As I wrote before, this would be my first time going to Vegas. I am leaving early, actually in about 24 hours and will arrive on Thursday, January 14 early in the morning and will be staying in new planet hollywood westgate towers. I hope that I get my tickets to ASW and give myself enough days to explore the city and win/lose some money.

As it gets closer to the event, I start seeing more and more parties by affiliates and networks. All of them are RSVP, you can see most of them in Nickycakes ASW party list here. You may also register for Meetup202 here, which is probably going to be fun and full of affiliate marketers as well. I am still thinking which ones to pick and can’t tell for sure if I am going to attend any of them.

Anyway, in case you are getting to Vegas earlier and feel like gambling a bit or just meet and have a drink, contact me using this form or just post a comment with your name and phone number (I am not going to post it).

Well, I hope it is going to be a lot of fun, as for now, I still got a bag to pack and get my cameras ready.

One of the biggest challenges of working from home is time management. Even since I left my job, my schedule got all screwed up. Even though I stay more at the computer, I actually work less. There are too many distractions and removing them should be the primary goal.

My #1 source of wasted time was checking my stats. I was checking my adsense, azoogle, cj, adwords, yahoo marketing, etc. accounts A LOT. After a while I just had them opened in a separate browser window and F5 every half an hour. That is a big time waste and don’t do it unless you are trying to optimize your campaign by studying conversion for a particular time of the day. Now I just check my stats at 12:00-12:10am every day, spend 10 minutes studying and tracking the conversions and done.

My #2 distractions were instant messengers. I generally use skype, icq, msn and aim. Sometime I would start a conversation with a client/friend/relative and talk most of the day. Not anymore… brb, away and offline statuses are there for me now, adding another hour or so of work time every day.

Email was #3 in my list. Now I try to check it only twice a day, which is more than enough – the first thing in a morning and the last thing before I go to bed. This saves me a lot of time as well.

#4 on my list is web – youtube, blogs, digg, etc… I am still trying to do something about it. I try to check those while I have lunch, but still get carried away sometimes… Not to mention that I just don’t feel too motivated on certain days and start checking these again… and again… Still a big time waste for me, but I am hoping to limit myself to 30 minutes a day while having my lunch.

#5 source is the general environment. Even though I have a separate office, I find it harder to focus since it is still at home. I can just get up and go grab some snacks or turn on the TV for the news on the background. All of these are the distractions.

#6 is my phone. Usually people don’t call during a day time, but when they are off work, I am still working. Putting my phone in silent mode helps.

These are the main reasons, however, a lot of time I just don’t have enough motivation. I still try to work, but I am not as productive. Usually after forcing myself to work and after a couple of hours I get into code/design/whatever and forget that I was not motivated. The day ends up being productive, unless something from the list above gets on the way. For instance, if I get myself focusing on work and an im window pops up, I end up chatting for a few minutes… Then it takes another hour to get back and remember where I was in code and get myself motivated again. buagh… that’s when I get frustrated and can’t get anything done. This is why I usually can’t be reached in any way any time I am working now. Hopefully I can get back to being super productive like I was before by eliminating these distractions.

Focus on one thing at a time. A lot of times I can’t get crap done (or at least it seems that everything stands still) because I try to focus on too many things at once. I code project on one screen, do some research on the other, looking for something else on my laptop, etc. Now I just focus on one thing at a time. Usually after checking my email in the morning, I set a goal of what I intend to get done by the end of the day. This helps to keep the frustration down since I don’t overload myself and motivation up since I know exactly what I need to get done. If I finish early, I just take my time doing something else and end up being super productive.

Working at home is not easy. Set your goals, eliminate the distractions that stand on the way and get motivated. Doesn’t sound complicated, but I couldn’t get anything done by the end of the day without it.

I have never been to Vegas before and affiliate summit was a good reason to go this year. After heavy celebration of Christmas and New Year I decided to book the trip today. I actually just got myself 7 days of stay since I never been to Vegas, leaving a few extra days to explore the city. I admit, I have a small gambling problem… I hope I left myself enough time to check out the city, all the greatest casinos and a few shows.

It was tough to make a decision and chose the right hotel since I have never been there. I read through many posts, including Shoemoney’s 2008 post about staying in Stratosphere, and looked through a TON of reviews of all the hotels. Stratosphere was almost free, but looks like it is at the very end of the strip, so I started to look somewhere in the middle. After hours of research I finally settled with the new Planet Hollywood Towers right in the middle of the strip. I hope I made a right choice. The hotel just had a grand opening, so they try to sell out the rooms with a decent discount through some of the sites.

I believe I may have a pass to the event, but not 100% sure if I do… It’s kind of hard to foresee how things will go and if I will actually get it, but I hope I do since affiliate summit west 2010 is officially sold out. Just hope I can get inside, listen to some of the sessions, meet people, take pictures and just see how it is.

Either way, I hope that Vegas is going to be a blast! “To the night we’ll never forget” (c) Hangover, or something like that… a week in my case actually.

Going to Vegas was actually one of my big dreams since I came to US in 2000. Another dream was to make it to affiliate summit. I guess 2010 already brings something I can scratch off the list of things I want to do and I just hope that I can scratch off more than one thing with this trip.

Getting started in something is hard. It may not be hard physically as it is emotionally because when you start something, you should commit to it. There is no sense in starting without commitment in most of the cases. I knew how to do affiliate marketing for years, but was always “too busy” to get started.
“Beginning is half of everything.” – Pifagor

It is easy to think about something than to actually do it. Just start doing it, don’t be lazy.
“The lazy are always wanting to do something.” – Vauvenargues

There are all kinds of “what if”s on the way. Don’t be afraid, start small, test things out before jumping all the way in. Just start and look at everything as a lesson.
“Always do what you are afraid to do.” – Emerson

You never know what is going to happen even when you have the plan all laid out. Dream big, but expect little to be happy with the end result.
“It’s easy to see, hard to foresee.” – Franklin

Don’t be afraid to start something different, something new, something that nobody has done before.
“There is only one step from the sublime to the ridiculous.” – Napoleon

Don’t waste time reading through popular blogs on a subject. Just do what you need to do, your own experience matters. I read affiliate blogs and forums for years – all the same crap, 99.9% is a waste, who cares what they eat and what they drive if they are not sharing how they got there. A small tip here and there, just start trying yourself.
Stop wasting time, start doing it!
“Never put off till tomorrow what you can do today.” – Proverb

However, make sure that you have the basic knowledge to get started. If you know deep inside that you need more info and your starting costs are more than what you can afford to lose than get a book and read more valuable information on the subject. If you CAN’T do it today, wait till you CAN do it tomorrow. This quote may seem contradictory to previous one, but I just see a different meaning behind the word “can” here:
“Never do today what you can do tomorrow. Something may occur to make you regret your premature action.” – Burr

I have quite a few hosting accounts, from shared to dedicated, and host my sites based on the needs. Some require a lot of cpu processing, some more emails per hour, some more bandwidth, etc. I have always recommended bluehost before. The first 2 years with them was just incredible. I never had ANY issues at all. My first problem came along about two years ago and it is still present. All of the sudden, I started to get “CPU exceeded quota” errors. I called in, and they told me that my sites have too much load on the processor, asked me to check my queries, code, etc… I was running phpld and was really surprised that just 1 site based on very popular phpld script would cause the problem. I was getting decent traffic, but it still was a small site… I moved the sites around, left just a few smaller ones on the account and it was fine for another year until this week. As I wrote before, I am running some affiliate campaigns now. Running affiliate sites usually requires some investment and I had quite a bit of traffic coming from adwords at that point, paying for each click.

When I woke up in the morning, I logged into my affiliate account to see how much was made on a new offer that I was running. It was 0. I was surprised and thought that perhaps my adwords campaign was not running for some reason. Logged in my adwords next and saw that it was still sending all the traffic and campaign was still running. Then I went to my email and there it was… I had a notice that they were migrating my account to a new server. It was sent in the evening a few hours before the actual migration. I expected better from them, at least a full day to a week of notice. Oh well, I lost some money, no big deal, paused the campaign and decided to check on the sites.

This is where I got really pissed off. I entered on of my urls in the browser bar and pressed enter. It asked me to download my php file. WOW, Really? Are the techs at BlueHost really that stupid? They left my apache server running and killed the php process. I am not a server technician and barely have any experience configuring the servers, but I know how not to give away free code. I know how to test after I do something. I had over 1,000 webmaster/seo visitors coming to see my sites, I wonder how many got my code and database information.

This is when I contacted them. I saved the conversation and listing it below (changed names and urls):

me [4:08:31 PM]: www.URLNAMEREMOVED.com – seriously, anybody can just get a custom code with full database access info for free?
them [4:09:04 PM]: What do you mean?
me [4:09:23 PM]: can you go to the site? its been like that the whole day
[4:09:35 PM]: apache is running while php is not
[4:09:52 PM]: so it just lets people download my source code
[4:10:35 PM]: for example, go to www.URLNAMEREMOVED.com/header.php – it asks you to download the file, which has all the database access information.
[4:11:28 PM]: the first hacker-wanna-be will empty my database when he gets a chance on all of the sites that I host on that account
[4:11:57 PM]: I get over 1,000 unique visitors a day there
[4:12:01 PM]:
them [4:12:01 PM]: It doesn’t have the database access information. It has header body and footer
me [4:12:46 PM]: well, download www.URLNAMEREMOVED.com/header.php , since it is a database driven web-application, it has a connection string there
[4:13:14 PM]: line 19-24
them [4:13:18 PM]: php is running, but I will have an administrator restart the server. Ultimately this process could take 15-30 minutes for everything to come back up to it’s optimal performance level. I’m sincerely sorry for the delay in service.
me [4:14:05 PM]: ok, thank you. thats what I was told about 4 hours ago though
[4:14:27 PM]: this is the second conversation I am having today…
[4:14:42 PM]: thank you. I will check back in an hour…
them [4:14:49 PM]: No problem. If you need any further assistance in the future, please feel free to contact us back. Thank you very much for contacting live support. Have a great day!

Ok, so I waited for over an hour, still the same issue. So I contacted them again:

me [5:28:54 PM]: My sites are still giving away free code. :-/
[5:29:11 PM]: Hi, please see www.URLNAMEREMOVED.com/header.php
[5:29:18 PM]: or any other site/page on my account
them [5:29:24 PM]: One moment please while I take a look
me [5:29:35 PM]: This is the third time I am contacting support today.
[5:30:10 PM]: My sites are down for 20 hours, which is not a big deal, but what big deal is – that they are giving away free code :-/
[5:30:17 PM]: along with all the connection information
[5:30:56 PM]: I can’t believe that your guys admins can’t figure out how to stop apache at least, this is a big security issue… :-/
[5:31:56 PM]: database can be accessed pretty easy with the connection information from php files like www.URLNAMEREMOVED.com/header.php and user information can be stolen…
[5:33:21 PM]: this is the third time I am contacting support today, every time I get a responce that the sites will be up in 20-30 minutes. I wait for 2-3 hours and still the same. Can you at least turn the apache off. I have a few sites there with some getting 1000 unique visitors a day, mostly webmasters…
them [5:33:23 PM]: your account is being migrated from one server to another. the php download that you’re seeing is most likely a result of this migration.
me [5:33:54 PM]: I know that somebody already has all the source code which I paid a good amount, for free. :-/
them [5:34:01 PM]: we can’t turn apache off on the server because there are hundreds of other customers on your server that would lose their website.
me [5:34:17 PM]: I know, I am not an administrator and can figure out how to turn off apache or turn on php and configure
[5:34:34 PM]: most likely their sites are having the same issues
them [5:34:48 PM]: no. it is only your account that is being moved between servers.
me [5:34:57 PM]: since php is just like apache – a service that is server-wide
[5:35:45 PM]: so, does it mean it’s ok to give my code to the world for free and have full access to the databases with a ton of user information?
[5:36:53 PM]: I get over 100,000 email addresses, user information in the database, just want to make sure that I am not the one being liable for the data in case something happens
[5:38:08 PM]: sinec I can’t even access my account to edit .htaccess to hide my pages until the migration is over
[5:38:52 PM]: and btw, good three hour notice on the migration. :-/ I didn’t get it until this morning when all my sites were already giving away free code. :-
[5:39:56 PM]: Also, I hope you guys don’t mind me sharing the chat logs on my hosting review posts…
them [5:40:48 PM]: If you wish to do so, feel free… we can’t stop you
me [5:41:10 PM]: I was your customer for about 4 years if not more, there were issues, but I can’t believe bluehost would just give my source code and data away like that…
[5:42:02 PM]: Thank you for not helping and giving empty promises all day. Have a good day. I know its probably not your fault, so I apologize for being a bit rude. I am just really frustrated.
them [5:42:32 PM]: I understand your frustration. I checked with a senior tech and they’re telling me:
[5:42:41 PM]: currently transfered 7.7G of 8.7G so approx. 1 hour remains along with any residual DNS propagation of course
[5:42:48 PM]: for remaining migration time.
me [5:43:20 PM]: ok, thanks for letting me know, I just wish the apache would not be running until the data is transferred
them [5:44:42 PM]: you’re welcome. I’m sorry I can’t be of more assistance. the migration processes are automated and can’t be stopped once started
me [5:45:20 PM]: ok, thanks. have a good day.
them [5:45:27 PM]: You’re welcome! I apologize for all the trouble. Have a great day! Au revoir

From what I understand, user information is free at bluehost. As I mentioned to the techs above, once you download index.php, you can see all the includes and go through those. In my case for one of the sites, database access information was included in header.php. Anybody could have grabbed that information and get all the data. Some of my bigger sites have info on 50,000 user emails and if I don’t send spam it doesn’t mean that the hosting should give away the database access information to those who would. So, if you are planning to store any user information or open up an e-commerce site, go with a more responsible company, unless you think it’s ok to share your database with the world.

I don’t know about you, but I like to keep my code to myself. I paid a lot of money for some of my code and NEVER wanted to give it away for free. Well, in this case the server would ASK you if you would like to download index.php whenever you try to access the page. From there your visitors can see and download all of the include files along with the database and have a clone of your site in minutes.

I used to host EasySubmits with bluehost back when I just started. A lot of “Exceeded cpu quota” pushed me to move it to a dedicated server along with other bigger sites. Search elance and rentacoder, you can see that people are willing to pay thouthands to have tools like Easysubmits and exact clones built.

Anyways, 3 years ago I would recommend bluehost to anybody. I recommended it as well as hostmonster until this week and had a few people sign up with them. In case you don’t know, as far as I know from the online research, hostmonster is operated by the same people as bluehost. As far as I noticed, it is pretty much the same package as bluehost, only $1 cheaper. I assume that since the server costs went down, bluehost wanted to offer competitive prices and didn’t want to charge a huge number of existing customers for $1/month less. They opened up the same service for less under a different brand name, but there may have been other issues.

I also noticed that bluehost has been cutting some features. I have a big email sending limit on my account, 500 an hour. As far as I know from reading some of the forums, they cut that number to 50 an hour for new accounts.

My conclusion – if you dont care for your code or the data, bluehost is good for the uptime, but when they would migrate you to a different account, don’t ask them to start php or stop apache, they wouldn’t do it. As far as I understood from the second conversation, bluehost technicians use automated migration process and can’t really do anything about it. I still like bluehost more than godaddy, but I think there are other service for under $2 a month that would be more responsible with the data and provide similar package. I think I am going to try webhostingpad when I will need another shared account, they have a $1.99 special going. I also used startlogic, different admin panel, but great service for a cheaper price. Never had problems with them.

I like dedicated servers more, and you can actually pick a lower end server for around $30 if you know how to configure it. I have one at ServerPronto for example, but I read quite a bit of bad reviews of them. I had them for over a year and can’t complain. Had to raise a ticked one time to restart a server since I could not ssh into the server, but that’s about it.

If you invest in traffic, it is important to be as sure as possible that the server is not going to be down when you send people there. Making a good hosting decision is important.

By the way, I was going through forums about bluehost while writing this post. It seems that they are having a promotion for $3.95 now. Just go to google and search for “bluehost 3.95″ if you need one. I think that’s about 3.95$ more than what they should charge for the service they provide, but if you want to try them, 3.95 is still better than 6.95.

Please let me know your experience with different hosting providers in the comments.