Leaving The Day Job

Archive for June, 2007

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It’s been a frustrating couple of weeks. Numerous things have distracted me to the extent that the whole “leaving the day job” thing has been on hold. I won’t bore you with most of the details but one is of interest : web hosting.

Initially I was using shared hosting from a well known US host. Obviously, shared hosting is far from ideal when you’re using it to run a business but I had an account already and I figured I could always upgrade once things got up and running. Unfortunately I was wrong. My web sites have been up and down like a thing that goes up and down a lot over the past weeks and I’ve been forced to put all my ad campaigns on hold until I can find a reliable host.

So I’ve been looking into virtual and dedicated hosting. Boy is there a wide diversity of setups and prices! The best prices are to be found in the US where the hosting market is more advanced but two things worry me about hosting in the States. For one, there is the issue of latency. The bits of data have further to travel and that can impact on the user experience. Secondly, support. A lot of places say they offer 24/7/365 support but experience tells me that the overnight part is likely to be one guy on his own. This is far from ideal when their “overnight” is your “during the day”.

UK hosting prices are ridiculous. Generally they’re more than double their US counterparts and, as I’ve discovered this week, they may claim to be British but actually have their servers elsewhere in Europe. For example, 1&1 are based in Germany.

So after much searching I signed up for a VPS with Webfusion. Big mistake. They advertise that they have UK data centres. What they don’t mention is that they also have German ones and that’s where their VPS servers live. Annoying to have been misled but not a showstopper. Ping times were still good.

Second problem: Virtuozzo. For the uninitiated, a VPS is a single physical server divided by software to resemble multiple separate servers. Virtuozzo is one of the software packages that provide such services. It’s very popular not least because it allows overselling. In other words you don’t have a guaranteed share of the server resources. Again, annoying but not a showstopper.

What did turn out to be a showstopper though was Webfusion’s support. One of the things they advertise about their VPS package is that if you balls up the server you can do a clean reinstall from the control panel. So I logged on and tried a few things out always with the intention that I would do a clean reinstall after I’d kicked the tyres a bit so I could start properly. Tried to do the reinstall and the server died. Reinstall failed. Tried again. Failed again.

Emailed support. Got a response about 6 hours later asking me for the root password. Tried to log in myself and realised that my password no longer worked and I was locked out too. Several days later and Webfusion still haven’t got my server back online. I’ve told them not to bother and to cancel my account. It’s one thing to break a server on your own but another thing altogether when the ISP’s own control panel, used exactly as intended, does the job for you.

I’m now enjoying a seven day free trial with a Dutch company Budget Dedicated. They use Xen virtualisation which is far nicer than Virtuozzo as it gives you dedicated resources, near native speed and all the freedom you’d get with a real dedicated server. Ping times from the UK are fantastic and they have an IRC support channel so you can get immediate answers when you have a quick question. I think they may be getting my business.

Found these Adsense tips via Digg : http://www.14thc.com/scout/?p=135

OK. First week over. Results not amazing. I’ve learnt quite a few things though and it’s time to take a step back and reassess the situation. I’ve paused all my PPC ads while I figure out my next step.

One thing I definitely have learnt though is that I need some more reliable hosting. Dreamhost is all well and good and it’s definitely a bargain for all that they offer but shared hosting means you’re at the mercy of God knows how many other users on the same server. On more than one occasion this week my sites went down because the load on the server skyrocketed - presumably because some other user was doing something daft like trying to calculate pi to a billion decimal places.

So I’m in the market for dedicated or virtual private hosting. Probably going to go for VPS in the States. Although I’d much rather have hosting here in the UK the prices just aren’t competitive. VPS over here seems really under-specced for what you are paying. The US hosting market is just more mature and has more economies of scale. Of course, the downside is the time difference can make getting support a right pain and because you’re relying on transatlantic internet connections there’s more that can go wrong. Fingers crossed it’ll all work out tho.

Yesterday was good for my AdSense account. I’d placed an ad unit and a search box at the top right of one of my sites and was getting somewhere around 50% click through on my ads. I experimented by moving a different (non-Adsense) ad to the top of the column and today I’ve had a grand total of 0% click through. Looks like that position is one of these hotspots I’ve read about. I’ll have to wait and see what results it brings for the other ad I placed there.

I’ve been experimenting with Microsoft AdCenter. I’m not very impressed. As usual they seem to have copied someone else’s good idea, overloaded it with bloat and released something very buggy. The reason I’m writing this post now is because AdCenter decided to log me out and won’t let me log back in.

Setting up some campaigns yesterday was a lesson in patience. There’s too much unnecessary Ajax going on. Pages load slowly and then you realise they’re blank and have to wait while it does some mucking about to actually display your data.

Maybe I’m missing something or maybe it’s a temporary glitch. I will be persevering with AdCenter though for two reasons. One, they don’t seem to be as picky about landing pages as Google is and, two, MSN should reach a different demographic. I suspect their users are, how to put this politely, a little less Internet savvy. After all, who would use MSN as their search engine except for people who either can’t change their default homepage or who haven’t seen how a search engine is supposed to work?

I’ve been having a back and forth series of email with Vodafone recently trying to get them to tell me precisely what is excluded from their new data pricing. Their publicity says it can’t be used for VOIP or instant messaging but I want it in technical terms so I know exactly what I’m being charged for. For example, if I use an IM client does that fall outside the bundle? How about if I connect to the same IM service via a web interface such as Meebo ?

I’m now banging my head against a wall trying to get a sensible reply out of them. Here’s the story so far:

[ Skip a few emails in which I just get back some marketing stuff about how great their offer is]

Me to vodafone

Thank you for your reply but you are still failing to answer my question. I’m not sure why it’s proving so difficult to get a straight answer from you.

Your website has the following terms and conditions : “The £1 per day charge and monthly data subscription cannot be used for Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services such as Skype or Peer-to-Peer services (such as instant messenger services, text messaging clients or file sharing). These services will not count towards the £1 per day charge or monthly bundle, and are charged separately at £2 per MB, with a 5p minimum charge for each data session.”

I want to know exactly what you define as VOIP, peer-to-peer, instant messaging, text messaging and file sharing and how you will be detecting such usage. As previously stated I do not want to be landed with a large bill if I use an application which I subsequently discover falls with your definition of the above services or which is flagged as a false-positive by whatever technical means you will be using to detect the usage of such services.

If the required information is not available to you please escalate this to a manager or other member of Vodafone staff who will have access to the information.

Vodafone to me

Thanks for contacting Vodafone regarding your account with us.

I can confirm that the reason the data subscription cannot be used for services such as VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol), instant messaging, texts or file sharing is because these methods are very expensive and unsafe methods to communicate.

VOIP is using the internet to make calls and is not a secure method of communication.

Instant messaging is services such as MMS where you can talk to another person instantly over the internet.

File sharing is downloading items such as video clips from the internet to your phone.

I hope this has helped to answer your questions to your satisfaction.

Me to vodafone

Thank you for your reply.

I was amused to learn that your reason for barring VOIP is because it is unsafe and insecure. Perhaps I can be the best judge of what is safe and secure for myself. As for the chicken and egg assertion that I’m barred from using a cheap data package for VOIP because it is “very expensive”, I’m somewhat at a loss to comment.

Leaving aside the rather dubious definitions of instant messaging and file sharing you gave below, you still have not answered my question as to how you propose to detect the usage of barred services. For example is this going to be based on port numbers? protocol inspection? ip addresses?

Vodafone to me

Thanks for your email to Vodafone about the VOIP services.

I’m sorry to hear that Sarah didn’t answer all of your questions.

I have spoken to our technical department and they have advised me that the only way to detect your usage is through IP Addresses.

In regards to the information that you were given by Sarah I have also double checked this with our technical department and the information provided is correct.

Me to vodafone

Thank you for your response.

If you could now just tell me which IP addresses or ranges are prohibited from being accessed as part of your new data bundle pricing I will have the answer I was initially seeking. I will be able simply to avoid connecting to these IP addresses and be reassured that I will not receive an unexpectedly high bill.

Vodafone to me

Thanks for your email to Vodafone about your IP addresses, I’d be happy to look into this.

I’ve checked with our Technical Department and they’ve advised me that we’re not aware of an IP address that you’d be unable to access. The only thing which may prevent you from accessing a particular site would be content control which is there as a security measure.

Me to vodafone

Looking back over previous emails and this most recent one it appears that Vodafone do not intend to bill VOIP, Instant Messaging etc as separate charges outside the scope of your new data bundle pricing. I have previously been informed that this could only be implemented by monitoring the IP addresses I was accessing and you are now telling me that there are no IP addresses which I would be unable to access as part of the data bundle pricing.

Please can you confirm that the above is correct and that therefore whatever usage I make of data access it will be billed at £1 for upto 15mb/ day or £7.50 for 120mb/month?

Vodafone to me

Thanks for your email to Vodafone about the data usage charges. I’d love to help.

I have checked the details and you can either subscribe for the daily usage pack or the monthly usage pack. If you choose the daily usage pack, you’ll be charged at the rate of £1 for upto 15 mb/day and if you choose the monthly usage pack the charge will be £7.50 for 120 mb/month.

Me to brick wall

*Bangs head*

Back to the “proper” job today. Not looking good. Sales figures are dire. Adds more impetus to my drive to escape.

Anyway, so what have I been up to so far? I’ve set up a microsite using Wordpress (OK, I say microsite, I mean a blog) which is going to be my initial foray into the world of landing pages. I’ve put up a few articles of my own and interspersed them with offers and ads. My theory is that people will be sufficiently interested in the articles and the “tips” (for which read, affiliate links) that they’ll sign up either to my mailing list or my RSS feed. It’s costing me in Adwords fees to acquire these visitors - I want to keep hold of them if I can.

Results from the weekend’s activities have been basically non-existent but these are early days. The lag time that you get with web analytics, Adwords, affiliate management sites and so forth make it difficult to measure progress this early on. Not that that’s stopping me from refreshing every five minutes to see if I’ve earned any commission!

It’s struck me that I don’t even know how quickly commission would be listed after a purchase has taken place anyway. At work we’re setting up an affiliate scheme but we’ll only be recording the sale once the goods actually leave our warehouse. Is this common? Either way, I think this is going to be a long game. After all, if it was as easy as knocking up a site and collecting the money everyone would be at it.

This evening I’ve been tweaking Adwords a bit and will probably post again to the microsite to keep it fresh. I’m also going to be looking at Web CEO again to see if I can get some organic search traffic coming in to the site - and to this blog too!

Hello. I’m Monty and I’d like to tell you about my blog.

So this is the story: I’m a fulltime IT and web geek who’s reached a bit of a plateau in what an optimistic person might term “my career”. I’m no longer happy cranking out code and resetting passwords for forgetful users but neither am I really sure where I want to go next in my life.

As a small side project I’ve been toying around with affiliate marketing. Since starting at the beginning of the year I’ve managed, much to my surprise, to bring in a little extra pocket money. This month though my affiliate income has somehow managed to double (don’t get excited, we’re still talking about a three figure sum here). And this has lead to me wondering if there’s something here worth making a go of fulltime.

Now, I’m not crazy (the talking cat next door told me so) so I’m not about to jack in the day job on some bonkers plan to get rich quick on the internet. But, I am going to be putting a lot more effort into my online business activities and the long term goal, way, way off on the horizon at the moment, is to be able to quit regular work and live off my affiliate income.

I’m going to be blogging about my progress right here and will hopefully have some half way interesting or useful tips to pass on. Remember, I make the no-brainer ballsups so you don’t have to!

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