Hosting Madness

Purchasing website/file hosting is sometimes like gambling. You win some, you lose some. (And in fact, some lose the lot) .

A few months ago I took a gamble and signed up to DreamHost, one of the most popular and widely used web hosting companies on the internet. I didn’t really know why they were so widely used and popular – they had a bad webpage and it all looked to good to be true.

I ended up signing up with a promo code and paying something incredibly low like $50 for a whole year of hosting with a free domain name thrown in. That price included 20gig of space and 1000gb of bandwidth! Insane. Not to mention every single week it goes up in gigabytes of space & bandwidth! Even crazier!

Now you wont believe what they did last week. Try: “Hey lets double everyones bandwidth” and “Hey lets give every 10 times more space.” No Kidding. I now have 200gig of space and 2000gig of bandwidth each month. Storage grows by 1gb a week and Bandwidth grows by 16gb a week. What’s going on here! These guys must be mad but it has happened. Some customers are even using this service as an offline backup hosting solution and just tranferring everything to their DreamHost account.

What now? Well I reccomend DreamHost if you truly want to host anything and everything you want on the web without having to worry about limits (this service is practically no limits with the amount they give you) & if you want a reliable large web/file host. They are even releasing new products such as files forever which enables you to store you files forever with a price that is practically for free! It’s just too good to be true – sign up before they raise their prices.

For those who are interested I have a promo code you can use to get yourself $50 off instantly. It just makes it even cheaper. Just enter the code: BLAZE50 when prompted on the signup screen and they will honour the discount for you.

Also if you can refer people in the future, you end up with cash in your back pocket or completely free hosting. So it helps to spread the word.

When SEO Fails & The Importance of Impressing Real People

Flash isn’t dead. In fact, Flash could well be growing in more of a niche than we realised. A lot of people may already know this but STOP PRESS: 1. SEO is great, but it’s strategies & implementation tend to spoil a website (gasp, ooh ahhh!). 2. Flash is great, for multimedia style presentations with fantastic creative displays of information & visual elements – when you don’t need to index a million pages & be number one for everything and top 10 google and ppc and adsense and paid links and ctrs and arrrrrrrgh! . . . . . Brain Explode!

My point here is simple: talk to more REAL people (not search engines). The best way to do this is to draw them in with creativity & good flash.

Don’t get me wrong, SEO is important.

…But there are so many people on the bandwagon. It’s gone to the extent of a large number of people using SEO practices as the basis for building websites.

Why not engage & use real life principles.

Be Creative

Be Spontaneous

& most of all

Be Intersting

Also I have found a good site with some good visual flash FX (effects) for those interested after the jump.

Different is Better than “Better”

Seth has it right when he says:

When you make something that works a little better, you're playing the same game, just keeping up with the status quo. When you make something different, on the other hand, you're trying to change the game.

Instead of creating something just that little bit better, why not try an innovate? Why not do something no one else is doing? It will be a lot more fulfilling for yourself and your business.