LinkMoney.org

NameCheap the west coast hosting company and domain registrar, is sponsoring an enormous contest on Twitter, starting tonight at Midnight Pacific time.

Every hour there will be a new trivia question asked from now until Christmas. You should all have at least some kind of decent chance to win some of their $17,000 dollars worth of giveaway prizes.

NameCheap is well known for having various types of hosting packages to fit any budget. Now you can possibly win free domain names, or free hosting packages in this Twitter contest.

If you have not yet registered for Twitter yet, and you two people know who you are, then you should get right over there and get a Twitter @[handle]. Say what you need to say in 140 characters or less and twit, tweet away.

You can follow me on Twitter by going to Twitter.com/linkmoneydotorg and clicking on the “follow” button.

Oh yes, you will also have to follow Twitter.com/NameCheap to get in the trivia contest.

Do me a favor please, and Subscribe to this blog, and leave a comment.
Thanks.
Rich

First off, this is about me, but I do NOT do any of the aforementioned things.

However I made a major snafu recently, late at night, that has changed my latest plan to become the next Kevin Rose. Hmm, wonder if he ever did?

Any way here’s what happened. I had this idea of setting up a social circle, you know friends helping friends, wink, wink. Sort of a you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours. Well this crashed into a not so happy ending, (pun intended.)

I was going to set up a site where registered mail list members could post their site or article url and then other members would hump it, oops, I mean help promote it with various social networking tools. I wanted a cool name, so during the night I got up thinking about it and said, something like “social.”… Easy to remember…. Hmmm…

Eureka! I got it. “sosso dot com”! It’s cute, rhymes sort of with social, easy to remember, and I could get it out as a Buzz word. You know what I mean?

Great! I had just read a Blog about how NAME dot com was the cheapest registrar and so I went there and bought it and a dozen other domains all in one day. Then I read another Blog about how great Hostgator was, and though I have sites on three other domain hosting companies already, I wanted to try out Hostgator.

So I said to myself, self, this is going to be HOT! He he he… Can’t afford a private server, not yet, so I purchased the high end shared account for 13 bucks a month, with the first month only costing a penny. Pretty good deal right?

So I set up sosso dot com as my primary account on Hostgator and then read the instructions on how to point the DNS on NAME dot com to my shiny new hard disks at Hostgator. Did that and saw the warning that this may take 24 to 48 hours to resolve. No problem. It isn’t like I don’t have anything to do in the meantime.

So I checked it the next day and the next day and it still had not resolved. What’s up with that? Forget it, I’m already into a dozen new projects, will fix it later. Well that was August 3, 4 & 5. Now this morning I said I’m going to find out what the Hell is wrong.

I checked sosso again and it was coming up on a GoDaddy parked domain website. Huh? This didn’t have anything to do with GD, or so I thought. I checked again with Hostgator tech support and they said it was NAME’s problem. Checked with NAME but had to wait two and a half hours because they don’t get out of bed until 9am mountain time, and they don’t offer 24/7 phone tech support.

Finally it turns out that I did not OWN sosso. I owned a domain named “sossol.” Naturally I got a little testy and said what do you mean, I registered sosso. So sorry, we only have sossol.

I finally figured out what happened. Remember when I said I did this during the night after I had woken up thinking about it? Take a look at where the “L” key is, right next to the “O” key. I did not purchase the right domain and it was ALL my fault! Turns out GD had registered that name years ago, and it was not even available.

So here’s my point boys and girls. Make absolutely SURE just what you are typing during domain registrations and hosting setups. If you screw up, it can’t be fixed. Now I just went through the procedure of taking sosso off my Hostgator account and setting up a different domain as my primary account. It is mostly done but has been a few hours and there is still a little more BS that I have to do to get the damned thing working.

So point number two is. I did this totally clean, honest! Other than being sleepy I should not have made such a stupid mistake. I wonder what people do that have a few beers before going through this procedure?

Oh well, I only lost about a half a month’s worth of my first penny right?

I’m Rich

(New info:  Here is a new website where you can purchase currently owned

domain names for sale.)

This article might as well be called “Webhosting For Dummies“. It really is easy to get on the web with your own website.

My Internet publishing experience started about 1990. I had no idea what I was doing, but came from a technical and industrial business background, so the web was understandable with a little study. I published mostly hobby related interests at first.

A few years ago I wanted to put up a business related website that would look professional, which I knew would be way beyond my expertise. So I shopped around and was very fortunate to find a small company near Ithaca, NY., “S-GO Consulting,” operated by Steve Gorney and several other geniuses. I can’t say enough about this team. They have been with me through all of the various website design changes that I kept making before I finally arrived at just exactly what I wanted.

They built one of our main websites with Joomla!, which is an open source programming language that I am required to know absolutely nothing about! S-GO does it all. Tell them what you want and it’s done, exactly the way you want.

They also afforded me enough hand holding training so that I am now able to make minor modifications and it is very easy to add new data. However, if I have any questions they are right there.

It costs a couple of thousand or so, to build a great site to a custom design, but worth every penny. They give you a very generous bandwidth allotment and they are instantly responsive to any problems. Don’t let the price scare you. If you have some firm ideas, ask them for a quote and I am positive that they will be very competitive. S-GO is not “just” a hosting company. They are Marketing Experts, and will help you with your overall marketing plan in all media and even have the expertise to assist you with writing your Business Plan.

This commercial will not benefit me in any way, but it sure will benefit you if you decide to go with www.s-go.net .

Now if you are an old hand at website building and management, or if you are a consummate Blogger, Podcaster, or Internet publisher in any manner, then you might just want some recommendations for web hosting packages that we use for our many sites.

As you no doubt have heard about the recent fire at “The Planet,” a web hosting company in Houston, Texas, that calamity brought down thousands of websites for a week end and some of them are still trying to recover.

That’s why we don’t put all of our eggs in one basket. We use three other web hosting companies along with S-GO, and they are; GoDaddy, BlueHost and HostIcan Website hosting is very competitive now and where it formerly took commitments of thousands of dollars per year, you can now have very professional hosting services for a little over $100 per year.

We recommend all three of these fine companies and you can trust them all to be very eager to assist you in answering any questions or immediately fixing any problems.

GoDaddy is very well known and popular. The only problem I have when signing on to their website is to keep my mind off Danica Patrick in leather! Their signup procedure is easy to do once you have learned the procedure. Their design is extremely busy and they want you to keep clicking more and more to buy, which I find annoying, but there is always a link somewhere on each page to just keep skipping by and going to the checkout page.

BlueHost was recommended to us by Caroline Middlebrook, one of our favorite Internet Marketing Blogging friends. BlueHost is solid, and their website is clean and very easy to navigate. Prices are very fair and they will help you all the way with your installation.

Our other Best hosting company is HostIcan. This company also has a website that is very easy to use and you can be set up in minutes with a brand new website. Their rates are as low as $6.95 per month with a free domain name FOR LIFE!

All of these hosting companies offer high end packages for large companies or organizations that need huge amounts of data, bandwith, and redundancy. By clicking any of the links on this website to take you to any of the companies we recommend, you will be able to pick just the perfect plan that fits your needs and budget.

Click on all three of these recommended web hosting companies and compare their services for yourself.

We recommend using WordPress and select a theme that you like, install the plugins you need and make your presence known on the web. In a previous article that we wrote there is a LINK to Caroline Middlebrook’s free eBook on how to install WordPress.