For those interested in going, please let me know – I was issued a discount code for being a presenter. I’m looking forward to connecting with all the other industry experts out there so if anyone is going please let me know! For those that can’t attend, I’ll be posting the slides to my presentation right after the event.

Some of the questions I cover in the interview include:

– Tell us about your main project, T35 Hosting ? Why did you launch T35 Hosting ? Where are you at now with T35 Hosting ?
- I understand that you have over 600,000 free hosting customers and a few thousand paid hosting customers, what advice would you give a young entrepreneur trying to build a membership of any kind?
- Your website has an incredible today’s alexa ranking of 7000! How have you been able to achieve such a high rate of traffic? What advice would you give a young entrepreneur trying to market their website?
- Why should people use T35 over any other FREE host? What do you offer that makes your service better than your competition?
- Do you think that entrepreneurialism is something that is in your blood? Or is it something that can be learned?
- What advice would you give to a Young Entrepreneur setting up their first business?

http://www.facebook.com/pages/T35-Hosting/43919113012

T35.com is back to PR6 (it was down to PR5 the last few months after we linked our new sites from the t35 home pages). Our brand new free hosting directory is now up to PR4, from PR2 when we purchased the domain just a few months ago. The other two sites are pretty stable at PR5. Considering we don’t really do too many link exchanges, these are all really good Page Ranks. How did everyone else do in the latest update?

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.

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!

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!

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?

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

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!

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

My name is Alex and I founded a web hosting company (T35 Hosting) in 1997, moving it to the present day T35.com domain in march of 1999. For those of you wondering what “T35″ stands for (and i know you are!), the original concept was a top sites list — top 35. Hosting was only a side project and was run from hosting.t35.com. It didn’t take long for our hosting service to become so popular that we closed up the other sites and decided to focus on solely free web hosting. In fact, T35 Hosting quickly became one of the top 5,000 web properties in the world (as ranked by Alexa) and we have consistently maintained that ranking since then. It made sense to keep t35.com since members received “user.t35.com” URLs and t35.com allowed for shorter website addresses.

Since then, T35 Hosting has gone through many transformations and I have personally been involved not only with T35, but have worked on dozens of other projects along the way. These range from home-grown ideas like wisecounter.com (sold in 2006), to many other start-ups, spanning across several different industries.

With over 10 years of web hosting and web development experience under my belt, I decided this blog might be a good outlet to share some of my experiences. I am hoping that I can not only provide a helpful insight into the world of web hosting, but to share all the knowledge and information that I have learned in the last decade.

I hope to follow up this introductory post with some articles shortly. Expect something good in the next few days… definitely before the end of the weekend!