It’s now been a full 3 months since we removed ads from T35 hosting member pages… Time to do a follow up test and see how we did! To back up a little bit, the removal of all ads from member pages was one of the biggest decisions I have ever made at T35 Hosting. Pop-up Ads (and Banner Ads before them) have been the primary driver of revenue at T35 since the beginning.

In fact, without the ads, we can’t even cover our costs and the issue of sustainability comes into question. Unfrtonuatly, removing ads was perhaps the only way to stay competitive and try to grow the business while facing increased competition from the likes of google and yahoo.

Fortunately, we came up with a multi-pronged solution to supplement revenue enough to keep the company running. The new plan involved increased monetization of our 404-not-found pages while at the same time banking on an increase in member count. We also decided to keep our “hosted by t35” footer text link and supplementing it with several other small links.

These new ads did not even come close to replacing pop-up revenue, but the hope of this bold plan was to increase membership and overall traffic to offset the loss of revenue. So enough with all of this talk… let’s see the results!

Although traffic didn’t increase as much as expected, we still saw a decent boost! Hopefully the increase continues in the upcoming months. Was removing ads a good decision? Well, I can tell you that all of our members have been ecstatic about the removal of the ads. At the same time, daily sign ups are at an all time high. Was this a good decision? Only time will tell. For the time being, I am satisfied with the preliminary results.

Earlier in this week I was invited by G Allan Roberts to do a phone interview about t35, web hosting, entrepreneurship, and internet marketing. The entire interview is almost an hour, but some of it is definitely worth listening to. I’m including the file in the mp3 format for those that want to check it out.

AlexMelenInterview(3-10-2008).mp3

Some of the highlights include:
- Information about the founding of T35 Hosting
- The ups and downs throughout the last decade
- Reasoning behind unlimited space/bandwidth
- Future trends in the industry

Post some feedback and let me know what you think!

Even with all our recent tweaks, t35 doesn’t seem to be doing too well in terms of SEO. After a recent seo analysis, it was brought to my attention that it might be impacted by the anchor text of the sites that link to us. In particular, about 99% of our anchor text is ‘free web hosting’, including all of the 6,000,000+ member pages on which we have a footer text link on.

Apparently, Google might consider this somewhat of a ‘google bomb’ where someone tries to manipulate the ranking of a site with millions of links with the same keyword. So for our latest SEO tweak/test I decided we are going to try to vary these a little bit.

The game plan is to dynamically rotate the 6,000,000 back links we have from member pages so they contain different anchor text each time the page loads. So in effect, we went from 100% weight on “free web hosting” to 15% “Free PHP Hosting”, 25% “Free Website”, 25% “Free Web Hosting”, 10% “Free Hosting”, 10% “T35 Hosting”. It’s difficult to tell if this will boost our overall ranking or just hurt “free web hosting” while improving the others. At the same time, I’m somewhat scared to lose our top 10 “free web hosting” listing on yahoo. This should be very interesting, and I’ll keep you guys updated as soon as I see any ranking changes.

On a similar (SEO) note, our brand new directory site seems to have dropped off from google a few weeks ago. The only major tweak we made recently was going from domain.com/category/ to domain.com/category.html. I asked on several forums but couldn’t get a definitive answer as to which is better for SEO. I’m going to try changing it back and see if it helps. I’ll keep you guys posted!

As part of a new monthly feature, I’m going to start finding cool new sites on the internet that would be useful for webmasters like you! I’m going to try to stick to new websites that I really find useful and that could use the bump in publicity to get them started.

For February’s feature I found a brand new site offering quality photoshop tutorials, php tutorials, SEO help, and free tips on developing a successful websites. Their alexa chart says it all:

Check out the site and I wish them the best of luck! It’s one of the nicer and cleaner tutorial sites I have seen in a while. I would expect the ranking on that chart to continue to grow; They are already top 50k (weekly average) and have only been around for 1 month!

URL: http://www.nowtutorials.com

Do you have a site you would like to recommend for our monthly spotlight? Shoot me an email and I’ll check it out.

You heard right! After almost a decade, we have finally launched a new site! (Well, if you don’t count this blog, and the webmaster forum that was spun-off from t35 a few months ago).

With all of my experience in the web hosting industry (specifically FREE web hosting), the new free hosting directory makes a lot of sense. During the last decade I went from being in the shoes of a customer looking for hosting, to developing and operating one of the biggest free web hosts around. During that process I have been able to compile a great amount of knowledge about the hundreds of other web hosts and their features.

The newly launched http://www.FreeHostingDirectory.com contains detailed information on almost all of the free hosts out there. In addition, all the hosts are broken up in distinct categories to help you quickly find what you are looking for (ie: PHP Hosting, MySQL Hosting, etc…).

Each category lists the web hosts based on a 10-star feature rating that helps you identify the host providing the best services for your needs. In fact, we have setup a system where visitors can even rate and review each web host to help others in their search for the perfect free web host.

Although we have not yet finished our expected 400+ database of web hosts, you are more than welcome to get a sneak peek and check out the site: http://www.FreeHostingDirectory.com.

In addition to the hosts that will be added, we also plan to add a resource and faq section that will help visitors with terminology as well as useful guides to help them get started building their site.

I ask that all of our blog readers help us welcome this new site by visiting the url and checking out some of the free web hosts. If you have used any of the hosts before, help us out and leave a review!

With all the changes going on with the google algorithm I decided to find out if link exchanges still greatly impacted search engine rankings. As you can probably guess the main keyword we target for this blog is ‘web hosting blog’. When this site was just launched, it received a lot of attention (and a lot of links) which quickly propelled us to the top spots for our keywords. Since then, most of the attention has dwindled down and we now barely crack the top 30 for the same keywords.

In an experiment to try to validate the importance of link exchanges, I am going to try to get several other established sites (PR3 and above) to link us with the keyword ‘web hosting blog’. Although I’ll check back in with the results, everyone should be able to monitor the progress of this test by simply seeing how well we are moving up in the rankings for ‘web hosting blog’.

My gut feeling is that although most people have disreguarded link exchanges in recent months (since google started penalizing for the practice), it is still perhaps the best way to get better rankings from the search engines.

When I checked my mail this morning, I was pleasantly surprised by a promotional ad from Yahoo! Search Marketing. I think it was based on a similar promotion a few years ago that I first signed up with their program. Since then, they have completely over hauled their search marketing program to a point where they are now starting to have a competitive edge over the more popular google adwords.

Since I am already part of the program, I couldn’t use the coupon for myself (applies to new accounts only), but I thought I’d share it with you guys! It’s a great program that lets you promote your website on yahoo searches. This coupon gives you $75 in credit, which is a substantial amount considering you can buy clicks for as low as 10 cents. Of course they do require a $30 deposit to start the account, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that you are getting $75 for free!

The promotion says “Grow your business – sign up for sponsored search and get a $75 credit”. Coupon expires March 31, 2008, so use it while you can! Just click the ad below and you will be automatically offered a $25 credit; But when filling out your account just enter the promo code ‘USDM0203’ for an extra $75!

Hate pop-ups? Why shouldn’t you? They are annoying, interfere with your web browsing experience and can often be very frustrating (especially when you try to close them). While that has been the general view on pop-up advertising over the last few years, it’s important to look back and see why they became such a popular form of advertising.

Perhaps the biggest benefit to pop-up ads is their ability to not interfere with the content of the site. Unlike banners, the pop-up ads are not placed directly in the site design/code, but instead open a new window! At the same time they can be popped up minimized, so you can check out the ad at your convenience.

Those were the primary reasons of why T35 Hosting switched from banners to pop-ups almost 7 year ago. In a sign that the tide is finally turning on pop-up ads, we have recently decided to get rid of ads on our member pages all together. My personal opinion is that a few bad apples ruined this form of advertising for everyone else.

For example, when you think of pop-up ads, what do you think of? You’re picturing the dozens of ads all poping up at the same time with no way to close them… sometimes even crashing your computer. As anyone can tell, that isn’t the best way to show an ad to a potential customer. As visitors became irritated by those ads, new pop-up blocking technology along with a strong resentment towards pop-ups developed.

To be completely fair, the advertisers have fought back and have developed pop-up blockers blockers. Yup, you read it right. Check with a few of the biggest pop-up advertisers today and they will show you their layered ads and other technology meant to block the ad from being blocked (ie: showing the ad to even those with pop-up blockers). Thus, even with the current trend’s, it’s still pretty profitable to run pop-up ads.

Alas, with overwhelming customer demand we have finally given in and removed all pop-up ads from t35 free hosting member pages. All that is left is a ‘hosted by t35 hosting’ footer link along with 1 more text footer link that we intend to sell. What’s interesting is that since the change, we have seen a DECREASE in traffic and account activity.

My theory is that over the years we have become the host for those that actually did like pop-ups and what we are seeing is the loss of those customers. I’m hoping that a few more weeks should start bringing in the much bigger majority of people who have come to dislike pop-ups and have avoided our hosting for that very reason. Only time will tell if this is an actually good move, but I’d love to hear some opinions. How do you feel about pop-ups?

Ahh.. I finally got a chance to make another post on the blog! Sorry for the absence, but I am still catching up on work all the way from thanksgiving break! A real post is on the way, but for now let me just update everyone with what’s been going on.

In terms of this blog, everything seems to have stayed pretty much the same. We now get a consistent 20 visitors/day from google searches (which is impressive since we haven’t done any SEO optimization). I’m also extremely surprised by the amount of spam we have been getting - there are over 100 spam comments that get submitted EVERY DAY. You’d think that people would eventually figure out that all comments are manually approved? On top of that, they come from different ip’s (so banning an ip or two doesn’t help). I guess that’s the price you pay for an increase in traffic?

On the T35 front, we have removed all pop-up ads from member pages, but I’ll post more on this later in the week. In the mean time, I had a chance to put together a quick site for myself and you can visit it at www.alexmelen.com. I’ve used the domain for my personal email account for years, but never had the chance to have anything up there. It’s not amazingly designed, or completely comprehensive, but at the very least gives a quick snapshot of the projects I’m currently involved in. You can also add me on the two social networking sites that I participate in – Facebook (personal) and LinkedIn (professional).

I again apologize for being absent for so long, I promise to follow this up with some actual posts in the coming week!

I’ve recently received a few emails with questions about making money on the internet. I think this would be the perfect time for a shameless plug of a new website my brother just started. It’s a somewhat new concept where forum owners and forum posters get matched up. If your forum is completely empty and a potential visitor stumbles upon it, they might not want to participate because the forum will seem dead.

The general idea is that forum owners pay forum posters to make the site look more active to entice other people to participate. My brother’s new project, postingdirect.com, does just that. It matches up the forum posters and the forum owners. As a poster you can get paid up to $1 a post to talk about your favorite subject on a message board. As a forum owner you get the chance to make your site more active and attract other visitors to participate.

So this doesn’t seem like a complete ad for his service, I asked him to offer a promotion to the readers of this blog and customers of T35. As part of the promotion, forum owners will get up to $99 to try the service out! Here’s the link for the promotion: http://www.postingdirect.com/promotion/

It hasn’t been more than a few weeks since our last mention in business week, but it seems we’ve made it on there again! I actually completely missed it and want to thank blackhawk5193 and chickenmeister from our webmaster forum for pointing out the article. T35 Hosting is prominently mentioned in the “best tech tools” section of the list. Although the article itself is short, it does mention our unlimited space and bandwidth which is something no competitor has been able to match for over a decade! I also want to point out that we are the only web hosting company (free or otherwise) mentioned in the entire best web freebies listing.

You can check it out for yourself by following the following link and clicking the 4th icon on the bottom left (the pink keyboard).

http://images.businessweek.com/ss/07/11/1121_freestuff/index_01.htm

After spending countless hours researching and trying out SEO techniques, I decided it might be a good idea to share some of the experiments with everyone else. For this specific test, I wanted to know if changing a site title would have an impact on the search engine rankings. Although most SEO experts agreed that a good title would increase your CTR once in the listings, very few were confident in how big of an impact it would make on the rankings themselves.

Most importantly, I was trying to find out if putting your keyword first (instead of your site title) would make a difference. For example: Is “T35 Hosting – Free Web Hosting” worse than “Free Web Hosting – T35 Hosting”.

Although no experiment with search engines is ever perfect, I tried to put in some controls and changed nothing except the title for an entire 2 weeks. In addition I used two search engines (Google and Yahoo) for this experiment.

Yahoo with old title:

Rank #11

Yahoo with new title:

Rank #10

Google with old title:

Rank #90

Google with new title:

Rank #86

Surprisingly, the new title increased the search engine rankings (although only by a little) on both Google and Yahoo! Although I still think it’s better to have your site name first (for usability), the search engines apparently prefer your keyword first. In addition, click through rate on my listings also went up! There you have it folks — titles do make a difference. Although I don’t think a title will make or break your rankings, it’s a contributing factor (albeit a small one) on both Google and Yahoo.

In the spirit of adding more transparency to our company we have added a new “member count” at the top of all T35 Hosting pages.

The count is automatically updated every 5 minutes in real time, so go ahead and check it out! We are hoping it will add more visibility and transparency to our member base while at the same time letting customers track our corporate progress! Plus, we will be giving out prizes to the 500 thousandths member, 600 thousandths member, etc… Our current trend is about 700 new sign ups each day!

Netcraft recently released their October statistics and the results are startling. Apache now has less then a 10% lead on Microsoft’s IIS — the smallest gap between the two since IIS was launched in 1996! From my personal experience, I was always under the impression that Apache was the dominant platform for serving content on the internet. Microsoft’s IIS similarly to it’s operating system, was always plagued by security and instability problems . It’s one thing to get a blue-screen on your personal computer, but imagine getting one on a server hosting millions of websites?

Never the less, Microsoft has apparently been able to not only reverse the market share loss, but attain a huge gain over the last few months. To me this seems to be the result the new Vista roll out and a greater focus on security. Poking around the new IIS I also noticed the integrated features and improved focus on web 2.0. In fact, it seemed extremly easy to setup a blog service and other social network applications with the new version.

A quick check on server statistics accross the ‘net confirmed my view: The majority of blog’s and web 2.0 sites now run IIS! Based on the way things are going, Microsoft’s IIS is set to become the dominant technology for serving content on the internet within 6-12months. Sounds far fetched? Check out the netcraft chart below:

Apache — 68,155,320 — 47.73%
Microsoft — 53,017,735 — 37.13%
Google — 7,763,516 — 5.44%
Sun — 2,262,019 — 1.58%
lighttpd — 1,541,779 — 1.08%

For those of you who follow Google Page Rank, this has been a pretty exciting week. After an almost 6 month wait, Google has finally updated the rank value it assigns web sites (which then contributes to how well the sites rank in the search engine results).  The major change for this update has been in the way Google looks at “paid links”. For years, webmasters have used the google page rank of their site to trade, buy and sell links.

For example, if you were to start a new website, you would have a starting page rank (PR of 0). To reaise your PR you would have to get sites with a higher PR to link back to you. This would in effect put sites with high PR in a good amount of power. They could now sell links on their site, and the higher PR, the more money they could get for the links.

Google has obviously never been a fan of this. They want sites to link to you because you have quality content, not because you paid them off. In effect, you would be cheating the google algorithm and make google think you are a good site that deserves to be higher in rankings (while in reality, you just paid off some high PR sites).

After several months of speculation, Google has finally rolled out their “paid link penalization” page rank update. Although this in itself wasn’t surprising, the kind of sites that got hit is shocking. Forbes, New York Times, and many other notable web properties were hit the hardest. In fact, Forbes.com now has a measly page rank of 4, while our three new websites that were started just a month ago now rate at PR5!

On that note, although I don’t claim to be an SEO expert, I have been experimenting with some SEO for our new websites. Surprisingly, I must have figured out the correct formula because all 3 of our new sites were ranked at PR5 - something that is unheard of for a brand new website! Unfortunately, those rankings came at a cost of lowering T35.com from PR6 down to PR5. I am hoping that once the next PR update rolls around, the new sites will be considered *established* and will boost T35 to PR6-7 instead of dragging it down to 6.

 With Google now officially frowning on paid links, and even link exchanges, I wonder how this will impact the web development landscape? At the same time, more and more people are becoming frustrated with the vagueness of the Google page rank. It might be a good opportunity for another company to come out with their own site ranking tool. Yahoo, MSN, and Ask.com are all good candidates.

I would love to hear some feedback from all of you guys. How was your site affected by the new page rank update? Do you plan to change the way you conduct business (link exchanges, etc..)?

Those of you who follow business week might have noticed that I was selected for the top 25 entrepreneurs under 25 years old around this time last year. They just did a follow up interview and article, so for those who are interested:

Then:
Over the years, Melen has batted away offers from big Internet companies looking to buy out his T35 Hosting service for fear that they would take away the offering that most distinguishes it from competitors: unlimited space and bandwidth hosted for free. Last year, Melen had set out three goals to expand his company in 2007: advertise more, offer domain name hosting for free, and boost features to its paid hosting offerings.

Now:
Melen says he met all three goals and increased his customer base to about 400,000, up from 300,000 a year ago. Still, one unforeseen competitor emerged: Google (GOOG), which launched free Web-hosting service Google Pages in February. Melen believes the search giant’s presence will help boost overall growth in the Web-hosting space, but in order to prevent losing market share, T35 will have to provide more unique offerings. Some of his strategies include starting a blog about Web hosting and adding social networking features to hosted pages.”

Here’s the link to the article:
http://images.businessweek.com/ss/07/10/1022_under25_finalists/source/17.htm

And here’s the actual “Top 25 Entrepreneurs Under 25″ from 2006:

http://images.businessweek.com/ss/06/10/bestunder25/index_01.htm

The wait is finally over! I have officially completed the long awaited free php web hosting comparison. To benchmark the different hosts I used a php script that timed itself while executing tens of thousands of math operations. This script was then run 10 times each day on 7 different days (for a consecutive week). The score signifies the average amount of seconds it took the script to execute over the 70 attempts.

For informational purposes I have included the php version and the max execution time for each individual host. If you want to know even more, I linked the version number of each host to a detailed php information file (hosted on that specific host).

On a more personal note, I am somewhat disappointed at T35 Hosting’s mediocre performance. Rest assured we will be taking steps in the next few weeks to improve our services! This comparison took almost 10 hours to complete, so comments and feedback is very appreciated.

Web Host	Space/BW	PHP Info	Benchmark (Lower is better)
110mb	Space: 5 Gigs Bandwidth: 300 Gigs	Version: 5.1.6 Max Exec: 15 seconds	Average 44 ms Lowest 41 ms Highest 46 ms
x10Hosting	Space: 100 Megs Bandwidth: 3 Gigs	Version: 5.2.3 Max Exec: 10 seconds	Average 47 ms Lowest 38 ms Highest 52 ms
T35 Hosting	Space: Unlimited Bandwidth: Unlimited	Version: 5.2.0 Max Exec: 15 seconds	Average 57 ms Lowest 50 ms Highest 67 ms
FreeHostia	Space: 250 Megs Bandwidth: 5 Gigs	Version: 4.4.0 Max Exec: 30 seconds	Average 57 ms Lowest 53 ms Highest 62 ms
12gbFree	Space: 12 Gigs Bandwidth: 25 Gigs	Version: 5.1.6 Max Exec: 20 seconds	Average 61 ms Lowest 52 ms Highest 65 ms
100Webspace	Space: 100 Megs Bandwidth: 3 Gigs	Version: 4.4.0 Max Exec: 30 seconds	Average 77 ms Lowest 72 ms Highest 93 ms
lycos.tripod	Space: 1 Gigs Bandwidth: Unlimited	Version: 4.4.6 Max Exec: 10 seconds	Average 168 ms Lowest 136 ms Highest 227 ms
Freewebs	Space: 40 Megs Bandwidth: 500 Megs	No Longer offers PHP

I was setting up another server for T35 Hosting yesterday and noticed something new in cpanel’s WHM (the administrative side of cpanel). They now seem to have a pretty comprehensive list of one-click-install scripts that can be offered to customers.

For those not so familiar with Fantastico, that has pretty much been their business model since they started a few years back. In fact, Fantastico has been so popular that it’s now a standard feature on most cPanel web hosts. Now that cPanel itself is offering the same service, has fantastico become obsolete? Why pay an extra $10/month per server and deal with the setup hassles when cpanel seems to offer many of the same one-click-install scripts? Granted cpanel’s list of add-on scripts isn’t as comprehensive as fantastico’s, they do seem to offer many of the most popular and the most used ones.

I’m curious to see how Fantastico responds to this new challenge from cPanel — especially when cPanel controls the software and interface that Fantastico’s scripts are built for.

I just wanted to give you guys a quick update about the things going on with the site. First and foremost, I managed to spend some time playing around with the blog and I added a bunch of new features. You can now see “recent readers” in the right column, as well as avatars for people commenting on the posts. If anyone has any feedback or suggestions, please let me know!

I am also hard at work wrapping up the php free web hosting comparison that I promised. If anyone has any last minute suggestions of free web hosts they want me to test, please let me know asap! I’m also open to suggestions on future testing and comparisons I can do. I’m thinking it might be worthwhile to start keeping track of up-time and other stats on the major free hosts. What do you guys think?

On the T35 Hosting front I’ve been racking my brains trying to figure out why we come up #9 for “free web hosting” on yahoo, and barely break top 100 on google. Any SEO experts out there that want to help? On google, T35 Hosting isn’t even ranking high for its own company name of “T35 Hosting”!

While browsing a web hosting forum yesterday I noticed an interesting phenomenon. Unlimited and unmetered hosting is becoming a big taboo in the hosting world. In fact, most web hosting and webmaster forums have begun banning all posts about such plans.

First a little background, including the difference between unlimited and un-metered.

Unlimited space and bandwidth is something that has been around since the beginning of web hosting. A web host usually offers this as a way to attract customers, while at the same time hoping that nobody uses any significant amounts of space or bandwidth. Unfortunately, many hosts offered such a service with the intention of terminating accounts that used more than a few megabytes of space or bandwidth. Thus in the late 90’s there was a significant customer backlash to companies offering “unlimited plans”. As a result, many hosts started clarifying that they didn’t offer “unlimited plans” but instead were offering “un-metered” plans. The difference they claimed is that they just didn’t meter or keep tack of bandwidth usage on the servers.

The present day situation

Almost half a decade later, it now feels like we are experiencing a second coming of the unlimited/unmetered backlash. What’s interesting is there are companies, like T35 for example, that still offer unlimited plans without any intention of deleting accounts that use a lot of resources. In fact, many companies have found ways to offer these plans by placing restrictions on other features to keep everything balanced. At T35 Hosting for example, we limit file sizes to 512kb. That makes it hard for a customer to use tens of gigabytes of space for legitimate reasons (although we do have a few using over 10gb). Unfortunately, the hosts that have abused the unlimited/unmetered offerings seemed to have ruined it for everyone. We now find ourselves at a point where we can’t even advertise these kind of plans in some of the largest webmaster forums on the ‘net!

What now?

All of this reminds me of the automobile industry, where based on bad experiences in the 1980’s, Americans have come to associate hatchbacks with something very negative — making it very hard for any car company to successfully launch such a car. I wonder if the hosting industry has come to a point where we need to re-brand unlimited plans to something that would make them more marketable? Kind of like calling hatchbacks “sports wagons” (audi a3, etc..). What do you guys think? Are unlimited and un-metered plans still worth keeping around? Are the companies offering hundreads of gigabytes (or even Terabytes) of resources the new “unlimited” web hosts?