used as a proxy between the users and other websites.

Start a free web proxy is extremely simple: all you need to do is registering a domain and downloading one of the proxy scripts, most of time, either Glype or PHProxy. You may check the comparisons of proxy scripts before making the decisions.

The script is very simple, and if you need customizations, you may check the Glype website or TheProxyGuide. Most people just download a template, then use default settings to start with. There is a very nice Glype installation and configuration tutorial. You may go through it before launch your site.

Once the site is up, traffic will not come automatically. You need submit your site to some proxy lists. The best known proxy lists are: proxy.org and unrestrictedsurf.com. Both of the sites approve proxies manually, so, be patient. usually after one or two days, your sites should be approved and you will receive decent traffic. If you have time, you may submit your proxy to another 10-20 such lists.

Of course, you need earn some money from web proxy. I will share with you on how to make money from web proxy sites in next article.

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Providing WordPress blog is even easier.

WordPress is unarguably the leader of blogging scripts. A lot of sites, including this site, is powered by WordPress. For the version 3.2 alone, it has been downloaded more than 6.3 million times when I write this blog. Version 3.0 had been downloaded over 32.5 million times by February 2011. If you are curious, you may check the live counter at WordPress Download Counter.

WordPress is a free and open source blogging tool powered by PHP and MySQL. It is licensed with GPL v2; this means you can use it freely for both commercial and personal purposes. Compared to other content management systems, the major advantages of WordPress include ease of use, simplified installation, ample extensions. Most users can use it immediately after the installation, which is also simple.

Because it is very popular, free WordPress hosting is a good start point for free hosting providers. However, a lot free hosting starters had mistakenly thought it would be very difficult to setup and manage.

Actually, WordPress provides out-of-box multi-blog capability since Version 3.0. Prior to Version 3.0, there was a WPMU project provides this capability. This was merged into WordPress since the release of WordPress 3.0 in June 2010. So basically, after install WordPress, you can simply enable network capability to provide WordPress blog hosting service immediately. You also become a network Administrator or super Administrator, and you can monitor and manage all blogs in your network.

Too simple? Yes, but this is the truth. So, what you need do is just enable network/MultiSite. The step by step guide of enable this capability (sometimes, it is called create a network) can be found here: http://codex.wordpress.org/Create_A_Network

That’s it. You can try to signup to create new blogs. Of course, you need install some plugins and templates. I will share with you some commonly used plugins for free WordPress blog hosting providers later.

The post Providing free WordPress blog hosting, actually is so easy appeared first on Free Hosting Answers!.

Act now, get the money from your free hosting service

Starting the free service is easy, but making it profitable is difficult. As I mentioned in previous article, starting free WordPress hosting, or starting free web proxy, does not need any fancy scripts and tools. But how many people do make meaningful profit?

Before you start to provide free web services, it is important to realize you have enough fund to pay your servers, your employees (if any) and yourself. Usually, it may take at least 3-6 months for you to get substantial revenues from your free hosting services; so be prepared for the hard time for the first a few months.

To generate generate revenue from your free hosting services, you have several options:

1. Sell you own ad space directly.

This could be very difficult for beginners as you do not have enough traffic. The advantage of this option is that you have full control of ads to be shown on your sites and you can set your price based on CPM (cost per 1000 impressions) or CPC (cost per click). The main disadvantage is that it is hard to sell!

You need install some software to track your ad campaigns. OpenX(formally PhpAdsNew) is an excellent ad server package. It is free, powerful and well documented. The shortcoming is that you may spend some time to integrate it with a shopping cart. You only need the open source version unless you have lot cash to burn.

2. Earn money through upgrading

This is more suitable when you have sizable user bases. You can provide more plugins, more templates, or more bandwidth, or more features, or ad -removal, as upgrades. If your service is good and stable, you should get about 1-2% upgraders.

3. Use 3-party ad services.

This is used by most providers nowadays. It is important to understand that the quality of these services varies largely and you may have little control of the ads to be shown on your sites. Although some providers allow you to exclude certain ads; it is usually not very useful. You should also understand most providers pay you on net-30 or net-60 days; it means you have to wait 30-60 days to receive your payment.

Here I give you some examples that suitable for free hosting providers.

The post How to make money from your free hosting services? appeared first on Free Hosting Answers!.

So, here are the 10 must-have free WordPress plugins. They will help you broadcast your posts, stop spammers, engage with readers, and improve the loading time of your blogs.

• PubSubHubbub. This plugin will let people know in real-time when your blog is updated. It works like a real-time broadcaster for your post. The name is not easy to remember, because it is named by geeks in Google. You may find more information on PubSubHubBub protocol in the official site.
• Slick Social Share Buttons. This plugin can add facebook, twitter, google +1, google buzz, linkedin, digg, and stumbledupon social media buttons to your website in either a floating or sliding panel. So, readers can easy share your contents and engage with your site. Based on our experience, floating works the best.
• Better WordPress Google XML Sitemaps. This plugin works on single blog and multi-site blogs (blog hosting) as well. Don’t wait for Google crawler, generate sitemaps and submit them to Google. Bing and Yahoo also accepts the same sitemaps.
• HTML in Author Bio. Adding the bio info in your blog will give your readers some trust. By default, for security reasons, WordPress strips all htmls in the bio. The plugin stops the stripping of html formatting from the description (bio) field and sanitize content for allowed HTML tags. For example, you can add links to your other projects, your Google+ profile
• Contact Form 7. This plugin makes it easy for your readers to contact you. It allows you to flexibly design the form and mail. You can manage multiple contact forms as well. There are several similar plugins there, but this one is the easiest one.
• Akismet. This plugin will fight against spammers for you. It comes together with WordPress, and you just need enable it. When enabling it, you need get a free key by registering your email on their website.
• Stop Spammer Registrations Plugin. This plugin checks IP address, email and user id of anyone who tries to register, login, or leave a comment against StopForumSpam.com, Project Honeypot and BotScout to to prevent spammers from registering or making comments.
• Custom Post Limits. By default, WordPress provides a single configuration setting to control how many posts should be listed in each section of your blog. This value applies for the front page listing, author listings, archive listings, category listings, tag listings, and search results. This plugin allows you to override that value for each of those different sections.
• Yet Another Related Posts Plugin. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) gives you a list of posts and/or pages related to the current entry, introducing the reader to other relevant content on your site. This is extremely useful when you have hundreds posts. I used some similar plugins before, but I switched to this one recently. It seems the algorithm is more accurate than other plugins.
• Quick Cache. When you have a few hundreds visitors each day, your blog will become slow. This Quick Cache can make it faster. If you are not a computer savvy, you can just image this cache can fetch the post/contents directly from the cached file, instead of from the database. This can save tremendous time. There are several cache plugins there, but this one is easy to use. You just turn it on. All default settings work perfectly.

Of course, there are many other free plugins you may try. Actually, this is one of the reasons why WordPress is getting more popular. If you need something special, you probably can find a free plugin.

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Now you know why nobody buys ads from Yahoo!

404 page refers to the “Page not found”. When a page is requested, your web server will serve the page to the web browser if it exists. If it is not existing, the web server will issue a 404 error. By default, most web servers (e.g., Apache) will give a plain text page indicating the page is not found.

The page not found error can be caused by different reasons. For example:

• typo in the URL;
• page was deleted;
• broken link;
• change of rewrite rules;
• you want to hide some pages to certain visitors;

For free hosting providers, you usually get 5-15% of such traffic. More importantly, visitors usually will click one of the links in this page to navigate to the other pages. That is the reason why I always urge all free hosting providers create a meaningful 404 page and monetize from it. Meaningful means clear navigation to proper pages (e.g., homepage, signup page, ..).

To create a 404 page is very simple. On most systems (Linux+Apache), you need:

1. create a html/php page. You can use your existing template so that this page has consistent appearance with all other pages. You can use html and any programming language (e.g., PHP), just like a normal content page. Then name it as you want.
2. in your website’s home directory (for cpanel, it is public_html directory), modify the .htaccess file. At the end of this file, add one line (replace whatever.php with the file name you specified in step 1):
   ErrorDocument 404 /whatever.php
3. update the .htaccess file. Test it with a non-existing page (e.g., http://YOURDOMAIN/nonexisit.pppp )

When you prepare you 404 page in step 1, it is important to put clear navigation (links) so that visitors can be redirected to the most suitable pages. You can also put some ads on this page. The conversion rate or CTR on a 404 page actually is similar (if not better) than other content pages.

Also, when you name the file, try to avoid 404 in file name because search engines do not like 404.php or 404.html. You may use “navigation.php” or “notfound.php”.

Anyway, put a 404 page today to: 1) provide better navigation for the lost visitors; 2). monetize such traffic.

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You will love this popup.

This is not always correct, at least it is often misleading. Using popup ads wisely can monetize your traffic without affecting genuine users.

Yes, you should not put popup ads in normal pages, or your own pages, because most users do not like popup windows. However, these pages are perfect for popup or pop-under ads:

• 404 page. If the page does not exist, put a popup ads before redirecting the user to the main page will not affect most users. Remember, for free hosting providers, you may have 5-10% traffic goes to 404 (page not found). Some free hosting providers never put a 404 page, or directly redirect the traffic to other pages. This is a big waste.
• Suspended pages. You will get a lot of abusers whenever you run free hosting service. You need take some actions to avoid excessive abuses. Once such account is suspended, you can show all visitors a suspended page, and put some ads, including popup or pop-under ads. Usually for abusing account, you should suspend it first instead of deleting it. If you delete it, the abuser can re-register and continue to use the abusing URLs.
• 403 page. If you installed mod security for your Apache server to filter abnormal traffic requests, you should setup a 403 page. If the page is not found, 404 page will be used. Anyway, you can also try to monetize such traffics with popup or pop-under ads.
• Proxified pages. As I mentioned in the Top 5 Adsense rules for free hosting providers, you should not place Google Adsense ad on proxified pages because you have no control on the contents. However, you may put popup or pop-under ads on such pages. As long as you cap the frequency of such ads, users usually do not mind it.

Be reminded, Google does not want to see pop-up or pop-under ads in Adsense pages. So, if a page can put Adsense, you should not put any pop ads, as mentioned as Rule #5 in the Top 5 Adsense rules for free hosting providers.

Anyway, you should maximize your earning potential from non-conventional traffics by using popup or pop-under ads wisely.

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