Today I just came accross a post by Darren Rowse where I just found out that WordPress.com is now offering free “VIP” hosting which is not available to the public, only high profile bloggers with lots of traffic. The hosting package is pretty nice, with some features including version control, SSL, etc. What really struck me though was the price, $500 setup fee and a $250/month hosting charge. I find this extremely steep, and Darren is already suggesting that it’s being criticized by the blogging community. I don’t doubt it!

For example in comparison, the hosting package that I’m offering through my company is similar, except that you don’t get version control, and of course the bandwidth and server load is not balanced (which I have some serious doubts about how they really do this myself), but I do install WordPress, I setup Askimet for you, I setup your domain, I’ll install one theme and a plugin or two (within reasonable limits). I also don’t force you to put a “Powered by…” link on every page on your website, or force you to put statistic hooks so that I can know your metrics.

I also only charge a $20 setup fee, and $100/year for hosting (that includes 200mb of disk space and 10Gb of bandwidth). After that, the second domain is only $50/year. I charge a little more than the really cheap hosting services for the same bandwidth, but that’s because I provide a higher quality and more reliable service. I also refuse to overload the bandwidth on the server! That’s something I personally really hated when I first started out, so I refuse to do that. I’ll charge a little more instead since it’s worth it, trust me I know from experience! Downtime, or an unresponsive server, is money lost. By the way, if you’re interested in getting a hosting package from me, you can contact me directly at: steph@followsteph.com

Anyways, it really struck me as an expensive hosting solution. For that price, I’d be ahead just getting my own managed dedicated server. It would cheaper and I’d have more power and options!

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Blog Pulling Power - Creating Flagship Content
Some decent tips on how to create “anchor” articles, articles that attract attention for the rest of your blog

10 things I learned from my stats tonight
Dustin from Rain City Guide shows us some of their web stats. There’s some very interesting numbers and lessons to be learned here.

How Many Articles Can a Blog Handle?
There’s a good debate going on in the blog comments of this post as to how many articles a blog can really handle. What’s information overload? How many posts are too few to keep interest?

3 Reasons Why Delicious Bookmarks Beat Digg Traffic Hands Down
I don’t fully agree with him but he does pose some interesting arguments…

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I just found out today that Google is updating it’s index right now, so you can expect many domains to move up and down in terms of their Page Rank (Google PR). So far it looks like my other blog FollowSteph.com is moving up from a PR4 to a PR5 which is great when you consider that each PR differs in terms of web presence by an order of magnitude according to Google.

Here’s a little tool I found on Darren Rowse’s blog that helps give you an idea of what you’re Page Rank will be once Google is done the update:

Future PageRank Tool © SEO Chat

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Normally I’d save such articles for the Quick Links section of this blog, but today’s was just too interesting! John Chow has compiled a list of the top 8 Google Adsense revenue makers. I know for a fact that there are many more than those listed, so I’ll assume these are only those that have publicly released there numbers.

In any case, I’ll quickly post the names and amounts below. If you want more details about each of them I suggest you read his article, it’s very interesting.

1. Markus Frind: PlentyOfFish.com - $300,000 per month
2. Kevin Rose: Digg.com - $250,000 per month
3. Jeremy Shoemaker - $140,000 per month
4. Jason Calacanis: Weblogs, Inc. - $120,000 per month
5. David Miles Jr. & Kato Leonard - $100,000 per month
6. Tim Carter: AskTheBuilder.com - $30,000 per month
7. Joel Comm - $24,000 per month
8. Shawn Hogan – DigitalPoint.com $10,000 per month

Needless to say there’s lots of potential money to be made with Google Adsense!

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Great news! Starting today, we’ve decided to go ahead and open up the LearningCentre.com forums to the public for FREE. In the past we charged a one-time time of $100 for a lifetime membership, but for now we’ve decided to remove that sign-up fee and make it FREE! As both me (Steph) and Glenn Scott are both too busy to fully give the forums the time needed to properly market them, so we’ll let it build itself through word of mouth and participation (this blog is already experiencing exponential growth). Therefore I highly recommend you sign up now while it’s free.

We’re still going to be the two biggest posters, I have no doubt about it! We’re pretty prolific posters. It’s now almost become our main way of communicating ideas between the two of us, so you’ll probably find some great tips in there!

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Just off the presses, it looks like Google is in talks to buy YouTube.com for $1.6 billion! There’s not much information yet as it’s still sketchy, but it’s solid enough that CNN is already reporting on the purchase.

This could be very interesting so let’s see how it plays out over the next little while…

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Yesterday while I was looking at Digg.com, I found a very interesting little online tool. By simply entering in a domain name (or an IP), it allows you to see all other domains on that same IP. Although it’s not entirely accurate (which I can attest from my own personal testing), it does a decent job. Better than any other such tool I’ve seen before. I also found it seems to be more accurate for older domains.

In any case, it’s another tool that’s good to have in your arsenal

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It’s official, Google.com is buying YouTube.com for $1.65 billion in stock!

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As many of you already know from the previous posts on this blog and the comments in the forums (as well as how prolific this news is online), Google’s purchase of YouTube.com for $1.65 billion is massive news. I did a little bit a digging into it today, and I found this very interesting post on Reddit.com which really helps explain more what’s going on.

As me and Scotty mentioned in our seminars, it’s better to have one large site with momentum than many small sites each fighting to gain any market share. There’s a lot to be said about momentum and getting to the critical mass, the tipping point. What I personally think is happening here is that YouTube.com has the momentum that Google was looking for with Google Videos. At first Google Videos was the clear leader but they fell behind, and the momentum (or trend if you will) is just so massively in YouTube.com’s favor that Google decided to take it. If you haven’t already seen it, the Google Trend search graph comparing Google Videos and YouTube.com is pretty telling, so check it out!

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Today on FollowSteph I posted an article where someone analyzed the difference between renting and buying a real estate property. Now there’s nothing new and innovative about this, you can find many such debates online. What’s particularly interesting though is that they used Google Spreadsheets to show their analysis! This is the first time I’ve ever seen anything like this. It’s valuable enough that I linked my latest FollowSteph article to it, and the blog entry too. Had it been a normal article, I might have also, but this really struck me, and so it’s effective!

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