The server this blog and others are running on is hosted by the US company Wiredtree. The hosting company rents managed servers and virtual private servers to customers. Before I migrated my sites to Wiredtree, I hosted them at the German company Hetzner. And while the rent was a lot cheaper there, the servers were not managed which meant that I was responsible for all administrative tasks. This included getting up at night if the servers went down to fix the issue on my own.

With Wiredtree, much of the responsibility lies at the company. They install updates on their own and monitor the servers 24/7 to make sure they are up and running all the time.

I received a SMS two days ago at around midnight that notified me that the server was down. I quickly opened the Wiredtree Grove support page and wrote a support ticket about the incident. It took less than 10 minutes to get a response, and the server was up and running again in less than 50 minutes.

The next day the same thing happened. This time it took less than 30 minutes to fix the issue. Wiredtree noticed that the server’s hard drive was failing and suggested to me that it needed to be replaced.

I agreed and the company’s support staff managed to backup, replace and restore everything in less than an hour on the third day.

Why am I writing this down here? Mainly for users who are researching Wiredtree, and users who are looking for a great web hosting company that is offering great support.

I have been with the company for several years, and up until now their support ticket response time was always at around ten minutes or less. That’s email support by the way. You can also use the toll free number to contact the support team in case of emergency.

Support is one of the things that is nearly invisible to you most of the time. It only becomes important when you need it. I have been with other companies that had response times of hours or even days. Imagine your server going down and you are unable to reach support for a day.

Where are your websites hosted? And how is that web hoster’s support?

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Once in a while I post something new here on this site. For the past five years or so, I have bought several websites from other webmasters and brokers. Most investments that I made were low level investments ranging from a couple hundred bucks to about $1500. Recently though I purchased a website that I paid $23,000 for. This was my first five digit investment. I bought it from a broker, and despite having all the information I needed at hand, I felt a sense of anxiety that I’d never see that money again.

I do not want to reveal the url of the website, or its niche. What I can do however is list some of the factors that made me make the investment.

The site had a track record of earnings for over a year. It also showed stable rankings, and an upwards trend when it came to the earnings. It was well established in the search engines, had some top rankings there for quite some time. Plus, it was more or less a passive kind of site which meant that I did not have to put a lot of time into it to keep the earnings on this level.

The site in the last three months before purchase made an average of roughly $2,000 per month, with an upwards trend in July where it made more than $2400 until July 22. Earnings before that were not that good, ranging in the $100 to $800 region. The big increase in earnings could be attributed to the broker taking over. Optimizations were done and this resulted in the earnings increase.

Another interesting fact was that there were still around $3000 in unpaid funds (July and before) in the account which I would get with the purchase. This basically meant that I paid $20k for the site.

My biggest concern at this point was that the site’s earnings would dip. Thankfully though it turned out that they stabilized in the $3000+ region. The site in July made $3500, in August $3200. September is not looking as good, but that can be attributed to the back to school, September 11 week where the site made only one sale instead of 10. It sites at $1500 currently, and I expect it to hit about $2300 at the end of the month.

This means that I got $8.2k in earnings from the site in less than two months. This leaves $14.8 that I have to earn to turn even. Everything afterwards is a profit. And please remember that I still have the site, which with solid earnings of around $3000 per month is worth more than the $23k that I paid for it. I’d estimate that I’d currently get about $36k for it, if I keep it for another ten or so month’s even more due to the longer period of stable earnings.

I’m not writing this article to brag about the investment. I just want to use it to show everyone that web investments can be very, very profitable.

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Most webmasters have a certain schedule that they follow when it comes to recurring tasks like moderating blog comments, writing new content or managing the SEO side of the website. Broken links should be part of this regular schedule, they are however often overlooked by webmasters.

A broken link in this context means a link to a page that does not exist (anymore) on the website. The website usually responds with a 404 error page in this case.

Every link is a vote for that website and every webmaster should make sure that all the links pointing to the website are put to good use. Bad links can hurt a website’s rankings and reputation.

This article is a basic how to that will explain the following concepts:

• Direct webmasters to locations where they can see broken links pointing to their websites
• Explain how broken links can be turned into working links using htaccess

How to display all broken links that point to a website

The answer in this case is Google Webmaster Tools. Webmasters need a Google account and a verified site to see the broken links that point to their domains and websites. The data is populated over time and it is a good idea to visit the section regularly to react whenever new broken links pop up.

Do the following after you have logged into Google Webmaster Tools. Access the registered domain, click on Diagnostics in the left sidebar and then on Crawl Errors. Crawl errors displays all kind of errors and restrictions, the data that is important when it comes to broken links is under the Not Found tab. If you see no crawl errors there congratulations, everyone else might want to read on.

The not found links are links on the domain the webmaster selected in Google Webmaster Tools. Each row displays the link url that websites link to, the detail (error code), number of pages that use that link and the date it was last checked by Google.

Redirect broken links with htaccess.

Please note that this article is not about explaining what htacess does. Before you start you should ensure that your web server supports htaccess. If you are unsure ask your web hoster or server administrator.

The .htaccess is usually located in the root directory of the website. It is possible that other htaccess files exist in subdirectories. It is basically a text file with directives for the web server.

The basic command to redirect link is

Redirect permanent localurl newurl

or

Redirect 301 localurl newurl

All that needs to be done is to basically add the urls from the not found section of Google Webmaster tools in the localurl section and the newurl that the link should now point to in the newurl section.

Please note that the localurl begins with a / and not with http://www.yourdomain.com/. A valid redirection of a link pointing to http://www.yourdomain.com/brokenpage.html would look like the following:

Redirect 301 /brokenpage.html http://www.yourdomain.com/validpage.html

This tells the search engines that the location of brokenpage.html has been permanently changed to validpage.html. The 301 redirect ensures that the linking power is attributed to validpage.html now.

We need to address a special case, pages with blank spaces. The localurl needs to be enclosed in “” if it contains a space. A broken link to http://www.example.com/broken directory/ needs to be redirected this way:

Redirect 301 "/broken directory/" http://www.yourdomain.com/validdirectory/

There is another question that needs to be answered: How do you decided where to link to? The best practice is to link to the right page on the website if the link has been misspelled. This should also be done if it is possible to guess where the link should be leading to. But there are cases where a link points to a no longer existing page.

You can either redirect to the homepage of the site, a special “broken link” page that explains why the visitor landed on that page or the closest alternative.

How do you handle broken links on your domains and websites?

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Several WordPress blogs have been hacked in the last two months leaving webmasters and system administrators puzzled. Network Solutions, one of the hosting companies affected by the hack discovered how the attacker gained entry and managed to manipulate the websites to service malicious contents or cloaked pages.

According to an article at The Register the culprit was the wp-config.php file. This file stores the database login information that are needed to connect to the database powering the blog. Many users seemed to have configured the configuration file so that other Network Solution customers had access to it.

I used this example to show that WordPress webmasters need to be extremely careful when it comes to securing their blog. This little guide will give some tips about passwords and the login process that can help the webmaster secure the blog further.

Every WordPress user has certain rights on the blog and a username and password. It is generally recommended to select a secure password which consists of at least 12 characters comprised of upper and lower case chars, numbers and at least one special character. Examples of secure passwords are j5w3f_45f!rRd3A and Pec,33.!4eas3ffF.

These passwords are hard to memorize and it is a good idea to use a password manager like Last Pass to store them for you. Last Pass can not only store them but also automatically log you in.

The first step to a secure WordPress blog is to select a secure password. Another option is to use an editor account for writing articles and an administrator account for administrative tasks. The first user that is generated during WordPress installation is always an administrator.

The login process is another element of the WordPress site that needs better security. Every attacker knows that the login for most Worpdress blogs is handled at example.com/wp-login.php/ and they write their attack scripts accordingly.

Stealth Login is a WordPress plugin that can protect the blog by renaming the login paths and enabling a stealth mode that is preventing users from accessing wp-login directly.

It is possible to use any phrase for the login path, the extension suggests login by default which can be changed for extra security. A webmaster could then log into the blog by opening example.com/login/ in the web browser.

This prevents brute force attacks and is usually considered a good security addition. Stealth Login can be downloaded from the WordPress plugin repository or installed directly from the Plugins section of the blog.

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