Once you set up you blog and have a bunch of niche sites running AdSense, making money maybe, you’re happy. Right? Right? Wrong!

Apparently I’m never happy, and must think of fresh new ways to improve on everything and make every small glitch dissapear.

One of those improvement-eureka moments was yesterday, when I said to myself that it’d be great to monitor my server to find what uptime it has.

Among other tools that are available on the net, I chose Basicstate.com. Why? Because it’s free and could answer my question. It runs checkups on the server every 15 minutes, sending email alerts if the server is down and allowing for basic statistics later on, for analysis.

Surprise, Surprise

Boy was I surprised when I got my first alert!

What?! – I said, this is impossible! This can’t be true with the top rated hosting plan I’m paying for! $7/month, mind you. Outrageous… (not sure if you’re getting the sarcasm, but yes, it’s me being sarcastic)

You can imagine how surprised I was when I got my second alert half an hour later. After that my face was longer than a horse’s and I went to sleep with heavy thoughts.

Wakie Wakie

Today I received a few additional alerts to my mail. When trying to browse to my site immediately upon receiving the alert everything was Okay, except one time what I indeed couldn’t access any of my sites. I guess the outages are very brief. Basicstate doesn’t report the duration of the outage.

So I guess, as usual, this coin has two sides:

• On one hand, it’s good to know everything that is happening on your server.
• On the other hand, I was doing fine without it, got nervous with it, and in retrospect I never should have bothered.

I really don’t care anymore- Every hosting has outages and that’s a fact. I’m sure every single one of them is doing everything they can to improve their stability, since competition is very strong, so If a server is down for a few minutes a day, no biggie.

Have fun.

- Alex

Happily posting useful content at Net-Entrepreneur.com
Current post was originally posted on:

One More Tool You Couldn’t Live Without. Or Could You?

What I like about this project is that I found myself being committed to it. I have already invested my money in this, and I’m not going to quit until I see results. 
I don’t know anything about html and I was pretty clueless about what to do next. My blog hopping showed many bloggers were using WordPress. Visiting WordPress’ website revealed that it is a publishing platform that you can install on your hosting and start publishing with the same ease as a hosted blog platform (e.g. Blogger.com), but with much greater flexibility of features and design. I discovered a huge community of people developing plugins and themes, and this is the support I thought I am going to need. Great!

Part of my strategy is to see what others do well and do the same, so, WordPress was going to be my platform.

When looking for a hosting provider, see if they have Fantastico among their features. I know that many do, and HostMonster is no exception. Fantastico is an auto-installer that can install many applications for you on the server. WordPress is one of the applications on the list and it takes under a minute to install.

At the time I didn’t know about this and was installing WordPress manually. This is not very difficult, but you have to create a database on your hosting, use an FTP client to upload the files, modify a .php file (I was really freaked out at this point), run the installation script and hope for the best. Each step took me about 10 minutes to figure out, so I was beating myself on the head with a frying pan when I found out (and tried) Fantastico.

Anyway, after 40 minutes of messing about with databases and php files (who would have thought) I was the proud owner of my own self-hosted blog.

Now I was out there.
Despite having only the default WordPress theme and the “Hello World!” example post, it felt good. It was like walking into a house you just bought, when it is a mess and smells really bad, but you feel on top of the world, because you know you this is now yours.
It felt really good.

- Alex

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Happily posting useful content at Net-Entrepreneur.com
Current post was originally posted on:

Money Online, The First Steps – Establishing Net Presence (3)