Found Not Lost

I have been hearing grumblings from other bloggers lately about their dissatisfaction with their host site provider. One of the main concerns is down time. When your host site experiences too many down times, it means that during those ‘down’ times your website is also offline. No one can access your site. Next most popular complaint is poor customer service. There are a great many of us bloggers out there who are just tech savvy enough to be dangerous. When we start messing with HTML, PHP and CSS, you just don’t know what’s going to happen. It helps A LOT when there is someone you can call to undo what you’ve done.

I haven’t heard much about Web Hosting Geeks, but if you’re looking for a web host, you may want to check out their ratings. I’m glad to see that my host, BlueHost, is rated pretty high on the list. Before you sign up for a year for a host provider you don’t know, make sure you check out others you haven’t heard about yet. One of them may just be a hidden gem you hadn’t discovered. Do your research and save yourself from a lot of headache and money.

Yeah, that’s what it feels like, sometimes. Our bedroom is the den. The girls like to hang out in our bedroom. Sometiems it gets so crowded I have to go elsewhere to read a book like the other day when I was looking for a place to hunker down to read Breaking Dawn. I ended up going to the back, in the garden, just so I can get some peace and read my book. My husband and I have discussed re-doing the house and getting some new home furniture. We sorely need it. The girls aren’t getting any smaller, only our space is. Geesh!

Speaking of ways to make money online, my sister has been sending me leads on surveys as a means to make money online. However, after looking at some of the sites and even signing up for a few of them, I’ve decided surveys are not for me. Even if some of them will send you promotional items for free in addition to the payment for taking the survey. I decided surveys aren’t for me because for one, they are just plain boring. After taking a couple of surveys I started getting bored answering pretty much the same question over and over again. Compared to sponsored blogging, the pay isn’t that great either. You can spend 10 to 15 minutes taking a survey and on average you would only make a few dollars if that. Some sites just give you ‘points’ that you can later redeem for promotional items.

So have you made money taking surveys? Was it worth it? Please tell me why or tell my what I’m doing wrong. Is there a method to make things go faster?

I’ve been entering a few contests lately because some of the prizes are just too irresistible. One contests I entered, for instance, was giving away a video cam another one was giving away an iPod. Awesome prizes, right? They are all pretty expensive prizes and I wonder how these sites are able to just give away such prizes. Could they really be making that much money from their blogs that they can easily giveaway promotional products without batting an eye? Then I found out that some ’sponsors’ will willingly give you an item to giveaway merely for the opportunity to be named and linked to as the sponsor! Did you know that? Well that sure was something new to me. Now hopefully I can grow my blogs enough that I can get similar offers.

One of the most common question asked among bloggers is, “Which is the best hosting service around?”. The answer is, it depends. It depends on how the purpose of your websites and how much do you know. If you are new to blogging or website maintenance and you aren’t all that tech savvy, then it will probably be best if you find a web hosting that provides great technical support.

Web Hosting Rating is a website that will be rating the different web hosting services available out there and will be classifying them by type such as Unix Hosting, Windows Hosting, Reseller Hosting, Dedicated Hosting and Managed Hosting. When they get all the ratings up, this may be a good starting point when searching for hosting solutions.