What do we need actually from a hosting account
Nowadays, you can see that many hosting companies are screaming about their super fat hosting packages with gigabytes of spaces and bandwidths. And that is only to attract more customers to use their service. But, as a blogger, what do you really need to host your blog (or blogs).
Now lets talk about webspace. You can get gigabytes of disk space just for a small amount of money. For example, my hosting (not this blog) offers 3GB webspace for just only RM80 (USD22.80) per year. But do you really need that much space? If your blog is still fresh and new, 3GB is too much for you. For most blog (except photo blogs), 50 MB is already enough. This blog begins its first 6 months with just 50MB. After that it begged for more due to increase in the number of posts and images.
Actually, it is not that hard to find hosting providers, which offer small amount of webspace. One of the example is Sempoihosting.com. You have the option to choose how many disk space you want for one year and you can upgrade your package anytime.
Another example is NearlyFreeSpeech.net, which offer you ultra low price, USD0.01 per megabyte-month, USD1.00 per gigabyte for data transfers and USD3.65 per year for one MySQL databse. At first, I think this is a great and cheap solution for me. Besides, Bugmenot.com is also hosted by this company. But after calculating the amount that I must pay for a year, it is clear that the hosting package from my current hosting is more favourable.
This is the details of the calculations
My monthly data transfers : 2.5GB
Cost per year: 2.5×1.00×12= USD 30.00
My webspace : 115.68 MB
Cost per year: 115.68×0.01×12= USD 13.88
MySQL Database: USD 0.01 per day
Cost per year: USD3.65
The total amount: USD 47.53, more that double the cost of my current webhosting. Hmm, I have read all over the internet about bloggers do not really need big space. But if I can get more spaces, bandwiths, and addon domains (NearlyFreeSpeech offers unlimited addon domains, but not Sempoihosting). If you have more spaces, you can experiment a lot. For example, I am now building my photo gallery and photo blog under the same hosting account. If you plan to have multiple blogs, do not hesitate to buy the big-sized hosting package. It worths a while.
Conflict between WP-ContactForm and Gmail spam filter
Hello again. It has been about ten days from my last post. Actually I was not busy, but just not having the mood to write. It is quite a good news because now I am certified as not a blogacholic blogger. By the way, it is not a good practice to let your blog not updated for 10 days. According to this graph from Sitemeter.com, this site suffered loosing of visitors.
Regarding the title of this entry, all emails sent to me using the WP-ContactForm plugin are considered as spam in my GMail. Even after I tagged the emails as “not spam”, the next emails still land in the Spam folder. To solve this problem, I switched to another contact from plugin, intouch. But the result is negative.
Luckily, I have found the solution, although it is not so ideal. You just need to change your gmail address in the WP-ContactForm option page to Yahoo Mail address or other not-so-good-at-filtering-spam email providers.
How to make a scraper site using Wordpress
First of all, maybe some of you don’t know what is a scraper site. I myself know about scraper site just after I have built one. According to Wikipedia, a scraper site is a website that pulls all of its information from other websites using web scraping. In essence, no part of the scraper is original.
Scraper sites are mostly created for monetizing the site using advertising programs such as Google AdSense. Such sites can get ranked better in search engine because the contents of the website are based on the selected keywords and the content if updated daily if the website is using RSS method.
My scraper site is about Wordpress and powered also by Wordpress. It is only about two months old and has currently 437 posts. Techlogs is over one year old, but the number of post is only 136.
Ok. Now let begin to make your own Wordpress scraper site. (This is only for educational purpose. Scraper sites are bad and it will make the search engine crowded with unwanted results. In other words, scrapper sites are spams)
Steps of creating scraper site.
- Get SmartRSS Plugins from DevPlug.net, which can be downloaded here.
- Follow the installation steps.
- Blend your adsense code into the blog
- Generate traffic to your scraper site.
- Start earn money
Some tips to get RSS feeds. Search for the targeted keywords with google. For my Wordpress scraper site, I’ve chosen the keywords like Wordpress themes, Wordpress plugins, and Wordpress Tips and trick. Thanks to the blogger, who are using wordpress because it is very easy to grab RSS feeds based to category.
For example: A blogger blog about Wordpress theme and categorize it into Themes category. To get the category’s feed, just put feed at the end of the permalink for that category.
E.g. http://blogaddress.com/category/themes/feed.
Want to see scraper site in action? Take a look at my scraper site here.
