In the beginning, was free hosting. Freewebs.com, geocities.com were the first ones I tried, but the limitations and ads were too annoying after a while.

The next one was a US/Canadian company that had an interesting affiliate program attached. I thought I was joining under an active business builder, but alas, cookies got the better of me, and I got no spillover at all. It was a very nice company, but overseas hosting wasn’t the best solution from an SEO perspective back then, especially if you had a .com domain you wanted to rank in Australia. So I looked for an Aussie PHP hosting company.

Started with Jumba first. They were ok at first. Then the support problems started. Some Chinese spam caused one of my sites to keep crashing, so they turned off ALL 12 sites without telling me. Um, I was quite annoyed. I put a placeholder page up for my broken site (while I waited for a new laptop to be able to debug the problem) and somehow Jumba managed to delete the .htaccess files for all 12 sites. Luckily I had my own backup, but that was the end of them.

Moved to Chombo, and again at first things were ok. Then a series of calamities seemed to strike them. Connections to data centres that caused everyones sites to go down. For days. Actually four days in September – and that was the last straw with them, especially as they didn’t update their clients, Twitter page, Whirlpool or their official status page during that time. And there was also the time when the infamous Turkish hacker got in and replaced all the index files. And somehow my single generation backup was in progress during the hack, so Chombo said they had absolutely no backups for me. Can a hosting company really run like that?

So now I’ve moved to rackservers.com.au. In the past I have manually moved all my sites over, one by one, although I know you should be able to backup everything through cpanel. But of course Chombo’s cpanel backup function failed. So Rackservers doggedly copied everything across for me.

I’ll still create my own backups. I had even bought a new external hard drive and new laptop in preparation for that, just before Chombo had gone down for four days.

Cross fingers, this will be the one!

I’ve been revamping  Australian Flower Shops again lately.

I originally started the site back in late 2003, and it’s had 2 makeovers since.

It’s actually fun going on the Wayback Machine, to see how the layout and content has changed over the years. I’ve finally gone away from the green colour scheme that seemed to be a fallback for a few of my sites.

Surprisingly, there hasn’t been much change to the content. Back in 2003 I was teaching myself SEO, and the trend back then was hyphenated domain names and filenames and reciprocal link exchanges.  So I still have hyphenated domain and filenames – there’s no need to throw away the history, and if someone offered me a nice link that still remains, then I’ll keep it there, as you should.

And my keyword research back then showed that there was less competition for the long-tail phrases like “floral emblems of Australia“, than initial seaches like “flowers”.

It was easy to rank on Yahoo using hyphenated names, and I would get regular organic traffic from there and MSN. Google was always a hard nut to crack.

But despite the amount of time that I spend researching SEO and web development, with a normal job during the week, plus a couple of kids and dogs, I never really spent much time refining the site.

So recently I decided to try and vamp it up.

Being lazy, I bought Confession of a Lazy Internet Marketer, and was surprised to find that I was already doing 80% of the content and structure approach that he suggested.  Way back in 2003.

So as usual it comes down to SEO.  Some of his techniques I won’t use, in the link exchange area – I don’t feel like getting an ongoing paid membership to a linking site. But some of his other techniques for SEO are quite good. It’s interesting how they also overlap with some of the techniques used in 30 minute backlinks, which I also bought recently. So I will be using some of their techniques that they have in common. I think the 30 minute backlinks suggestions are easier for less technical people.

But I haven’t actually done any of their suggestions yet. I’m about halfway through preparing the groundwork.  So my Google rankings still need a lot of work.

And now I’m about to go out to a door shop, cos I really need to fix up the bottom room – it’s too crowded and dog oriented, and needs simplicity and lightening up.
Like a lot of websites I know.

One day the site will be finished. And then I can go on and revamp some more websites.

I love these business rules, from Yanik Silver.

34 rules for the maverick entrepreneur. Running a business can and should be fun.

http://www.maverickbusinessinsider.com/

Bruce is our resident Fractal Lover.

When you see some of the images generated by Apophysis at Techrepublic , you’ll understand why.

There are lots of images on the post for you to click through.

Ewen Chia has a new program out called Affiliate of the Month, in which he promises to tell all his affiliate secrets, and also has a competition to see who will be the Affiliate of the Month, each month, with a cash prize.