There’s common wisdom that you should put all your eggs in one basket, then watch over it like a hawk. But if like me, you manage a number of domains, customer sites, and blogs, this is somewhat disastrous if your primary host does go down. Fact is even if a hosting company promises you that you will have 99.9% uptime in any 12 month period, that still means you will have over 8.76 hours downtime in any year.

So, if you are going to manage any more than a couple of sites, split your eggs between baskets to ensure that WHEN one of your sites/accounts goes down, you can still be productive on the OTHER sites until service returns. This is what I’m doing at the moment to keep sites up and running.

Keep your domains and hosting SEPARATE

Domains are registered at NameCheap. If one host turns out to be really hopeless, as long as I can retrieve the most recent data, I can be up and running on another host within 24-48 hours as long as it takes the DNS to resolve properly. Recently, it’s been within 12 hours for some changes.

Separate Crucial Sites

Customer sites are generally hosted on their own accounts, separate from my blogs, and separate from each other. With domains registered elsewhere, it makes switching sites a breeze. Also, it largely protects sites from mistakes made by their owners having an effect on other unrelated sites.

Keep redundant back ups

My own blogs are generally hosted on one personal server, but the biggest have their own space on another server as well. Smaller blogs, though, share my VPS solution. Unfortunately, this means if my server goes down, most of my blogs are inaccessible. Since most repairs are quick, and data is generally unavailable during outages, moving the domains at that time is impossible.

However, if you have a daily backup of your blog, including the database and the files, you should be able to get up and running quickly on another hosting company. I don’t have a copy of the latter stuff. More fool me.

Redundancy: An Expensive Option

For my most important blogs, I’m looking at creating some form of redundancy so that I can switch and keep things up. But for most small blogs, this is quite expensive to achieve. It’s called Failover Web Hosting where your site is accessible from a number of IPs should the original site fail. This would work well with HTML based sites, but dynamic sites which lots of commenting and posting would have issues with keeping the data synchronized properly.

I’ve been using BlueHost, BlueFur, Hostmonster and Dreamhost for hosting these past few years. Though each has had intermittent problems through that time, I found Dreamhost has been the most reliable in the past six months, while BlueFur turned into a bit of a disaster as we kept getting locked out of our account/Cpanel/Website. It got so ridiculous that we stopped using their service. I can’t particularly recommend BlueFur but you may get different mileage. Still, let me know how you plan to keep your sites running in an emergency.

Is Payperpost experiencing slow business?

I recently received an email from Ted at Payperpost who writes:

As you know we recently made some changes to the PayPerPost platform. While the feedback regarding our interface refinement has been great, we have also received some concerns relating to our pricing adjustments.

I am sensitive to your pricing feedback and would like to try a new model for a limited time. My hope is that we will find a balance that works financially for advertisers, bloggers and IZEA. With that in mind, we have made the following changes: – Minimum total cost per post reduced to $1.00 – Minimum word count reduced to 25 words with a link only option This is a limited time promotion that starts today and ends at the end of the month.

I’m not surprised at this announcement. I also wonder how long PPP will run these announcements for because of their recent drastic price increases. It’s likely true that PayPerPost’s cost structure was untenable originally.

However, their timing in increasing pricing was just awful. Increase prices as advertisers and everybody else start trimming budgets and spending. It’s also clear that there are competitors out there that offer more for less in advertising and blogging terms. Perhaps Payperpost is now trying to attract advertisers away from competitors.

But there are just too many problems for me working with Payperpost now, and not much upside at all.

You need to be in North America or even Europe to have a chance of good posts; you need some PR; you need to maintain posting even if you don’t get opps; you have to follow the rules for Opps; you have to follow the requirements; you have to include links, codes, word requirements (200 words are increasingly required), style of opp, you have to have Alexa rankings, PR ranking, RR ranking, your own domain name, your own hosting, a decent tack rating, and you have to reside in certain countries, … all to get a share of $5.00 opps that require 200 words or more for a blog with a PR of three! Wow! And that’s if your blog is still considered ‘acceptable after the audit.

Whither now?

It’s a telling sign of where blogging is headed: prices are going down, Payperpost’s share is going up, traffic from India is up (Alexa cites India as the primary source of traffic for PayPerPost) as bloggers there find they have a competitive advantage. But worse seems to be in store: Compete is showing that time on the site is down considerably since last year, as are monthly visits. This means more competition for fewer opportunities.

Competitors abound?

There are indeed many wannabes in the marketplace, and in fact, I’ve been blogging for several of them over the years, and I much prefer PayU2Blog which pays a standard rate per link only, there’s no censorship of content or links provided you have a minimum number of words; and there’s no hassle getting assignments. You either have them or you don’t. If you don’t have them, check back next week.

Compared to the hassle of PayPerPost, it’s seeming a viable even pleasant alternative to Payperpost without most of the downsides. So I’m still sitting on the sidelines with PayPerPost. SocialSpark has no interest at all for me now, more’s the pity.

Any thoughts about these two blogging companies? Owen’s already posted his thoughts, but I wonder what’s going on… Owen…