Data Center, Servers, etc.

They say the only thing a human brain cannot remember is pain. I truly believe that a lot of anger and details from the story I’m about to share with you are long gone. I’ve been meaning to share this story ever since moving away (..far away) from our the previous server providers and I’m not going to name any names because that’s not the purpose of this post.

The server providers I’m talking about are one of the industry’s leaders when it comes to X amount of customers they have, and advertising they push (*cough* superbowl *cough*). However, the product they provided (Dedicated Server) had no perks, (managed supports, automatic backup etc). No, nothing at all really. I was basically buying a box in one of their data centers and if it crashed then no one would reboot it. If it would have shut off, no one would have restarted it – and I’d have to call, wait approximately 5 – 7 minutes on the support and have them reboot it and it would take up to an hour to come back online. Sometimes, these things happened overnight and I’d wake up to a blank page, and sometimes I’d wait over 30 minutes on hold, or a customer rep wouldn’t even know how to deal with this issue and I’d just be left wandering. When I asked to move to another server the fee of the migration service was over $350 (Plesk to Plesk, nothing complicated) and said that it was going to happen between 24 to 48 hours, which means I had to take my entire business down for this operation.

Long story short(er) I was not as experienced as I am these days with managing a server nor did I know anyone who was able to manage a server besides Alexander Conroy (of esotech.org) and I didn’t want to bother him as often as I did and didn’t have the budgets to get his experienced team on board, I was pretty hopeless.

This would generally happen approximately once a week, once every two weeks that the server would randomly either crash or shut itself of, no errors w/ code were found in the log and I was running PHP & MySQL – why would this happen when I’m paying a fair amount for a dedicated server and it’s just supposed to work. About a month later as the servers health start going down. I realized that it was the hard drive that was going bad, and it kept putting the filesystem into read only mode which left me with no access. Eventually, like I said, it just died and took all my work with it (MySQL dropped, deleted, gone).

The thing that bummed me the most is that no one cared. I spoke to the highest level of administration and I was not even offered a refund, any perk, hours of communication and they offered me a months free (of a service that doesn’t work). What happened was that me and my staff had scraped off Google’s cached/indexed articles and manually uploaded it to a new database, which I had to purchase a new server (sadly, with the same company who provided me one for 1 month free at the time).

So yeah, that happened and I was pretty much bitchin’ to most of my friends and colleagues, I told my friends over at NetDNA (http://netdna.com) about that and they recommended that I’ll get in touch with Clint Chapman of Ubiquity Servers. Not 25 minutes after my conversation with Clint, we had set up a new box, and with a blink of an eye Team Ubiquity had migrated Bloginity.com over to the new server (FTP, MySQL etc) I couldn’t believe my own eyes. I was about to pay $350 for the migration fee to go from 1 server to another initially, within the same company, and they have done that free of charge, and that didn’t take 24-48 hours to do like the other company stated.

I realized I was being screwed, with what I like to call “The Umbrella System”, when they shove a large umbrella up your ass, and then slowly, they begin to open the umbrella.

I now have a fully managed server with the company and I have moved all my sites over there. I have also referred many of my friends & clients and the thing is this migration thing wasn’t a “hook up” it’s just a service Ubiquity offer, so if you are even considering to move your server to another one, they’d do it gladly in less than an hour.

I can’t word them up enough, seriously. I’ve looked up to Ubiquity for such a long time and I’ve been so passionate about the team that I now found myself Directing the Marketing dept here in Arizona. I truly believe in this team and that they have the best product in the market, hands down.

If you are a webmaster, working with any other server provider in the industry and you’re considering or thinking perhaps you’re not getting the service you’re looking for – I promise you that the prices you’ll get at Ubiquity are competitive, the support is of the strongest force, and the product is the best, guaranteed. You will never be left alone or talking to a random support associate. Quickest email replies, personal assistant. Just the experience you need to when you’re getting a managed server.

Big ups to the Support Team Ubiquity!

I have now joined forces with Ubiquity and am serving as the Director of Digital Marketing here. One of my first projects is to personally manage the Facebook/Twitter/Google+ pages,I will be sharing a lot of insight for web masters, and internet-based business owners. Make sure to follow and read the information I’ll be sharing. Do not hesitate to ask questions – if you have any, or concerns if there are any. Ideas, and thoughts. I’m here to think together and share the wealth of knowledge and experience.

Follow @UbiquityServers

My personal Klout

How do I measure the influence? It’s simple, the stats talk for themselves. A page/visit of 13, an average time of 20 minutes, and both of these stats apply to new visitors. Returning visitors at 45 minutes average time, with 19 – 25 page/visit. That means that the users are actually enjoying the content. And that’s for me influence.

I am by no means a Klout expert, I know that they are using around 35 factors to weight Facebook influence, and some factors from Twitter to measure your amplification. But that’s partially the reason I came to write my review about Klout and why I think they need to fire their staff.

Klout’s Website Sucks

If you’ve gone into Klout and used it for 20 minutes, you’d know that you could have done these exact tasks in less then 5 minutes using another platform but since Klout.com’s platform is so unresponsive at times I find myself clicking something, or waiting for a loading thing to finish and basically not utilizing my time right – and that caused me to stop visiting Klout and helping grow the influence there (vote for influential users, giving a K+ to a user, and so on).

Another problem that irritates me the most is that I monitor about 8 different Twitter accounts (businesses, personal, and other brands we operate) and Klout doesn’t have it’s own user login (why?!) there’s a “Sign with Twitter” and “Sign with Facebook” and whenever I click the Twitter option, it automatically logs me in with whatever I’m logged in with that specific browser.

Another known issue is that the “Merge Accounts” function rarely works. And when voting whose more influential (once a day, vote for 20 users) I can click “Vote” for about 100 times and nothing happens. I end up clicking “Skip” and revoting.

I just can’t believe that a company that size wouldn’t change it’s site up to something more simpler. I would have, and it wouldn’t have taken me any longer to do that.

Ever since around 2008 I’ve devoted my life to becoming an entrepreneur, it’s just that back in 2008 my father gave it a slightly different term, being 20 years old and having no job, working on my own project without a college degree, he called it “unemployment”. I’ve had my passion, and when 2009 hit I took that passion to the next level.

With all the stuff I’ve learned from working with some of the most talented “SEOers” in the industry I’ve implemented it into the blogging world, basing on organic growth. Never bought a single link, and focused most of my time on building a brand, with no guidance.

Now in 2012, I think I’ve succeeded at making a name for myself in the blogging world. People recognize my blog, some know me by first name, some were excited to meet me and that brought me some business but most of the people I meet don’t realize that this entire industry is smoke & mirrors. It’s hard to make money, you have to work hard to make it, and the longer you’re not taking action the more money you’re losing

Building businesses is not an easy task, and it’s a fact that you won’t be seeing profit on your first year. I’m so tired of seeing these entrepreneurs over-evaluating themselves at such a high ates yet they’re not making shit. If you’re keen to grow yourself and want to open a business, first research the market before you’re going to open that business. You don’t just open up a business because you’re passionate about a topic. That’s called “having a hobby”, with massive stupidity to turning it into a business. Start by defining your targets and I’m not talking about a target “I’ll get 100,000 uniques and then probably people will start advertising” – it’s just not how it works.

Over the last three years I’ve had the pleasure of meeting all sorts of entrepreneurs. The artistic type, the talented, and the hustlers, who like me know how to “pimp” these talents and put together plans to make real money. You might think you’re a hustler – but the way to really be a hustler is to commit to something and not work on 10 different things at once. Remember: “he who begins many things finishes but few.”

Most of these artists have a brilliant talent at what they’re doing, but talent doesn’t cut it. And while I’m at it, artists are not only fashion designers or painters, it’s also web designers, and web developers (like me). The problem is that they don’t know how to take it to the next level, and with all do respect, it’s their fault.

Arrogance & ignorance, and the failure to understand that when you’re not making any money you don’t say “I’m not going to do this project because it doesn’t meet my hourly pay” when you’re not making shit to begin with.

Here’s an example:

An artist is being offered $7,500 to paint a 4×7 painting for a lawyers office. However “your specialization” is only bigger paintings. Here’s where you’re wrong, you’re being hired for your talent and you will do per the request. Just like if I called a welder tomorrow and requested to take the same chair, but make it a bit taller – he’d customize it. Take that example and look at it in this way, if you’re a web developer and someone approached you with $10,000 to make a framework for a website, but your previous works were $25,000 I’m sure you could find a way to make a low-budget website because that’s your specialty. But you don’t ever ever decline an offer. You take every money you can from everyone you know and that’s how you become rich and I’ve seen so many developers giving up these opportunities because they “had no time to deal with it” yet they’re just going to stay at home and wait for another deal to come through when it never does. All it takes is to define the walls and explain to them what you’ll be doing and what they can expect. The idea is that you need to become a business man and learn to negotiate and maximize revenues.

Everything I do is designed to be milked to the last drop of revenue.

You can’t be picky.

The best tip from this page is to be consistent with your code but a lot of new HTML codes, with styling included. For example, no need to close paragraphs or lists anymore. Or the strangely, removing the “http://” and “https://” from src=” in otherwords, src=”//yourdomain.com”.

Check out the full HTML/CSS style guide in the link below.

http://google-styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/htmlcssguide.xml

• Would you trust the information presented in this article?
• Is this article written by an expert or enthusiast who knows the topic well, or is it more shallow in nature?
• Does the site have duplicate, overlapping, or redundant articles on the same or similar topics with slightly different keyword variations?
• Would you be comfortable giving your credit card information to this site?
• Does this article have spelling, stylistic, or factual errors?
• Are the topics driven by genuine interests of readers of the site, or does the site generate content by attempting to guess what might rank well in search engines?
• Does the article provide original content or information, original reporting, original research, or original analysis?
• Does the page provide substantial value when compared to other pages in search results?
• How much quality control is done on content?
• Does the article describe both sides of a story?
• Is the site a recognized authority on its topic?
• Is the content mass-produced by or outsourced to a large number of creators, or spread across a large network of sites, so that individual pages or sites don’t get as much attention or care?
• Was the article edited well, or does it appear sloppy or hastily produced?
• For a health related query, would you trust information from this site?
• Would you recognize this site as an authoritative source when mentioned by name?
• Does this article provide a complete or comprehensive description of the topic?
• Does this article contain insightful analysis or interesting information that is beyond obvious?
• Is this the sort of page you’d want to bookmark, share with a friend, or recommend?
• Does this article have an excessive amount of ads that distract from or interfere with the main content?
• Would you expect to see this article in a printed magazine, encyclopedia or book?
• Are the articles short, unsubstantial, or otherwise lacking in helpful specifics?
• Are the pages produced with great care and attention to detail vs. less attention to detail?
• Would users complain when they see pages from this site?

global $wpdb;
$find_this = “/home/”;
$replace_with_this = “/”;
$database = $wpdb->get_results(“SHOW TABLES”);
foreach($database as $database_tables):
foreach($database_tables as $database_table):
$table = $wpdb->get_results(“SHOW COLUMNS FROM $database_table”);
foreach($table as $column):
$column->Field;
$wpdb->query(“UPDATE $database_table SET $column->Field = REPLACE($column->Field,’$find_this’,'$replace_with_this’)”);
echo “UPDATE $database_table SET $column->Field = REPLACE($column->Field,’$find_this’,'$replace_with_this’)”;
endforeach;
endforeach;
endforeach;

A big thank you to Alexander Conroy (@Geilt) for writing this script out.

America demands invention and innovation to succeed, therefore we must act as a whole to continue the reshaping of today’s industry whether it’s offline online. Innovation is the key for success. Never stop innovating. Always develop, re-invent the wheel and reverse engineer.

Whether it is you are running a social network, an e-commerce or a simple WordPress site like Bloginity you are in the market to generating more pageviews. I have figured out a simple arrays that lead a user to browse 6+ pages per session and I spoke about it in my previous article on how to increase pageviews. Among displaying ‘rand’ images, eliminating titles to get the users curiosity to increase CTR there are other tools to help that.

First and foremost your presentation is everything. Keep it clean, don’t have a website that’s overly cluttered like Huffington Post or a design that’s disgusting as Perez Hilton’s site.

Here comes a product of which I wanted to blog about for a really long time. It’s called Nrelate, those who work close with me know how much I respect their work and how much I recommend their plugin for any WordPress lover, so much that I almost wanted to keep Nrelate just for myself and that never happens as I believe in sharing everything I know with all of you.

If you’re a WordPress user you know that there is a fair amount of related-content plugins, such as YARRP, however, what I found about YARRP is that it seriously damages your MySQL, creating huge amount of tables slowing down the entire server completely. Since that’s not an option to consider, we are moving towards other plugins, here comes an attractive package.

Head over to Nrelate.com and give it a try. You won’t regret it. Follow @Nrelate

Here is the perfect explanation of social media:

The guys at Bully Breed Rescue posted this on Facebook 21 hours ago. 730+ shares with donations to the animal hospital.

And here’s an update, 8 hours ago.