I made a big move a couple weeks ago with my main site; I moved to a host with lots more disc space and bandwidth. The extra bandwidth was what I really needed most, but there’s nothing wrong with more disc space.

The host looked good, has a great reputation - in fact, I would still recommend them (Dreamhost, and not just because of the affiliate program; I’m hosting other sites with them), but they had some limitations I just couldn’t deal with for that particular site.

Tried another host. They were probably good, but when I transferred the Aspects of Home Business site over, something happened with one of the scripts running on the site, and it ate 6 Gig of bandwidth in about 12 hours, so they booted me with about an hour and a half’s email warning; that is to say very, very little warning since I read the email about an hour after it was sent. Even when I offered to remove the site they wouldn’t work with me to let my main site, which was not the problem at all, be up and running for my visitors. They claimed that my sites had been causing problems for days, which is interesting since I did get a look at the logs and it was quite clear which site caused the problems, and it had only been on their servers for about 12-14 hours before they shut it down. Yes, I caused a problem, but it wasn’t deliberate and I still haven’t figured out why the script went bonkers, and the site runs just fine now. Obviously, I can’t recommend them. Not just for giving me the boot, but also because they kept insisting that I had caused trouble for days when that was completely untrue and because they wouldn’t work with me at all.

Finally, I found Site5. Now that has been a good experience. My site is up and running, and they even helped me get my discussion boards get online, when that turned into a major, major problem. Fast tech support and very friendly. Utterly amazing disc space and bandwidth. A control panel that lets you do more than manage your sites - you can manage your billing too. I’ve only been a customer for a few days, and I’m impressed. Their discussion boards tell you when outages are expected and when servers should come back online - plenty of effort to keep you, the customer informed.

I like that.

Have you ever wondered what’s going on with AdSense? Now the folks working at Google AdSense have a blog. It’s only a few days old, but hopefully this will be a great resource for what’s going on at AdSense.

The Googleblog has always been interesting reading. You get interesting tips from Google, things they’ve found interesting, just like any other blog… but since it’s coming from Google you might get some very interesting information. I’ve seen tips on how to search more effectively, explainations about relevant court case rulings and so forth. Even if you don’t look at it regularly, it’s worth an occasional look.

I wouldn’t neglect Yahoo’s blog either. It’s hard enough to figure out what search engines want, why not pay attention to what they’re willing to say?

Went to the bank the other day to deposit some checks. The teller took one look and wanted to know what I did. She was amazed to find out that I could earn so much just from a website. Of course, I was careful to tell her that it took me about two years to get to where I was earning the kind of money I’m earning now, but still, she was amazed.

That’s one of the delights of succeeding in home business. I would guess that this girl had heard of affiliate marketing before, judging by her reaction to my description of it, but I think it was the first time she had met someone making a living at it.

I directed her to one of my sites and told her to just email me if she had any questions. We’ll see if she comes along.

That’s one of the things I love to do - share with others that I am succeeding and get them pointed in the right direction. Most won’t succeed at what I do anyhow - as with all business, most will fail, but some will do wonderfully and I’ll have made a difference.

I saw an article today which says that Yahoo will be launching their ad network for small publishers tomorrow, August 3. This should be interesting to watch. I’m not getting in at the start, but I do wonder how much trouble they’ll have, since every publisher who has been banned from
AdSense is likely to try to join. I hope they do a good job of watching out for click fraud.

Certainly, some of those who were banned will have learned their lessons and be good publishers for Yahoo, but there will always be determined scammers out there.

Lots of webmasters have been looking forward to having competition out there for AdSense, even if they’re in good standing with Google. It will be interesting to see what, if anything, Google does as a response to this.