Web hosting review: Media Temple vs. Dreamhost
Posted March 10, 2009 – 9:14 pmSome months back before I started this blog, I posted a detailed review of web hosting providers Media Temple and Dreamhost on one of my websites, CallingGuides.com, and on the Drupal.org website (Drupal being the content management platform I use for many of my sites).
The review recounts my experiences with these two web hosting providers and highlights the dramatic performance differences that I saw between them. Basically, Media Temple blew Dreamhost out of the water.
There is a graphic on the post showing the huge reduction in page load times the moment I moved over to Media Temple (graphic is from my Google Webmaster account). Media Temple performance was great then (Sep 08) and it remains great today. I couldn’t be happier.
As noted in the write-up, the comparison is not quite apples-to-apples. With Dreamhost, I had a pretty cheap shared hosting plan for, like, $120 per year for unlimited sites and MySQL databases. Though you can find even cheaper plans elsewhere, the Dreamhost plan I had is typical of the shared plans you can get with many providers, such as Bluehost, among others.
With Media Temple, I skipped past their shared hosting plan and bought their ‘Dedicated Virtual’ hosting plan for about $600 per year (I needed to host way more websites than their shared plan would allow, else I would have tried that).
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How to price banner advertising on your website
Posted March 10, 2009 – 6:15 pmIf you are a smaller content publisher, setting the prices for banner ads, text links, and other types of online advertising for your websites can be challenging.
Over time, you will eventually converge on the right pricing based on what your advertisers say and what prices seem to move the most inventory. But in the early days when you first introduce paid advertising to your website, it can seem pretty much like a shot in the dark – even if your site has been around for a while and has some decent traffic sell against.
In fact, ad pricing is as much art as science, especially for smaller publishers who offer access to specialty niches and audiences. To some degree, the right price is whatever price you can get away with charging. However, it is probably best to apply a bit of rigor to the process so you can defend your pricing against hardnosed ad buyers from agencies or advertisers.
To figure out what your online ad prices should be, you should visit a site like Federated Media and go through the process of planning an advertising campaign. Federated Media is a well known and fairly exclusive advertising network that’s popular with the digerati in Silicon Valley and elsewhere. It inclues some very popular sites such as TechCrunch and Mashable, but also plenty of lesser known sites as well.
Obviously, the campaign you build is pure make believe, but if you walk through their campaign planning tool, it’ll give you access to the quoted pricing of 100+ popular websites from a variety of content categories and niche markets.
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Replace the battery in an iPod Mini 6GB
Posted March 9, 2009 – 8:14 pmMy iPod Mini battery had been fading for a while. I love the device, but it just wasn’t usable anymore when it wasn’t plugged in.
Courtesy of Ho John Lee
I went online and found a couple of iPod Mini battery replacement videos and they laid out exactly how to do, what tools were needed, and how long it would take.
I had understood the batteries to be sealed and irreplaceable, but then I heard that with a little effort you could put in a new battery yourself for, like, $10 to cover the cost of the battery.
The battery replacement process looked reasonably easy and it was. Once you organize your workspace, get the right tools, and have the replacement battery on hand, it takes 10-15 minutes or so.
Rather than me describe the process, it is easiest to watch somebody do it. I found this iPod Mini battery replacement video quite good, but there are numerous others. In this one, the fellow has clearly done it before, so you shouldn’t expect it to be so smooth, but the process is just as he explains and he highlights the main sticking points in his voice overlay.
Couple points that I would make:
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