I spent so many hours working on them. I also spent hundreds of dollars paying to have custom designs and logos made. I kept thinking that if I could just do this one thing or that other thing, then they would start paying off. It felt like I was on a mouse wheel, always running, but never getting anywhere.

No matter how much effort I put into them I just couldn’t get the traffic I wanted. Even the traffic that I was getting didn’t convert into revenue. I suppose I made a few pennies a day from adsense, but nothing substantial

As my frustration mounted, I started to look for information that would help me finally get my websites converting. I literally spent thousands of dollars on programs, videos, books, coaching, etc. I studied everything from product launches to mass control to video.

I was getting tired and running out of resources.

One day a friend of mine told me about some free training called the 30 Day Challenge. He asked if I was going to follow along with it. My first impression was “no way”. I figured that if the information I had paid thousands of dollars for didn’t get me where I wanted to be, then a free program certainly wouldn’t. I was a bit jaded about some of the programs I had purchased and the lack of results

He kept asking me about it and so I finally took a look at it. Then I decided to give it a try, so I registered a brand new domain name, runningshoesexpert.com, and decided to follow along with the 30 Day Challenge. I also found a buddy to work on it with me.

I was astonished at what happened!

I literally just set aside everything that I knew and followed the instructions given during the 2008 Challenge. Step by step. My buddy and I just did what the videos told us to do. That included everything from how to structure the blog, choose the keywords and create backlinks.

Within a few weeks I was amazed to see that our brand new website had taken the #6 spot for a rather competitive keyword. By the end of the challenge that year our site was getting an average of 180 visits per day.

Fast forward a few years now and that website is #1 on Google. It gets 1200 to 1500 visits per day and generates enough revenue to pay a mortgage payment, every month.

Just in the last year I’ve repeated that first success again and again for other keywords and sites. But it really started with the Challenge and Ed Dale back in 2008.

He’s at it again. It’s still free. It still works. And you can Learn all about the Challenge here.

If you decide to do the Challenge this year, leave a comment below and tell me how it goes. There’s nothing like making your first dollar online (except maybe making your second

That sounds great, but an entry level wireless microphone system can cost as much as your camera did. You also have to order them online and wait to test them once they arrive.

I decided to see if it was possible to create a battery powered (i.e. portable) wireless microphone system from components that are available locally and for about $60. I also recorded myself while I did it. The result is this three part series where I literally show you every detail.

It turned out to be quite easy to find components and add battery power to them. The down side is that the sound quality isn’t very good and, without some sort of mixer, the audio comes in on only one channel. Aside from that, this is an easy, fast and inexpensive way to build a portable wireless microphone system for your Kodak Zi8.

Remember to leave me a comment telling me what you think and if you used my suggestion.

Part 1, Components and Assembly

Part 2, Testing and Permanent Assembly (AA Batteries)

Part 3, Build 9V Battery Assembly

Happy Recording!

The reason I wanted to post it here is that it turned out to be a good tutorial about using a fantastic free tool (Inkscape) to create graphics for your website. I actually show you how to use Photoshop too.

You can download the HD version below the video. If you watch it on the page, click the full screen button so that you get all the details.

Download in HD

Onsite vs. Offsite

First it’s important to understand some backup terminology. An onsite backup means that the data for the backup and the data for the production website exist in the same physical location. This might be like making a backup of your computer onto an external hard drive attached to your computer. This would protect you from a hard drive crash, but if your house burns down then both go up in flames.

Offsite means that the data for your backup and the data for your production website are in different physical locations. If one place burns up, the other will still have all the data intact.

There’s a benefit to each type of backup. An onsite backup, such as an external hard drive, can provide a much faster recovery than downloading the data from another site. Offsite backups are more resilient to acts of God (and kids).

Backup in the cloud (Amazon S3)

When it comes to your website, it turns out that the hard drive at your house qualifies as an off site backup. Even better than your hard drive is Amazon S3. There are two reasons why choosing a cloud based service is more appealing than your hard drive.

1. You can automate access to it from your website
2. They manage redundant, fault tolerant data storage for you

What to backup

I think many bloggers (those that create backups at all) use the WordPress export feature and feel confident that they have everything they need to recover their website in case of a crash.

It turns out that several things are missing. First is that even the most disciplined person can find it difficult to login regularly and take frequent backups. Since a blog is an evolving opus, constantly changing, it’s important to take frequent backups. Another problem has to do with the ‘rest’ of the information on your website.

What about all the pictures, audios and videos that you upload, along with theme and plugin files? This data needs to be included with your backups in order to restore your website. Without it, you would be able to restore little more than the text content from your site.

So, if you insist on taking manual backups then make sure you use FTP and grab the wp-content folder of your WordPress website in addition to the XML file that you export.

There’s a better way

If you don’t want to worry about all these details and risk messing them up then you’re in luck. I found a great plugin which I’ve been using on all my sites for about a half a year now. It’s called Automatic WordPress Backups. To get it up and running all I had to do was provide it with my Amazon S3 account information and it took care of the rest. It manages creating backups on a regular schedule and maintaining historical backups too.

The cost for S3 storage works out to be pennies a month, and for the peace of mind that it brings, that’s CHEAP!

How to restore

In the event that you need to restore your data, you can most likely find someone on elance.com. In fact, if you’re restoring after a hosting company crash, you could probably even give them the backup file from your S3 account and let them work through the details. It turns out to be pretty easy. Here’s the process I would follow:

1. Ensure that you have the domain configured and pointed to a directory on your host
2. Upload WordPress (you can probably use cPanel if you want to)
3. Delete the wp-content folder and upload the folder from your backup
4. Create a database and import the database file from your backup
5. Update the wp-config.php file with the connection information to your new database

Hopefully you never need to go through these steps. but if you do, you’ll be glad that you took the time to setup Automatic Wordperss Backups. Post a comment if you have any questions or need additional help.

What is the point?

The people that are looking for a tutorial about FTP often don’t know the ‘basics’. When you tell them to type the ‘host’ in here, and ‘navigate’ to this folder, and ‘set permissions’ there… Well, it just doesn’t mean anything. The first video that I watched used at least a half a dozen words in the first 30 seconds that most regular users just don’t get.

So I decided to change my approach. Rather than teach you about FTP, I’d rather tell you why you shouldn’t ever use FTP again.  Huh?

Let’s start out with a simple question. At the moment you decided to learn how to FTP something up to your server, what were you trying to accomplish? I think it’s very unlikely that you were sitting down to figure out how FTP works and how to use it to get stuff up to your website.

Instead, I bet you were trying to communicate with your audience/clients/visitors. That’s a really important distinction. You don’t want to know how to FTP. You want to communicate with people. So how can you ditch the FTP and start communicating with your clients?

Use a blog

The absolute best way I can think of is to use a blog.  With most modern hosting accounts you can install a blog without FTP, without database setup and without needing to use any tool other than your web browser (I recommend Google Chrome, by the way). You literally just click a few buttons and you’re done!  Once it’s done then you use a web browser, from anywhere in the world, to communicate with people.

If you’re thinking that a blog would be great except that you still need to upload pictures and videos and so you can’t get around FTP, then you’re wrong. WordPress has little “easy buttons” that let you find the file on your computer and it puts it right in where it belongs. As far as video, you can now just paste a link to a youtube video and WordPress will take care of the rest.

Special cases

There are special cases when you need to FTP something up to your server, but those are more rare. When that moment comes along, do yourself a favor and hire your kids to figure it out for you. If you don’t have kids at home, find a neighbor that’s in high school and have them give you a hand. The $10 you pay them will be a huge prize and you can keep your hands clean of all the dirty work.

Keep your eye on the real prize

Don’t forget the real purpose of your website is to communicate with your target audience. Do yourself (and your site visitors) a favor.  Stop trying to figure out how to FTP stuff up to your server and instead figure out how to use WordPress.  Then go on to provide the content that they want. That’s the real gem!

(photo by Gabriella Fabbri)

What they tell you

Hosting companies will tell you that the dedicated server is the best you can do for a demanding site.  In some ways this is true, but it’s not the whole story.  A dedicated server also represents an increase in maintenance and a need for active monitoring.  Addressing some problems that come up with your own server can be expensive, time consuming and risky.  The old adage about giving you “just enough rope to hang yourself” can be very appropriate for dedicated servers.

As an example, I’ve observed several big product launches where a dedicated server was setup to process orders on launch day.  In each case they anticipated millions of dollars in sales.  On launch day their server crashed.  What happened?

A scenario like this makes for a great story about how not even a dedicated server could handle all the traffic.  But I don’t think they planned it (that would actually be pretty careless and could reduce their sales).  They simply failed to recognize a few basics.  Here they are:

• Whoever manages your dedicated server may not know as much as the guys that mange the shared hosting or VPS servers.  Managing a server is a lot more complicated than managing a website.
• The two big factors that affect server performance are
  • The number of people that visit your site at one moment in time
  • The amount of processing that needs to happen for each visitor
• How various technologies interact together.

A Bus can carry more people than a Car

Here’s one way to look at it.  I’m a guy and so I’ll use a car analogy.  There are small economy cars, large trucks and then semi trailers and finally buses.  Each one has its purpose.  The entry level servers might be like a small economy car.  They give you the ability to decide exactly where you go and when.  You choose what you play on the radio and whether you tint the windows and roll like a “homey” (haha, did I say that right, dawg?).  The problem is that an economy car was designed to carry a few people at a time, not dozens.

The shared hosting servers are buses.  They’re designed from the start to accommodate lots of people doing different things at the same time.  But you don’t have as much control over the windows, the radio, etc.  Despite the fact that you have to share the space with others, there’s a natural ebb and flow that can actually give you more burst capacity than a dedicated server.  In other words, if you have 100 people come to your site at the same moment, a shared hosting environment may actually process those requests faster than a dedicated server.  This stops being the case when you have to sustain that load or your processing requirements become very complicated.

As you increase what you’re willing to pay for a dedicated server, you get more processors (CPUs), more memory and even faster components altogether.  Since you can use 100% of the resources in a dedicated server, a small increase in cost may give you big gains down the road.  There’s a point at which a dedicated server becomes a better choice for high traffic than shared hosting, but the price point might make other alternatives more appealing (for example, cloud computing).

Good uses for a dedicated server

If your business requires very custom software or has strict (even statutory) requirements about how you deal with customer data, then a custom server might be the right choice.  You might also have the need to setup several different environments that use a variety of resources.  Configuring these resources can be much easier in an isolated, dedicated environment.  However, you want to keep in mind that you can achieve a custom environment with a VPS at a much lower cost, but you can’t accommodate as many visitors.

For a single dedicated server the most significant impact on responsiveness and how much load it can handle before pooping out will be:

• Number of CPUs
• Amount of memory (RAM)

A machine with two CPUs can accommodate two visitors at the same time.  A machine with 16 CPUs can handle 16 visitors at the same time.  Now while that may not be exactly true, it’s a really good approximation, and as long as you don’t run out of memory or spend too much time waiting on the database, you can have a pretty responsive site.

When not to have a dedicated server

Dedicated servers, much like VPS plans, can buckle under heavy concurrent load.  Concurrent means many people at the same instant.  So if your website gets 100,000 visits per year and they are evenly spaced, then you’ll get by just fine.  However, if you were to get only 20,000 visits per year but they all came within a two (2) hour window, then a dedicated server might not be the best option.  Remember, it’s not the number of visitors to your site, but their proximity in time to one another that will determine the responsiveness of your server.

Alternatives

If a dedicated server isn’t right for you then you might consider a shared hosting or VPS hosting plan.  You could even move up to the granddaddy of them all.  THE CLOUD!

The term “cloud” makes some tech folks laugh, because there isn’t really such a thing as the cloud, but calling something a cloud and giving it a mystical power to absorb any amount of processing or traffic without breaking a sweat is downright awesome marketing fodder.  That’s what I’ll cover in my next article.

What they tell you

VPS will offer several things that you don’t get with shared hosting.  In general these include more direct access to manipulate the software and settings of the server, more isolation from other processes running on the shared machine and fewer sites sharing a given server.  If your eyes started to glaze over, don’t worry.  It will all make sense in a minute, but what might trouble you is the way that the hosting companies translate this for you.

Many hosting companies suggest that “upgrading” to a VPS will be like having your own server, including having more, guaranteed resources.  That’s partly true, but it doesn’t hold true when you have a large traffic spike.

Think about it like this.  If you decide to throw a party for your friends, you’ll have much more control over where furniture goes, what to eat, watch, play, how much noise to make, etc. in your own apartment or condo.  The problem is that once you fill up your apartment, there’s no more room (no where to spill over).  If 100 people show up, then some of them just aren’t going to fit.

A case where shared hosting beats VPS

In my last article about share hosting, I explain that a single machine is shared between many users.  In some cases a few hundred.  It seems reasonable then to assume that a VPS machine which is shared by fewer users would give you more resources.

The big difference is that in a shared environment, even though it’s shared by more users, each one of  you have access to all of the CPUs (processors).  That means if there’s a spike in traffic you can use all of the processors in a short burst.  A lower end VPS typically provides only one CPU which will reduce the burst capacity.  This is similar to the way that a hotel can accommodate many more people than a condo, but there are more restrictive rules that apply in the hotel.

So the most typical resource limitation in a VPS is access to the CPU, which can be especially problematic if you have a high traffic site that’s CPU intensive.  Since the starting ($20/month) plans give you one (1) virtual processor, all of your traffic has to go through that one processor.  Memory size is also fixed for a VPS and once it’s gone it’s gone.  This is different than a shared plan where everyone has access to multiple processors and the memory is typically determined by page load and pulls from a much larger pool.

Server isolation

Another misconception is that the servers are perfectly isolated.  In fact they’re not.  They are virtually isolated.  That means you may still be sharing processor cycles with another VPS.  This can lead to your site becoming slow due to high load by another VPS user on the same system.  While resources are more isolated, they still interact, just like an apartment building where each unit is connected and they all share public parking spaces.

In my experience, traffic spikes can actually cause more damage to a VPS than a shared hosting environment, since the requests stack up so quickly and the resources available are fixed and generally smaller than on the shared plans.

Good uses for VPS hosting

There are some times when getting a VPS makes a lot of sense.  These include the need for a custom server environment, or more stringent security requirements for the data your managing.  You might also find a VPS a terrific testing environment for new server configurations and new software.  $20/month is a lot cheaper than buying a new physical server.  In other words, you want a VPS when your traffic is going to be spread out and you need more control over the server environment.

When it might not make sense to choose shared hosting

• You’re hosting mainstream software that doesn’t require any special configuration on the server (WordPress, for example)
• You have traffic spikes where many people are coming to your site in a short period of time
• You’re not very computer savvy and don’t want to manage your own server

I should mention that the idea of a VPS tends to be a popular choice among a lot of the more techie web developers.  That might be due to the fact that they get to tinker with the server or they think isolation is preferable to fully shared resources.

If your ‘web guy‘ suggests a VPS I recommend you ask yourself the questions that came up in this post.  How much traffic do you get?  Do you really need a custom server environment?  Do you need isolation of data and other resources?  While shared hosting has more rigid rules to follow, in some ways it can accommodate moderate traffic spikes better than a VPS.

Alternatives

If a VPS isn’t the right fit, you can try to move over to a shared hosting plan or upgrade to a dedicated server.  In the next article I’ll discuss dedicated server hosting.

What they tell you

Send any hosting company an email asking if their shared hosting plans will accommodate a large amount of traffic and you’ll probably get a response like this: “Yes, our hosting plan can easily accommodate that”.  I had one client ask the question “What happen’s when I end up on Oprah.  Will my website shutdown?”.  Of course they replied and said that it would work just fine, even if they were on Oprah and so they wen’t with that hosting company.  A few months later they were on a lesser TV show and got a big spike in traffic the server basically shutdown.  What about the Oprah promise?

It might seem at the surface that their answer is misleading or even dishonest, but I’m not convinced that all of them are intentionally misleading you.  The reason they answer so confidently that their hosting will accommodate those levels of traffic is that most people talk about traffic all day long, but don’t actually do what it takes to get the traffic.  It’s actually a pretty safe gamble on their part.

Typical resource limitations

Even if a hosting company promises unlimited everything, there are limitations.  Some of the typical limitations that come along with shared hosting include memory usage limits, how much of the computer’s processor (CPU) you can use and maximum number of concurrent requests.  Here’s an English translation:  You can have unlimited bandwidth, disk space, websites, etc. so long as no more than 25 people want a web page from you at any one moment and each page doesn’t need more than 1/4th of the CPU or X amount of memory.  If that sounds a little less than unlimited then you’re right, but again, it’s a safe gamble on their side.

And if it sounds cheap, it really isn’t.  The fact of the matter is that they probably have between 50 and 300 other people on that same server (motel).  Each site on that server needs some of the memory, some of the CPU, etc.  If one site consumed all of the resources, that wouldn’t be fair to the other people renting space there.  With shared hosting it’s important to understand that your site isn’t the only one on the server and the decisions they make about that server take into account everyone that hosts there.  Just think about what the management would do at motel 6 if you rented one room and invited a hundred people to a party there or to enjoy the pool with you.  Their not being rude, but you’re only paying for a small slice of the pie.  Don’t expect to eat the whole thing.

Traffic spike (yours or theirs)

The most common problem I find on shared hosting is that a site slows down due to one of two things.  It could be that one site on the server was not made very well and uses more resources than it should (like a gas guzzler car).  It could also be that one site on the server gets a big spike in traffic and starts consuming all the resources on that server.  It doesn’t matter if it’s your site that’s responsible or not.  No matter which site causes it, all of the sites on that server are affected because they’re all trying to use the same resources at the same time.

This is the reason for one of the most unfortunate occurrences in internet marketing.  Some diligent chap has been slaving away for years trying to get a break that will bring the traffic rolling in.  He finally gets slashdotted, or digged and what happens?  His server poops out, or his hosting company does the unthinkable and suspends the account.  AAAARRRRGGGHHH!  What a nightmare.

At the very moment that you finally get tens of thousands of visitors to your site your hosting company puts up a billboard saying “This account has been suspended”.  I do fault hosting companies for not being a little more savvy and having an alternate suspension message like “This site is currently unavailable because it got boat loads of traffic“.  At least that wouldn’t leave people to wonder if your site is shady and it might even add to social proof that your site is ‘cool’.  Oh, the dreaded account suspension for succeeding…

Good uses for shared hosting

But alas, you can’t really expect to rent a motel room then host a party for a thousand people, right?  There are some good uses for shared hosting and they include wordpress blogs and basic shopping carts.  Due to the large variety of plugins, themes and other options in just a blog, it’s very difficult to say how many visitors a site on shared hosting can accommodate.  It’s probably safe to say that a shared hosting account can handle a couple hundred to a couple thousand visits per day.  But remember that the proximity of one visit to another plays a big role.  With that in mind, you have to think about your site visitors surfing patterns.

How to get the most out of shared hosting

Some factors to consider when choosing a shared hosting company include the following:

• How many cores their servers have
• Number of accounts per server
• Resource limitations

The number of cores (or CPUs) has an impact on how many visitors the site can handle at one time.  So if you’re on a server that has 8 cores then your site can (in theory at least) handle eight visitors at the same time.  Remember that this is like eight people showing up at the supermarket at the same time.  If there are eight check stands open, no one will have to wait.  The more cores the better (assuming the servers don’t have too many users).

This really turns out to be a bit of a crapshoot, since you might have the misfortune of ending up on a server with another high volume site.  Hopefully if you really do have a high volume site then you end up on a server with a bunch of people that don’t get much traffic at all.

What are my preferred shared hosting providers?

I currently host with two different providers.  Some of the reasons I host with them include

• Fast response to support requests
• Very few events that require support
• Reliable, industry standard platform
• Fast servers that aren’t oversold

For the reasons above I have shared hosting accounts with the following companies:

• Hostgator
• Byethost

I’m very confident recommending them because I’ve had such a great experience with them.  The real trick with shared hosting is making sure it’s a fit in the first place.

When not to buy shared

Some reasons not to get shared hosting include:

• Large traffic spikes in short amounts of time
• Require custom programming and/or other atypical resources

Alternatives

If shared hosting isn’t a fit you can upgrade to a VPS, dedicated server or load balanced system.

As I write this article I expect that only a small percentage of people will have any reason to read beyond the third paragraph.  I’ll probably offend someone with the reason I give for this, but I invite you to prove me wrong.  Unfortunately the cards are stacked against you and I have proof!  There’s an entire industry that gets fat off of you because it knows you so well.  I’ll get to my web hosting comparison in just a minute, but first, let’s talk about the real problem.

If you’ve ever searched for a web hosting company, you’ve probably been excited to find a ton of hosting companies that offer UNLIMITED everything.  That includes unlimited bandwidth, unlimited disk space, unlimited websites, etc.  I’m sure a lot of people assume that the blazing speeds of modern technology make it possible to process data instantaneously while consuming very few resources.  After all, how else could they provide unlimited everything for $5/month?

The answer is that they can only provide unlimited everything because they know a few things about their clients.  First is that you don’t produce content for your website regularly.  When you do produce content for your website you don’t create backlinks to it.  In fact you don’t do much at all to drive traffic to your site, which means you don’t get a lot of traffic and your site consumes virtually zero resources!  In short, it’s easy to offer someone unlimited everything when they know you will take advantage of almost nothing.  If this is you then stick with the cheapest shared hosting plan you can find and it will do everything you need.

If you’re still with me, allow me to explain what I mean.  The fact is that there is no such thing as unlimited hosting.  The good hosting companies account for every electron that travels through their servers (almost).  For every CPU or MB of memory there are only so many web pages that a server can serve.  Every server has a limit.

Let me compare web hosting to housing

There are several types of hosting that range in price from FREE to hundreds of dollars per month.  Each of these different hosting models exists because there’s a niche to consume it.  Interestingly, very few people understand which type of hosting they should use or why.  Here are some of the most common (popular) hosting types:

• Shared
• VPS
• Dedicated server
• Cloud or load balanced servers

Within each of those hosting types there are tiers of options, but I’m going to discuss those in separate posts.  Today I want to explain some of the differences between these four top level hosting models.  The easiest way I can explain is with an analogy about housing.  Here’s the correspondence:

• Shared == Hotel/Motel
• VPS == Apartment/Condominium
• Dedicated server == House/Building
• Cloud == Campus

Just as Hotels and Motels come in a broad range, from ultra cheap and dirty to ultra luxury, so come the shared hosting plans.  Likewise for the others.  Within each category there are big swings in quality and features.  There are a few important things to get from these analogies.

First is that in a shared environment (think hotel/motel), what one person does in the hotel can potentially affect the others.  If one careless guest lights his room on fire, everyone in the whole place must evacuate.  If you’re staying in a cheap motel and the neighbors are making a lot of noise, you hear it too.  If you decide to eat a really smelly fish dinner in a hotel, the smell might waft into other rooms.  This thinking readily extends to amenities like a pool, hot tub, sauna, snack bar and so on.  What one person does affects the others.  So it is in a shared hosting  environment: what happens to one website affects the others.

As you move up into apartements, condos, houses and campuses, the effect you have on someone else (and their effect on you) is diminished.  The trade off is that your personal maintenance increases.  In a motel, you don’t have to care about the plumbing.  You don’t even have to make your own bed!  If there’s a problem with your room they get you to another room.  In an apartment a problem is more of a pain since you have to call the landlord and deal with it until he can send someone to fix it.  In a house you have to call the plumber yourself, or fix it yourself.  The repairs can be much more expensive too, especially since you’re not spreading the cost among a group.

The effort you go through with hosting correlates pretty well with my description of housing above.  If you use shared hosting you don’t have to worry about much at all.  If you use a VPS, you have to manage a little bit more and it’s more of a bother.  A dedicated server can require a lot of maintenance and expense to keep it running smoothly, and the cost of a load balanced cloud system can be pretty high.  Hopefully you’re starting to see that to make the best decision requires more than just a web hosting comparison.  You need to accurately identify your needs in the first place.

My site is so slow

One of the most common complaints about web hosting is “my site isn’t fast”.  There are literally an endless number of reasons this could be.  Some have to do with the hosting provider, some have to do with what you’re trying to host.  Some may not have anything to do with you or your host, but are actually caused by other people hosting on that same server.  Even other reasons may have to do with your internet service or global  internet issues.

The most common reason that a site will slow down is that there are too many visitors at one time.  To understand this, you want to think about the checkout at your local supermarket.  If you have a small shop with a single checkout and five people want to checkout at the same time, you end up with a line.  A web site is no different.  If you have five people that all want to view a web page at the same time, they have to get in line.  Fortunately, a web page can load faster than you can checkout at the supermarket, but they still line up and get served one at a time.

What might surprise you is that the number of visitors that come to your site is NOT as important as when they come.  If you take two sites that both get 10,000 visitors per day, where one gets all of its visitors between 8:00 am and 9:00 am (in one hour) and the other gets those same visitors evenly spread out throughout the day, you have very different needs.  The site that receives all it’s visitors in the same hour will need significantly more resources than the site that has them evenly spread out.  In fact, the cost to host the site with all the visitors in one hour could be 10 or 20 times more than the other site.  Just like the supermarket, during a big sale they’ll need to open more checkout lines.  but even with more checkout lines you might still have to wait (it always feels like this at Wal-mart).

This is why product launches crash servers

This is why product launches crash servers.  If you’ve ever watched a big launch for a new product and found your way to their server at the launch minute, you probably noticed that the pages load slow or perhaps not at all.  It’s not a stunt or trick aimed at convincing you that their product is popular (that would be a risky trick to pull on people interested in giving you their money).  The fact is that they’re trying to accommodate the rush.  It’s as if several thousand people came to Wal-mart at the exact same moment to buy a new video game console.  They form a line and get served one by one.  The same thing happens when a new movie comes out.  You end up with long lines.  For some reason the idea of standing in line makes sense to people in a physical (real) world sense, but they think technology is different.  Turns out it’s not.

Another surprise is that revenue doesn’t necessarily track with the cost of  hosting and expensive hosting doesn’t guarantee revenue.  As strange as it sounds, one guy might be able to host a low traffic site on a free shared hosting account (I don’t recommend this for commercial projects, by the way) and make a full time living, while another would have to pay hundreds of dollars a month to accommodate traffic that produced barely enough revenue to cover the hosting costs.  By the way, if you’re doing that I recommend you rethink your plan or find a new niche.

In the next few articles I’m going to continue my web hosting comparison and explain each of the four hosting models I mentioned above in a way that helps you know why you would need one or the other.  A well informed decision can save you time, money and a lot of headache from lost opportunity or traffic.

If you have something specific that you want me to cover, leave a comment blow.

Don’t go telling folks how to hack passwords

I’m sure someone will comment or send me a note that it’s not wise of me to call attention to the methods of hacking passwords.  Unfortunately it’s a bit like gun control.  The bad guys are going to find the guns they want and the good folks won’t use them for the wrong reasons anyway.  It also reminds me of another old joke about the security practices of some companies: “Security by Obscurity”.  Simply avoiding the topic and not drawing attention to things that should be secure usually doesn’t get you very far.

The good news is that most of you don’t have a thing to worry about.  Why?  Because you’re not a high value target.  As long as you don’t do anything to ever upset anyone or draw any attention to yourself or download crap (like free music, software, etc) from the internet then you probably don’t have to worry too much about it.  The guys that spend their time hacking passwords either have a gripe with someone or want to steal money and information.

Just to be safe

Either way, why not make sure that you’re covered and use a password manager?  What’s that you ask?  A password manager is a small bit of software that generates strong passwords and keeps track of all of your passwords.  The one I use is free and open source: KeePass.  In order to login to a website there are shortcut keys that actually type in your details so you don’t have to remember a thing.  It also runs from a USB drive or you can sync your password file using a service like dropbox.com.  If you’re on a Mac then you can use this version http://www.keepassx.org/.

Sure it’s a little more work than typing in you favorite food, but you’ll wish you had if you ever get hacked.