e-ignite

I’m pleased to announce the launch of the new Ignite Web Hosting Services website. We are now offering great value web hosting packages starting at just £1.50 per month (but you can save money by paying yearly - just £12.00 for our lowest-priced package!) that have cPanel, MySQL databases, PHP, PERL, PYTHON and very generous disk space and bandwidth allowances. However, the term “great value” doesn’t just mean “cheap”. Is a cheap hosting package that doesn’t work good value? I don’t think so.

IWHS is able to offer very low-cost hosting packages that are reliable (uptime of 99.9%), are fully-featured and have great levels of customer support. That’s “great value”. With several satisfied customers alread, we are confident that you’ll be more than happy with any of our packages. We are even able to offer custom-built packages especially for you if you find our standard offerings don’t quite fit your requirements. We can also offer benefits to existing members who introduce new customers.

So why not pay Ignite Web Hosting Services a visit today and see how we could improve your web experience.

Well, you guys all know me by now - I’m always looking for a new project or new ways to make a little money. I decided to invest some time in creating a free web directory for everyone to submit their sites to. In turn, I’ll be updating a load of sitemaps to Google to help get pageranks of all the users up. Most of the directories I’ve found all want reciprocal links this, or pay me extra for that… I longed for the day I could go to a site, add my link and a bit of blurb about the site, then be on my merry way (hoping that my pagerank would increase).

Well, I launched it today and have been advertising hard through various forums, other directories and sites so hopefully, this will have a positive impact on the pagerank (currently zero) quite quickly. Within the space of about an hour and a half, I was inundated with about 80 site submissions! What do I get out of this? Well, partly I wanted to do something for the Frihost users (help them improve their site rankings), but I also wanted to do a little something for me: distract me from all the work I should be doing!!! Don’t fret though - I added a few advertising boxes to hopefully gain a little extra pocket money… although it is looking very much like a “little”

So get yourselves to the directory and start submitting some links:

http://ignite.frih.net/

So I decided it was time to widen the scope of this blog a little. While it’s still primarily the Privacy and Security blog, I thought it was time to add a bit of info about other website related matters, so I’ve added the Website Category.

So what’s with the Blues? Well, I’ve got the advertising blues. Deciding relatively recently that adding some form of revenue generation on my site was a good idea, I looked into several options - Bidvertiser came up as sounding like a good idea. They offered payments via PayPal every $10 and this seemed pretty achievable. I’m a realist: I know that my site is a bit of a niche market, and I know that my stats aren’t jaw-dropping, so I thought that I may make a little money, cover any costs that I’ve accrued setting up the site (although the hosting is free thanks to Frihost, I’ve had a few things to pay for). Bidvertiser therefore seemed like a good idea. However, the advertising performance was so bad and so far below any averages I could find on the web, I removed it myself after a month.

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I recently made the switch from Squirrelmail (the default mail service with my hosting company) to Google Apps For Your Domain. This has allowed me to create a load of email accounts with 2Gb storage, full pop/smtp access and a Gmail interface for webmail. I’m most impressed, I have to say. The email service is hosted by Google itself, so will have full reliability even if my site goes down, and it seemed such a waste for me to be given the ability to create so many addresses and only need a few

So I’m not boasting about this in any way - in fact, I’m offering my regular users, viewers and readers an opportunity: How would you like a free email account? As discussed above, it has a full Gmail interface for webmail, pop/smtp access and (crucially) 2Gb storage - addresses will be anythingyouwant@e-ignite.co.uk (I’ll also help you set up free email encryption if you’d like)

Interested? Drop me an email.

Since my previous post on the irritation that is comment spam, I have had some time to play with protection methods. You’ll now notice an image verification code field underneath your comments - this should hopefully help out with the mass of spam I’ve been getting. It’s not ideal, and my sincere apologies to those with poor eyesight, but hopefully we can all share and discuss the privacy and security stories once more!

There is, unfortunately, one minor drawback: I have to use the default theme. As much as I liked the look of the blog previously, I’m a firm believer in content over aesthetics. But I’ll never say never… I may find a new theme at some point!

Recently, I have been inundated with several hundred spam comments being left on this blog each week. It’s now taking up too much of my time to keep on top of them and remove them. It is therefore with sincere regret that I am closing the comments on all posts. This is a real shame since my intent for the blog section of my website was to encourage discussion and debate and hopefully help others (and even myself) to think about things in new ways. The persistance of spammers has, unfortunately put a significant obstacle in the way of this.

However, I would still welcome comments on the articles discussed here, and if you would like anything added to the posts, please send me an email (details on the Contact page) and I will add it to the blog manually. Possibly in a few months when the spammers have forgotten about this little site, I could maybe re-open the comments. However, for now I’m sad to say that they are closed.