the richest man in atherstone

Hey Guys,

Just a quick post to tell you all about a bad experience I had with one of my hosting companies UK2.NET.

Well, actually, I'm still having problems with them and a number of my sites have been down for three days now (fortunately, my websites are split between a number of webhosts, so not all my websites are affected).

I first noticed the websites were down on Monday night and logged a support call on their system to tell them about the problem and ask how long it would be before they sorted it.

The next day I received a reply saying they were aware of the problem and were sorting but didn't give me an estimated fix time, so I asked them again.

The day went on with no reply from them. I logged another call to ask them to talk to me - still no joy. Meanwhile my websites were still down.

The next day, my websites were working but unbearably slow - too slow to use - so I logged another call. After another long wait, they informed me that the RAID was rebuilding so response times would be slow for a while. The next day they were still running slow.

Then they went down again. Another support call logged. No reply as of yet. And that's where I am at the moment.

I should also add that I called their "freephone" support number but it's not really freephone as displayed on their support pages. When you call it, they tell you to redial an expensive 0900 number, the crafty buggers!

About a month ago, I had a similar problem with them - 4 days my websites were down - so, it's perhaps my fault for moving to another when I had the chance!

The upshot is, I've lost lots of revenue and I've just found my websites have lost the awesome ranking I worked for in Google. I'm hoping Google will reposition my sites when they're up again (and with a new webhost) but this is not guaranteed.

When I moved to UK2.NET, I was happy to pay the more expensive costs because I thought I would be receiving a better customer service and support. It turns out this is not the case. In my opinion, their support are rubbish and their customer service representatives are either vague or unresponsive.

I can't wait for my websites to be back up, so that I can move them away from UK2.NET forever.

And so concludes my brief UK2 hosting review. I'll be writing a more thorough account on one of my other blogs soon.

Update: 13/10/2011 - Here's the full UK2.NET Review

Arkad

Hey guys,

Just a quick post today because I'm off out for dinner with the missus in a few minutes

I want to tell you about Backlink Profit Monster, which is due to be released to the public on July 18th 2011.

For anyone that earns their bread in the SEO or Internet Marketing industries (and even those just starting out in this field), Backlink Profit Monster is an awesome tool to have in your marketing arsenal.

At the touch of a button, it seeks out authoritative websites that are in a similar niche to your own and attempts to link to your website from them.

So how does it find websites to backlink from? Simple - it takes a gander at where your competitors are getting backlinks from and copies them. So not only do you end up backlinks from the same websites that your number one competitor is using,you also have backlinks from the guys at number 2, 3, 4 etc.

You can even filter which websites you want BPM to make backlinks for based a number of factors including Google PageRank.

Click here for a full review of Backlink Profit Monster.

Hey guys,

Just a quick post to tell you that I joined The Millionaire Society (well, for a 3 day trial at least).

There's some great info about Internet Marketing and making money on the Internet in the members area, but whether it's worth the monthly subscription fee is a matter of opinion. Personally, it didn't make much difference to me because the majority of stuff in there I knew already, however I think it could be a potentially sound investment for beginners in the trade.

One of my friends has joined up and he's going to give me the lowdown on what he's learnt and how much he's earned in a couple of months time.

You can check out my full no-bs review of Millionaire Society here.

Arkad

Hey guys,

One of my websites got penalised by Google!

The website is http://www.howtogetridofshinsplints.org and it crashed overnight from the Number 10 spot to the 650 spot for the keyword 'how to get rid of shin splints' lol

But I can't complain - it was my own fault for using shady backlink-building techniques.

Unfortunately, although I can name and shame myself, I can't name and shame the online utility I used because I can't remember what it is.

All I remember is that the software offered to create backlinks for me. I logged on to their webpage, filled in a form with my website name, email, url and a generic blog comment, I think and it did the rest (by 'the rest', i mean it completely screwed up my rankings lol). After 5 mins of form filling, I forget about it...

Although I noticed that I seemed to be getting quite a few auto-response emails as well, so the utility wasn't just filling in blog comment forms but any form it could find, including contact forms.

To be honest, I'm not sure what possessed me to try out something that definitely looked a bit dodgy - and I hate spam myself but this system was obviously a spam engine.

I guess I wanted to experiment a little with new techniques and measure how useful they were. As you can guess, this is not a method I will be trying again.

Saying that, however, it's a little worrying that a website can be penalized so easily. What if I were to fill in my competitors web details on this online utility...

UPDATE 14/06/2011
As if by magic, the shin splints website is now back in the top 10!

I've experienced the Google Shuffle before as rankings bounce up and down for a period of time, whilst Google works out which websites are most relevant but I've never experienced a bounce from the top 10 to 650th for three days then back into the top 10 - I still think it was penalised temporarily.

So what did I do? Well, it's more than likely anything I did had absolutely no effect on my rank, however for the sake of full disclosure I:

• Provided a YAHOO! Answer that linked to my website
• Wrote a new blog post on the website
• Removed links to it from my other websites (actually replaced them with a link to another page I own about shin splints
• Wrote this blog post

It's actually come back into the Google SERPS slightly higher than before (in 9th position), so i'm rather happy - especially considering a few days ago I thought the domain was doomed!

UPDATE 17/06/2011
It's out of the top 100 again lol