Searched for

How to Build your Pagerank

Tech

Improving your site’s SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and Google PageRank requires a combination of technical optimizations and strategic content development. Although if you want the quick rundown, just make great content, that 90% of the time is enough, because people want good content and therefore the search engines want good content!

Quality content creation – Develop high-quality, original content that provides value to your audience. This can include blog articles, guides, tutorials, videos, or infographics. Engaging and informative content not only attracts visitors but also encourages other websites to link back to your site, improving your PageRank. It’s like creating a captivating story that keeps your readers hooked and eagerly sharing it with others.

Keyword research and optimization – Conduct thorough keyword research to identify relevant search terms that your target audience is using. Optimize your website’s content, including titles, headings, meta tags, and body text, to incorporate these keywords naturally. It’s like sprinkling the right keywords throughout your website’s content, so search engines can understand what your site is all about.

Website performance optimization – Ensure your website loads quickly and performs well across different devices. Optimize images, minify CSS and JavaScript files, and enable caching to improve page speed. A fast and responsive website is a important marker of quality and therefore Google likes you more.

Mobile-friendliness – With the majority of internet users accessing websites on mobile devices, it’s crucial to have a mobile-friendly site. Make sure your website is responsive and provides a seamless experience on smartphones and tablets.

On-page optimization – Pay attention to on-page factors like title tags, meta descriptions, and header tags. Craft unique and compelling titles and meta descriptions that accurately represent your content and entice users to click through from search results. It’s like writing captivating headlines and engaging summaries that make people curious to explore further.

Backlink building – Earn high-quality backlinks from authoritative and relevant websites. Engage in guest blogging, collaborate with influencers or create shareable content that naturally attracts backlinks. Backlinks are like votes of confidence from other websites, signaling to search engines that your content is actually valuable and trustworthy.

Regular updates and maintenance – Keep your website updated with fresh content, fix broken links, and ensure all pages are accessible to search engines. Regular updates shows search engines that your site is actively managed and relevant.

Also please remember, SEO and PageRank improvements take time and continuous effort, its always a work in progress, and if you keep improving it will improve your rank and visibility! Until next time!

How to Perform a Server Move Without Downtime

Tech

Moving data between two servers without downtime requires some careful planning and execution. I’ve done this a thousand times, its also a good benchmark on the quality of your backups, so lets check my guidelines to a smooth server move!

Backup your old server – First, you need to make a fresh backup of your old server, this will guarantee that if something goes wrong you will still have a way to go back, you will have some downtime but nothing is loss, so start with a new backup.

Set up the new server – You need to prepare the new server to ensure it is fully configured and ready to receive the data. This includes installing the necessary software, configuring the server environment, and optimizing performance. Think of it as setting up a cozy new home for your data, complete with all the essential amenities.

Synchronise the data – To minimize downtime, you’ll want to synchronise the data between the old and new servers. This can be achieved through various methods, such as database replication or file synchronisation. i tend to ssh into the new server and rsync everything. It’s like making sure all your belongings are safely transported from your old house to the new one, ensuring nothing gets left behind.

Important Note Here, normally before starting the sync i put the old site in maintenance so there is no change or updates while the data is syncing, especially if the site is big or popular.

Test the migration – Before fully transitioning to the new server, it’s crucial to thoroughly test the migration process. This involves verifying that all data has been successfully transferred and that the new server functions correctly. Think of it as a dress rehearsal, where you ensure that everything runs smoothly before the big performance. I tend to use ssh with the diff command to achieve this.

Switch the DNS – Once you’re confident that the new server is ready to take over, you can update the DNS settings to point to the new server’s IP address. This step ensures that when users access your website or application, they are directed to the new server seamlessly. It’s like updating the address in your contact information so that people can find your new location without any hiccups.

Monitor and verify – After the DNS switch, closely monitor the traffic and performance on both servers. Keep an eye on any potential issues and ensure that the new server is handling requests correctly. Also make sure that other services dependent on that old server are transferred over like e-mail.

By following these steps, you can migrate data between servers with minimal to no downtime. However, it’s important to note that each migration scenario is unique, and careful planning and testing are crucial to ensure a smooth transition and always ALWAYS ALWAYS!!!!!! Have plenty of backups!

New Portuguese Search Engine

News

Yep, i had some requests and some tweaks to do, so i made a new site, its called PT1 or Portugal 1, its based on google search with a portuguese free directory of the best portuguese sites we like (the search engine and all the added services are done, stuff like quick link search engines for firefox or search toolbar with some cool stuff ), the directory is still not live yet, also ill add more services later on, but for now it looks simple and cool and works like a charm ^_^

Moving to Asynchronous Tracking

Update

So in this move to… well move faster hehehe, im pushing Google Analytics Asynchronous Tracking on all S2R sites that use Google Analytics (almost all, the ones that don’t, they use Reinvigorate ^_^ ), although I’ve tested through this past week the speed changes between normal code and the asynchronous code, i can say i don’t see much of a speed difference, that could be, because well, my sites already run fast, but anyways when you join all of those little tweaks that speed sites up, it makes a big difference, especially if you get bursts of traffic ^_^

New and Improved S2R

Update

yep i made some improvements on S2R heheh, just making it nicer, still all of this “google now adding speed as another factor in ranking” is making everyone all nervous and getting CDN and doing all this changes, well i’ve always tried to make my sites, quick and easy, both in the webdesign/structure/hosting side of things, because i want my sites to be fast…, so… well im always trying to put one less picture in a site, or offload content or optimize code or have faster better hosting anyways, so i guess no change here ^_^’

Apthost Hosting Review

Reviews

Well im doing reviews of host i’ve used, in this case it was Apthost Shared Hosting in mid 2009, sometimes when i finish a new site i decide to make a new account on a new host (cause they look good, or have a awesome promotion, and yes i know hosting promotions are more hype than substance, but you never know unless you try, thats why i continue to be a Dreamhost customer), so in this case i choose apthost, mostly because of their tag of being the best host for “FFmpeg”.

So lets get into the review, the setup and payment was quick and easy as expected, my account was activated, and like normal quick upload and everything is looking good, i also requested a transfer of another one of my sites but that was a fail apparently apthost staff hasn’t mastered transfer from cpanel to cpanel so i never did anyways, speed isnt awesome, but its all good, about a week later i noticed there were several error_log type files (some growing to multiple mb sizes) in a lot of the folders on the site, but the site seemed fine, when opening those, it was just standard log files with lots of weird errors (like page loads fine, but log reports errors from my ip anyways… weird), talked with support that dismissed it.

So like 3 weeks into it, the real problems started with multiple downtime’s and overall pretty lousy performance (strange how this tends to happen to this kind of hosts, probably when they finish filling up the server to the brim…), since the site was new i decided to put a “maintenance page” while i try and workout the issues, so then it starts a week of trouble tickets with support and it kinda gets silly, most of the replies are “Your site is coming up fine.Please check it from your end.” while the site is still down, also “It is being taken care of. I noticed that one of the techs did not show up, and left the monitoring of the server unattended, which caused to go into overload mode. It is coming back online in few minutes.” or the “the account has been suspended for 30 minutes in our node due your account is responsible for overloading the server, which is impacting overall performance in the node.”, so my site that wasnt even online is overloading the server… awesomeeee i kinda couldn’t believe it, i know it was probably and automated system of some-kind and because the server was in the shitter that probably went to everyone on the server, still funny though

So after a week of practical downtime, they announce that they are moving me to a new server, ok… ohhh but there was a problem and the new server is built from backups that are from Friday and not Monday, what? well at this time since i was still on my 40th day (45 day money back guarantee) i asked for a refund and that was awarded after about a week,

So a recap of my review of Apthost:

  • They aren’t a very good host overall, at least they don’t seem to have their shit together
  • Support is not very supportive, there is a lot of one liner copy+paste replies from support
  • I also don’t appreciate the 30min suspension for “overloading” (i would suspect a lot of people would hit that, in a more professional webhost they contact you ALWAYS before turning off your site)
  • Apparently their backup system sucks
  • They did follow trought with their moneyback guarantee
  • Setup was quick and easy

Our Very Awesome Web Directory

News

Ok, major improvement on or very own Web Directory, aka orgme.com, and we are actually thinking about making a Portuguese version, ok maybe a bit different, and yes i know there are billions of web directories, but most are not nice at all (you have to pay or give reciprocal links or has misleading links or affiliate links or other nasty stuff), so we will try and make ours nice and helpful and clean and not weird or dodgy ^_^

Nee.Hostcult.com is Down

Update

Yep sorry about that, so a couple of our sites are down for the moment >_<, the nee server is doing a FSCK as of now (probably due to a bad shutdown or some other glitch that didn’t come up before), once the FSCK is finished, the server should be back up ^_^’

update: every site is back up ^_^ total downtime 1h15m, yeah FSCK takes loads of time…but better that, than a corrupted hard drive hehehe as always never forget to make your own backups! ;D

Review of Virpus VPS Hosting

Reviews 6 Comments

So this is my review of Virpus VPS Hosting, as a principle i only review hosting companies AFTER i’ve been with them, as well as i try and be to the point with my review and it shouldn’t be taken as a literal performance of the hosting company as a whole, just of my particular experience.

I was with Virpus for 5 months, and i signed with their unmanaged Advance package (so a mid to high end hosting package) with Directadmin, since the initial payment it took around 9 days to setup my account but after a contact with support they did apologised, they said that they had a huge surge of new customers and were a bit late on the setup as well as i was discounted for those days, so thats cool.

After the initial setup there were a couple of things that weren’t setup right, especially since there were extra notes fields when you first signed up to put that kind of added or just needed information for a correct setup, but those seemed to be ignored (not a huge deal, since a lot of vps companies do this, probably cause the people that make the setup don’t do any tinkering), so a few back and forth with support and everything is on track.

So the hosting comes with Directadmin hosting control panel, well its kinda a subpar hosting panel, but at least it has a low overhead (doesn’t consume a lot of resources), that and probably a new server (although with not so new hardware) meant performance wise, the vps was quick and the first site i transferred over was indeed almost 2 seconds faster than on the other vps it was on.

After about a month later i transferred another site over, still the performance of both sites was pretty good, this lasted for 2 and a half months, since then i started having some downtime, for some apparently unknown reasons, others were to DDOS or Server Problems, so i had about 5 fairly large periods of downtime in the first 4 months, however in the last month i started having daily mini periods of downtime, i know i know, it can be a problem on my vps, but the vps was stable and apache has like 20 days of uptime i was using barely half the resources on the vps as well as the downtime was at random times, but still the sites started to drop off the internet for 5 or 10 minutes at a time (i use 3 different site monitoring services), i contacted support and nothing but excuses but nothing is done, so i moved one of my sites back to another vps, but the downtime continued for 2 more weeks, then again i contacted support and i was said they were going to scale this to management, i waited one more week and since i wasn’t contacted by support or management and the trouble ticket in question was closed, i moved the last site to another new vps.

So like i always do, i go and read the terms of service (to see their cancellation policy and if i had to pay anything extra, but no, i was within my time to cancel and not have to pay anything) and so i asked for a cancellation, after that i didn’t heard anything from support, not a “we have canceled your account” or anything (if my e-mail account or virpus account was hacked it seems it would be quick and easy to burn my vps), but what comes next wasn’t that nice, although my due date for payment was more than a week from that time, after i canceled they immediately tried to make a payment to my credit card, as well as tried several more times the following week (i was lucky that the reason i didn’t wait 1 or 2 more months with virpus, to see if the service would get better, was that i had to renew my credit card and i didn’t feel like adding my new one to virpus…), so to sum it up my review of virpus:

Good Points:

  • Pretty Cheap VPS Hosting
  • Good Enough Support for Technical Questions
  • Average Performance (was good at first but then it kinda when to normal+downtime)

Bad Points:

  • Cheap Hardware
  • Downtime (my threshold for downtime is about 2 per month, that is to be expected from upgrades to random problems, more than that, its totally unacceptable)
  • Bad Support Followup (they told me at least 3 times that they would check and get back to me, of course they never did)
  • Unethical Cancellation Procedure (tried to charge my credit card without reason after cancellation)

So i would say that i would recommend virpus to anyone that wanted a cheap vps for hosting anything that wasn’t priority (hosting files, cache, image galleries, backups), it was quick and overall the downtime wasn’t that bad (a month with about 20 downtime windows of about 5 to 15minutes each is bad for a active site, but not that terrible for file hosting or something like that, its still about 90% uptime), but i can’t recommend them cause they did try and charge my credit card when they didn’t have any reason to do it (for some companies you do have to pay something before you leave), so if you read this, there are way better and cheaper hosting companies on the web, so stay away from virpus.

Update: So a week as gone by and im still getting the “Invoice is Due” and that i should log in to my account and pay, nice ^_^ but since they closed my server and then closed my account, so even if i wanted to pay i was out, a little more of this and ill just consider it spam/phishing and start flagging them all as such.

How to Protect your Sites

Tech

Well one of my sites was taken down for a couple of hours after it was completely screwed from a hack (well from script kiddies, but still), that deleted admin accounts and posts and added re-directs and other nasty stuff, cleaning it up would mean several hours and some things might be completely lost forever anyways, so what to do? before this happened, during or after to fix it, so what do i do to keep my sites online and protected, ill separate these into 3 major points:

Preventive Protection (before any problem)

  • Always have the latest updates to your online software, yes i know sometimes it brings new bugs, but most of the times its better to take the time to find workarounds and still update to the latest than opening yourself to an attack;
  • Always have multiple backups, all my hosts have backups but i also make my own to other servers (weekly) as well as a to my own computers (montly),  this ensures that even if there is a catastrophically bad failure (your host dies on you or deletes your account) that you are still able to bounce back pretty quickly;
  • Make sure your hosting is separate from your domains, since keeping those 2 together means if you need to jump to another host that you will always have problems (also have always a backup host that you like, and trust to jump to quickly if need be);
  • Use popular software, yes it might be a bigger target for hacks and security issues, but the chance of having updates and fixes is also much larger;
  • Resilient Hosting, doesn’t need to be cloud hosting or some strange arrangement, just needs to be from good hosting companies with good track records, they ensure that most hardware/server failures will never happen and if they did, that a fix would be done quickly and efficiently

Immediate Protection (when you first detect the problem)

  1. Put the site Offline, if you are on a apache server it normally means an update to the htaccess/htpasswd, you don’t want your users getting affected by your compromised site;
  2. Check to see how was the site compromised, was it the server, a bad admin, software flaw, try and find how did this happen;
  3. After you find out the flaw, search and see if there is a fix to it (server/software update), banning an admin, whatever it is, cause after you fix it, you need to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

Reactive Protection (how to fix the problem)

  • Best way is always, just delete the whole site and bring back the latest stable backup, sure you will lose some content or news but you have a guarantee that your site comes back crisp and clean, fixing it by hand means you can miss something and still keep your site compromised;
  • Make a test run and check if everything is alright, make sure to make the necessary adjustments before bringing the site back online;
  • Fix the security issue, if you found out what was the problem, go ahead and do the updates or workarounds, so this doesn’t happen again;
  • Make a brand new backup immediately before bringing the site back on, this ensures that if the site is still vulnerable, that you can bring it back up quickly, without much loss.

So that’s it, yes i know its basically using backups, and yes there are other ways, but this is the easiest more efficient way to protect your site from premature death ^_^

Brand New Tentakle

News

Yep new design for tentakle.com, i went with a simple campy look, 50’s horror look hehehe, makes it way nicer to check the awesome imageboard, also added several new boards, lets see how all the uses will like it, so yeah check here for some slimy tentacle hentai pictures ^_^