Online Directories, Are They Worth It?

[RayGroupInsurance]

By the way Ray...Pathnet charges $80-$140 per month to build a site. I would think that you would want to pay a one-time fee ($400-$800?) and some nominal hosting fees instead.

I'm paying $120/month for 12 months. This includes the design of my site, hosting for the 12 months and 1 hour of maintenance/month for the 12 months. They were handling my PPC campaign and I really liked the guy I was working with so I was willing to pay a little more. He has spent hours and hours on the phone with me just teaching me about SEO and how to get into the internet marketing game.

I know there are lots of sites out there that will sell you a template for $400-$800 but most of the ones I've seen look very cheap. This site needs to represent me and my agency and I don't want to look cheap or look like we cut corners to save a little bit of money.

I have since purchased about 30 more domain names like saltlakecityhomeinsurance.com that I plan on forwarding to my main site raygroupinsurance.com. But eventually I will want to use some templates for each of those sites so that I can have 30 or 100 sites out there instead of 1. I am planning on linking all of those sites to my main site to help it's PR.

I have spent a lot of time on this forum and on SEO sites studying since I found out about it. I am having a lot of fun with it. Some people probably don't want to be involved like that but it is really exciting for me. I guess it's fun to dream about the hundreds of leads a month that are going to be flooding my inbox as soon as I get this up and running. (before you tell me I'm not going to get 100's of leads a month know that I am kidding, but it's still fun to dream!)

 

[RayGroupInsurance]

Forgot to mention, when I get to the point where I'm hosting numerous sites I plan on getting my own server and hosting them myself. That's not economically feasible right now but if I had 50 sites even at $10/month thats $500. From what I've been told you can host your own sites on your own server for around that much each month.

Let me know if that is completely wrong because I'm working off of that assumption.

 

[The New Guy]

You can get into the server business for around $40 for the software plus the use of an old computer, if you have one laying around, and internet access.

My question would be why?

Professional hosting is so cheap now days, why would you want to risk running your own operation where if you go down, they all go down. Or worse, your system swallows a bug.

It sounds good in theory, but why not let somebody who does it for a living take care of it?

Check out the Host Monster link in my signature, you can host up to 999 names for the same price, get almost real time stats, plus tons of other cool stuff. But most important to me is the support, 24/7 live breathing english speaking telephone support.

I have used more than 10 plus hosting companies in the last 12 years or so. I switched to host monster, when my last hosting company went from phone support to e-mail only support. There's nothing more frustrating than waiting 3 to 24 hours for an e-mail response when you have a problem.

I had to call them last Friday about a file that had gotton corrupted on my server, acutally a bad adsense template program I bought from another person, they worked on the problem for an hour and ten minutes while I was on the phone with them. They rebuilt the entire file for me. Now, that's service.

 

[Alston]

Guy...I meant to ask you...The Ohioquotes site is being replaced with a new site. It should be done in a few weeks.

Obviously the domain will stay the same. Will I keep any backlinks or other little SEO things I have done, or will they be lost. Also...I understand the older the site...the better. Or is is the older the domain?

I don't want Google to think that the new site is a brand new entity.

Thanks.

If you will continue to own the old site, you can do permanent redirects in the .htacess file of the old site. If you redirect old_site/page_A to new_site/page_x anyone requesting old_site/page_A will see new_site/page_x. Search engines will see the new page as well. You can redirect multiple pages from the old site to one page on the new site or redirect them on a one-to-one basis.

Unfortunately, I don't think that you can do it on a site-wide basis. You will have to do it on a page by page basis although you don't need to redirect each page of the old site. The most important pages are the pages that have links pointing to them and any pages that are ranked well.

 

[RayGroupInsurance]

Check out the Host Monster link in my signature, you can host up to 999 names for the same price, get almost real time stats, plus tons of other cool stuff. But most important to me is the support, 24/7 live breathing english speaking telephone support.

I didn't realize you could hose unlimited sites for one price. Is it $6.99 for the unlimited plan?

A friend of mine mentioned that I would need a dedicated server? so that all of the info people enter in my site would remain safe. Is that true? He said if you are on a shared server that you run the risk of other users on the server stealing your info.

There is a local company here called Fibernet (Fibernet: Utah colocation, Utah ISP, web hosting and more) that offers hosting. My plan was to use them when I got to a point that I needed to. That would get rid of the problem of my home computer/server going down. It would cost more, but I want to use the best option available. I don't want to have problems with my sites because I tried to save some $. Let me know what you think of fibernet compared to hostmonster.

 

[The New Guy]

My guess would be that they share the same facility or backbone.

They are both located in the same town. Perhaps Fibernet resells Hostmonster?

Do your due diligence on each, I've already made my choice, and yes, that's $6.95 for the unlimited plan.

Check the tech support for Fibernet, seems they charge a fee, and are only available til 5:30pm.

That's just what I gleamed from the site, I didn't call them, or explore their site beyond that.

 

[Alston]

A friend of mine mentioned that I would need a dedicated server? so that all of the info people enter in my site would remain safe. Is that true? He said if you are on a shared server that you run the risk of other users on the server stealing your info.

I think that your friend meant a dedicated IP address. There is a big difference. A dedicated server is expensive and probably not necessary to meet your needs. You need a dedicated IP to use SSL (https:// instead of http://).

By the way, I've tried and rejected a few hosting companies lately as I've been developing new sites. I have 4 that have a Google page rank and 5 that are profitable.

I switched to glitterhost.com for my newest site https://medicare-supplement-quotes.com. It's been less than a week, but so far I'm happy with them.

If you are not going to use SSL, or a server side programming language (like PHP) or an MySql database, it probably doesn't matter who your host is unless they make your pages load slowly. (Speed is mostly in the control of the webmaster, but some hosting companies deliver your pages faster than others.) Also it is fairly easy to switch from one host to another when your needs change. I pay about $250 a year per site for hosting service that meets all of my relatively advanced needs.