When choosing a web host its almost impossible to separate the fact from the fiction in terms of the quality of the services offered. It is especially hard to determine the most reliable web hosting service

There are many good articles about what to look for in a new host, but very little in the way of hard cold comparisons of actual performance.

We have hosting from three hosts, all selected after following the usual advice to determine the best option for our circumstances (entry level hosting).

The three host option was chosen to ensure:

• If one host went down our whole business was not affected
• To improve SERPs by interlinking from different IP blocks
• To gain some experience of the performance of different hosts

To provide further robustness the last hosting selected was a Hostagtor Reseller plan. This plan was selected because it allows you to setup multiple accounts on one host. If one account needs to be disabled by the hosting supplier (Digg etc) then other accounts are not effected. Contrast this with single account plans which are cheaper but would result in all sites on that host being disabled.

Here is a summary of the web hosts we use:
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Earlier this month Google announced another enhancement to their Adsense program. Its called targetable custom channels.

It works a bit like this:

• Each Google Adsense ad-block can be allocated to one or more “channels”. These are used to track the performance (including earnings) for the ad-block.
• This allows the publisher to experiment with colour, placement and Ad type to determine which combination works best for each site.
• Usually Ads are allocated to random Ad-Blocks by Google.
• Now, with targetable custom channels, advertisers can choose to locate their ads within a specified location on a publishers site.

There is a bit of debate about when and if this offering will be effective.
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Mompreneurs – Entrepreneurs of the fairer sex. Here are some interesting numbers:

• Women own 46% of privately owned business in the US
• They are  starting  their own businesses at twice the rate as men
• Over 7.7 million US firms are owned by women
• They contribute $1.1 trillion in revenues to the economy
• Their firms create jobs for 7.2 million Americans.

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Over the last year we have focussed on SEO to grow the traffic to this blog. We are just starting to see good results with traffic and revenues lifting (Although it hasn’t been reflected in Alexa raking).

Now its time to look at other methods of increasing traffic.

The most common advice is to build an email list. Having tried this in the past we have decided not to pursue because:

• If your accused of spam, there is a risk your whole online business will be shut down
• Spam filters shut out a lot of legitimate traffic
• The size of your email list cannot be measured in any way by search engines so it doesn’t count towards SEO.

So we have decided to build our RSS feed readership.

In researching best way to achieve this we learned a lot about Feedburner & SEO.
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When your looking for an idea for the next project or post its a good idea to look around at what others are searching for. Sometimes its just a fun an interseting way to fill in a few spare minutes (I should get out more :-) )

Most of the search engines provide an indication of popular search tems. The following pages provide popular search terms . They are listed in alphabetical order:
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