A Time of Magic

Since the 1and1 billing department take it upon themselves to automatically cut website service out of hours with no prior warning, naturally they have quite a number of irate customers to get through each Monday morning when they open for business and so I’ve just been on hold for 20 minutes.

Not that there was any real satisfaction from them. It’s going to take “a few hours” to get the sites back again which means more lost money for me: already the total loss exceeds $100.

Once I get the sites back online, it’s going to take a while transferring things over as all the sites that are being moved are database driven and with running yesterday from my backup hosting service, there’s data merging to be done too.

I’m something of a collector of websites and have amassed over 20 domains over the years which represent a variety of different types of site.

As a result of the sheer length of time that I’ve been collecting domains, they’re not all registered with the same place nor are they hosted in the same place either which is something that complicates my life a little but also gives me some unplanned for backup for those times when you have “issues” with one of the hosting services or need more facilities than are economically available from a specific host.

That backup is proving to be useful at the moment as 1and1 took it upon themselves to take down all my sites hosted with them on Sunday morning. Turns out that it’s because the credit card they use has expired. Simple to fix, but only during business hours so I have to wait until Monday morning. Yes, they can close all your sites down outside business hours, but no they can’t clear the problem and, despite 1and1 offering 24/7 support, no they can’t do that outside business hours.

This is the second time in a month that they’ve taken the sites down without notification (no explanation at all for the other time) so I’ll be getting the sites up on Monday, moving them to my second hosting service and closing the account later in the week when everything is operational as their service is overpriced anyway and the additional loss of business each weekend that they’ve taken the sites down is just too much.

Anyway, it’s off to EUKHost who’ve been quite excellent in terms of service and are also considerably cheaper (£30/year vs £120/year for less on 1and1).

Going by the uproar in some blogging sites, Googles latest pagerank review has very squarely targetted those blogs that write paid posts this time around.

The reason they’ve done that is, in principle, simple: they don’t like people buying links. Of course, it isn’t as simple as that because they’ve not (yet) gone after directories accepting paid links yet they are very much aimed at a straight payment for a link. The snag is that they’d then need to remove some fairly major sites from their directory including yahoo so this probably isn’t going to happen anytime soon.

Instead they’ve targetted the little guy who writes an article with a link and gets paid for that. The money for those concerned can be quite significant yet is peanuts compared to the charges that, say, yahoo collects. After all, a typical blogger would get $500 to $1000 per month vs $300 per link that yahoo gets.

So what’s the difference? Well, the problem for Google is that the articles provide links in context which therefore do pretty well within the Google index whereas a paid link in a directory (even if it’s yahoo) doesn’t do nearly so well in relative terms.

Of course the problem with Googles approach is that these articles might well be paid but that doesn’t stop them being relevant to what people are searching for. Effectively deleting those taking paid posts from the index just devalues the index. Besides, when are they planning on removing the paid adverts that they take themselves?