Bluehost Issues

Filed under: Other — rasim

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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.

test .htaccess

Filed under: Web Development — rasim

A number of times I had to check why .htaccess was not working on a localhost or a server. Different machines have different setting and whether it is a wamp server, windows or linux box, I always check .htaccess file itself first. The easiest way to check if .htaccess settings get picked up is to create one with minimal settings. I like to have it redirecting to some other website as a confirmation. Below is the example of the content, just copy and place it in your .htaccess to see if it works:

Options +FollowSymLinks
rewriteEngine on
rewriteRule ^test\.html$ http://www.hackcorp.com/index.php [R=301,L]

Now go to test.html on your server and if your .htaccess gets accessed by the apache, you should get redirected to this site – http://www.hackcorp.com/index.php. If not, start looking into your apache settings. Make sure that the basic settings are set correctly, such as mod_rewrite module is enabled in httpd.conf and AllowOverride All is set on the directory in the httpd.conf.

Wheather it is a simple error of misplacing .htaccess or wamp and windows not seing the file, the first step of checking if the settings get picked up is often overlooked.

P.S. Don’t forget that apache server needs to be restarted every time you make a change. :)

Please let me know if this post was helpful or if you would like to see more details on the topic.

Life is a series of steps: next step

Filed under: Other — rasim

stairsI had a full time job for a while and have been working all this time. After my regular 10-12hours at work, I was trying to put another 5-6 hours into my start up and it was tough.  Having a regular job gave me more security and a way to expand my team of programmers to 3 people. Working 15-18 hours was really exhausting me and I had to ask to work less or quit even though my start up is not making enough to support itself yet.

I gamble a lot, and I think this step of my life is one of the biggest bets I ever made. I don’t know what will come out of it, but I am moving to working on my contract jobs starting  11/16/2009. I have a few projects going and hope that I can close them soon. It is pretty hard to have 2 full time jobs and stare at the screen so many hours a day plus be able to spend some time with the family and friends. I believe it is the time to go all in on what I have in mind. I had two choices, one being a stable, successful web developer and spend my life creating perfect CMS systems and another going entrepreneurial way and face a lot of uncertainty.  I chose the second path, which is more risky and we will see if I made the right choice. I am all in at this point. Higher risk tends to generate a higher return. :)

There are a few things that pushed me. Working every day in a company is great, I get to work with a lot of people, develop new things, get appreciated for it, have stable paychecks, etc. Working on my own projects is way more risky compensation wise, more challenging, more fun and can generate higher return. At some point I had additional time to do some affiliate sites and it generated 100% return on my investment from offers like netflix. I had to put some time into it but I know I will be able to do something similar. I have more knowledge, more experience and a bigger team now. Not every offer I tried worked out, but it worked for me overall. I also have a few websites that generate a decent amount and I think they are good to get me started. Having more time will let me put more work into existing sites, improve the rankings, features and take them to the next level. On top of that I have quite a few big ideas for my own websites and do custom websites for a few people. I am pretty sure I can make it work.

I know I can do better. I know I will. These thoughts push me to work harder for myself now and have a better control over my team. I will deliver custom projects faster now. I will do more progress on the sites that I own. I will create many new ones. I will commit to perfecting my skills! I am going to the next level and the big step has already been made.

At last, just want to share some goals. By 2010 I plan to create about 20 additional websites. Some are in a certain niche running affiliate offers and the others are just general content sites powered by adsense. I will finish the contract projects that I have now and start on the new ones. I am planning to double my online income by the end of next month this way.

Life is a series of steps and with a lot of uncertainty I am making the next one.

Ubuntu 10.04, Lucid Lynx

Filed under: General Web — rasim

ubuntu

Update: A little late, but I finally got around to installing Ubuntu again and creating a blog on the domain. :)

Finding a good domain name can be very random.

Every once in a while I look through top stories on digg. Today I came across the article that talked about the next release of Ubuntu – 10.04 codenamed Lucid Lynx.

I was thinking about a domain for a new directory as I was reading the article. Than I thought about lucid lynx and what a great name it can be for one. After checking lucidlinks, which was taken, I tried lucidlynx.com. To my surprise it was available, as long as .net, .org and all the rest. I bought the .com, and left .net and .org in case you still want to buy one (assuming you are the first one reading it) since the value may go up by April 2010. :)

I don’t think that I will be making a directory on lucidlynx though, unless 10.04 changes the code name closer to the release date. I actually ran Ubuntu 9.04, Jaunty Jackalope, for a while. It was pretty interesting to mess with it since I haven’t had Linux installed for several years, see all the changes to the kernel, UI and applications. I had to let it go since I installed it on my new i7 with all the new hardware and Jaunty didn’t have my video card drivers.

Anyway, to make a long story short, now I am thinking to install Lucid Lynx when it becomes available and blog about all the useful commands, learning experiences and tips. Just a plan for now, who knows, may be I will do something different with it down the road.

I thought I would post this article just to show how sometimes you can get a pretty valuable domain name or an idea as soon as you hear about something coming out. Even though you may think that digg is a distraction most of the time, you can always make something useful out of it. ;)

Featured Directory Submissions

Filed under: SEO & SEM — rasim

featured_links

Why would somebody buy featured links on a directory if they can get a regular one for free? There are a few important factors. Many tend to think that it is approval time. I think that the average approval time for a featured link is 1-2 days, however, it is not the main criteria.

As you may know, we run a few directories for several years already. We sold quite a few featured links for $5/year (I think that this is an average what they go for).  Usually the bigger the PR the more links directory sells. If you take the average price of $5 that gets you a featured link for a year, it only costs you a little less than 0.42c a month.

Well, here is something interesting behind featured links.  To illustrate the point, we will start explaining how regular links on most of the directories work. When you submit a regular link to the directory, it takes some time to get approved. Upon approval – it becomes the first link in the top of the category. As soon as another link gets added to the same category, yours becomes second and moves down the line from first to tenth, from page one to page two, three, and so on. So your link does not stay on the same page all the time. Therefore it may be indexed in one day and disappear from search engine’s list of incoming links the next day. Featured directories do not move from page to page – in the most directories they are on every single page of the category.

Where am I going with this? Lets look at a random category on a random directory – I chose “Business” on Onpaco Free Web Directory. At this point there are 154 pages in “Business” section. So, whenever you buy a link – you are buying a link on 154 relevant pages! Plus you get a chance to get a link to your site from the pr1 index page since they show random featured links on the index page as well. If you are familiar with SEO – you know that the top part of the content generally is more important then the bottom. That is where featured links usually go as well, which gives us another point that shows the value of 42 cents a month. We also noticed that featured links get more clicks as well.

Does it make sense now? Well, how do you find the right directories? You may think like the most of the crowd and go after the pagerank, but it may not be the best idea. A lot of times webmasters buy expired domain names with a pagerank and put a directory there. They run it for a few months, collect the money, pagerank drops with the next update and the directory goes down. Look at the age of the directory, amount of pages in your category and quality of approved links rather than the pagerank. Also, check if the directory is active and adds links on a constant basis. While administering Free Directory Submission Site – EasySubmits we noticed that about half of the new directories disappear within first 6 months or so. There are a ton of the ones that been out for over a year or two, target those instead.

Run an experiment, see what a featured link can do for you, but I just thought that I’d share our observation.

Edit the look of a site with javascript

Filed under: Hacks & Tools — rasim

A lot of times people ask us to make something that looks similar to already existing website. Many don’t have photoshop, gimp or other image editing software and it is pretty hard for them to explain the visual need. What we often advise is to use the javascript since it is one of the fastest and convenient ways to alter the page. We use this script ourselves sometimes on the mockups. It takes a lot of work to remove some sneaky background or image in the image editor, and this script does simplify things a bit.

You can move, delete, resize and modify elements on the page by clicking on the element that you want to alter. Javascript works right from the browser’s URL bar. Just copy and paste the code below into the browser URL bar, press enter and the content becomes editable:

javascript:document.body.contentEditable=’true’;void 0

Then you can click “print screen” button, open word, paintbrush or an image editor of your choice and “paste” it into the new file.

Below is a simple example of what you can do to a page right from your browser.

page_edit_javascript

Sometimes its just fun to poke around, mess with a few websites and see how it would’ve looked with some adjustments.  Of course there are other tools like firebug that do more, but this is one of the simpler ways to do it.

Free directory submissions with EasySubmits

Filed under: Our Projects — rasim

Update: We do not own EasySubmits anymore. Please feel free to leave a feedback to the new management that already took it to the next level by adding new features such as social bookmarking and link classifieds. As for us, we find it more entertaining to build new services and spend time learning affiliate marketing…

easysubmits

One of our most visited websites is a free directory submission site – EasySubmits.

We came up with an idea to create EasySubmits while submitting our own sites to the directories. It took forever to fill out the forms, especially find the right categories in the drop down boxes. This is when we decided to automate it. Even though there are other desktop applications, we thought that we could bring something new to the table. Something that with a better tracking and availability from anywhere as long as there is a browser and internet connection. We were not satisfied with the results after trying a few desktop applications since most of them are pretty complicated to figure out, don’t work or crash half the time.

At first we just put it out online. It was not available for public for a few months and we thought about starting a directory submission service. Since we do custom web projects and have a lot on the plate, we changed our mind about submission service and made it public. It took off almost instantly. In just a few weeks we had so much traffic that we had to dump a shared hosting and move to a dedicated one. Now some sql tables, such as tracking, have over 1,000,000 records. EasySubmits gets 200-500 new user registrations every day and around 10,000 daily page views.

There were a few problems on the way and some are still there. Directories tend to go up and down on a regular basis. With over 500 listings it is hard to keep up and assure quality of the list. Some directories become paid as they grow and attract more traffic, others get broken with the corrupted databases, smarty errors or just disappear and the rest keep on changing their captcha settings. It also happens that directories go down for a day or two while switching hosting or having problems with the server load. These are the main issues that we have to deal with.

Now I would like to go over directory submissions in general.

Many people tend to believe that directory submissions do not have any effect on SEO anymore. While it doesn’t make much sense to spend days and days to submit, we believe that it still has a certain effect. The main argument is that people don’t see much links listed in google from the directories by typing “link:url” and this is true. You will not see every single link, however, you should still see some. Besides, search engines do not show every link that they know about. Another factor is the amount of pages that the directories have. When you submit a link, it usually goes to the top of the list, and as more and more links get added, your listing gets pushed down to further pages. Yes, those pages are PR0 in most of the cases, but being around relevant content still passes some value.

Many people do the submissions wrong. They use the same anchor text or irrelevant anchor text. Do the keyword research, go towards the keywords for which you want to rank good and change the title (anchor text) every 50 submissions or so… This way you will get good ranking for the keywords and search engines will not think that you are trying to spam them with the same link titles. For instance, if you are trying to get higher on search engines for “florida realtor”, don’t use “florida realtor” all the time. Make a few variations like “realtor in florida”, “florida real estate”, “real estate services in florida”, etc.

Just to prove the point, we did an experiment once. We got a new site and submitted to all of the directories with a few relevant keywords. In a week we had no backlinks showing in google, however, we were already indexed. With some onsite optimization we were already on page 8. Two week later, some directories showed up and we had 2 backlinks, however, we were already on page 2. It is up to you, but we believe that directory submissions still have some effect, not as much as few years back , but it still helps.

Some people also say that it is bad to submit to over 10 directories a day. We don’t think it matters since the directories have different approval time. While some may list you the same day, others wouldn’t approve your site for months. That is besides the fact that the links will be picked up by search engines at different times as spiders don’t crawl the same page over and over every day. We just chose 100 since we get bored to submit all day and the number works for us. What’s more important is continuous link building.

Another point that you may find useful – do not use primary email address for directory submissions. Many directories do send spam! Register one that you will be using for submissions and commenting on the sites that send spam.

These are pretty much the points that we had to share with a few users who would email us and ask for some advice. We hope you can find this information useful.

Please let us know if you have any problems with the site or have any suggestions.

Thank you and enjoy EasySubmits!

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