Usually a blog website won’t need to much space, it’s mostly text. That’s one of the great things about a blog that helps you keep a reliable webhost without paying a lot of money. You probably know from experience that getting 5GB of bandwidth for $5 per month leads to oversold servers and downtime. Usually with so many clients a company that sells packages like this will also lack customer service qualities.

However, in order to make a blog popular you sometimes need to give away things, like Wordpress Themes and Plugins, and that will require a lot of space and bandwidth. Do you want to compromise reliability and support for a bigger package? Probably not. In this case, I would suggest checking out a hosting company like Gossimer, which offers a lot of space and bandwidth for a minimal price.

Something few people know is that with a little big of effor you can set up your account so that your downloads are on the large account but your site is still on your current host. All you need to do is contact your host and ask them to edit the IP address for a subdomain you set up. If you have a reseller account, you can do this on your own. In the DNS zone when you point the subdomain to another IP (the one Gossimer, gives you), it will point to that server and pull up the files on that server.

There are some great ways to make use of an account like this withouth jeopardizing your sites reliability. I’m not saying they oversell their accounts, but when you do the math it’s hard to believe otherwise. They offer limits on their features, like 1 MySQL database, so you may not wish to use them for a full featured site, but for purposes such as this they could be an extremely valuable, yet cost effective, service.

Are you accepting paid reviews or ads with offers that are lower than you think you deserve? You probably are, I am. Why? Because we need to make money to survive and if it’s a choice between accepting low price ads or not getting anything at all, we tend to lower ourselves. Advertisers are going to try and get as many people out there for the lowest price they can. They don’t care that you have two kids, a mortgage, a dog with health problems..

Paid To Post
If you’re selling paid ads or reviews on your website you will need to take into consideration the time you spend on the review and how much your time is worth. Depending on your situation in life you may feel you’re worth more, but let’s start with minimum wage. If minimum wage is $5.25 per hour you know that you shouldn’t get any lower than that. Think about the amount of schooling you’ve had or your writing style to decide if you’re worth more. Personally, I feel like I’m selling myself short if I accept any less than $10 per hour. If you decide that you’ll accept nothing less than $10 an hour for your writing, then take into consideration the worth of a link on your website and how long that link and review will remain on your index page. If it will be pushed off by tomorrow, you should consider it to be lower than if it stays on the index 2-3 days.

Moving on to the review, there are a couple of things to keep in mind here as well. First, would be the amount of time you spent on the review. Not just in writing it and planning it, but also researching it and interacting on the website. Even if you enjoy the website and go deeper into it than you normally would, you are experiencing their website and your time is money. If you discuss the website with someone else to gain perspective, consider that time as well. Second, consider any images you made or entered into the review. Images in the post have had a better success rate for many paid posts and advertisers will usually pay more for this.

Optionally, you can consider any costs you have. If you need to make a video for the post, you’ll consider the cost of your camera. You may also consider the cost of your computer. If your computer costs $1200 and it lasts for 3 years, you’ll want to make back $400 each year. If you do 100 paid posts per year (1 every 3 days) you would want to add $4 into the worth of those paid posts. By this login you could also consider the cost of your internet and a percentage of your electric bill (if you’re not already writing them off in your taxes).

Banners, Adverts, Etc
Adding a link, banner, or advert to your sidebar takes minimal time, so the worth of this link is determined differently. I’m talking about just ads, not pay per click or affiliate links. Many sites out there will help you, such as Text Links Ads, by reviewing your website and higher or lowering the amount. They sell the ads for you so they’ll have a pretty good idea how to keep them selling.

If your website has 1000 unique visitors per day and a following of the same 10 people who comment, you can expect a fairly nice amount. One of my friends who uses Text Link Ads had numbers like this and she was making about $80 per ad, selling 10 ad spaces. That’s $800 per month. Of course, keep in mind, you’re going to lose some of it in fees. If you go through a place like Text Link Ads they’ll take some fees, and if you accept them yourself via Paypal there will be fees involved with the transaction.

However, those are text links. If you’re selling an advert or a banner spot, you can expect more. The advantage to image based ads is that they can grab more attention and they can be animated, to get more of their message across. They’re also much larger than a text link. A banner or advert will be worth more than a simple text link, but they will be more of an intrusion. Make sure to consider the quality and relevance of the link/ad before accepting it.

Relevance is more important than people may think. On this website if I had a choice between a banner ad for diapers and a banner ad for computer equipment, it would be an easy choice. The diaper ad would have little chance at survival on a site like this. You want to choose a good balance between bids and relevance, because a non relevant link will not continue to advertise on your site and the relevant one may not still be there for you next month.

Please feel free to comment if you’d like to add to this.

Backups are an essential part of any website. Most hosting companies will offer backups with their services, but you shouldn’t rely only on the automated backups they offer. I can tell you first-hand that the cPanel automated backups are not 100% reliable. I ran into a problem once where they just stopped running altogether but I didn’t notice.

The only real drawback to saving your backups to your own computer is that you don’t have it anywhere else, and creating a backup disk each day is tedious. And with my personal computer getting older, I’m a little worried about losing my digital photos and all my past work. I keep everything.

This is where keeping an online backup is handy. But you can’t simply pick any website to upload your files to. IDrive is an online backup service that encrypts your files for added protection. They offer up to 2GB completely free. If that’s not quite enough, like 5 years worth of photos, they have a 50GB storage package for $50 per year.

The features on both packages are amazing. They have a ‘continuous backup’ feature which will allow you to automatically back up your (updated) files every 10 minutes. You simply download it, install it, and you’re ready to go. Or if you want to make a manual backup you simple drag and drop it in like you would moving files from folder to folder on your hard drive. Then you have the detailed statistics you can refer back to if necessary.

I’ve just set up my account today, I’ll update you later on how it goes.

I’ve put my hosting company, E-Starr, into the Sponsored Reviews pool to generate a little buzz. My review isn’t worth much, but I’m hoping to get some word of mouth going. Doing this has given me an advertiser’s view of the system and I thought I would tell you a bit about it.

Just minutes after I set up my campaign I had a good 20 offers. Another half hour later, 20 more. It’s nice to see people are interested in helping me get my company out there. But if you look at my list of offers you’ll see that 95% of them list nothing more than their site names. Sponsored Reviews lists the rank and category next to it, and that’s about all there is to go on. But I need more info.

When you post your site name in Sponsored Reviews it will benefit you (and help the advertiser) if you tell a little about your site. They’ll want to know about your Page Rank, your Alexa, your Technorati, and your site’s participation level. Offer as much positive information as you can into your title, because no one’s looking at your description. When you have 300 offers to get through, the description is the last thing anyone’s going to look at.

So if you were an advertiser and I offered to review your site, you would see “The Blog World (PR4, -150k Alexa)” as the title of my site. This gives the advertiser the information they want upfront and gets the site seen faster than simply listing a title. Try it out, let me know if it helps you out any.