Choosing a web hosting plan for your personal blog may not be complicated at all, but when it comes to choosing the best web hosting UK service plan for your online business, you need to take the necessary precautions for sure. You would want to have the best web hosting service provider hosting your site, wouldn’t you? That is why you need to pay close attention to uptime guarantee, server features, and of course customer support.

Most web hosting service providers offer 99.9% uptime guarantee, but only few of them actually keep the guarantee in force. That is why comparing hosting plans and reviews essentially important; you will be able to avoid having to go through all the trouble again in the near future. Once you find a solid and reliable web hosting company providing the right service plan for your online businesses, it is time to check out features offered.

You will most likely use web applications to support your online businesses, so make sure the hosting plan you are getting can support the web apps smoothly. There are some known compatibility issues, but it would be best to simply ask questions or request a trial if you are not sure. By asking questions, you will also be testing the customer support.

As you know, I had rebranded my old blog domain to Blognamic dot com. I did some research and of course, gathered a few advices from the experienced web guys before i actually did the correct way. Doing the correct way is important as it ensures that you will not lose any SERP rankings and get blacklisted by the big “G”.

The Wrong Way

This is what i have done wrong and is NOT recommended. My old blog name is derek-ang.com, therefore to rebrand the blog, my initial thoughts was to parked my new domain, blognamic.com to the directory in my server that my files is located. So for example, derek-ang.com and blognamic.com will be parked to /sites/blog ( the same directory path). However, this is a big mistake in terms of SEO. For technical aspects, it works perfectly fine. However, in SEO, search engines DO NOT LIKE duplicate content. Parking the 2 domains to the directory will results in duplicate listing in the search engine when they spidered your site. And this ultimately can result in your website being blacklisted by search engines.

The Recommended Way

The following steps are the best practices when moving your website to a new url; rebranding

1) Sign up for Google Webmaster Tool
2) Verify the ownership of both your website.
3)  Create 301 redirects from old url to new url.
4) Submit change of address to inform Google webmaster team that you have change your url.
5) Submit sitemap for new url so that Google can index your new url pages.

How to create a 301 redirect

This is where some technical parts come into issue. Configuring 301 redirects is a relatively simple process that consist of only 2 steps. ( However, configuring 301 redirects differs from different webservers).

Step 1 - Edit your httpd.conf file to allow 301 redirects

Add “AllowOverride All” to the end of the configuration file. After all save the file and restart webserver ( apache) to allows changes to take effect.

Step 2 - Adding .htaccess file for adding 301 redirect entries

To redirect from old site to a new website. Below are entries that you need to enter.

For example,

redirect 301 / http://www.newsite.com/
redirect 301 /about/ http://www.newsite.com/about/

So what the above entries do is to rediect http://www.oldsite.com to http://www.newsite.com and http://www.oldsite.com/about/ to http://www.newsite.com/about/

After you have create all entries for your page, save the .htaccess file ( name the file as .htaccess)  and upload into the root directory of your old website location.

It is recommended to create page by page redirects so that you can ensure that all pages in your old website are redirected to the new website successfully. After one day, login to Google webmaster tool to see if there’s any crawlers errors.

Just 2 days ago, i finally made my decision to buy the Thesis wordpress theme from DIYTHEMES, INC. Well, Blognamic will be built on this powerful awesome, and flexible framework. With alot of factors taken into consideration; the loading speed, the scalability, the ease of use and of course the most important factor, seo benefits, thesis theme is no doubt a worthwhile investment for serious wordpress blog developers/designers.

I would say that to understand Thesis framework, you would need to have some basic understanding of html/css/php. However, if you have none of the mentioned experience, don’t worry as after all it isn’t that hard to understand to framework totally, you just to take some time and explore the scripts, asking questions in their populated support community. For the plans now, Blognamic will be built using wordpress platform ( Using Thesis theme framework) with a customized bridge to VBulletin 4.0 ( To take advantage of the social community feature). I’m still deciding on the various commerical software that can possibly bring the best social community features out of Blognamic. The reason why we won’t develop our own communtiy software is due to the time contraints factor and money. You know, why bother to create something that you can purchase in the market already? Save time, save effort and of course, money$$.

For me, i have spent a few hours these 2 days, customizing Thesis theme, including our brand logo, trying out the Thesis theme’s functionality. It totally rocks. Now, Blognamic are already reaping the SEO benefits from Thesis Theme. Compared to the old theme, with thesis theme, our code for the blog are now alot cleaner and neater and having neat codings is a crucial factor that affects how search engine spiders crawl your website. Our traffic has increased by at least 20%, having an increase of 100+ unique visitors for the past 2 days daily. ( Confident it will stay consistent). That’s pretty good results right?

One big mistake that alot of websites make  is the failure to develop a unique style to differentiate itself from others. If you don’t believe me, just google ” blog using thesis themes”. I would say that majority of the existing sites uses the same thesis default style. In Blognamic, we wanted to be different, therefore i will be designing a unique theme for Blognamic in the coming weeks. Having a unique style will definitely build value to the site. If you are a wordpress blogger and you ain’t using thesis theme, i would surely recommend you to make a switch. It’s worth the investment.

Beautiful Unique Thesis Theme

Below is some thesis theme designed by some of the awesome designers on the net. Just see how flexible each thesis theme can be.

After months of talking about rebranding derek-ang.com, i finally took my first step in this major project rebrand change over of mine. Derek-ang.com is  my first blog and is started around 2 years ago while i was still in college, doing my final year project. Things started out really well, with alot of support from fellow forum peeps and of course my friends. However, as time passes, choosing the domain (derek-ang.com) seems to cause some downfall in determining the value of the blog. Who would possibly be interested in a blog that is named after derek ang? Is he a celebrity or public figure? Hell NO. That is why i have this plan of mine to rebrand the blog into something that can attract attention and of course brandable.

Blognamic. I chose this name because i think it rocks and it rhymes well. Actually i was brainstorming about powerful expression words like “Dynamic, intensive and ….  finally i settled myself with Blognamic. I will be developing Blognamic into a blogger community whereby bloggers, webmasters or entrepreneurs can mingle around and share their knowledge with one another. Blognamic will serve as an online school for noobies to learn everything about blogging. Of course, i will be building Blognamic from scratch, releasing new, informative articles every week. All my previous blog posts will be dumped into a  ”Blog” section. It’s a section whereby i will blog about my experiences, interesting stuffs,  internet encounters etc. The main theme of Blognamic will be around Blogging, therefore you can imagines the type of categories i will be creating soon.

Well, as many of you know, i had stopped blogging in derek-ang.com for months. Many things happened around me, i had graduated from Nanyang Polytechnic Singapore and now i am serving my compulsory national service for 2 years. ( another 8 more months to go). I learnt alot of things, matured and most importantly, i looked at things differently now. So, I’m taking this really seriously now! It’s a first step.

Finally guys, stay tuned! If you are looking to be updated, be sure to subscribe to our rss feeds. ( Link at the bottom of the post).

We’re on it again! It’s been ages since we had our last paid review request over at this blog. Today, we will be reviewing a established web service by the name of Duneier. Duneier.net is a sophisticated rapidshare search engine that indexed rapidshare links throughout the internet. It has a “google” interface that provides a simple and clean yet easy to use feel. Unlike other similar rapidshare search engine that purely just run on turnkey scripts, Duneier rapidshare search engine has their own unique crawler (bot) that index links from the internet every seconds.

For those of you who might not be that techy savy enough, a crawler is a script that is written by the engineers to collect specific data from the internet ( websites). A powerful crawler plays a important part in defining how big the search engine can grow into. Since the launch of Duneier rapidshare search engine, it has already  indexed over 8 millions rapidshare links. Instead of just indexing links, i am told by the engineers behind Duneier that their crawler are actually capable of scanning the indexed links and check each and every links if their status are ok or deleted. If in any case where the links are deleted, the entries will be removed from their server database.

Before writing this review, i have been experimenting with the website, testing the features, the speed between searches etc. I have tried searching links for flashforward season 1 and demi lovato albums. You can go straight to the search page by clicking on the hyperlinks to see how it looks. The presentation of the results are pretty good and straightforward. A music file is represented by media player icon, a video file by digital film icon and a zip/rar file by a package icon. This is good as it allows users to differentiate between different file formats at the first glance.

There might be many questions on asking, why use Duneier rapidshare search engine while i can use google search? The answer is simple. It’s a more “niche” service. And i suppose that Duneier will be more efficient if you are searching for only files hosted on rapidshare. However, i am not saying that google search ain’t that good for searching rapidshare files. Use google if you can’t find what you want on Duneier, afterall google is notable for their ability to return most relevant results and their immense database.

Ways to improve the site

For every review here in future, we will be giving the owner some feedbacks that we thought can be implemented to improve their website further. As a web designer myself, i  feel that the logo can be improved further. A catchy and memorable logo can create good brand awareness for the audience. Also, more features on the result page further enhance the presentation of information. One good example will be the ratings, to allows users to rate the listing, whether the file is  relevant or correct. Comments is also another good way of getting feedbacks. Users can comment on listing, whether the video is of good quality or not. All these simple features can allows other users to know if that’s the correct file that they wants.

So if you are looking for rapidshare links, why not give Duneier rapidshare search engine a try? Hope it helps.

There seems to be a growing trend online of people wanting to hack other people’s Facebook account. It is quite amazing how few people realize that this is actually illegal, since any online accounts are considered private property, just like someone’s home. People seem to understand that breaking and entering into someone’s home is illegal and definitely not something to ask online, yet they don’t see that hacking into someone’s account is just as bad. Then, of course, there are those who understand this but are in the “business” of identity theft. Although, it is highly unlikely you will find these folks asking online how to do it. How to hack facebook accounts.

Now, to be able to protect yourself from these hacking attempts you need to understand how it is done and also what can happen as a result. It’s not as difficult as it may seem, if you know what you are doing, so we will be looking at a few ways it can be done by creating some hypothetical case studies. This way you will know what steps to take to protect your account and private information, as well as that of your friends.

One way a stranger can gain access to your account is by checking your friends list, which is public. This person then chooses one of your friends, downloads their picture and copies their publicly available information and then proceeds to set up a copycat account. Since Facebook is very user friendly this will take them less than a minute to do.
Once the account is set up this person sends you a friend request and since you believe you know this person you accept and suddenly a stranger has access to all your information and you have no idea something is wrong. It is frightening how simple it really is. The problem is that there is no way you can check whether or not a friend request is legitimate or not.

There are certain ways to deal with this issue. First and foremost, don’t just switch to automatic pilot when accepting friends. You know you do it. You have so much stuff to go through so you don’t bother to check the person’s profile so you just click, click, click your way into supplying some stranger with your private information. Before you just accept a new friend have a good look at their picture and check out their profile. If their profile is very sketchy with little information then it is very likely this is a copycat account. You can also check for common friends, if you think that maybe it’s a real request, but if you have absolutely no friends in common then maybe you should be a little more circumspect before accepting.

Also, you should never add strangers. Just like people teach their children not to talk to strangers, why would you add a complete stranger as a friend, especially since you can never know who is hiding behind the computer screen. It’s much better to be safe rather than sorry. Another step you can take is to limit your profile so only people you add to your list can see your profile, it will involve more work and a little extra time but it is worth it in the long run.

A lot of these hackers rely on human psychology to gain access to your information. They know the statistics, namely that 40% of friend requests are accepted, no questions asked. To make it even easier for themselves they set up an account with the sweetest photo they can find, so sweet that it can give you cavities, and the nicest name in the world. Who is going to believe that a cute kitten is actually intent on uncovering their private information and intends to use it for their own personal gain?

Social networks make it easy for these people to prey on the unsuspecting since they can hide behind their computers and no one is any the wiser. So, you must be as cautious online as you are offline. You wouldn’t give your information to just anyone who walked up to you in the middle of the street and asked for your address, phone number, list of friends and the places you like to go, now would you? So why do it online? You have to make sure you check the veracity of the friend requests you receive by at least checking out their profile, and even asking your friends if they know this person. Don’t fall into the trap of the childish competition of “I have more friends than you do”, since a lot of these hackers exploit this weakness.

Now, this discussion may have been for naught if you have your profile set to public. That’s like putting an advertisement in the paper calling all stalkers to come pay you a visit, with your home address and phone number as well. Set it to private, now! You can let people search for you, but make sure you are in control of what they can see.
You are probably thinking to yourself by now things along the lines of, what can anyone use birthdays for or other such information? Well, the answer is simple, a lot of services, including banks, use your birthday and other such information to verify your identity. The best way to avoid these issues is to try and refrain from supplying too much information that can be used to verify your identity. We all know that the internet is about sharing information and making friends, but do you give, even your closest offline friends, your banking details and credit card verification codes? I think not. So why would you supply someone you don’t know, online with all your information?

Another pitfall is when you innocently announce to the entire world that you are going to be on holiday starting tomorrow, for a week. It probably never crosses your mind that this is a way to let any felons know that your house will be empty for a week. You might as well mail them the key as well. You wonder how they can discover your address? The sad thing is they probably already know it because this person may be a friend you think you made online who you have been talking to regularly and you have disclosed information about yourself, never realizing this person had any ulterior motives. So, maybe it would be wiser just to call the people you know to tell them that you are going away. Or better yet, don’t tell anyone, especially if your home will be empty.

It is frightening to realize how much something you considered as innocent as making friends online can impact you offline. Maybe now that you know you will take steps to protect yourself and then you won’t have any regrets. It’s always better to be a little more paranoid than to cry later. Knowing how hackers normally hack facebooks account can better secured your facebook account.

In this internet era that we are living in now, the web hosting service providers are probably having a hard time, fighting with one another,  for customers to engage their services everyday. With millions of website being hosted daily, the web hosting industry is a indeed a very competitive industry. Of course, there are many web hosting companies out there in the market, catering the needs to host that million of websites. But, as a consumer of such services, how are you going to choose among that millions of companies?

Today, we are glad to introduce a website that helps consumers like me and you to make that difficult choice. Upperhost is a website that offer great and detailed reviews of different web hosting companies. ( I would probably say, some of the most established companies in the niche). It strives to provide the best web hosting service reviews and solutions for users by consistently updating their weekly chart and testing of their services.

The main objective of Upperhost is to provide realistic and reliable reviews of different web hosting companies in the industry. Therefore, unlike others web hosting review sites, Upperhost does not take in any advertisements from third parties to specifially promote their services. This is indeed good as advertisements can tends to mislead users when making a choice. Upperhost is made up of  a team of over 20+ experienced webmasters. These webmasters are responsible for testing the individual web hosting services and providing honest and reliable web hosting reviews for the users. It’s not just a one hour work in writing the review and that’s it. These webmasters spent hours and hours per week, researching the various web hosting services, testing out it’s different features and how it caters to different consumers with different needs.

I would say Upperhost is a very different web hosting review site that i come across compared to others. One such thing is that opinions and ratings is not based on clicks & ratings ( from visitors) or advertising dollars. It’s is solely solely based on a team of professional webmasters that know the industy needs well.

As a web developer, i have been consistently looking for web hosting providers to host projects. Therefore, upperhost will definitely eliminate the excessive time that i will spent googling for suitable providers. If you happen to be looking for web hosting, i would recommend you to read the hostgator web hosting review and the hostmonster review over at Upperhost. For your information, i have been a loyal customer of Hostgator for years.

That’s all for my review of Upperhost and hope this website will in turn make your life more easier when chooseing your web hosting providers.

This is a guest post contributed by Sarah Harvey on how she make money online off her free time. Follow her here on twitter to know more about her.

Selling Handcrafts Online

Have you ever thought of working with handmade crafts or creating your own? Why not make money from your handmade crafts that you so lovingly create?

Well to my surprise I found there was an easy way to make money with handmade crafts. Here are the basic steps you need to follow:

1. Sign up with www.etsy.com

Yes, you heard me right. I discovered a great social community called Etsy where you can buy and sell all things handmade. Some categories where you can sell your handmade crafts in could be art, bags and purses, ceramics and pottery, dolls and miniatures etc. There are many other categories you can choose from. It is worthwhile to have a look.

So once you have signed up, now what?

2. Sell your hand made crafts.

3. You could create digital collage pieces that you can sell for $3-$5 a time. This is the only time where you can collect public domain art and make your own to sell on this site. One thing you need to keep in mind is that you need to mention the fact that it is digital and that people can print it out. Of course you have to work on your pieces to make it creative and interesting or else it will not sell.

Here is a link where someone is selling their digital collage:

http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php…_desc&includes[]=tags&includes[]=title

Now that is one way of making easy money on the internet.

So besides handmade crafts, how else can you make a bit of money?

Offering Freelance Writing Services

My personal favorite is to do some freelance writing.

Now some people may not enjoy the idea of writing, but for those that have a bit of creativity, you can easily make a bit of money part-time. If an extra $100-$500 sounds like it can help your family financially then consider freelance writing.

The catch is most people do not know where to start looking for these opportunities.

Here are some sites where you sell your services on:

http://www.guru.com

http://www.freelancewritinggigs.com/

Both the mentioned sites you can scour for potential jobs, but if you are more adventurous and love to attract visitors to your own sites then I would have to say that you need to sign up to http://www.ezinearticles.com and write informational content. The more interesting your content, the better it will rank and if you are selling a product or service on your website, you will make money from this. But like everything else it takes dedication and perseverance.

As for advertising your services, start with the basics. Create some business cards once you are confident of yourself, and start to think as a professional. If you don’t have a domain name yet, it is worthwhile to get one. Get a clean design and have the url imprinted on business card and stationary. Approach your local convenience shops and see if they will allow a free advert on the community boards. On the internet you can gather a reputation by participating in discussion forums, social sites and blogs of interest. In the end the more effort you make, the better the rewards will be in the long run.

Do you believe that a mere investment of $$7.15USD can make you hundred of dollars monthly? I know that many people will think that this is a scam when they first saw the title of this post. If you happen to think like this, you are just one of the many ignorant people in the world that could’nt see the “light”, the “power” that lies behind internet. In this post, i will be emphasizing on the “main principles” that is hidden behind making money online. I will be sharing and stating examples on why one should be making use of the internet ( making websites ) to make money. Please note that this post is not targeted at people who are already making money online, it’s specially written for people who have absolutely no experience in making money online and would like to learn more and do so.

At a start, i thought that to make money online, one need to know how to develop a website. But i was wrong. Case studies in the web shows that even if you are not tech-savy enough to make a website, it doesn’t mean you can’t make money online. Well, not ALL web developers/designers know how to make money online. So don’t worry if you don’t know anything about making websites, you can still make money though. Do you know that the most successful web design company in Austrialia is run by a guy who have absolutely no idea on how to even create a simple html page? 10 years back, it’s easy to make money online! NOW, it’s even easier!! Why do i say this? Just look at the number of people who manage to make money online now compared to the number in the past, it’s growing!

So now, are you convinced that making money online doesn’t require any programming/designing skills? Back to the main topic, how did $$7.15USD makes me $180USD on autopilot? Actually, if you have an existing blog, you already have the potential or resources to make money through it. You just need do so some hardwork and tweaking to start the ëngine” of your money machine. Let me share the amount of money that i invested in this blog. It’s $7.15 USD. Yes, it’s not a lie. Now, this blog is worth at least 200 x more than the inital investment. I have listed it for sale to gauge the worth, and you can see that it get bids over $1000 USD. Since the day i launched this blog, it has made me thousands of dollars already. ( through advertisments, selling reviews etc ) And it all started with just $7.15USD. That’s why i am into ÏNTERNET”

The second part of the post, i will be sharing on how you can tweak your existing blog to start making money. Note that it’s not some step by step tutorial, it’s just some main principles that you should be doing to start off.

What to blog about?

If you are dead serious about making money off your blogs, i will recommend you to blog about things that you have an extensive knowledge of. Examples, games, sports, etc. Normally, users visits blog to learn more about new things, so if you ain’t  any celebrities, models, or well-known personals, don’t monetize your personal blogs. I would recommend you to start a new blog and blog about stuffs that will interest others. A niche blog will be far easier to promote compared to a personal blog.

Driving Traffic

The most crucial factor before being able to make money online is to have traffic to your blog. Even if you have developed a superb, cool web service or application, if you did not drive traffic to let the world knows about it. You fail. This is also one of the reason why many websites failed though they have potential. What’s the use of having the website but not being able to publicize it and let the world know about it? You do not have any idea on how to start building traffic? Below are a list of posts that may helps:

1. How To Get Traffic To Your Blog
2. Building Page Rank – Rank Right up There!
3. 8 simple ways to SEO your blog to perform better in Google
4. 5 secrets to gain more backlinks for your blog
5. I have a website but no one knows about it! Why?

Selling Advertising

If you asked me,  the easiest and slackest way to earn money online is through selling advertising. Of course, you would need to have a platform to place ads, in this case, the platform is the blog. Also, advertisements is the key to passive income. This blog is making $180 USD passively from advertisements from various sources like Kontera, BuySell Ads, Text-Link-Ads and it’s private ad management center. For blogs, i would also recommend selling reviews. (Good source of income if you like writing)

3 main steps to make money off a blog

In summary, the 3 main steps to start money off your blog is to start blogging about topics that will interest others, then drive traffic to your blog and once traffic is consistent,  join ads programs that pays. With the correct techiques and perseverance, anyone can make money off their blogs now!

I hope this post actually can inspire and encourage you to start monetizing your blog. Don’t remember to leave a comment back here if you succeed in making your dollar.