My Website Journey

So at about 1am this morning, Burst.Net finally got my server up and running for me to use.  Unfortunately for me, I was already sleeping and I had work today so I wasn’t able to actually play with it until tonight.  Like other VPS’s and dedicated servers out there, the server is usually bare boned with no software except the operating system.  For me I decided to use CentOS 5 64-bit edition to get my web server up and running.  Burst.NET had Apache 2 pre-installed on my VPS for me but that was pretty much about it.  So I had to scramble around and search for an easy way to install Mysql and PHP to go with my Linux Apache server.

After some searching, I realized that it is really easy because Linux CentOS 5 comes pre-bundled with Yum.  Yum is a feature that allows you to download and install software automatically.  It will determine all of the dependencies and take care of the rest.  I determined which packages I needed and sent off my command: Read more…

As I start my website journey, I decided to purchase a new hosting package from Burst.NET.  I will be reviewing it over the next couple weeks and see how I like it.  As of right now I have hosting through 1&1 and GoDaddy but I want to expand as I get new websites in my collection.  Burst.NET has the advantage of being very very cheap for a VPS.  I am currently only paying about $6 a month to get a VPS with 1ghz and 512mb.

I have been really happy with GoDaddy’s VPS service.  They have very prompt with assisting me with any of the problems that arise.  For the past 3 years, I have had no issue with the reliability and speed of GoDaddy’s VPS hosting.  I am currently paying $40 dollars for a Windows VPS machine.  Why did I choose Windows?  I have a couple ASP sites from when I first started web development that are running that require a Windows environment.  With Godaddy, I am able to get Remote Desktop services which is great because I can have admin rights.  I am trying my best to move away from Windows because it has a big overhead.

The VPS I ordered from Burst.NET is going to be running CentOS 5 64-bit edition.  This sounds like the best distribution of Linux for Web Hosting, with the least amount of overhead and the fastest speeds.  Hopefully Burst.NET will be able to keep up with the load and speed requirements that I need.  It is important to run a VPS instead of shared hosting because it will allow you to perform backups and snapshots with rsync.  I will post information about rsync in the future.  It is GREAT for making backups and snapshots of Linux machines without using much bandwidth.

Starting on with my website development journey! I decided to blog about web development experience and my upcoming sites.  After speaking with a bunch of SEO and website specialists, I realized that the best websites are the ones that are built with REAL content.

What do I mean?  This post is considered REAL content because I actually wrote it.  I have always thought that the best way to create a website is just like what they say on infomercials “Set it and Forget it!”.  Unfortunately for me the whole idea of setting and forgetting doesn’t work very well.  Google and all the newer search engines look for unique content that hasn’t been used before.  If it sees too much duplicate content, it decides that you aren’t very important to the search engine.  So instead of thinking of ways to cheat the system, I decided to just go with it.  I want to do it legit, aren’t you proud of me?

So why am I so interested in making a big website/blog?  I’m not going to lie, eventually I plan to place ads on this site from Adsense to gain some revenues.  Going along with the idea of setting and forgetting it, it is much easier to maintain a blog than going into work everyday.  My blog and websites will be able to gain revenue for me while I am sleeping or away from the computer.  As I continue on with my journey, I will tell you all about advertisement and the different methods used.

To tell you a little about myself, I already have a couple websites out there and most of them just syndicate data (get content and post it on my site).  They don’t receive many hits but they have LOTS of content.. So.. I guess content doesn’t mean a lot does it..  Apparently another very big factor of website development is getting link-backs into your site.  A link-back is when another site has a link to your site on it.  Of course the bigger the site that links to yours the better.  The whole idea of Page-Ranking from Google comes into play on how great a link-back is to your site.  I will be going over ALL of this later on.