eBloggers.ph - Pinoy Bloggers Forums and Community

Posted on July 2nd, 2008 by admin, under Blogging.

Today I am officially launching eBloggers, my new and first forum that is dedicated in providing a place for Filipinos to learn blogging and start earning some real dollars through it.

This Bloggers Forums for Filipinos is also a place where bloggers can help promote each other’s weblogs which can be in the form of stumble, technorati favorites and other Social Media or social bookmarking exchanges. It is a place where bloggers can discuss anything and everything about blogging. This is a place for both people looking to start blogging and experienced bloggers who have been blogging for years.

eBloggers also aims to provide a place for writers and other freelancers to earn some cash. The eBloggers Marketplace is where service providers and seeker meet and transact freely. If you are bored, the General Chit Chat section is open for you to talk just about anything your heart desires.

I am optimistic about the concept of this newly launched forum. eBloggers is a perfect place for people who wants to earn money even if they just stay at home, for employees looking to earn some extra income and for students looking to support their studies. If you are a blogger who wants to promote your webblogs, and experienced blogger willing to help other Pinoys or a person who wants to learn blogging and earn some real money, I invite you to join eBloggers - Bloggers Forums for Pinoys.

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Choosing a Web Hosting Provider for Your Blog

Posted on June 25th, 2008 by admin, under Web Hosting & Servers.

Another important part of establishing your weblog is choosing a reliable web hosting company. If this is your first time to establish your own first websites or blog, you could be asking yourself what a web hosting is. A web hosting company provides a server space where you can store the files that make up your websites and make them available and accessible to internet users.

Determine Your Web Hosting Needs

Before you can actually choose a web hosting company, you should first determine your exact web hosting needs. Some of the things that you should determine before choosing a webhost are:

1. Number of sites you are looking to host or store in your webhost - this is important because this will determine the amount of storage space and domains allowed that you require or need in a web host.
2. Estimated amount of traffic - it is understood that a new website or blog will receive minimal number of visitors. However, you should also anticipate the increase of your traffic. Determining your estimated traffic is important to know the amount of bandwidth that you need.
3. Programming Languages, Scripts and Databases to use - this is important to know what operating system your web host needs to run, scripts and programming languages that it supports and number of databases that it allows.
4. Additional Features or Services - determine what additional features or services that you require for your websites or blogs.

Choosing Your Web Host

After determining these things, you are now ready to search for a good web hosting service provider. Here are the things that you should take a look at when comparing hosting packages from different companies:

Disk Space is the amount of storage that you are allowed to use. You should choose the hosting company that can provide you the amount of storage that you need plus a little allowance for future expansion or adding more websites.

Check how much bandwidth or amount of traffic your web host is allowed to receive per day or per month. Exceeding the allowable bandwidth will make your website temporarily inaccessible. You should get a web host that offers high or unlimited bandwidth.

Another important consideration is the number of domains allowed in a hosting package. Of course, the more domains allowed, the better.

Price is one of the major considerations in buying any product or service but it isn’t necessarily the most important. Some good things in life are free but I’m afraid a web host is not one of them. There are companies that will offer you web hosting services for free but in exchange, advertisements in the form of banners, pop ups and PPC ads will pollute your site. I recommend that you get a cheap web hosting services rather than a free one.

You should also check the companies’ hosting payment plans. Some web hosting companies offer cheap monthly prices but they will require you to pay for 3, 6, 9 months or even 1 year upfront. It is lighter if you buy a hosting package the will require you to pay on a monthly basis.

There are 2 different operating systems that a web host runs: Linux and Windows. The two differ in the programming languages that they support. Windows support Active Server Pages or ASP. On the other hand, Linux supports Personal Home Page or PHP, Java, Perl, and Ruby. Future tutorials will focus on establishing Wordpress Blogs that uses PHP so you will need to choose a web host that runs in a Linux server.

A database is where all your blogs’ content is kept. Choose a webhost that will meet the number of databases that you require. A hosting company can offer from 5 to an unlimited number of databases to be set up in a hosting account.

Reliability is a major concern when choosing a web hosting service provider and it goes beyond the measure of numbers. A good and reliable web host should offer you:

1. 99% uptime for all your Websites
2. 24/7 sales and technical support
3. Instant or scheduled backups
4. Money back guarantee

There are two web hosting companies that provide services for my blogs and websites. These are GoDaddy and Hostgator:

GoDaddy is well known company in the domain name industry and it has also become one of the most reliable web hosting providers. $6.99 can give you 150 Gigabytes of storage, 1,500 GB of bandwidth, 25 MySQL databases and host unlimited number of websites. They also provide a good email support to help you with web hosting related questions. However, there is one downside of using GoDaddy as your web host. It has a complicated interface that could give newbies a hard time in using. This webhost is more recommendable to more advanced webmasters.

Host Gator is the web hosting company that I can recommend to new webmasters and bloggers. This is because it uses a user friendly Control Panel. For as little as $7.95, you can get 600 GB of disk space and allowed up to 6,000 GB of bandwidth. You will have no problem for future expansions and increase in your weblogs’ visitors with this amount of storage and bandwidth. You are also allowed to host unlimited domains and database. This is the best hosting provider for new bloggers looking to set up a wordpress blog.

When choosing a webhost, or any product or services, keep in mind that “good” is defined by meeting your needs plus a little extra features.

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Choosing a Registrar for Your Blogs’ Domain Names

Posted on June 9th, 2008 by admin, under Domain Names & Registrars.

So, you’ve finally came up with a domain that you want for your blog after making several considerations. Now it’s time to buy and register that domain name. But where? There are a lot of domain name registrar companies where you can register your domain. A simple search on the internet could give you a good number of domain name registrars. However, finding a domain registrar is not that easy. There are some things that you need to consider when choosing a domain registrar.

Price is the first thing that a buyer looks at when purchasing something and the same goes for domains. Registering a new domain name will cost you around $6 to $10 per year depending on the registrar that you have chosen. Some domain name extensions, like .ph or dot ph domains, can cost you up to $35 per year.

Aside from the registration price, you should also consider the promotion codes and coupons of domain registrars. Some promo codes can reduce the price of new domain registrations, domain name renewals and every whois guard protection for up to 30%.

It is also important that you end up choosing a domain registrar that offers a user-friendly interface. This will allow you to easily manage your account and domains in it; saving you time and minimizing the risk of errors.

Personally, after taking all the possible considerations, I can recommend the following domain name registrars to you:

GoDaddy is the hottest domain name registrar in the internet today because of their sexy and attractive models that they use in marketing their products and services. In addition to that, they have a good number of promotion codes and coupons that offers huge discounts on your purchase. You can check the GoDaddy Promotion Codes and Coupons page to see the list of current promo codes that you can use in purchasing domains in GoDaddy.

Namecheap, in my opinion, offers the most user-friendly account management among the current registrars. Though registering a domain name with Namecheap is not as as cheap as the company’s name imply, I don’t mind paying a few extra dollars or the convenience it offers. For that reason, this is a better choice for starters in the internet industry. However, if you are looking to register in bulk or many domains, I don’t advice you to pick this registrar. Check out the Namecheap Promotion Codes and Coupons page to save on your next domain registration with Namecheap.

Domains are like valuable, hard earn money that you keep in a bank so like choosing a bank, carefully choose where to register and keep your domains. These two domain registrars are where I registered all my domains. Feel free to share or suggest other good domain name registrars that you’ve personally used and tell us why you chose that registrar above the others.

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Choosing a Good Domain for Your Blog

Posted on June 4th, 2008 by admin, under Domain Names & Registrars.

What is a domain name? In a layman’s term, a domain name is a unique name that identifies a particular website in the internet. As for this blog, the domain name is JoedelSanvictores.com. There are two parts of a domain name: Mid Level Domain (MLD), and the Top Level Domain (TLD). Here’s an illustration to further understand the two parts:

The first part (joedelsanvictores) is the Mid Level Domain. This part of the domain name is where you are going to spend most of your time thinking. There are two known approaches in choosing this part of your domain name:

1. Keyword Related Domains - in this approach, you will choose a domain name that is related to the niche or subject that you have chosen. For example, your blog is going to be related to “blogging”, then you should choose a domain name that contains the word “blogging” in it.
2. Generic or Brandable Domains - this approach is the opposite of choosing keyword related domain name. In this approach, you will choose a domain name that is unique, memorable and short. This is the approach used in choosing domain names for popular websites like YouTube, Digg, Google and Yahoo.

The second part (.com) is the Top Level Domain or better known as the domain name extension. The most recommendable domain name extensions (in order or priority) are .com, .net and .org. In my opinion, .info is also a good domain for a blog. Visit the Complete Domain Name Extensions and Meanings page for a complete list of extensions and their meanings that are currently used in the internet.

Here are some general guidelines in choosing a domain name.

1. Only letters, numbers, dashes are allowed in choosing a domain name.
2. Shorter domains are easier to remember so keep your domains as short, but clear, as possible.
3. Be creative! Register a domain that will give a good impression to internet users.
4. Make sure that you are not registering a domain that is a registered trademark or protected by copyright.
5. Avoid confusing domain names. Conduct a small research if there are similar websites using a similar domain which might cause some confusion.
6. Register a domain with a .com extension as much as possible.

Domain names play an important role for your website; whether it’s a blog, directory, forum or information resource. It is the center of your internet or online identity because most internet users remember websites through their domain names. Make sure that you spend enough time and effort in choosing the right domain name for your blog.

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Decide on What to Blog About

Posted on June 3rd, 2008 by admin, under Blogging.

Before you can actually start blogging, you will need to determine what to write or blog about. Deciding what to blog about is a difficult stage for most bloggers because they are looking to start a blog that will attract more visitors and make them tons of money in the future. This is not the best way to determine which topic your blog is going to be about. What you should do is to stop looking too far ahead, being greedy and thinking about how much blogging can give you in return. The best thing that you can do is be yourself.

Okay, so now I’ve raised some eyebrows. Joe promised a guide about good blogging and now he tells us to be ourselves?! Well, sure you can start a blog about a niche that will make you more money but this will only earn you short term benefits. Start a blog that is something about you, what you do and your expertise. This is the real concept of blogging: to keep an online journal about yourself.

The worst thing that you can do is to blog about things that you don’t really know about. Don’t pretend to know about things, write inaccurate blogposts and publish them in the internet. This is unethical and bad for the internet community.

If you are a person who is in the internet industry, share your personal experiences about the internet. If you are a business man, it would be great if you blog about business principles and your personal experiences in the business industry. A passion driven blog is also good. If you love gadgets or technology stuff, blogging about them would be a good idea. Keep in mind that the success of your blog is going to be based on the content that you put in it.

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