On Thursday and on Friday, I expressed a lot of frustration at an impasse I reached in my bloggings. When caught between a rock and a hard place, it engendered in me the notion that InvestorBlogger dot com has to change. The time is coming.

I’ve been quite frustrated with a number of the service providers I use to support InvestorBlogger dot com currently. But when the shit really hits the fan, there is only one solution.

It’s time to shake things up…

Payperpost: I’d been with Payperpost since the early days in 2006, and started blogging with them regularly. But each iteration of their service progressively made it harder and harder for me to earn ANY money at all. There was segregation, then there were PR requirements, then there was regionalization, then RR, then Technorati, then Alexa… Each and every time I rose to the challenge by blogging a little bit harder, it got a little bit harder just to meet their requirements. So on Thursday, I quit Payperpost by simply breaking their TOS: I used a simple way – I started using nofollows on all my posts. I don’t know that it will be the right decision, but I think it’s time to move on, at least for me.

Dreamhost: I’ve been with Dreamhost since my first domain registration in 2004. With InvestorBlogger it’s already over 3 years. But in the past 12 months, I’ve experienced outages for this blog at the MOST inconvenient times. Today, my blog carnival was FEATURED on Blog Carnival TODAY! I don’t know if I’ll get the chance again any time soon. Coincidentally, I managed to buy an EntreCard slot on John Cow’s website. Both of these sites are top websites with tons of daily visitors, and with prominent placement, I was sure to attract a lot of visitors.

But about 10 hours ago, I logged on to the message boards to find this UGLY message:

Due to continued space and power constraints in our primary data center, we will be moving all central DreamHost functions as well as the “spunky” cluster to one of our newer data centers. This move will begin Friday, March 21st, at 9PM PDT, and is expected to last up to 12 hours, until Saturday, March 22nd, 9AM PDT.

I was not advised of this message prior to the time, so I had no option to alter the contact. Who knows how many visitors tried to click through to a dead link? After the billing screwup in January where I received threatening notes that my websites would be shut down, and previous outages that were unexplained and interrupted traffic for hours, I’m at the end of my tether with Dreamhost, too, esp. as the websites are still down, and it’s been over 11 hours. This is a huge opportunity squandered.

So it’s time to change. In my heart, I can no longer recommend Dreamhost for anything but the smallest and most insignificant websites of all. It’s great for hobbyists, but if you are at all serious about hosting, you cannot rely on their service even with the VPS plans, and quite frankly, the unmetered everything is not worth the hassle when you can’t use it.

I’m looking at four different hosts: BlueHost, MediaTemple, BlueFur, and ASO, though I will keep Dreamhost for other things.

InvestorBlogger

Well, it’s time: here’s my plan for the blog.

Sub-domains

I’m going to be splitting up the blog into four (or five) sub-blogs each hosted on a relevant subdomain. Initially, I will set up two sub-blogs (for blogging, making money), then add the others. Initially all posts will remain at the current locations; but eventually, I will have to go through all of the posts, one-by-one and hive them off into their separate domains.

Traffic

InvestorBlogger’s main domain will slowly morph into a reblog of the subdomains. This will help to sharpen the focus on each of the themes, while retaining the overall feel of the blog. It should also help to keep the audience while bringing in more focused traffic on each of the subdomains. It may also help solve the PR issues, the nofollow issues by allowing different subblogs to co-exist with different requirements.

Writing

This is going to be the real challenge. My writing started off much like other bloggers, short and sweet posts, with not much real meat to the content. Occasionally, though, I would pump out different stuff. Now, though, it’s getting much more difficult to write just short posts. I am finding that I want to write more and in much more depth, about each of the issues.

Money

I’ve really appreciated having advertisers and hosters with me, though I may wish to reconsider some of my advertising methods such as paid posts, large banners, etc. I wonder if they are really that effective or if in fact they detract from the blog itself. I’ll be looking at changing the advertising as traffic builds.

Plans are set: things are moving

I’m now researching alternate hosts, and would appreciate some guidance from my trusted readers! Tell me what hosting you used, how reliable is it, etc? I’d love to hear.